It's not the beer, it's the soap

ScienceDaily: Obesity In Men Linked To Common Chemical Found In Plastic And Soap

From the above article:

Phthalates have been widely used for more than 50 years, but only recently implicated as a possible health risk in people. Animal studies have shown consistently that phthalates depress testosterone levels. Recent human studies have found that phthalates are associated with poor semen quality in men and subtle changes in the reproductive organs in boy babies. This connection between phthalates and testosterone helped to establish a basis for the study, Stahlhut said.

Stahlhut's group hypothesized that phthalates might have a direct link to obesity, since low testosterone appears to cause increased belly fat and pre-diabetes in men....

The analysis found that, as expected, several phthalate metabolites showed a positive correlation with abdominal obesity. Indeed, men with the highest levels of phthalates in their urine had more belly fat and insulin resistance. Researchers adjusted for other factors that could influence the results, such as the mens' age, race, food intake, physical activity levels and smoking.

Pretty surprising, hey?

I'm ready for my close up..

ScienceDaily: Videotaped Confessions Can Create Bias Against A Suspect

For those with an interest in law enforcement, this story indicates that the way suspects are videotaped affects a jury's perception of a confession:

In videotaped confessions, many law enforcement agencies focus the camera on only the suspect. Lassiter’s research shows that this practice creates what he calls a camera-perspective bias that leads trial participants to view the confessions as voluntary, regardless of how interrogators obtained them.

That sort of makes sense to me, and it's easily fixed. Good to see some very useful psychological work being done.

More on the big ideas

Could Crazy Technology Save the Planet?

This Physorg.com article starts off with a bad metaphor for the geo-engineering style proposals for reducing CO2:

"Of course it's desperation," said Stanford University professor Stephen Schneider. "It's planetary methadone for our planetary heroin addiction. It does come out of the pessimism of any realist that says this planet can't be trusted to do the right thing."

Well I wouldn't trust this planet to ever be well behaved. It's spent a hell of a lot of its time covered in ice, and by that I mean the real thing, not the crazy homeless man with bugs under his skin type.

Anyway, the article is worth reading. I didn't realise another test of fertilising the oceans with iron was about to begin.

A dark energy solution?

0703364.pdf (application/pdf Object)

The link is to a paper on arxiv in which a couple of guys claim to have sorted out what causes dark energy. Not that I can understand it properly, but they say their solution is a relatively simple one, which cuts out the need for a lot of the more complicated stuff in other proposals. It's also testable (unlike string theory.)

Good luck guys. If their solution turns out to be correct, remember that I may one of the first bloggers in the world to have posted about it.

Bad medical practices of the world

Unneeded cure spreads a deadly killer - International Herald Tribune

Oh good. The "Blog This" feature on Blogger works now on the new version of Blogger. I find it very handy.

Anyway, back to the point. The story above is about a medical treatment issue I had never heard of before: the use of unnecessary blood transfusions in Russia, Asia and Eastern Europe, and its role in spreading HIV.

Keep Gran alive for Christmas

Phillip Adams once wrote somewhere about how intense hatred of a politician can be a powerful incentive to stay alive, in the hope of seeing said politician fail.

Further confirmation of this idea, and a lot of excitement amongst the left generally, is currently being generated by the strong Labor polling. Have a look at the comments to this post at Road to Surfdom. Some extracts:

I was talking to an old mate yesterday who is eighty six and not in good health, we talked about things generally and he said suddenly, “Lang, I’d like to live just a little while longer, I want to see Howard voted out and most of the people he controls, I fought in the second war, as you know, and the friends and family that died in that war would be most upset that this fellow has been in a position that he should never have been allowed to obtain and the disgrace he has brought on this country.”

And how about this piece of calm political commentary:

The point is that the current Canberra Mafioso absolutely HAS to disintegrate into oblivion, and soon. History will eventually write down Howard’s band of loony freaks as just that: a marauding abberation that unfortunately reigned upon the nice land of Australia simultaneously with the uprising of the worst ghostly shadows of Hitler and Stalin: e.g. Bush, Blair and the chronically addicted liar and dangerous warmonger extraordinaire: John W. Howard of Australia....

Only a snail who has lived in a darkened hole for the last ten years would think that John Howard and his Gestapo militia of stinking jackbooted thugs has brought benefit and honesty to this country....

If Howard’s Nazis aren’t thrown out soon, then we won’t have a home. Or an environment. Or a future.

I suppose this means that if there is a Labor win later this year, there will be a sudden surge in deaths caused by all those frail or terminally ill people who have been hanging on just to see Howard's defeat.

If you want to have your aged relative here for Christmas, I say vote Howard.

I want a can

Japundit has a story about a new insect spray that works by freezing the bug. Sounds cool (boom boom.)

But... wouldn't an accidental spray to the eye with that be a lot more dangerous than what happens with your average can of insecticide? Paging litigation lawyers...

Under the knife not good for the brain (and a rant against cosmetic surgery)

It seems to me that there is still a lot that is not understood about the possible consequences of modern anaesthetics. A story in Nature points out:

Exposure to widely used anaesthetic drugs increases production of a brain protein thought to cause Alzheimer's disease, a study of mice has shown. The research feeds concern that general anaesthesia may be linked to dementia in humans.

Inhaled doses of halothane, one of a class of drugs called volatile anaesthetics, increase the amount of a protein called amyloid beta in mouse brains, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia have found.

Some 60 million people worldwide are given volatile anaesthetics each year. The drugs are known to cause 'post-operative cognitive decline' in many cases, which can last for days, weeks or years.

If these drugs boost production of amyloid beta, they may also be linked to long-term dementias such as Alzheimer's. The brains of Alzheimer's patients contain high levels of amyloid beta, although the molecule's links with disease are still unknown.

Clearly, being put under for an operation always carries some risks, and what puzzles me is that the cosmetic surgery industry seems to be booming despite this. Just how clearly are the risks of the anaesthetics alone explained to someone who is undergoing a voluntary operation for something as mundane an increase in bra size?

Four Corners had a good show about the industry in Australia last year, and I am not sure whether I had an earlier post about it. In any event, here's the link.

If there is one area where I have a sort of socialist urge to kill off a profession for ideological reasons, the cosmetic surgery industry is it. At a time when there are not enough doctors for everyday illnesses, it seems scandalous to me that so many should be diverting off into the world of facelifts, breast implants and tummy tucks. The TV shows that are devoted to cosmetic surgery "makeover" stories are just awful in the way they promote such surgery as crucial to self esteem. I say ban those shows! Only allow plastic surgery for those who are disfigured as a result of illness or accident. Liposuction should be illegal!

People will say that it is market forces at work. True, but we also regulate and restrict lots of things that, arguably, the market wants. Prostitution comes to mind. It can be regulated in such a way that it minimises harm, but we don't want brothels all over the place, and restrict the way it can be advertised. Also, there is no real argument as to the valuable resources it is diverting from an area of employment for which there is an urgent shortage. Most prostitutes aren't there because they don't want to use their degree (partly paid for by the government) for a more socially beneficial job.

So, cosmetic surgery is arguably in need of greater restriction.

I have no idea how it should be done, but if I were Australian Dictator, ordering doctors out of that industry and into a field of practice that is actually socially useful would be one of my first actions.

Note: revised considerably since first posted a couple of hours ago. The thing is, I often post first when I am busy and then re-read it an hour later and see mistakes or a better way of wording it. Provided I don't change my basic argument, I just revise it and don't bother telling people. Usually, only a few people would have read the first version by that time anyway.

An odd comment

Ronald Dworkin has a short comment piece in The Guardian in which he sets high standards for "genuine" democracy:

In a new book I argue that the conditions of genuine democracy are far from met in the US, the UK and other mature self-styled democracies. These conditions can easily be set out in very abstract terms. Government must respect human rights, it must respect religious freedom and other forms of freedom of conscience, it must distribute its wealth so as to give everyone a fair stake in its economy and, above all, it must conduct its elections and other political procedures argumentatively so that each citizen is treated as someone worth convincing not just outvoting.

