To Containers: hip hip...

Free exchange: The humble hero | The Economist

I would have always assumed that the use of shipping containers had been a major innovation for trade, but I had no idea it had been as significant as shown in the above article.  For example:

  It was the brainchild of Malcom McLean, an American trucking magnate. He reckoned that big savings could be had by packing goods in uniform containers that could easily be moved between lorry and ship. When he tallied the costs from the inaugural journey of his first prototype container ship in 1956, he found that they came in at just $0.16 per tonne to load—compared with $5.83 per tonne for loose cargo on a standard ship. Containerisation quickly conquered the world: between 1966 and 1983 the share of countries with container ports rose from about 1% to nearly 90%, coinciding with a take-off in global trade (see chart)....

In 1965 dock labour could move only 1.7 tonnes per hour onto a cargo ship; five years later a container crew could load 30 tonnes per hour (see table). This allowed freight lines to use bigger ships and still slash the time spent in port. The journey time from door to door fell by half and became more consistent. The container also upended a rigid labour force. Falling labour demand reduced dockworkers’ bargaining power and cut the number of strikes. And because containers could be packed and sealed at the factory, losses to theft (and insurance rates) plummeted. Over time all this reshaped global trade. Ports became bigger and their number smaller. More types of goods could be traded economically. Speed and reliability of shipping enabled just-in-time production, which in turn allowed firms to grow leaner and more responsive to markets as even distant suppliers could now provide wares quickly and on schedule. International supply chains also grew more intricate and inclusive.

 And a study claims this:

In a set of 22 industrialised countries containerisation explains a 320% rise in bilateral trade over the first five years after adoption and 790% over 20 years. By comparison, a bilateral free-trade agreement raises trade by 45% over 20 years and GATT membership adds 285%.

I have been impressed by containerisation ever since I saw the automated container straddle carriers at the Port of  Brisbane in 2007.   My post about that trip is here.

Lust and that disease in history

Syphilis, sex and fear | How the French disease conquered the world | Books | The Guardian

I think I find reading about the history of syphilis so interesting because I just find it hard imagining societies coping for so long with an illness that was so devastating to the individual and their family, and so closely tied  to personal behaviour.    It's like the first decade of AIDS, but going on for four or five centuries.

Here are some bits of information about syphilis which I don't think I had heard before:

The theories surrounding the disease were are as dramatic as the symptoms: an astrological conjunction of the planets, the boils of Job, a punishment of a wrathful God disgusted by fornication or, as some suggested even then, an entirely new plague brought from the new world by the soldiers of Columbus and fermented in the loins of Neapolitan prostitutes.  

The boils of Job seems a pretty apt guess, I suppose.

There seems to be a hint of exaggeration here:

 Whatever the cause, the horror and the agony were indisputable. "So cruel, so distressing, so appalling that until now nothing more terrible or disgusting has ever been known on this earth," says the German humanist Joseph Grunpeck, who, when he fell victim, bemoaned how "the wound on my priapic gland became so swollen, that both hands could scarcely encircle it."

 I don't think I knew wet nurses could pass it on to babies:

 Erring husbands gave it to wives who sometimes passed it on to children, though they might also get it from suckling infected wet-nurses.

 This seems a novel suggestion:

 In a manifestly corrupt church, the give-away "purple flowers" (as the repeated attacks were euphemistically known) that decorated the faces of priests, cardinals, even a pope, were indisputable evidence that celibacy was unenforceable. When Luther, a monk, married a nun, forcing the hand of the Catholic church to resist similar reform in itself, syphilis became one of the reasons the Catholic church is still in such trouble today.

 I hadn't heard this suggestion before either:

Those who could buy care also bought silence – the confidentiality of the modern doctor/patient relationship has it roots in the treatment of syphilis.

What about this horrible plan for husbands who wanted to secretly treat their spouse:

The old adage "a night with Venus; a lifetime with Mercury" reveals all manner of horrors, from men suffocating in overheated steam baths to quacks who peddled chocolate drinks laced with mercury so that infected husbands could treat their wives and families without them knowing. Even court fashion is part of the story, with pancake makeup and beauty spots as much a response to recurrent attacks of syphilis as survivors of smallpox.

And what about that last sentence - as you can tell, there is a lot here that is new to me.

As to the famous who may had suffered from it, there are a few names on this list I hadn't heard mentioned before:

Detective work by writers such as Deborah Hayden (The Pox: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis) count Schubert, Schumann, Baudelaire, Maupassant, Flaubert, Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Wilde and Joyce with contentious evidence around Beethoven and Hitler.

The mystery of how "hysteria" became the fad of the day that Freud and his ilk were so interested in may also be connected: 

Late 19th-century French culture was a particularly rich stew of sexual desire and fear. Upmarket Paris restaurants had private rooms where the clientele could enjoy more than food, and in opera foyers patrons could view and "reserve" young girls for later. At the same time, the authorities were rounding up, testing and treating prostitutes, often too late for themselves or the wives. As the fear grew, so did the interest in disturbed women. Charcot's clinic exhibited examples of hysteria, prompting the question now as to how far that diagnosis might have been covering up the workings of syphilis. Freud noted the impact of the disease inside the family when analysing his early female patients.

All very fascinating.  I should read an entire book on the subject, perhaps.

Spend less, get the tick of approval

Budget polling: Newspoll 56-44, Nielsen and Galaxy 54-46 | The Poll Bludger

The most surprising outcome from the post budget polls is the strength of the popularity of decision to reduce the "Baby Bonus":

 Abolition of the baby bonus has received strikingly strong support: 68% from Nielsen and 64% from Galaxy, with opposition at 27% and 22%.

Who'd have thought:  the public can identify overly generous middle class welfare when they see it.

Doesn't this suggest that Labor's move towards tighter means testing of benefits is a winner, too?

It's not just me - Part 3

I'm encouraged to read, via this spectacularly wrong headed assessment that Dr Who is still a fantastic show, that there are indeed a large number of former fans pretty much abandoning it due to the woeful trajectory it has been on with Steven Moffat in control.     

Have a look at this blog post, for example, found via from the previous link.  It correctly identifies the obvious current problem:  Moffat sets up big story arcs that end with a pathetic, uninteresting and un-engaging  deus ex machina fizzle.  (And, I would argue, even the "stand alone" stories now frequently have pathetic resolutions.)  From the last link:

Notably, both season five and season six end with a wacky aborted universe and a wedding. If there’s not a wedding and a wacky alternate universe at the end of season seven, I’ll be worried Stefan Moffat forgot to rip himself off. Now, I’m not saying Doctor Who should be a champion of stories that make sense all the time, but it should at least be consistent with its own mythology. The excellent Tennant/Davies era episode “The Waters of Mars” showed us the huge consequences (mostly emotional) when you screw with fixed points in time. These days that doesn’t mean jack shit, because the Doctor seems down with rewriting time whenever it suits the needs of the script.

Rest the show.  For 5 years.

But can he make them have babies?

Japan: Abe’s master plan | The Economist

"Abenomics"  is getting some good reviews for its sudden improvement to the Japanese economy.  It also seems to be a massive experiment which, if successful, would be seen as a strong win by Krugman for his take on economics.

Yet, in this Economist article, there is little to suggest what he can do about the major long term demographic problem for his country.   In short, if the Japanese are never going to accept high levels of immigration, how are they ever going to be persuaded to have more babies?

It's not just me - Part 2

Hoppy beer is awful—or at least, its bitterness is ruining craft beer’s reputation. - Slate Magazine

The boutique beer business is big in the US as well as Australia, and I am happy to hear that I am not the only person who is finding too many of these beers just too overpoweringly hoppy.

While different hops are supposed to have different taste characteristics (other than simple "bitter"), it's good to read that there really is no point in making it too bitter:

From a consumer’s standpoint, though, beers overloaded with hops are a pointless gimmick. That’s because we can’t even taste hops’ nuances above a certain point. Hoppiness is measured in IBUs (International Bitterness Units), which indicate the concentration of isomerized alpha acid—the compound that makes hops taste bitter. Most beer judges agree that even with an experienced palate, most human beings can’t detect any differences above 60 IBUs. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, one of the hoppiest beers of its time, clocks in at 37 IBUs. Some of today's India pale ales, like Lagunitas’ Hop Stoopid, measure around 100 IBUs. Russian River’s Pliny the Younger, one of the most sought-after beers in the world, has three times as many hops as the brewery’s standard IPA; the hops are added on eight separate occasions during the brewing process.

Craft brewers’ obsession with hops has overshadowed so many other wonderful aspects of beer. So here’s my plea to my fellow craft beer enthusiasts: Give it a rest.

 Hear here.

It's not just me - Part 1

“Star Trek Into Darkness”: Who made J.J. Abrams the sci-fi god? - Salon.com

Readers will know I don't care for the directorial work of JJ Abrams, so it's good to read a review by a critic who seems pretty lukewarm on him too.   (He's enjoyed him more than me, though. I think.)

I'm also lukewarm on the new version of Star Trek, and was bored with Abram's first effort. 

This new movie has good reviews, but after reading Andrew O'Hehir's, I don't think I'll bother seeing it.

O'Hehir's review is pretty witty, if you ask me.  It ends on this note, for example:

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with “Star Trek Into Darkness” – once you understand it as a generic comic-book-style summer flick faintly inspired by some half-forgotten boomer culture thing. (Here’s something to appreciate about Abrams: This is a classic PG-13 picture, with little or no sex or swearing, but one that never condescends.) That’s the way almost everyone will experience it, and fair enough. Still, if you feel like bitching about it, come on over. We’ll crack a couple of watery brews and complain (in Klingon) about Uhura’s ill-fitting romance with Spock, or Chris Pine’s frat-boy weightlifter Kirk, who completely lacks the air of provincial, semi-educated suavity that made William Shatner the greatest bad actor in TV history. Or the fact that those in charge of the “Star Trek” universe could have entrusted its rebirth to someone who actually liked it.

Tank love

Sensory deprivation, flotation tanks: I floated naked in a pitch black tank, and you should too. - Slate Magazine

Well, I didn't know that floatation tanks were making a bit of a come back.

This article explains their history, and re-arrival, and tries to describe what the experience is like.

I wouldn't mind trying it myself, actually.

Coolest holiday home, ever?

Found in Dezeen, a remarkable looking holiday home in upstate New York:

From another angle:

 

It reminds me a bit of the sky apartment in Oblivion; especially in the oh-so-white interior:

Yes, sure, it looks fantastic.  But you would have to like stairs.

Unwise tax cuts, unwise spending cuts

BUDGET 2013: Who framed the budget bloopers? | Business Spectator

Here's a good summary of the Australia Institute work which pins current budget deficits on tax cuts which Costello invented and Labor implemented:
 

In a pre-budget briefing paper, Australia Institute senior economist Matt Grudnoff said: “The impact of the Howard/Costello income tax cuts on the federal budget has been huge. They were delivered at a time of strong economic growth, ignoring what would happen when that growth slowed.

“Costello chose to take the windfall generated by the mining boom to fund large and permanent cuts to income tax. What he didn’t say at the time was that he was funding a structural change to the budget with a cyclical boom. This was simply unsustainable.”

This is not a new story. However, Grudnoff has used the same economic modelling tool used by many government forecasters, NATSEM, to work out how many more billions would have flowed into government coffers had Swan and Rudd just said ‘No’ to the Costello cutting program.

Grudnoff found that not only would the budget likely be into the black by now, but that the cuts disproportionately benefited higher socio-economic groups. He found that “income tax cuts between 2005-06 and 2011-12 have taken a massive $169 billion out of the federal budget, meaning the deficit announced by Prime Minister Gillard might not have eventuated”.

He adds: “Had the tax cuts not taken place, the 2011-12 budget would have been $38 billion better off. Instead, the top 10 per cent of income earners gained $16 billion. This was more than the total benefit to the bottom 80 per cent of income earners.”

You might have expected, therefore, that a Labor government would have done its sums, worked out that the cuts didn’t further the cause of ‘fairness’, and stopped the madness of rolling tax cuts that were funded by an unexpected mining-revenue windfall at the start, and during the GFC, funded by issuing billions of dollars worth of government bonds.
But they didn’t.

Sounds pretty convincing, but the political problem for Labor is that it is hard for them to admit that they made a bad call by promising to deliver the Costello tax cuts.  

What I can do, on the other hand, is ridicule those who argue that lower taxes always works for the good. 

And back to the matter of the effect of further cutting as promised by a future Abbott government:

But Swan bashing aside, there is a more sinister aspect to the chart above, given that it’s likely to be Treasurer Hockey giving next year’s budget speech.

Think for a minute what would have happened to the economy, and tax receipts, if Rudd and Swan had tried to balance the budget not by ending the Costello tax-cut program, but by cutting spending.

Had they been cutting spending to the bone from 2008 to the present, the mistakes of the European austerity programs would have been repeated here, albeit in milder form. That is, by cutting into a downturn, many more businesses would have collapsed, GDP growth would have slowed or gone backwards, and tax receipts would have plunged lower still.

But that is exactly what Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey have planned for next year. Their hope is that business, buoyed by the scrapping of the carbon and mining taxes, red tape reductions and less regulation, will create a new surge of economic activity that will start to refill the coffers.

It’s not impossible, and we’re certainly not in Europe’s dire predicament. But it does seem like a gamble as big as some of the punts Swan and Rudd took during the GFC and which, thankfully, mostly worked out.

The federal budget may be $19.4 billion in the red for 2012/13, but the economy is still growing, unemployment, inflation and interest rates are low. That may be a scenario we look back on with some nostalgia if the Abbott/Hockey punt doesn’t work out.

About that reduced revenue

From the 22 minute mark, I think there is a very decent discussion about Treasury's way optimistic (and wrong) budget forecast for revenue for this year.  (Down $17 million or so, which is very close to the year's budget deficit of $19 million.)



Andrew Leigh does the talking for Labor.  He always impresses as a smart and decent politician economist.   What's peculiar is that, even though the way Sinclair Davidson spins Labor's economic management must drive Leigh berserk, Davidson does always speak up for Leigh as being a "good guy".   Odd.

Tony Abbott: a weak leader with poor judgement

So, Tony Abbott is now vacillating on support for the "recognition of local government" referendum to be held at the next election:

On Monday, Mr Abbott said that while he supported the idea of allowing the federal government to directly fund local councils, he thought the government was rushing the referendum at the last minute. Mr Abbott added that the government should not be ''muddying the waters'' of the election with another vote.