In the comments that follow, I found this one, which starts off as if it is written by a normal intelligent person, but then suddenly ends with such aggression that it made me laugh in surprise:

I live in America.
I know I live in a democracy. I serve on my local town's water board, and on a county hospital board. Two of my friends are county supervisors. We argue our cases before our voters, the state, and the federal government. We've failed in some things but been successful at others and got funding to improve our hospital, our water system, our infrastructure. We've made a difference.
I discuss religion, politics, and economics on forums and blogs like this one before an audience of millions. My voice is heard. I get a fair hearing.
Because of this I know Ronald Dworkin is a sub-human, lying moron not fit to write advertising for toilet paper. He belongs in a sewage treatment plant where he can be converted to useful fertilizer.

You have to remember to take your pills before commenting, you know.

Fun in the diplomatic life

An ambassador is caught out having just a bit too much fun in the Embassy:

Israel has recalled its ambassador to El Salvador after he was found drunk and naked apart from bondage gear.

Reports say he was able to identify himself to police only after a rubber ball had been removed from his mouth.

I just hope our likely future ambassador Amanda Vanstone doesn't get any ideas...

Slowing down the universe

It is possible that the current accelerating expansion of the universe will slow down and stop. There's a recent arxiv paper about it here, in which it seems to be argued that a natural process may lead to deceleration.

On the other hand, Frank Tipler believes that expanding intelligence in the universe will cause its slowing and eventual collapse. (But with the happy ending of the Omega Point, which is the equivalent of eternal heaven.) I like the idea; it's good to know there is useful work to be done until the end of time.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Frank Tipler is writing a book in which he maintains that the most important miracles of Christianity can be explained by the same mechanism to be used to stop the universe expanding. Here's a sample of his ideas:

It is this mechanism of baryon annihilation via electroweak tunnelling that could have been used to accomplish ALL of the miracles described in the Gospels, in particular the Resurrection. I point out in my book [1] that Jesus' resurrection body, as described in the Gospels, has all the essential properties of the computer emulation resurrection bodies we all will have in the far future. The property most difficult to duplicate at the lowest level of implementation is the sudden dematerialization (vanishing from the appearance of His disciples) and re-materialization (suddenly appearing inside a locked room). De-materialization can be accomplished by electroweak quantum tunneling, which violates baryon number and lepton number conservation. The key reaction would be proton plus electron goes to neutrino plus antineutrino. This would convert all the matter in Jesus' body into neutrinos, which interact so weakly with matter that a person in a room with Jesus would see only Jesus appear to vanish. (If the matter of a human body were converted into photons rather than neutrinos, this would be equivalent to the detonation of a 1,000-megaton H-bomb, assuming Jesus weighed 178 pounds ([27], p. 2). The people of Judea would notice this, though the disciples would not, since they would be vaporized.) Materialization apparently out of nothing could be carried out by reversing the process . The Resurrection is then merely an example of first de-materialization of Jesus' dead body, followed by the materialization of a living body. The Resurrection, in other words, is a profoundly different process than the mere resuscitation of a corpse.

I must admit that I have not even read all of that article. It is very long, and deals with the Virgin Birth, Turin Shroud and even original sin. All are explained in a quasi scientific way (to the satisfaction of Tipler's mind, anyway.)

I don't think he is mad; he's a physicist/cosmologist who seems to have done good work for many years. However, I reckon his views are going to be taken as so eccentric and on the fringe that his book might not even be reviewed by the science community.

There is more I want to say about miracles, but don't have time today.

Metaphors on the march

In 2004, the SMH's Alan Ramsey went on and on about Latham being a Mack truck looming behind John Howard. (Handy list of links is at Tim Blair's.) Today, Phillip Adams writes:

There’s a hurricane called Kevin bearing down on John Howard.

I think there may be some law that silly metaphors doom a candidature, so conservatives can stop being quite so worried about those poll results now.

The Clinton character question

Captain's Quarters has a post about the latest evidence of Hillary Clinton's tendency to either confabulate or lie about her past. Some other examples were helpfully listed by Dick Morris in his Lateline interview here.

Such people make me uncomfortable in real life, as social politeness often prevents any correction to false recollections told to a group. Not every politician has to be personally likeable to achieve good things, but a repeated history of telling falsehoods about your past does reflect poorly on character, and on reliability of judgement in all aspects of your life.

On Kurdistan

I forget to mention last week that the always absorbing Foreign Correspondent on ABC had an interesting story on Kurdistan. You can watch it on streaming video via this page.

Rats know what they don't know

An interesting story at Science Daily about evidence for rats being capable of "metacognition".

Maybe this means rats can have failure dreams too?

Dreams of failure

Last night, I had one of those dreams of failure that I assume everyone has from time to time. It may be sitting down to an exam and realising that you know nothing about the topic whatsoever, or, in the case of my dream last night, trying to discuss a matter in dispute when it was clear my opponent knew everything about the topic, and I was totally unprepared. I have had missed deadline dreams too.

It occurred to me this morning that the consequences of failure of my job are no where near as spectacular as that in other, more dangerous professions. Does this mean that, for example, pilots dream of their plane taking a dive towards the ground because they forget to check the fuel before takeoff? Do surgeons dream of patients dying on the table in front of them for some really silly oversight? And, I wonder, do nuclear reactor operators dream of missing an obvious warning that leads to a meltdown.

Of course, it might just be that I am more insecure than other people, and such dreams are not as common as I expect. If that is true, just ignore this post. Otherwise, I would be curious to hear the nature of any other reader's failure dreams.

Make some comment, vast international readership!

An odd weekend

It seems a bit of an odd weekend when The Australian is getting pessimistic about John Howard, but on the Fairfax side it has a column criticising Labor's lack of policy decisiveness in The Age, and an SMH exclusive indicating that Rudd may be a bit too much into self-mythologising.

On the News Limited side, George Megalogenis warns that "Howard is in serious trouble", and draws comparisons to the 1969 election swing to Labor despite full employment at the time. (There's one big difference that comes to mind: conscription for an unpopular war.)

The Age column makes the point that Labor is still fuzzy on specifics in quite a few policy areas which it has had a long time to consider.

The SMH story on Rudd the Younger is here.

That's just not right...

For one of the most unusual clips from Japanese TV I have ever seen, have a look at this:



Found via Japundit, which also gives the explanation of what it's about.

Update: For an even more disturbing octopus related video, you can always view extremely fresh octopi bits being eaten here. (I found this posted at the brainiac site Cosmic Variance, OK?; I don't go out deliberately looking for grossness, you know.)

Death at the ABC

What is it about the supposedly religious themed Compass that makes it keep coming back to stories about euthanasia? Last Sunday, we had the story of a New Zealand woman who was looking after her dying mother at home, and killed her by morphine and putting a pillow over her face. She was not charged originally, but then she decided to press her luck by publishing a book about it. End result: 6 months in prison. Of course, international death hound Philip Nitschke was there offering his support, and the whole documentary was done in a way that was meant to elicit sympathy.

Only problem was, I didn't find the daughter very likeable at all. (Admittedly, she was put in a terrible situation, and the medical system didn't work as it should; but still, smothering relatives with pillows is something I think few people want to see encouraged.)

Then this Sunday coming, I see Compass is about a woman with a terminal illness giving a party before she heads off to Holland to hopefully [sic] be legally put down. Again, I am expecting nothing less than an emotional appeal for legalised euthanasia to be the main aim of the documentary.

The thing about this is that it would seem palliative care specialists are usually against euthanasia and insistent that the right sort of care can mean a relatively "good" death for most people. (OK, there will be always be exceptions. Nothing's perfect.) Yet the views of such practical experts rarely seem to get an airing. To my surprise, and to his credit, Norman Swan's Health Report on Radio National recently did devote a show to one such doctor. The transcript is here. I am guessing, though, that the audience was not large.

In a way, I don't like talking about this topic because it feels too much like tempting fate. No one who speaks against euthanasia wants to be personally tested in their attitudes by watching a close relative slowly die, or having a painful terminal illness themselves. Still, the pro-euthanasia lobby seems to get a pretty much unfettered run when it comes to the print media and television documentaries, and that bugs me.