''(The election) ought to be a referendum on Julia Gillard and the carbon tax rather than a referendum on local government,'' he said.

Why doesn't he just say "I'm more interesting in playing politics than seeing something useful gets done"?

His wavering comes after strong complaint from the old guard that he shouldn't support it:

This week former Liberal heavyweights Nick Minchin and Peter Reith spoke out against the idea. It is up to the Federal Government to propose the referendum but in-principle support from the Coalition makes it more likely that will happen.

and the "new guard" of dimwits as led by Andrew Bolt,  and his best friends forever in the IPA, and shared by such shining luminaries as Cory Bernardi. 

Sure, this issue has been raised before by Labor and failed, but this time there is solid, practical, court decision based reasons as to why the constitutional amendment is warranted.

Some in the Coalition (Barnaby Joyce, of all people!) recognize this, but more are interested in re-hashing the idea of it being about ideology and Labor power grabs. 

The IPA and their friends in the large, stupid, ideologically driven climate change skeptic faction of the Coalition (which, apart from Joyce, seem to compromise the bulk of the opposition to the referendum) should explain to me - in the current budgetary and economic conditions, what Labor Federal government is going to be interested in directly funding a huge amount of local government responsibilities just so they say "ha ha, we're in control"?

But back to Tony:  his new, barbed wire fence straddling attitude on this is just like his "it depends who I'm talking to"  approach to climate change.   His vacillation on an ETS, and final decision to take an opportunistic stand against it at the beck and call of Right wing talk back radio and Andrew Bolt is how he got the leadership.

The only policy which he has ever owned totally is one which virtually no one, except a hand full of feminist commentators, thinks makes economic sense (his overly generous parental leave plan.)

In short, the policies on which he chooses to dig his heals in are weak and ill founded; on those things which are practical and worthy he's still sniffing the wind as to what he should do.    (Another vacillation - the NBN lite plan.)

He is a crook leader who does not deserve to win government. 

Speaking of Parkinson's

Brain damage 'crisis' looms from illicit drug use - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Researchers in Adelaide are investigating links between stimulant use and an increased risk of people developing Parkinson's disease.

They said many drug users were developing a brain abnormality which also was seen in people afflicted with Parkinson's.

"People who have used illegal stimulants in the past have a change in a brain region that's right in the middle of their brain called the susbtantia nigra," explained Dr Gabrielle Todd, a senior researcher at the University of South Australia.

A recent German study found otherwise-healthy people with that abnormality were 17 times more likely than others to develop Parkinson's.

"When we looked at the brain stems of fairly young people, all less than 45 years old, they had the same changes that we saw in people with Parkinson's disease," Flinders Medical Centre neurologist Dr Rob Wilcox said.

It does look watchable

The Michael J. Fox Show trailer: watch the actor return to TV. (VIDEO)

I guess I was not the only person to doubt that it was wise of Mr Fox to head back to regular TV:  the person writing at Slate seems as surprised as me that the trailer for his new show looks so smart and witty.

People who don't find something appealling about Fox need therapy.  Sorry, that's the only sound thing to be found in the new DSM.

The free market of (rodent) death

Of mice and markets | Ars Technica

This study which was reported last week was not well reported in some places, but I think this explanation at the link does it pretty well.  The opening paragraphs:

How do ethics and the free market interact? As the authors of a new paper on the topic point out, the answer is often complicated. In the past, Western economies had vigorous markets for things we now consider entirely unethical, like slaves and Papal forgiveness for sins. Ending those practices took long and bloody struggles. But was this because the market simply reflects the ethics of the day, or does engaging in a market alter people's perception of what's ethical?

To find out, the authors of the paper set up a market for an item that is ethically controversial: the lives of lab animals. They found that, for most people, keeping a mouse alive, even at someone else's cost, is only worth a limited amount of money. But that amount goes down dramatically once market-based buying and selling is involved.

 The article then goes into detail as to how the experiment worked.  It's pretty fascinating.

Fortunately, while the study could be used by to attack markets and capitalism, the authors do recognize something important:

....they're well aware that other forms of resource distribution have fostered some fantastically unethical behavior. Or, as they put it in more academic terms, "Other organizational forms of allocation and price determination such as in totalitarian systems or command societies do not generically place higher value on moral outcomes."

Still, it probably does have something useful to think about in terms of markets and ethics.

 

George in Space

This teaser trailer for a movie featuring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock (?!) in what appears to be an attempt to do a very accurate kind of near future science fiction, looks very impressive:

How Google glasses work

Google Glass privacy: It’s actually the world’s worst surveillance device. - Slate Magazine

My second tech post in a day.

This one is a pretty interesting, and amusing, description of how Google Glass currently works, and why they are (at least not yet) the best device for secretly recording video or taking photos.

Still, if they become cheap and popular in future, I would not be surprised if we start seeing a lot more video of street crime than before.  After all, despite what the article says, their use will still be less conspicuous (and easier) than holding up your mobile phone to record video.

Adventures in rooting (a consumer warning)

It was about 9 months ago that I bought a Samsung Tablet, the Galaxy Tab 2 10.1, which is still commonly on sale and now down to just under $300.   It's pretty much at the bottom of the Samsung line, and the reviews even when it came out indicated not to expect top performance.  However, for your basic tablet user, I've been pretty happy with it, and Google Play services (with the recent opening of their music store in Australia) have improved a lot.

But a few days ago it started acting strangely.   Trying to type into any app (such as a browser) would immediately cause the app to stop working.  Also, I had created a half dozen folders on the home page in which to sort out my apps into categories, and I could not open any of those folders.  (The warning on that was "SecLauncher has stopped working.")

Googling around on my PC (because I could not search anything via the tablet) about the typing problem (but not the folder problem) quickly showed from Android forums that this was a known issue that sometimes occurred in this model tablet, and that it has been occurring for quite some time (more than 12 months, I think.)   Someone complained that they had contacted Samsung and a vague promise that they would fix it in future was made.

However, I don't think there has ever been an update for my Tablet's Android version since I bought it.  (Even though it appears an update has started to be rolled out elsewhere around the globe in about December 2012.  Australia must be low on their priority.)

So - the problem I had was with the Samsung clipboard, and could only be fixed by either doing a factory reset (which would not guarantee that the problem would not return) or "root" the Tablet via some software and slightly tricky instructions which could, if it all went horribly wrong, "brick" the Tablet and make it good for nothing, and then delete the data/clipboard folder contents.

I went for the latter option, and followed a couple of sets of instructions (first here, but then to XDA forum) because it seems it is hard to find one perfectly clear set of instructions for something like this. 

Anyhow, I finally got there, after a few hours of research and fiddling and not understanding exactly what was going on.

Anyone reading who has struck problems doing this - I might be able to help with a few tips of what was not working for me.

So, next problem: having successfully "rooted" my tablet,  I couldn't find the data/clipboard at all.

I tried the "File manager" that came with Samsung, and an app manager I had downloaded which had an option to allow access to root files which had to be turned on, but I still could not find the relevant folder.

I knew there were other file manager apps to download, but here's the thing:  I still couldn't type into Google Play to find them.   I had to search through categories, but they seem to list the "top paid" or "top free", and if want you want isn't in the top, you can't get to it.  Furthermore, if it was a paid app that I wanted to download (and there was one or two possibilities) I could not type in my password to confirm payment!