UPDATE: I started to watch last night's Compass program (the one about the woman holding a party before heading off to Holland.) Unfortunately, I didn't get far past the first five minutes, then woke up as the end credits rolled. (I should not lie down on the sofa past 10 pm.) From the introduction, it seemed that maybe the party process made her change her mind about euthanasia, but I am not sure. People who are all for it don't often seem to be the type to change their mind. If anyone saw it, perhaps you could enlighten me? The show's transcript is not up yet.

On a general point, Compass is generally a pretty dull show these days. Maybe there is a lack of good religious themed documentary being made by anyone, which is a pity.

Russian roulette

Yet more poisoning in Russia:

A physician well-known in Los Angeles' Russian community and her adult daughter were poisoned during a trip to Moscow last month, U.S. Embassy officials confirmed today, the latest in a string of Russian poisoning cases that have sparked international intrigue.

Officials said Marina Kovalevsky, 49, and her daughter Yana, 26, were poisoned with thallium, an odorless, colorless toxin originally suspected in the death of a former Russian spy in London last year.

I like this part of the report:

They had been staying at one of Moscow's fanciest hotels.

"I think it's an accident because I can't imagine anything else. It's really bizarre," said Tabarovskaya, a chiropractor who works in the same West Hollywood office as her cousin.

How on earth do you have an accidental thallium poisoning while you are staying at one of the "fanciest hotels" in Moscow? Are Council health inspectors there always having to tell hotel kitchen staff not to keep the shaker of dissident poison next to the salt and pepper?

Stuck on Iraq

Tigerhawk is sticking to his pro-Iraq war guns.

Of course, overnight there is news of more large scale killings of Shiite pilgrims. One thing that I still don't understand about the situation there is this: Shiites have the control of the government, and (presumably) are the great majority of the armed forces. They would not have a supply line problem if there was a full scale civil war of the type that it is said the Sunni's suicide bombers are trying to promote. But where do the Sunnis expect to get their weapons supply with which to fight a full blown war?

Also, so much of this killing is being done by suicide bombers targeting civilians. Would it be so hard for Muslim clerics to declare repeatedly the moral judgement that we in the West find easy: namely, that suicide bombing against civilians is a depraved and essentially cowardly act. (It is, after all, an entirely one sided form of combat. A suicidal attack against an armed target that might get you first if they see you coming is different; there is scope for acknowledging a type of bravery there. But blow yourself up in a civilian street? Just obscene murder.)

I know that some clerics have condemned repeatedly the violence generally; but what I am getting at here is specific condemnation of this particular tactic. I am not sure whether that has been done.

More on carbon offsets

More sceptical views on carbon offsets are in this TCS Daily article. A key paragraph:

If you want to fight carbon emissions, then join the Pigou Club and push for taxes on bad energy. If you want to fight carbon emissions at a personal level, then act as if there were a high tax on your use of energy from carbon-emitting sources, and reduce your use of that energy. If you are not really all that worried about carbon emissions, but you get pleasure from making empty, self-righteous gestures, then do what Al Gore does -- buy carbon offsets.

Double guessing the past

David Aaronovitch's column in The Times about the fantasies about what would have happened if Gore had been President is well worth reading.

Some political predictions

Today's polling in The Australian (showing Labor still strongly ahead) is nothing to panic about for the Liberals. As Gerard Henderson writes today, the main effect of last week's attack on Kevin Rudd was to show he is not a saint. (Indeed, if you saw last night's tough grilling of him on The 7.30 Report, you would know that Rudd can be as evasive about his specific memory as any politician.) As others have also noted, the other thing about last week is that Kevin Rudd suddenly revealed an inclination to initially go to water when surprised by an attack. This reaction is of most interest to those in the government doing the tactical plotting against him.

On the other hand, there is no doubt that unless someone who attended the meetings with Rudd and Burke suddenly comes out with damaging information about what was discussed, Howard and Costello will have to let the issue slip away soon, or else they will definitely look like they are over-reacting. The true benefit of the attack has been achieved already.

Keating coming out in defence of Rudd only helps the government, despite the unbounded joy his nasty style of attack gives his old admirers. (As an aside, that link is to a post by the person who gets my vote for the most consistently irritating style of any current contributor to any political blog in Australia: Aussie Bob at Road to Surfdom. It's not even a contest.)

Today's polling shows other dangers for Labor. Australians are warming to the idea of nuclear power. Widespread scepticism about the initial reactions to global warming, such as carbon offset schemes, seems to be developing strongly over recent weeks, and I expect that it will continue to grow. This will mean an increased emphasis on emissions free power, and the limits of the use of windpower and solar for base load electricity will also be increasingly recognised.

I therefore expect that nuclear power for Australia will increasingly be seen by the public as a real alternative if you are serious about CO2, and the Liberals are the only party who will even contemplate it. As I suggested last week, if they were to grab the chance to run with new, inherently safer nuclear designs, they may gain extra credibility.

Other issues of danger for the Howard government - the trial of Hicks, progress in Iraq, the state of play in Timor, are all in too much of a state of flux to make firm predictions. Actually, there seems to be some reason to be vaguely optimistic on the "surge" in Iraq, despite the ease with which bombings can still take place. So I am not necessarily writing Iraq off as a clear detriment to the Liberals yet.

My final prediction: Brendan Nelson will remain a goose. He should be cut free.

Keeping them cool for baby

It's interesting to see that a study confirms that some men's sperm count is seriously affected by having hot baths.

The idea that heat is bad for sperm is well known, of course, but it surprises me that no one seems to have done studies on this in the one country where very hot baths are a really popular past time - Japan.

If hot baths can kill off a normal male's fertility, I would expect there to be at least a seasonal drop in conception in Japan during the winter months for those men who regularly bathe. They like their baths hot, and newer houses have ones with a water heater that keeps the bath water at a constant temperature, which certainly encourages a long soak. Has anyone looked at that?

Comedy from Conan

Conan O'Brien is a weird looking man with very strange hair. His style is sometimes irritating, and I can't really imagine why NBC thinks he has a broad enough appeal to be the replacement for Tonight Show host Jay Leno. (Leno is more or less harmless, but his scripted material is just fair to middling and fairly low brow. Letterman is much sharper and smarter, and the touch of crankiness appeals to me.)

But for my taste, Conan's show often has the best scripted eccentric comedy bits around. Have a look at this recent YouTube clip of him and Jim Carrey (who I really don't like) talking about quantum physics (sort of).

Update: bad link has been fixed.

Burning rhetoric

The IHT yesterday had a small article that, to this Australian at least, reads as somewhat overblown:

This summer, Australia feels like a war zone. Cities and towns across the country are enveloped in a perpetual smoke haze, and the braying of fire sirens is as commonplace as birdsong. Every evening television commentators deliver grim-faced reports from the front lines.

Tired farmers look dazedly into the camera. Firemen with soot-smeared clothes and chili-red eyes shake their heads and mumble that they have never known anything like it.

As with every modern war report, helicopters make a ubiquitous backdrop. They dip down in front of shrinking reservoirs, then stagger toward the fire front, their water pouches swaying marsupial-like underneath their bellies.

Look, I know that it was an early and harsh fire season in the South, and Melbourne had a lot of smoke haze. But still, writing like this is more for dramatic effect than reflecting most Australians' experience.

So who is the writer? It's Professor Iain McCalman from ANU, a historian of sorts. If he writes up current day events like this, I am curious as to the accuracy of the "colour" that he may add to his histories.

He certainly knows how to talk the academic talk to the right audience. This is from what seems to be an address in 2000:

Deeply imbued with deconstructionist theories and methods, New Historicists tend to juxtapose some aspect of a canonical text with a seemingly unrelated fragment of contemporary culture in order to demonstrate the multiple flux of meanings within. Their mission is to expose textual silences, elisions and contradictions, and to show that both text and context are fragmentary and incomplete, riddled with contradiction and uncertainty.

By contrast we historians are trained habitually to connect and construct, to seek out unitary as well as differential meanings, and to track similarities across our sources over time. When we work to recover lost or suppressed historical voices, it is usually to make normative claims, to argue for the value and dignity of those peoples and traditions that have suffered posterity’s enormous condescension.