Still, if you find one app that's kinda relevant, you can see links to other possible ones of interest, and that is how I stumbled across File Explorer (which is free) and a separate, now free, File Explorer (Root Add on) which allows root access via File Explorer.

Using these apps, I did find the data/clipboard folder, deleted its contents, and yes indeed, the Tablet started working normally again.

Presumably, if it happens again, I have all the tools to fix it.

But here's the thing:   I must never put File Explorer in a folder, because that may make it hard to get to if the problem re-develops.

Apparently, having a "rooted" Tablet means you can fiddle with it and do all sorts of things - perhaps such as uploading the new Jellybean Android instead of waiting for Samsung to deem Australia worthy enough to receive it.

I'm not sure what I'll do.  The warranty is gone anyway.

But the final lesson is:   this is pretty poor service by Samsung, not fixing a serious problem like this and just telling people they have to reset the Tablet to factory (and re-load all apps and data back to it.)

Shame, Samsung, shame.

More on fizzy drinks

A soda a day keeps the doctor in pay: soft drinks and diabetes

A can a day of sugary oft drink is a bad idea:

This large study from Europe found drinking a 12 ounce (about 355 ml) can of soft drink, or soda, a day was associated with a 20% increase in the risk of developing diabetes. This same effect has previously been observed in populations from the United States, Finland and Singapore.

If this is a real effect, as increasingly looks to be the case, it has massive implications. Half of eight-year-olds in the United States already drink this amount of soda, and teenage males consume more than double that. In conjunction with soft drink consumption among American adults, this represents tens of millions at risk of diabetes in the United States alone. Hundreds of millions more people are affected in other developed and developing countries worldwide.

There’s an obvious reason why soft drink consumption causes diabetes – more sweetened drinks equal more calories, which equals weight gain. Excess weight is the single most important factor in the global diabetes epidemic. While soft drinks may have effects on diabetes independent of obesity, this latest study (again) implicates weight gain as a key factor.

I am a little relieved to read the next bit, though:

The study’s apparently anomalous finding of an association between diet sodas and diabetes likely reflects “reverse causation” – a phenomenon whereby people switch to diet soft drinks once they start to get the health problems caused by regular ones. So it’s the development of disease that’s causing people to drink diet soft drinks, not the diet soft drinks causing disease.

My Pepsi Max remains safe, perhaps.

More bugs bugging us

Antibiotics could cure 40% of chronic back pain patients | Society | guardian.co.uk

Yet another story of an unexpected bacterial connection to health.  

Krugman talks about the Keynesian long run

Keynes, Keynesians, the Long Run, and Fiscal Policy - NYTimes.com

Further to the post about Ferguson and his silly comment about Keynes, Krugman here talks about the issue of the long run.

Clear and concise, as usual.

More in Søren than in manga

Julian Baggini — I still love Kierkegaard

I quite enjoyed this summary of the somewhat odd philosophy of Kierkegaard from someone who first became a fan as a teenager.

This paragraph amused me:

Yet alongside this melancholy was a mischievous, satirical wit. Kierkegaard was a scathing critic of the Denmark of his time, and he paid the price when in 1846 The Corsair, a satirical paper, launched a series of character attacks on him, ridiculing his gait (he had a badly curved spine) and his rasping voice. Kierkegaard achieved the necessary condition of any great romantic intellectual figure, which is rejection by his own time and society. His biographer, Walter Lowrie, goes so far as to suggest that he was single-handedly responsible for the decline of Søren as a popular first name. Such was the ridicule cast upon him that Danish parents would tell their children ‘don’t be a Søren’. Today, Sorensen — son of Søren — is still the eighth most common surname in Denmark, while as a first name Søren itself doesn’t even make the top 50. It is as though Britain were full of Johnsons but no Johns.

As for the title of this post:  I was trying to make a pun, and took a stab that there would be manga versions of some of Kirkegaard's books.  Looks like I was right!

Bacterial ecology, continued

To Beat Bad Breath, Keep the Bacteria in Your Mouth Happy: Scientific American

There seems to be a lot of interest suddenly in scientific circles about how bacterial ecology (particularly in the gut) affects the general health of  humans.  Here's another instalment of the story, but this time starting at the mouth:

Bacterial geneticists contributing to the Human Microbiome Project, funded by the National Institutes of Health, have so far identified about 1,000 species of bacteria that commonly inhabit human mouths. Yet one person's particular mix of “bacterial colleagues,” as Rosenberg calls them, is probably quite different from another's. “Each person has maybe 100 to 200 of those bacterial species colonizing their mouth at any given time,” says Wenyuan Shi, a microbiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

During birth our previously sterile mouth picks up some of our mother's bacteria, and in childhood we quickly acquire new microbial colonizers. Studies suggest that a preschooler's population of mouth microbes most closely mimics his or her primary caregiver's. As the years go on, diet, stress, illness, antibiotics and other forces can shift the demographics of an individual's microbial community—and change its collective aroma. When bacteria that release smelly compounds dominate, chronic bad breath may be one of the consequences.

Many current treatments do not improve oral ecology—in fact, they might make matters worse. Although some mouthwashes merely mask unpleasant odors, alcohol-based rinses sold in drugstores and prescription rinses containing chlorhexidine or other antiseptics target all oral bacteria, stinky and otherwise. Shi says that approach has several drawbacks. A chlorhexidine rinse, for example, may improve breath for as long as 24 hours but can temporarily change the taste of food. In one study, 25 percent of subjects experienced a tingling or burning sensation on the tongue after a week of use. Heavy use of rinses with alcohol can dry out the mouth, sometimes exacerbating bad breath. Further, wiping out too many of the mouth's native bacteria could disrupt the usual checks and balances, making way for opportunistic species responsible for gum disease and other infections to move in and take over.

 The article goes on to discuss new treatments being tested to give a more permanent "cure" by changing the bacterial mix in the mouth.  For example:

Other teams are investigating whether probiotics rife with a gram-positive bacterial strain known as Streptococcus salivarius K12 can fight halitosis. A common resident of the mouth and respiratory tract, S. salivarius K12 is benign and known to produce substances that deter harmful bacteria. In a recent study by researchers in New Zealand and Australia, volunteers gargled with a chlorhexidine mouthwash to clear their palate of many native bacteria and subsequently sucked on lozenges laced with K12. Seven and 14 days later they had much sweeter breath. Presumably K12 outcompeted its foul-smelling kin, opening up niches for less offensive species.

 I wonder if protracted kissing with someone with good breath can help too!

Keynes and the long term

Yesterday, when the story about Niall Ferguson quipping that Keynes didn't worry about the future because he was gay and childless was doing the rounds, I commented elsewhere that having children certainly seems to have no effect at all on the Tea Party Right and their dismissive attitude to the long term  issue of climate change.   (The point being that they are an obvious example of how having kids is not co-related to "concern with the future of humanity".)

But what I suspected was that Ferguson's take on Keynes not being concerned about the future was the more fundamentally wrongheaded claim.  Not being one who reads much about economics, though, I didn't know where to find a good commentary on this aspect.