I have read worse examples, but it still could do with a dose of de-jargonisation. Interesting view he has of the aim of many historians, too. (See the section in bold.)

In the same address, the Professor makes the following claim:

Let me finish by taking us closer to home by referring to one specific example of a cultural narrative that is still gripping most of us today—the harrowing story of the ‘stolen generation’. Here surely is one of the most powerful narratives to emerge out of the sorry history of Australian European–Aboriginal contact, and it is a story that will not go away. If John Howard thinks that he can argue it out of existence by statistical and semantic cheeseparing about what percentage of people constitutes a ‘generation’ or by claims that Aboriginal children were not ‘stolen’ but borrowed for their own good, he is yapping in the wind. This story obtains its emotional power not only from a mosaic of individual tragedies enacted over successive epochs, but also because it crystallizes our deepest guilts as European Australians and taps our deepest mythic memories as western moderns. ...

Our formative early reading and film viewing has been steeped in stories about stolen generations of children: whether it is the lost boys of Peter Pan, the stolen children in Pinocchio, the street waifs of Victorian England snared by Fagin, the abducted young girls of Parisian bordellos, or the lost generation of young men blasted out of existence on the beaches of Gallipoli. All these prior traces feed the cultural purchase and power of cultural narrative that has become, and will long remain, European Australia’s brand of shame.

Nice theory, Professor, but hands up any Australian readers who think the "stolen generation narrative" is actually politically significant today? The problems in Aboriginal communities are severe and extremely difficult to remedy regardless of whether the "stolen generation" is true or not, and which political party is trying to address them. I reckon the flurry of sympathy the stolen generation story got from a segment of white Australia has more or less burnt itself out, and the Professor didn't seem to see that coming.

Despite this, his bio states:

In February 2005, he was appointed to the Prime Minister's Science, Engineering and Innovation Council. He chaired an inquiry into Creativity and the Innovation Economy, presenting the report to Prime Minister and Cabinet in December 2005.

I guess the pool of potential appointees for such inquiries isn't all that big here.

Missed it by that much...

According to a report in The Guardian, the UK's reduced CO2 target will be missed by, oh, only 30 years or so:

An independent scientific audit of the UK's climate change policies predicts that the government will fall well below its target of a 30% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2020 - which means that the country will not reach its 2020 milestone until 2050.

Anyway, I plan to be living on the Moon by then in my transhumanist engineered robo-body. Either that, or in a retirement village close to the sea (which by then, will mean in Toowoomba.) This is assuming that CERN hasn't ended the universe beforehand.

I remain a "glass is half full" sort of guy.

Unimportant disasters

Some languages are dying out. Some people who make a living by studying them take this very seriously:

Humans speak more than 6,000 languages. Nearly all of them could be extinct in the next two centuries.

So what?

University of Alaska Fairbanks professor emeritus Michael Krauss addressed that question during his presentation at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting, which begins today in San Francisco.

"I claim that it is catastrophic for the future of mankind," Krauss said. "It should be as scary as losing 90 percent of the biological species."

I have no idea how to judge how scary that would be. Given nature's particular fondness for insects, I am guessing you could get close to 90% before even reaching the creatures we actually like. And if a significant number of the blood sucking, disease carrying ones went away, I may not be too worried at all. (Yes, I am half joking here. It's all very complicated, this inter species diversity stuff, so I am told. Still, I am not entirely sure what irreplaceable benefit to the ecosystem are, say, the malaria carrying mosquitoes.)

But back to languages:

Humanity became human in a complex system of languages that interacted with each other.

"That is somehow interdependent such that we lose sections of it at the same peril that we lose sections of the biosphere," Krauss said. "Every time we lose (a language), we lose that much also of our adaptability and our diversity that gives us our strength and our ability to survive."

I have heard this sort of argument before, and never found it convincing. I would have thought that the evolution of language was something that just happened, and government intervention could only slow the inevitable. Furthermore, the idea used to be that a universal language would help promote world peace and understanding; but now that forecasts of ecological disaster are culturally popular, by analogy a loss of languages will also be a catastrophe.

How can any linguist really prove that losing a language is a detriment to society overall? What he is spruiking here does not even sound like real science to me.

If this line of argument is the best they can come up with, I will remain a firm non-believer.

Global warming and Europe

Tigerhawk has an interesting post up suggesting a possible explanation for why Europeans seem to take global warming more seriously as an issue than Americans.

China problems

A couple of weeks ago, I heard a (ABC Radio National) Counterpoint interview with George Friedman from Strategic Forecasting about the future of China. He made out a pretty convincing sounding case for possibly quite severe economic troubles ahead. A transcript is now available.

This seemed to be a crucial point:

George Friedman: The conservative count of non-performing loans is $600 billion in non-performing loans. A more realistic estimate that comes from companies like Ernst & Young are $900 billion in non-performing loans. There are some who say that non-performing loans are in the $1.2 to $1.3 trillion range. However you look at it, we're talking about somewhere between 30% and 60% of the Chinese GDP being bound up in bad loans. To benchmark it, when Japan reached about 15% non-performing loans of GDP it began its severe generation-long recession.

When East Asia, particularly South Korea, for example, reached about 20%, 22% it began to tumble.

The news today that China is expanding its military spending was in line with what Friedman said here:

China is not that difficult a country to blockade, and the Chinese regard the Americans as highly unpredictable, not fully rational, and that makes them very nervous. So one of the things we've seen the Chinese do, we saw a Chinese submarine penetrate an American carrier battle group a few months ago which is a pretty aggressive and unusual move. We've seen them in space use lasers to try to blind American satellites, and we've seen them demonstrate an anti-satellite system.

So the Chinese are moving fairly aggressively in the high-tech side of things to develop counters to American power, and quite frankly they've got people in Washington quite concerned because they seem to be very good at it.

You really should read the whole interview.

A very trivial post

The Japan Times has a travel story about the extremely busy Shinjuku area in Tokyo. (You should read it if you are going to be in Tokyo soon.) Maybe I am easily amused, but the name of this old association struck me as very funny:

Outbreaks of cholera and eventual deterioration of the wooden Tamagawa conduits brought about the Shinjuku-based Yodobashi Purification Plant in 1892. Impressed with the plant's engineering, the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association of London presented Shinjuku with a ponderous commemorative fountain, which today sits just outside the east exit of Shinjuku Station.

I'm also not sure if these are official or unofficial names:

The claustrophobia-inducing underpass toward the west side of Shinjuku Station feeds into a web of yokocho (side alleys) with a postwar patina. The names of some alleys, shomben (urine) and gokiburi (cockroach) might be better lost in translation, but the Lilliputian yakitori and drinking joints are fully packed by 5 p.m. every night.

I think I have a photo of me in one of those.

Charles on the Moon

Well what d'ya know. I didn't realise that likeable conservative Charles Krauthammer was such a space nut. He has a nice column today about why going to the Moon is a Good Thing.

As he notes, a lot of the criticism of human space exploration comes from those on the left of politics, because of some crazy idea they have that human society on Earth is perfectable if only you spend enough money on it. As Charles says:

I find this objection incomprehensible. When will we stop having problems here on earth? In a fallen world of endless troubles, that does not stop us from allocating resources to endeavors we find beautiful, exciting and elevating -- opera, alpine skiing, feature films -- yet solve no social problems.

Well said, Charles, although he then hastens to add there is good science to be done on the Moon anyway.

Not only does he love space, we agree on priorities:

Sure, Mars would be better. It holds open the possibility of life and might even have water on its surface today. But the best should not be the enemy of the good. Mars is simply too far, too dangerous, too difficult, too expensive. We won't go there for a hundred years.

Given the disinclination of lefties to want to be in on colonizing anything (even barren rocks currently devoid of life), it would seem a fair bet that the politics of future space colonies might of the rather conservative, or perhaps libertarian, bent. (By the way, I have increasingly felt that the later novels of Robert Heinlein, with their libertarian societies and all kinds of marriage and sexual arrangements, have actually turned out to be more prophetic, and at much greater speed, than I ever expected when I read them in the 1980's. I still can't get over how quickly Western society has swung in its acceptance of gay marriage as a concept, for example.)