Overnight, what I wanted appeared at Slate.  It's a good read.  Here is the opening slab, for which I trust Slate will forgive me for reproducing:

Niall Ferguson, the distinguished historian who for the past several years has increasingly abandoned his trade in favor of inept conservative punditry, stepped in it over the weekend when he told an investors’ conference that John Maynard Keynes’ allegedly misguided ideas stemmed from the fact that he was gay and had no intention of having children, and was thus blinded to the importance of long-run considerations.

When an uproar ensued, Ferguson, to his credit, offered a full and complete apology on his website. But both the controversy and the apology primarily reflect the welcome fact that gay-bashing is increasingly frowned upon in polite society. They don’t confront the larger smear, which is against Keynes’ ideas. The fact of the matter is that both Keynes personally and “Keynesian” thinkers about macroeconomics in general care deeply about long-term issues. In fact, Keynes is one of the deepest thinkers about the long-term economic trajectory of all time.

The assumption that Keynes only cared about the short run stems from Keynes’ too-often quoted line that “in the long-term we are all dead.” This is, obviously, true. But while it’s often taken to be something like a 1930s version of YOLO, that kind of carpe diem economics has nothing to do with what Keynes was actually writing about.

The line appears not in the General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money but in 1923’s Tract on Monetary Reform. Most countries, including Great Britain, had abandoned the gold standard during World War I. After the war, the major powers sought to return to gold and the British authorities wanted to return their currency to its pre-war peg, a step Keynes thought would be disastrous. The question of the long run arose in response to the claim that overvaluing a currency relative to the currencies of its trade partners can’t make a difference since in the long-run domestic prices will adjust to any exchange rate.

Keynes says that this is true. If after the conclusion of the American Civil War “the American dollar had been stabilized and defined by law at 10 percent below its present value” that would have had no implications for the world economy of the 1920s, 60 years later. Nominal prices would have adjusted. “But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs,” he wrote, “In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.”

Read the whole thing.

It certainly helps illustrate the intellectual poverty of what passes for much Right wing commentary on economics in the last few years.

Fan boys and girls who are not to be trusted

Diana Rigg in Doctor Who: The Crimson Horror recap.

I continue to be amazed at the global fan boy detailed analysis, excitement and praise appearing at Slate (above) and The Guardian after every episode of Dr Who, when I am finding the stories increasingly incredibly stupid.

Last night's episode, for example, in my opinion, just made no sense as a story whatsoever.  I personally think that the makers of the show think they can include any steampunk element and fan boys will "ooh" and "ahh".  (Last night, it was a steampunk ballistic missile type thingee.)  

The stories have become absolutely hopeless.   The end times must be near, one would think...

In praise of stretchers

I've always liked stretcher beds.   As a young child, I remember finding the camp beds comfortable during the Christmas Holiday trip to Maroochydore.  I don't remember anything in particular about their design, but I'm pretty sure they were canvas stretchers or bunks of some design.

As a teenager, when in cadets, we used to sometimes sleep on old military canvas stretchers of this type of design:

except the canvas was white and very thick, and and the steel rods and leg brackets were pretty heavy and the whole thing probably weighed three times as much as the modern version shown here.

Still, I always found them comfortable too.

And so we advance to today, where recent experience both at home and camping has made me turn against inflatable bedding and try the modern version of this (presumably) old design:

In fact, this was the very model bought this weekend, when an air mattress failed us on the first night.  (Air mattresses are not to be trusted.  Sure they can be bought very cheaply  now in nice, thick versions, but there's nothing worse than a slowly deflating mattress to disturb a night's rest.)

Stretchers like this are, in contrast, very sturdy and comfortable, and fold up quickly.  This one is pretty heavy, but it's not as if you're ever going to try to carry one far.

Of course, they don't use canvas for them any more, so you don't get the added pleasure of the smell, but you can't have everything.  (Everyone likes the smell of canvas, don't they?  Or is it just that it was imprinted on me as a child during pleasurable beach side camping?)

Googling around tonight to see if my fondness for stretchers was shared, I tried to look up the history of this design.  Certainly, nothing turns up of great use in the first pages of results. I assume the cross leg design must be pretty old, and maybe its inventor is lost to us.

It's hard to find anything about their use, let alone the designer.  I did find this, though, from the Australian War Memorial:

It's a stretcher as used by a Captain JM Head in New Guinea in the Second World War.  It's pretty basic, and one would assume it may well be the same used in World War 1, or the US Civil War.  But it's hard turning up information on this topic quickly.

The problem is, of course, that whenever you search for "stretcher" something, you get links to medical stretcher information and images.  And, gosh, don't people find that subject fascinating.   Look, here's a 29 page "Short History of [Mountain] Stretchers" alone.

Anyhow, I'm all impressed anew with the comfort and portability of stretchers.  I'm not entirely sure why mattresses ever caught on.

Main Beach, Gold Coast, 4 May 2013

Dark thoughts about superhero

‘Iron Man 3,’ With Robert Downey Jr. - NYTimes.com

The reviewer for the New York Times has some dark thoughts while watching Iron Man 3, but I think it's a valid observation:

  

The only significant difference between “Iron Man 3” and others of its type is that it is opening a few weeks after the Boston Marathon bombings. It’s an unhappy coincidence that might not be worth mentioning if “Iron Man 3” didn’t underscore just how thoroughly Sept. 11 and its aftermath have been colonized by the movies. 

The makers of “Iron Man 3” — including the director, Shane Black, who wrote the script with Drew Pearce — could not, of course, have known that their carefully engineered entertainment would open so soon after the Boston attack. Yet the explosions in the movie, as well as its plot elements — among them the threat of terrorist violence, homegrown terrorism, American soldiers and improvised explosive devices — made it impossible not to think about the marathon. When a Los Angeles landmark is blown up on screen, a twist rendered with the usual state-of-the-art digital technology, all I could think was how clean it looked without the pools of blood and grotesquely severed body parts.

The most discouraging gift ever?

“For the Law School Graduate in Your Life: Gift Certificate to Have Your Eggs Frozen”: Julie Shapiro

From the link:

I’ve been travelling a lot recently and in Anchorage (American Bar Association Family Law Section Meeting) I was on a panel with a doctor who does fertility work in southern California. He mentioned that it was now possible to give a gift certificate that allowed the recipient to have her own eggs frozen. It turns out to be a popular gift from parents to their daughters who are graduating from law school.

The idea here is that the eggs can be harvested when the daughter is young and in her (reproductive) prime and then they can be safely stored away until after she finds Mr. (or maybe Ms?) Right and/or gets her career up and running. It’s a way of stopping–at least for a while–the biological clock. Now, thanks to the wonders of technology and the generosity of her parents, the daughter has a choice.   Freezing her eggs lets her have it all.

 That's a terrible idea...

In 10 years time, I'll have no idea what this was about....

Spooky Stuff

I've never added a blog about UFOs to my blog roll, but I've occasionally looked at the one by long time Australian UFO writer Bill Chalker, The Oz Files.    It seems, as far as I can tell, pretty sensible for a UFO blog, so I'll add it.

I've also found an infrequently updated blog called Parasociology, which seems to cover some interesting topics, and has a handy list of links to bodies involved in parapsychology.

And for my third new source of spooky stuff, I see that Dean Radin has put together a list of links to studies that have been published since 2000 that he thinks are collectively a good introduction to the evidence for psi.  It looks like there is plenty of interesting abstract reading to be had from that springboard.