Anyway, I doubt there are going to be any socialists on the Moon, even if there will be a high degree of interdependence amongst the residents in small colonies.

Kevin Rudd - needs practice

I reckon the damaging thing about Kevin Rudd's performance under pressure yesterday and today is his psychological reaction - the glum face, the look of a good boy who knows he really does deserve the scolding, the extra blinking on his Sunrise appearance this morning, the depressed sounding voice etc.

People criticise John Howard often for taking a "best form of defence is offence" approach, but I still think it may be taken by the public as showing a greater resilience to pressure than the Rudd approach.

(Mind you, admitting to and apologising for mistakes is something that Peter Beatty in Queensland has elevated to an art form, and it did him no harm in the last election. The big difference, though, is that there is no credible alternative government in the present opposition in Queensland.)

Just half a glass of wine a day...

...is all it may take to get its life extending health benefits. I would be happy to have a glass every night with dinner, except that if I am tired already it will usually send me off to sleep on the sofa earlier than I like.

Doctors and death

An article/book review in Slate takes an interesting look at the issue of how doctors, or at least American doctors, deal with death. Here's a point I have never heard before (highlighted by me):

In fact, doctors aren't bad at handling the details of dying. We know how to ease pain, promote comfort, and arrange the medical particulars. But we are disasters when it comes to death itself, just like the rest of the human species. (Morticians often have the same problem.) I admire Chen's and Stein's pep-club optimism, but they might have integrated Ernest Becker's seminal Denial of Death into their discussions. Becker's basic point is that all of human behavior can be traced to our inability to accept our own mortality. Cowards that we are, we not only refuse to consider our own inevitable death, but our patients', too: We duck the tough discussions, flinch and flutter and order another test, and finally leave it to a (usually much younger) colleague to sit down with the family. We don't slink away because we are bad people; we slink away because we are people.

I had never really thought before about how morticians cope with death in their own family.

By the way, I also had a conversation recently with someone with a lot of insider knowledge of the medical business world, who assured me that being a retail pharmacist with your own business in Australia is one of the most lucrative jobs around.

It doesn't seem particularly stressful, either. Is it too late for me to become one?

The enforcers

There have been too many words here lately.

Following the recent popularity of a YouTube video of a rabbit chasing off a snake, there's now a good one of chickens doing an extremely convincing impersonation of a couple of cops:



Why do these chickens care about 2 rabbits fighting?

The cat who loves Chavez

Ha! George Galloway (whose creepy cat act on Big Brother is forever preserved here) writes a comment piece in The Guardian strongly supporting the "so called" dictator Chavez.

As one commenter notes:

"So-called 'dictator'":

He rules by decree. What more does one need to be labeled a dictator?

This comment further down by MalachiConstant is amusing (be sure to read it to the end):

I must admit I have had a hard time making up my mind about Chavez. I like some of his policies very much, however he does seem a trifle ham-handed, autocratic, and a bit of a clown who is more concerned with scoring points on the world stage than sorting out the real problems of Venezuela (should he really be giving the people of London half-priced bus rides while the people of most Venezuelan towns use buses that would have been scrapped in the UK twenty years ago, all to buy friendship with a leftwing UK fringe of very limited influence?). However now that I know he is good buddies with George all doubts are put to rest - any friend of George's is certainly an authoritarian scum and to be opposed on all points. Thanks for sorting me out on that George.

Ride that laser

Found via Futurismic, here's a post about the potential use of solid state lasers for space propulsion. (It contains a link to this series of slides about a proposed modular laser launch system.)

All this talk is inspired by recent success in powering up solid state lasers.

What with heat beam weapons, laser battle guns, and a return to the Moon, the 21st century is starting to look as if it might live up to a futuristic image after all. Just waiting for those flying cars and personal rocket belts, though.

Inherently safer nuclear (and free advice to the the Howard government)

Technology Review has an interesting article on "gen III & IV" reactors, which are basically designed to be simpler and inherently safer than current reactor designs.

As you may expect, pebble bed reactors get a mention, but so does another reactor (the Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor) which would, like Pebble Beds, could automatically shut down without any outside intervention:

The ESBWR replaces previous reactors' complex systems for residual heat removal with a design that uses no pumps or emergency generators--in fact, it possesses no moving parts at all, except for the neutron-absorbing control rods that are pulled partway out from its core so that nuclear fission can proceed. That fission reaction boils the water in the ESBWR's core, which becomes steam that gets carried away to large tubes in which it rises, releases its energy to turbines, and then condenses so that gravity causes it to flow back down to the core as water again. In short, the ESBWR runs wholly on natural circulatory forces. Rao says, "It could not be simpler. The control rods get pulled out, water comes in, and steam goes out, carrying heat that gets turned into electricity."

But even other, more complicated designs, are still much better than older plants:

This simplicity of design also features in other gen-III reactor designs like the Westinghouse AP1000, which has 60 percent fewer valves, 75 percent less piping, 80 percent less control cabling, 35 percent fewer pumps, and 50 percent less seismic building volume than currently operational reactors. This trend becomes more pronounced in gen-IV designs like the pebble bed reactor. In conjunction with "the modern computer-aided manufacturing technologies currently used most extensively in the ship-building industry," Peterson says, what's now possible is a modular approach to nuclear-plant construction, whereby large segments of the plants will be prefabricated in factories.

It seems to me that if the Howard government wants to defuse some of the Labor Party's "tell us where in Australia would you locate a reactor" scare campaign, it should be talking loudly about these new reactor designs which are safer, cheaper, and probably just becoming available when we would want our first reactor anyway.

It may be premature to do so, but it could be even better to commit to only allowing reactors with strong passive safety, such as a pebble bed or that ESBRW described above. I mean, if the thing can't melt down, even if something goes wrong while everyone is at the Christmas picnic, that has to be a strong selling point in the public's mind.

This aspect of the future of nuclear power generation is not getting the publicity it deserves.

My other advice to John Howard: it's not too late to get rid of that goose of a Defence Minister Brendan Nelson.

The Economist on reasons to be skeptical about carbon offsets

This Economist blog entry seems to be a good and simple explanation of why any carbon offset scheme is a very dubious exercise. The crucial paragraph:

When you donate money to build a new windfarm, you don't take any of the old, polluting power offline; you increase the supply of power, reducing the price until others are encouraged to buy more carbon-emitting power. On the margin, it may make some difference, since demand for electricity is not perfectly elastic, but nowhere near the one-for-one equivalence that carbon offsets would seem to suggest. Especially since the worst offenders, big coal-fired plants, are not the ones that renewables will substitute for; solar and wind power are not good replacements for baseload power. Instead, renewables are likely to take relatively clean (and expensive) natural gas plants offline, since those are the ones that provide "extra" power to the system. Similarly, by giving villagers in Goa energy-saving CFL bulbs, you do not lessen the amount of electricity consumed; rather, you make it possible for other people to purchase the extra energy freed up by more efficient lightbulbs. This may be excellent poverty policy, but it does not lessen the carbon footprint of your international flight.

The post is inspired by Al Gore's defence of his very energy hungry house by his use of carbon offsets.

No one has commented on the post at The Economist yet. I have no doubt there will be carbon offset defenders coming out in Al's defence, but it will interesting to see if they can counter the basic argument.

By coincidence...

It must be dissection day here. I just stumbled across a review of a biography of an important figure in the history of surgery and dissection (not that I have heard of him before.) His name: Astley Cooper. From the New Statesman review:

In 1792, with a revolutionary glint in his eye, he made a pilgrimage to Paris, and was an appalled witness to the violence of the mob as they processed through the streets with bits of the bodies they had torn apart, like a grotesque parody of the enlightened surgical techniques he had gone there to learn....