Made me laugh

Spotted in a discussion in The Guardian about whether Ben Elton is now too old for comedy:

I'm guessing that maybe someone like Louis CK (aged 45) holds a place in your heart once occupied by Ben Elton many years ago? Louis CK is no spring chicken and his stuff is just getting better and better. No one is older than Joan Rivers (actual age: 197) but I didn't see anyone walking out of the sold-out 6,000-seater Royal Albert Hall when she played there a couple of months ago.

Testosterone can send men mad

Scientists unpack testosterone's role in schizophrenia

Hormones are a worry...

Waiting for stagflation

Krugman wrote about the "stagflation myth" as favoured by conservative economists in June 2009:

Ever since Reagan, conservatives have been using the evils of stagflation to denounce liberal economic policies. Yet mainstream economics — even at Chicago — has never made that connection.

Stagflation was a term coined by Paul Samuelson to describe the combination of high inflation and high unemployment. The era of stagflation in America began in 1974 and ended in the early 80s. Why did it happen?

Well, the textbooks basically invoke two factors. One was a series of “adverse supply shocks”, mainly the huge runup in the price of oil. The other was excessively expansionary monetary policy, especially in 1972-3, which allowed expectations of inflation to become entrenched. (Ken Rogoff — a Republican, by the way — attributes that expansion to the desire of Arthur Burns to see Richard Nixon reelected.)

The appearance of stagflation was a win for conservative economics, but it was conservative monetary economics that was partly vindicated: Milton Friedman’s assertion that there is no long-run tradeoff between inflation and unemployment turned out to be correct, and is now part of the standard canon.

But where is the Great Society in all this? Nowhere. The claim that stagflation proved the badness of liberal ideas is pure propaganda, which not even conservative economists believe.

Two years later, anti-Keynesian and all round hater of taxes and government spending Sinclair Davidson gave "stagflation" for Australia a run on The Bolt Report and The Drum:

It is the consequence of pursuing Keynesian economic policy. It should come as no surprise that the return of Keynesianism during and after the Global Financial Crisis could see the return of stagflation.

In 2007 Kevin Rudd argued, 'this reckless spending must stop'. He was quite right then, he would be even more correct today. The Australian economy is in trouble – according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the first quarter of 2011 experienced negative growth. Second quarter figures will be published in early September. This week the ABS reported that inflation is well above the Reserve Bank's two to three per cent inflation target.

Normally an inflation result like that would see an increase in official interest rates. After all the previous inflation figures were also on the high side. But the economy is very sluggish at the moment. A second consecutive quarter of negative growth would mean that the economy is officially in a recession.

 So what has happened to inflation since then?:

 Hmm.  Looks like inflation is under tight control.  

When asked today, about 20 months after his stagflation warning, we get this, in Catallaxy:

How is your stagflation call going anyway, Sinc?

Going well. The economy is stagnant, unemployment rising, cost of living amongst the highest in the world. Interest rates almost back at the depths of the GFC. The Americans are yet to unravel their QE. I don’t why you’re so happy – it brings me no joy.

So in the absence of actual inflation, you can just substitute "high cost of living"?  

 

What's also interesting is the anti-Keynesian spin put on it.    Yet when I Google on the topic of stagflation, I find that there has been a sudden recent burst of stagflation warnings from the UK:

Indeed, Britain has suffered persistently from higher inflation than any other advanced economy since the financial crisis struck. Unlike in the US and the eurozone, where inflation has remained broadly on track, inflation has been above the BoE’s 2 per cent target since the end of 2009, rising as high as 5.2 per cent in the autumn of 2011.     

So the country which gone much further down the anti-Keynesian "austerity" path than the US is the one facing potential "stagflation".

Looks like a theoretical "fail" too, then; not just a practical one.

A long article on why austerity doesn't work

The Austerity Delusion | Foreign Affairs

Haven't had time to read it all yet, but this section is at the core, I think:

Austerity is a seductive idea because of the simplicity of its core claim -- that you can’t cure debt with more debt. This is true as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. Three less obvious factors undermine the simple argument that countries in the red need to stop spending. The first factor is distributional, since the effects of austerity are felt differently across different levels of society. Those at the bottom of the income distribution lose proportionately more than those at the top, because they rely far more on government services and have little wealth with which to cushion the blows. The 400 richest Americans own more assets than the poorest 150 million; the bottom 15 percent, some 46 million people, live in households earning less than $22,050 per year. Trying to get the lower end of the income distribution to pay the price of austerity through cuts in public spending is both cruel and mathematically difficult. Those who can pay won’t, while those who can’t pay are being asked to do so.

The second factor is compositional; everybody cannot cut their way to growth at the same time. To put this in the European context, although it makes sense for any one state to reduce its debt, if all states in the currency union, which are one another’s major trading partners, cut their spending simultaneously, the result can only be a contraction of the regional economy as a whole. Proponents of austerity are blind to this danger because they get the relationship between saving and spending backward. They think that public frugality will eventually promote private spending. But someone has to spend for someone else to save, or else the saver will have no income to hold on to. Similarly, for a country to benefit from a reduction in its domestic wages, thus becoming more competitive on costs, there must be another country willing to spend its money on what the first country produces. If all states try to cut or save at once, as is the case in the eurozone today, then no one is left to do the necessary spending to drive growth.

The third factor is logical; the notion that slashing government spending boosts investor confidence does not stand up to scrutiny. As the economist Paul Krugman and others have argued, this claim assumes that consumers anticipate and incorporate all government policy changes into their lifetime budget calculations. When the government signals that it plans to cut its expenditures dramatically, the argument goes, consumers realize that their future tax burdens will decrease. This leads them to spend more today than they would have done without the cuts, thereby ending the recession despite the collapse of the economy going on all around them. The assumption that this behavior will actually be exhibited by financially illiterate, real-world consumers who are terrified of losing their jobs in the midst of a policy-induced recession is heroic at best and foolish at worst.

Austerity, then, is a dangerous idea, because it ignores the externalities it generates, the impact of one person’s choices on another’s, and the low probability that people will actually behave in the way that the theory requires. To understand why such a threadbare set of ideas became the Western world’s default stance on how to get out of a recession, we need to consult a few Englishmen, two Scots, and three Austrians.

Gatsby considered

Gatsby may be great, but F Scott Fitzgerald is greater | Books | guardian.co.uk

Someone writing in The Guardian is a big fan of The Great Gatsby (re-reads it every year) and notes that the Luhrmann film coming out about it may well be disappointing.  (Let's hope so - Luhrmann's lurid style never seems to get quite the uniform rubbishing it deserves.)

As for the book, which I read some years ago:  it struck me as adequate but pretty light weight.  I caught a bit of the Robert Redford Gatsby movie on TV recently, and it seemed that it did the opposite of usual cinema compression of a novel:  it was very long for a book that was very short.  

But anyway, The Guardian writer gives a potted history of the trouble life of Fitzgerald, and I don't think I knew  this:

When he died in Hollywood in 1940, Fitzgerald was almost completely forgotten. His funeral was attended by just 30 people, including his editor Maxwell Perkins. Sales of his books had virtually dried up. His publishers, Scribners, still had unsold stock from the first printing of Gatsby. He had lived the American dream, and it had turned into a waking nightmare.

Given that (as I recall) Gatsby ends with the funeral of the title character attended by virtually no one, that's a bit of an unfortunate "life imitating art" episode.

Colebatch puts revenue and spending in perspective

Before we tackle the budget, let's clarify a few points

In the last eight years of the Howard government, cash revenues averaged 25.4 per cent of GDP while spending was 24.2 per cent. Result? Budget surpluses averaging 1.2 per cent of GDP.

In 2012-13, revenue will be roughly 23.2 per cent of GDP. Underlying spending, after adjusting for last year's budget fiddles (which shifted $9 billion of spending into 2011-12), will be roughly 24.5 per cent of GDP.

You do the sums. Which is the bigger problem: revenue or spending?

The gap was meant to close in 2012-13. Revenue was forecast to swell 11.8 per cent, mostly from company tax and the mining tax, while spending, thanks to the fiddles and ''efficiency dividends'', was meant to shrink 2 per cent. It hasn't worked out like that.

Spending in the eight months to February was up 1.8 per cent year on year, but Finance Minister Penny Wong insists it will end up on target. But revenue has risen only 4.5 per cent year on year. For the three months to February, tax revenue was 0.5 per cent less than it was a year earlier.

Why? We've been told again and again, but some don't want to hear. Mining companies, which have been doing well, have been quite legitimately reducing tax by writing off the record $285 billion they invested here over the past decade. And the mining tax was so poorly designed that it has raised virtually nothing, and might not for years.

Apart from the banks, the rest of the economy has not done well, mainly due to the overvalued dollar, so it's not paying that much tax. Company tax was meant to reap an extra $6 billion this year, but in the first eight months, its take rose just $381 million, less than 1 per cent.

But the government spends too much, you say. Well, all of us can think of areas where we think it should cut spending. Equally, we can all think of areas where it should spend more. The International Monetary Fund estimates that, excluding east Asian countries where welfare is left to the family, Australia already has the second lowest spending of any Western country, behind only Switzerland.

Noting changes in spending and revenue as a percentage of GDP puts the figures in a perspective that propagandist economists for the Coalition who infest The Australian and News Ltd (and spend their days at Catallaxy) would rather not talk about.  For them, it's all "but revenue has increased!" 

[Catallaxy has, incidentally, been just about completely taken over by conservative Catholics or wannabe Catholics who want to condemn abortion all day; complain about Labor politicians who are pro-choice (let's not fret about Liberal ones who are too - or Tony Abbott adopting the "legal, safe and rare" formula); and worry about how the Catholic Church is being persecuted on the sex abuse issue.    Oh, and Islamists - they are very, very worried about Islam.     Strangely, Sinclair Davidson seems to very sympathetic to anti-abortion calls himself - he has never objected to one particularly neurotic visitor linking continually to his own anti-abortion posters featuring graphic photos of aborted foetuses.  Davidson also complained about the sex abuse enquiry that has just started, and one poster made (and never retracted, despite his being shown how bizarrely wrong he was) the  ludicrous claim that more Labor politicians had been to jail for child sex abuse than Catholic clergy.   It's like the Tea Party (Traditionalist Catholic sub-branch) of Australia.   A weird place.]  

Show way past its peak gets Slate column

Doctor Who "Journey to the Centre of the Tardis" recap. - Slate Magazine

Isn't it odd.  Now that Dr Who is way, way past its prime (I have been seriously underwhelmed with it in the latest series,)  Slate has started giving it the Dexter treatment.  That is, started giving a show which doesn't deserve it a discussion column after every single episode.

Last night's episode, which should have been full of fun with the interior of the Tardis being exposed for the first time, was the typical shambles of late.   The problems are:

a.  Everything can be solved with time travel, so there is no tension.

b. There is an endlessly malleable explanation of time travel used in the series.

The show needs to be put out to pasture again for 5 years, until better stories can be conceived.

Talking about Antarctica

A white and inexpressibly horrid land | TLS

I learnt some things from the above review of a handful of new books about Antarctica.  The number of people who visit during summer, for example:

...every (southern) summer sees more than 30,000 visitors arrive, swelling the resident population of some 5,000 scientists and support staff, though in winter that number drops to just over 1,000, many of whom apparently regard themselves as the luckiest people on earth. 

The charms of penguins:

Gabrielle Walker recalls that she began her time on the ice determined to resist these “clichés of Antarctica”, distrusting the way their cuteness is used to reduce the continent’s alien vastness to a manageable human scale. She would write about them only “because there was interesting science to tell. That was all”. Her vow did not last long, however, and the day an Adélie penguin played statues with her – “each time I turned it was motionless. Each time I walked, it walked with me” – was the day she finally lost her battle with the anthropomorphic impulse.

 and the "Antarctic stare":

One of those lucky ones was Gavin Francis, who spent a year working as the base-camp doctor at a remote British research station on Antarctica’s Caird Coast. Empire Antarctica is his record of that year, an intense and lyrical portrait of the slowly changing polar seasons, at the heart of which lies the cold monotony of the lightless southern winter. At first, as the sun gradually dipped below the horizon, Francis felt he was adjusting well to the coming of the polar night. But by the end of the second month, he writes, the frozen darkness had lost any beauty it once held: “it became a pause, a limbo, a drawn breath between history and the future”. His colleagues on the isolated station grew listless and forgetful, while tempers frayed, owing as much to the lack of privacy as the lack of natural light. Some even developed the notorious “Antarctic stare”, brought on by months of isolation, as though zombified by the pitiless dark. 

On a related note, my handful of long time readers (hello?) may recall that I very much enjoyed the account of the Mawson expedition that is a large part of Heather Rossiter’s biography of Herbert Dyce Murphy.   (Heather actually commented here too about my post about the book.  It's good to be noticed by authors.)   The expedition came to mind again when listening to a Radio National show on Anzac Day last Thursday.

I think Heather may have mentioned it in her book, but one of the unfortunate crew who had to winter over for the second time when Mawson turned up hours too late to catch the boat was killed soon thereafter at Gallipoli.

Edward Frederick Robert Bage was an engineer.  Here's a photo of him with a particularly large pipe which presumably helped him get through two Antarctic winters.  Poor old (actually, he was much younger than he looked) Bage was killed following orders of dubious merit.  Googling around, this article in The Australian seems to be the script of the radio show:

BAGE returned to full-time soldiering, and five months later the Great War began. He joined the Australian Imperial Force, and was appointed deputy commander of an engineers company. Soon afterwards he announced his engagement to Dorothy Scantlebury, a university student.

He left Australia with the first contingent, trained his company's sappers in Egypt, and landed with them under fire at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915. They rated him highly. "Besides being a good officer, Captain Bage was a fine fellow in every way," declared Tom Prince in a memoir of his war service. Another sapper, Jim Campbell, a 27-year-old carpenter, described Bage as "an excellent officer".

The engineers were given a series of urgent tasks during the chaotic first few days at Anzac. They widened roads, made bombs, strengthened trenches, carted ammunition, constructed loopholes and excavated emplacements for the artillery.

Bage spent the morning of May 7 surveying the terrain near Lone Pine. As it happened, the commander of the First Australian Infantry Division, Major-General W.T. Bridges, was appraising his tactical options in a nearby trench. He had just decided on his preferred course of action when Bage materialised along the trench. War historian C.E.W. Bean wrote that Bridges cried: "Here's the man!" When Bage found out why he was the man, he became concerned.