Burch doesn't gloss over the unpleasant aspects of Cooper's personality: the vanity that sometimes confused the "theatre" of surgery with a love of self-display; the clumsy sense of humour that led him once to ask his hairdresser to reach into a tub of hair powder which he had replaced with monkey entrails; the willingness to use body-snatchers in his quest for new anatomical specimens; and especially the obsession with dissection that seemed to go well beyond the needs of medical science. If some of Cooper's experiments are hard to stomach, such as his decision to close the urethra of a rabbit merely to see what would happen (the rabbit died a slow and painful death), others are merely hard to fathom. One wonders what contribution to the knowledge of human anatomy was made by his public dissection of, among others, "elephants, cuttlefish, baboons, polar bears, walruses, lemurs, leopards, the lymphatics of a porpoise, kangeroos, tortoises, porcupines, panthers and seals and the stomach of a cormorant".

Quite the dissecting showman, wasn't he.

Gruesome WWII story

The Times has an article about an old Japanese guy who talks about his gruesome war time activities:

Over the course of four months before the defeat of the Japanese forces in March 1945, Mr Makino cut open the bodies of ten Filipino prisoners, including two teenage girls. He amputated their limbs, and cut up and removed their healthy livers, kidneys, wombs and still beating hearts for no better reason than to improve his knowledge of anatomy.

“It was educational,” he said. “Even today when I go to see doctors, they are impressed by my knowledge of the human body. But if I’m really honest, the reason we did it was to take revenge on these people who were spying for the Americans. Now, of course I feel terrible about the cruel thing that I did, and I think of it so often. But at the time what I felt for these people was closer to hatred than to pity.”...

The “operation” took about an hour; when it was over the body was sewn up and thrown into a hole in the earth. Eight more vivisections followed, Mr Makino said, up to three hours long. “Over the course of time, I got used to it,” he said. “We removed some of the organs, and amputated legs and arms. Two of the victims were women, young women, 18 or 19 years old. I hesitate to say it, but we opened up their wombs to show the younger soldiers. They knew very little about women - it was sex education.

Rather like young boys who play cruelly with insects, isn't it?

And some Japanese wonder why people get upset over visits to Yasukuni Shrine.

A fundamental problem for Hawking Radiation?

PhysOrg brings to attention a paper on the black hole information paradox that seems to be important to the issue of whether Hawking Radiation really exists. (Well, I think that is one possible implication of the article, even though that is not stated in explicit plain English.)

The actual paper is here. (Actually, it seems to be a year old, so why is PhysOrg running it now?)

Its conclusion:

A robust statement of this result leads to a severe formulation of the black-hole information paradox: Either unitarity fails or Hawking’s semi-classical predictions must break down. The
no-hiding theorem rigorously rules out any “third possibility” that the information escapes from the black hole but is nevertheless inaccessible as it is hidden in correlations between semi-classical Hawking radiation and the black hole’s internal state. This provides a criterion to test any proposed resolution of the paradox: Any resolution that preserves unitarity must predict a breakdown in Hawking’s analysis [2] even for cosmologically-sized black holes.

Hey, I didn't say it was easy! But I am assuming that a "breakdown in Hawking's analysis" means that possibly Hawking Radiation doesn't exist. (Which, for any new readers of this blog, is relevant to the issue of whether micro black holes that may be created at CERN soon will evaporate and be no danger to the Earth.)

Gender and India

For a detailed report on the terrible problem of gender imbalance in India (caused primarily by gender selecting abortion), this Washington Times report is worth reading. Some extracts:

Many families therefore elect to not have a girl at all. Medical clinics -- which Sister Mary calls "womb raiders" -- have advertised "better 500 rupees now [for an abortion] rather than 50,000 rupees later" [for a dowry]. The first amount is about $11; the second is $1,100.
Dowries are theoretically banned under the 1961 Dowry Prohibition Act, but enforcement is poor and other religious groups such as Muslims and Christians have been caught up in the custom...

Surprisingly, it seems it is the richer areas that have the biggest problem:

She cites the Indian state of Haryana, just north of New Delhi, which has the country's second highest per capita income. It also has India's second worst sex ratio, after Punjab state to the west. For every 1,000 boys born in Haryana, just 820 girls were born, according to the 2001 census. In 1991, it was 879 girls.
Punjab is similarly wealthy; thus, instead of the poor killing their children, it's the rich, says Ms. Chowdhry, a former senior fellow at the Nehru Memorial Institute and Library.
"Punjab and Haryana are the two highest per capita income states, but they have such regressive trends," she says. "How can they call themselves modern?"

As for the extent of the problem worldwide:

Early this year, the British medical journal Lancet estimated the male-female gap at 43 million. Worldwide, Lancet said, there are 100 million "missing girls" who should have been born but were not. Fifty million of them would have been Chinese and 43 million would have been Indian. The rest would have been born in Afghanistan, South Korea, Pakistan and Nepal.
China gave an even bleaker assessment last month, with the government saying that its men will outnumber women in the year 2020 by 300 million.

There's a serious need for cultural re-education here.

UPDATE: if you don't trust the Washington Times on anything because of its right wing politics, you can read pretty much the same story (better written too) at The Guardian. The article confirms that richer areas in fact have the bigger problem:

India's paradox is that prosperity has not meant progress. Development has not erased traditional values: in fact, selective abortion has been accelerated in a globalising India. On the one hand there has been new money and an awareness of family planning - so family sizes get smaller. But wealthier - and better- educated - Indians still want sons. A recent survey revealed that female foeticide was highest among women with university degrees.

Wow. How is this going to be dealt with when even better education of the women is not helping?

The upside of gloom

There's an interesting piece in the Guardian about the pessimism of the European liberal intelligentsia. I like the last two paragraphs:

...instead of optimism we have a kind of European baby-boomer guilt - the feeling that we are the last privileged generation. And it is definitely a European thing - you do not find the same gloom in rising parts of the world or in the US. And if Europeans in general tend towards pessimism as a reflection of their reduced weight in the world, perhaps European intellectuals are even more pessimistic as a reflection of their reduced weight in their own societies too.

But perhaps we should draw some optimism from the pessimism of the British and European thinking classes. After all, 100 years ago the main emotion in politics was hope - and then look what happened. The despairing tone of some of these responses may be a sign that we are on the threshold of a period of unprecedented peace and prosperity.

Reasons not to visit Saudi Arabia

From the IHT:

Three Frenchmen who lived Saudi Arabia were killed by gunmen Monday in the desert on the side of a road leading to the holy city of Medina in an area restricted to Muslims only....

The men were resting on the side of a road about 17 kilometers (10.6 miles) north of Medina when gunmen fired at their car, instantly killing two of them, al-Turki said. The third man died later after he was taken to a hospital, and the fourth Frenchman was in serious condition at an area hospital, al-Turki said.

Women and children also were with the group but they were uninjured, the Interior Ministry spokesman said.

The area the group was traveling in is restricted for Muslims only. Non-Muslims are barred from the area around Medina and neighboring Mecca, the holiest cities in Islam. ...

Al-Turki said the group was probably making a Muslim pilgrimage. But it was possible they were traveling to another ancient site north of Medina where the Saudi government recently started allowing non-Muslims to visit.

Were they killed for not looking like Muslims? Nice country.

Oh no, Maxine

I liked Maxine McKew as a journalist and had no objection to her working for Kevin Rudd. But she's straining the (entirely one way) friendship by deciding to run for Parliament, and choosing the PM's electorate in which to do it.

Even before it was known whether she really wanted to run for Parliament, it seemed to me that her background as the journalist with whom politicians of both sides could enjoy a friendly lunch/interview (even though it may have been "on the record") made it a little unfair of her to now want to actually be a political player. Isn't it likely that as a politician she is in a position to abuse information gleaned in her former occupation, which probably traded to some extent on a perceived trustworthiness to keep certain comments and asides confidential?

You could probably argue this for almost all political journalists, and say that you can't have a rule that they should not run for Parliament.

But still, with McKew, it seems to me a question of the style of some of her journalism which makes it questionable. Of course, all Liberals interviewed by her knew she was married to a key Labor identity, and that may have made them more cautious anyway, but I don't know. Maybe she was still able to charm comments out of them which they would now regret having made.

The other argument may be that she could cause just as much harm by being a Rudd staffer anyway. That would be true, but all politicians need media advisors and they are often former journalists. I just feel that is part of the political territory, but I still don't like journalists running for Parliament, or at least ones that you can imagine politicians finding charming. (By this criteria, I would have no objection to Margo Kingston or Alan Ramsay running for Parliament!)

Speaking of mice...

The Times provides a link to a Memri video in which an Iranian lecturer explains the secret meaning behind Tom & Jerry cartoons. It's all to do with the Jews, of course!

Bryan Appleyard's blog brought this to my attention. (Has it been on LGF before? If not, I guess it will be soon.)

Rat excitement in New York

Have a look at this story and video from the LA Times. It seems someone passing by a closed KFC in New York noticed a bunch of rats having the run the place. The news crews came and filmed it from outside. The audio is perhaps the best part, as you listen to a bunch of people getting grossed out by seeing this.

I find rats sort of cute, but there are limits as to where I would prefer to meet them.

Rocket explosion over Australia

The ABC seems to be the only news outlet in Australia reporting this at the moment. Maybe other media will pick it up over the weekend, because the photos are very cool.

Pebble bed in China

The science show Catalyst on ABC last night had a story about a Chinese prototype pebble bed reactor. A transcript is available here, but unfortunately no video. (Maybe later?)

It gives the impression that it is working fine already, but the detail was slim. It was good to see what the "pebbles" actually look like.

Profitable things to do on the Moon

There's a short article here about ideas for early profit from going to the Moon. Nothing too exciting yet.

I seem to recall that some years ago there was a proposal for privately funding a lunar rover to be operated remoting by paying customers on earth. Sounded cool to me.

Whoever does it, they really need to get some robotic exploration of interesting areas on the moon going. The lunar poles, and areas with possible lava tubes, are where I would be headed first.

Losing interest in cinema

Each year, my interest in the movies nominated for an Oscar seems to be reaching new lows never before seen. I mean, until perhaps 7 years ago, even if I haven't seen the films, it has been a matter of some regret that I have missed at least some of them. But in the last few years, my interest in nominated films has been virtually in free fall.

It is almost certainly something to do with my stage in life, and if I was younger I would take risks again in seeing movies which may or may not turn out to be better than expected. But at the moment, I am lucky to be seeing one adult movie a year at the cinema, plus maybe another 2 child-friendly ones. The one adult movie, chosen because by all accounts I should like it, has been a disappointment in the last few years.

I only saw the last Star Wars on DVD about 6 months ago. Disappointing. (I reckon Orson Scott Card did a good job criticising the vacuousness of its moral philosophy here.) It's gorgeous to look at, but even that is just a cover for inadequate emotional logic in the story telling. I liked Village Voice's take on the visual style:

In debt to lurid sci-fi-novel cover art, Revenge of the Sith achieves the ultimate in what could be called Baroque Nerdism, a frame-filling aesthetic of graphic overdesign that began with The Phantom Menace and has now been jacked up to an absurd degree. Half the film takes place at dawn or dusk, so that the Marin County team can geek out on artificial roseate glow—a sugary luminence used so frequently one wonders if they developed a Maxfield Parrish plug-in to get the job done. On metropolitan Coruscant, background windows buzz with distant air-cars of various models; on DVD zoom mode, they will likely reveal individual license plate numbers.

What about Babel, this year's serious movie Oscar contender? I am not encouraged by the David Denby review in the New Yorker:

My friend Herbert was rude to his mother last spring, and, some time later, Mt. St. Helens erupted. And three girls I met on the Central Park carrousel were kicked out of school for smoking, and the price of silver dropped by forty thousand rupiah in Indonesia. With these seemingly trivial events from my own life, I illustrate the dramatic principle by which the Mexican-born director Alejandro González Iñárritu makes his movies. Iñárritu, who made “Amores Perros” (2000), is one of the world’s most gifted filmmakers. But I had the same reaction to “Babel” that I had to his most recent movie, “21 Grams” (2003): he creates savagely beautiful and heartbreaking images; he gets fearless performances out of his actors; he edits with the sharpest razor in any computer in Hollywood; and he abuses his audience with a humorless fatalism and a piling up of calamities that borders on the ludicrous.

As I have commented before, I think cinema goes through joyless phases from time to time, but this current one is lasting an inordinately long time. It's like waiting for a drought to break.

UPDATE: good to see it's not just me. I wrote this post before I read this Slate story, claiming that some Oscar voters are deliberately leaving the "Best Movie" ballot blank!

Also, it's probably an appropriate time to note again that some of the loss of interest in cinema is partly to do with the lack of charm or reliable likeability in the current raft of mainstream Hollywood actors. Can't any studio sign up a bunch of new, young-ish stars and promote it a new start in something resembling the old studio talent system? (Sign them up to an updated morals clause too, so they can be dumped as soon as they start turning up at parties without underwear.)

UPDATE 2:

I just read Danny Katz talking about Babel:

There was a huge selection of teary, jerky movies this year: there was the chirpy-weepy Little Miss Sunshine, and the baklava-syrupy The Pursuit Of Happyness - but the award goes to Babel, which was so magnificently miserable, for two and a half hours, all I could hear was the cast crying, the audience crying, and even the projectionist crying, from inside his sound-proofed, triple-glazed glass booth. I saw this film with my friend, Roger, and afterwards we were so shattered by the powerful themes of human fear and cultural isolation, we sat down in a cafe and discussed the movie's most profound question: how do you pronounce "Babel"? - I thought it was pronounced "Babble" but Roger said it was pronounced "Bay-bel" and I said "No, I'm pretty sure it's Babble" and he said "NO, IT'S DEFINITELY BAY-BEL" and this went on for about an hour and a half, yeah I really love those intense kind of post-cinema intellectual discussions.

Made me laugh.

Careers to avoid: clowning in Cucuta

The BBC reports:

Two circus clowns have been shot dead during a performance in the eastern Colombian city of Cucuta, police say....

Local reports say the audience of about 20 people, mostly children, thought the shooting was part of the show before realising both men had been killed.

Last year, a prominent circus clown, known as Pepe, was also shot dead by a unknown assailant in Cucuta.

This is story crying out for further explanation.

A new concept for the day

You know something is complicated and "out there" when someone who posts at Cosmic Variance finds it new and hard to fathom. Have a look at this post about "Boltzmann brains" and the decay of the universe. More detail about Boltzmann and entropy is at an earlier CV post here. It is not easy going.

I will soon be doing a post about cosmologist Frank Tipler too, and his upcoming book claiming to show the physics behind various miracles in the Bible (or the New Testament, at least.) His previous book "The Physics of Immortality" got rubbished by most of his scientist colleagues, but I expect that will be nothing compared to the shellacking the new book is likely to take.

Targetting for beginners

Former Spook, who has some experience in these matters, has a good post explaining why people should not think there is anything unusual going on when the media runs a "targets have been selected already" story.

Debating the multiverse

Here's an interesting account of the recent debate at a conference between top cosmologists who take opposing sides on the issue of the anthropic principle and whether a "multiverse" exists. (String theory gets a mention too.) It explains the issues in pretty straightforward fashion, and is well worth a read.

Good surgeons play with monkey

OK, something surprising to post about.

The LA Times notes:

New research today found that surgeons with the highest scores on "Super Monkey Ball 2," "Stars Wars Racer Revenge" and "Silent Scope" performed best on tests of suturing and laparoscopic surgery.....

"For as little as three hours a week, you could help your children become the cyber-surgeons of the 21st century," said Dr. James C. Rosser Jr. of Beth Israel Medical Center in New York and lead author of the study in the Archives of Surgery.

The research looked at 33 surgeons attending a course on laparoscopic surgery and found that their game-playing skill was a better predictor of success on the surgical tests than years of medical practice or number of surgeries performed.

Expertise with "Super Monkey Ball 2," which involves steering a ball containing a monkey down a serpentine track while simultaneously targeting bananas, was most closely linked with high test scores.

No news today

My morning survey of the news is showing nothing I particularly care to post about. Instead, for diversion, have a look at this website for "weird and funny" photos. (Originally I found it via Red Ferret Journal, which linked to the post about cool aircraft-in-flight cockpit photos. However, the rest of the Static website is worth looking at too.)