Bridges wanted the infantry to occupy a forward post, and wanted a reliable officer from the engineers to mark out the position beforehand as soon as possible. He wanted Bage to venture out in front of the AIF front line for 150m, and then bang in some marker pegs - this in broad daylight and in view of the Turks. Bage respectfully pointed out that the best chance of tackling such a risky undertaking successfully would be to do it at night. But Bridges was adamant that it had to be done that afternoon.

As a loyal and capable officer, Bage accepted that an order was an order. He resigned himself to his probable fate, and arranged for the dispersal of his belongings.

Bage did his utmost to carry out the task, which "could hardly have been more perilous", as Bean confirmed. Bage was hammering in a marker peg when he was killed by a fusillade of fire from Turkish riflemen and at least five machine-guns.

After his years at Antarctica, Bage was well known and widely admired. The way his life was imperilled so cavalierly by Bridges filled those on the spot with repugnance. It was "madness - he is a great loss to us", Campbell wrote. Indeed, what happened to Bage on May 7, 1915, confirms that Australian soldiers died not only as a result of incompetent decisions by British commanders; Australian commanders were also flagrantly culpable at times.

 Sad, hey?

Family photo

Winnie the Pooh author AA Milne was first world war propagandist | Books | The Guardian

I don't recall seeing a photo of AA Milne before, and this surely can't be his best:

That's his son in the picture.  (And the top of a bear - which would be interesting to see.) 

I trust AA did not always look vaguely sinister.

A major problem with nuclear

IAEA: Japan nuke cleanup may take more than 40 years - AJW by The Asahi Shimbun

When you read stuff like this, you have to wonder whether the fantastic, extraordinary cost of dealing with major nuclear accidents is adequately factored into economic studies on the nuclear industry:

A U.N. nuclear watchdog team said Japan may need longer than the projected 40 years to decommission its tsunami-crippled nuclear plant and urged its operator to improve plant stability.

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency team, Juan Carlos Lentijo, said April 22 that damage at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant is so complex that it is impossible to predict how long the cleanup may last.

"As for the duration of the decommissioning project, this is something that you can define in your plans. But in my view, it will be nearly impossible to ensure the time for decommissioning such a complex facility in less than 30-40 years as it is currently established in the roadmap," Lentijo said.

The government and plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. have predicted the cleanup would take up to 40 years. They still have to develop technology and equipment that can operate under fatally high radiation levels to locate and remove melted fuel. The reactors must be kept cool and the plant must stay safe and stable, and those efforts to ensure safety could slow the process down.

Safer living via technology

The future of the car: Clean, safe and it drives itself | The Economist

To be honest, I hadn't really thought of the wider implications of self driving cars before:

Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, predicts that driverless cars will be ready for sale to customers within five years. That may be optimistic, but the prototypes that Google already uses to ferry its staff (and a recent visitor from The Economist) along Californian freeways are impressive. Google is seeking to offer the world a driverless car built from scratch, but it is more likely to evolve, and be accepted by drivers, in stages.

As sensors and assisted-driving software demonstrate their ability to cut accidents, regulators will move to make them compulsory for all new cars. Insurers are already pressing motorists to accept black boxes that measure how carefully they drive: these will provide a mass of data which is likely to show that putting the car on autopilot is often safer than driving it. Computers never drive drunk or while texting.

If and when cars go completely driverless—for those who want this—the benefits will be enormous. Google gave a taste by putting a blind man in a prototype and filming him being driven off to buy takeaway tacos. Huge numbers of elderly and disabled people could regain their personal mobility. The young will not have to pay crippling motor insurance, because their reckless hands and feet will no longer touch the wheel or the accelerator. The colossal toll of deaths and injuries from road accidents—1.2m killed a year worldwide, and 2m hospital visits a year in America alone—should tumble down, along with the costs to health systems and insurers.

Impressive.

They can talk under water

LED devices let divers talk underwater | SmartPlanet

I'm a little surprised this has only been invented now.   My science fiction mind also is thinking that such a system might be the basis for secure communications between space-suited spies.  (Heinlein just had people in spacesuits putting their helmets together, and I have always been curious as to whether that works well, or if you have to shout.)  Anyway, back to the invention:

A Japanese firm claims it has developed the “world’s first” communication device that allows divers to “talk” to each other by using LED technology to convert voices into light signals.

The Okinwa-based firm, Marine Comms Ryukyu, has created the “i-MAJUN system,” which combines a light-emitting diode (LED) flashlight with a diving mask that is able to convert a diver’s voice into LED signals that blink. When a diver wishes to talk to another underwater, the diver says their message — and then once converted into LED signals, the data is transmitted to the other diver. Signals are then converted back into speech and played back through speakers embedded in the diving mask.

Local Anzac Day

The local Anzac Day service is very well attended, in a memorial park garden that is kept in very nice condition.  It's almost too small for the day, though:

 

My father didn't participate in Anzac Day parades, perhaps because he served in the British Navy and felt he didn't have adequate Australian connection. My mother felt more interested in the parade itself, having served in the air force in Townsville. She's in a low care facility now, and I should visit her later today. I hope they put the march on TV for her.

High temperaure solar

Collaboration aims to harness the energy of 2,000 suns

An interesting idea:

Based on a study by the European Solar Thermal Electricity Association and Greenpeace International it would take only two percent of the Sahara Desert's land area to supply the world's electricity needs. Unfortunately, current solar technologies on the market today are too expensive and slow to produce, require rare Earth minerals and lack the efficiency to make such massive installations practical.

The prototype HCPVT system uses a large parabolic dish, made from a multitude of mirror facets, which is attached to a tracking system that determines the best angle based on the position of the sun. Once aligned, the sun's rays reflect off the mirror onto several microchannel-liquid cooled receivers with triple junction photovoltaic chips—each 1x1 centimeter chip can convert 200-250 watts, on average, over a typical eight hour day in a sunny region.

The entire receiver combines hundreds of chips and provides 25 kilowatts of electrical power. The photovoltaic chips are mounted on microstructured layers that pipe liquid coolants within a few tens of micrometers off the chip to absorb the heat and draw it away 10 times more effective than with passive air cooling.

The coolant maintains the chips almost at the same temperature for a solar concentration of 2,000 times and can keep them at safe temperatures up to a solar concentration of 5,000 times. The direct cooling solution with very small pumping power is inspired by the hierarchical branched blood supply system of the human body and has been already tested by IBM scientists in high performance computers, including Aquasar.

A deserved cynicism

Video: American culture now generating entire movie franchises about Thor � Hot Air

There is precious little worth linking to from Hot Air lately, but this short post lamenting the extent to which superhero movies have taken over Hollywood is fine.

I remain completely unmoved by Iron Man (I've watched bits and pieces of No1 and 2 on TV - I lose interest within about 15 minutes).  Now No 3 has received good initial reviews in England.  I doubt this is enough to get me over the 15 minute barrier when I see it on TV in 2 years time.

I forgot to mention that this was another pleasure of Oblivion:  it was adult science fiction that was OK for older kids (one discrete bit of female nudity and no blood splattering violence) that had nothing to do with superheros.

We need more films like that.