The cause of ice ages

It would give everyone a greater degree of confidence in climate predictions if scientists had cracked once and for all the issue of what triggers ice ages. As this post at Real Climate makes clear, they are still several theories around, and no doubt more to come. (Cyclic orbit changes are a significant part of it, but the exact mechanism seems still very much up for grabs.)

The comments to the post include these one, which I add here just to give some background on the whole history of ice ages:

...the question "What triggers ice ages?" only applies to the late Pleistocene (since about 800,000 years ago). From the onset of northern-hemisphere glaciation (about 3 million years ago) to the "mid-Pleistocene transition" (about 800,000 years ago), glacial advance and retreat follows a strong 41,000-year cycle, which has led to its being called "the 41 ky world" (Raymo & Nisancioglu 2003, Paleoceanography, 18, 1011). This is surely due to the changes of earth's obliquity, since changes in the amplitude of the climate signal correspond to changes in the amplitude of the obliquity cycle (Lisiecki & Raymo 2007, Quaternary Science Reviews, 26, 56).

But since the mid-Pleistocene transition (not precisely since, this happens intermittently before that time) glacial changes are dominated by a 100,000-year cycle. The behavior during the "late Pleistocene" was originally attributed to changes in earth's eccentricity, but that idea has now fallen out of favor. Huybers & Wunsch (2005, Nature, 434, 491) and Huybers (Quaternary Science Reviews, 26, 37) have convincingly shown that even during the late Pleistocene, the timing of deglaciations is strongly correlated to the obliquity cycle. They find no such relationship for the precession cycle or the eccentricity cycle.

(This comment seems to be by someone the scientists who run Real Climate trust.)

And this comment is make by one of the Real Climate authors, in response to the question of when would we be next due for an ice age were it not for global warming:

We've just come out of one of the big every-100KYr glaciations, and the normal course of events is to build up to another biggy through a series of small, short glaciations over the next 100KYr. In the normal course of events, the first try at an ice age would be due sometime in the next 20,000 years but I myself wouldn't try to pin it down more than that. One of the most interesting attempts so far to say what global warming might do to the glacial cycle is in the paper (pdf) by Archer and Ganopolski that appeared in the AGU journal GGG. I'll leave it to David to say whether that has been followed up by more detailed GCM work.

By the way, I don't post this to express scepticism about legitimate concern over CO2 levels, but it is interesting that something as significant as ice ages are not properly understood yet.

Japanese culture corner

The Japan Times has an article about the declining popularity of period drama in Japan. You know: samurai, ninja, some very strange haircuts and all. The casual visitor to Japan will still find quite a bit of it on TV, but apparently not as much as before.

I guess it's a similar phenomena to the decline of the Western as a genre. Anyone who was a child in the '60's can remember just how many cowboy and wild west shows were made in those days. I suspect the 1950's was probably the height of its popularity in the cinema, but I could be wrong. TV now is dominated by gritty crime shows, I suppose, and plain crap of all varieties. (Someday, a good sitcom about adults that doesn't always deal with sex will emerge again.)

Anyway, this got me thinking about the one childhood Japanese show that I can recall - The Samurai. The Wikipedia entry is relatively short, but points out that the show was very popular in Japan, Australia and the Phillipines, but was hardly shown anywhere else. How odd.

For those who can vaguely recall what the lead character Shintaro looked like, here he is:



(The picture is from a small fansite here.) Not exactly rugged good looks, but a sister-in-law of mine used to swoon over him, so she tells me.

I think most kids were most impressed by the evil ninja who jumped up backwards into trees, snuck around the houses with paper walls, and had an endless supply of throwing stars.

It would probably be seen as hopelessly violent for children today.

Pearson visits home

For a depressing first hand account about aboriginal life in his home town in Cape York, Noel Pearson's column from Saturday's Australian is worth reading.

Talk about your intractable social problems. It's also interesting to note yet again how communities as a whole faired so much better under the Christian mission system.

Easy global cooling?

I don't think I have seen this exact suggestion before:

Benford has a proposal that possesses the advantages of being both one of the simplest planet-cooling technologies so far suggested and being initially testable in a local context. He suggests suspension of tiny, harmless particles (sized at one-third of a micron) at about 80,000 feet up in the stratosphere. These particles could be composed of diatomaceous earth. "That's silicon dioxide, which is chemically inert, cheap as earth, and readily crushable to the size we want," Benford says. This could initially be tested, he says, over the Arctic, where warming is already considerable and where few human beings live. Arctic atmospheric circulation patterns would mostly confine the deployed particles around the North Pole. An initial experiment could occur north of 70 degrees latitude, over the Arctic Sea and outside national boundaries. "The fact that such an experiment is reversible is just as important as the fact that it's regional," says Benford.

"Benford" is Gregory Benford, the scientist/science fiction writer. A couple of years ago he was in Canberra talking up the prospects of a rotating space mirror as an engineering solution to global warming. He is evidently looking at more down to earth options now.

The quote is from Technology Review, which seems a pretty neat publication generally. What it doesn't explain is how to get the silicon dioxide up there, and how long it will stay. I thought you also were not supposed to breath the stuff (from what I recall of using diatomaceous earth in an old pool filter,) so I am not sure what is meant to happen when it comes back to earth.

The history of declining birthrates

An interesting short article here about some research looking at why women have fewer children:

Before the 1800s, children were educated at home or in church. Children became more expensive to care for and less helpful around the house once public schooling became available. At the same time, women were freed up from all-day children-rearing, allowing mothers to enter the paid labor force.

However, money isn't the only incentive for smaller families, experts say.

"We know for sure that you don't have to reach a high level of per capita income for fertility to decline, but we don't know exactly what sets it off," said historian George Atler at Indiana University. "Whether it's general change or attitudes about birth control is still a question debated among demographers today.

It's interesting, but still doesn't help answer why some Muslim countries have such high birth rates. I can't say I have ever seen much explanation of that.

Who knows...

..what is going on in Antarctica? A couple of reports around today show the uncertainty about that icy pole:

First one:

A new report on climate over the world’s southernmost continent shows that temperatures during the late 20th century did not climb as had been predicted by many global climate models....

“It’s hard to see a global warming signal from the mainland of Antarctica right now,” he said. “Part of the reason is that there is a lot of variability there. It’s very hard in these polar latitudes to demonstrate a global warming signal. This is in marked contrast to the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula that is one of the most rapidly warming parts of the Earth.”

Bromwich says that the problem rises from several complications. The continent is vast, as large as the United States and Mexico combined. Only a small amount of detailed data is available – there are perhaps only 100 weather stations on that continent compared to the thousands spread across the U.S. and Europe. And the records that we have only date back a half-century.

The second report is about vast amounts of water under the ice:

Scientists using NASA satellites have discovered an extensive network of waterways beneath a fast-moving Antarctic ice stream that provide clues as to how "leaks" in the system impact sea level and the world's largest ice sheet. Antarctica holds about 90 percent of the world's ice and 70 percent of the world's reservoir of fresh water.

It's a very interesting place.

Ranking the sharks

It turns out that Australia is not the top country for shark attacks at all, which comes as a bit of a disappointment in a way:

The number of attacks in the United States, the world’s leader, dipped slightly from 40 in 2005 to 38 in 2006; well below the 53 recorded in 2000, he said.

As in past years, Florida was the world’s shark capital, with 23 attacks, Burgess said. This was slightly higher than the 19 cases reported in 2005 but considerably lower than the annual average of 33 between 2000 and 2003, he said.

Elsewhere in the world, Burgess tracked seven attacks in Australia, four in South Africa, three in Brazil, two in the Bahamas and one each in Fiji, Guam, Mexico, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, La Reunion, Spain and Tonga.

Someone should do it on a per capita basis to get a better idea of how competitive our sharks are internationally.

The Catholics take over

The Times reports that Catholicism is becoming the most practised faith in England, due to European migration:

Average Sunday attendance of both churches stood even at nearly one million in 2005, according to the latest statistics available for England and Wales, but the attendance at Mass is expected to soar.

A Church of England spokesman said: “I don’t think you can talk in terms of decline in the Church of England. It is fairly clear that with small fluctuations the worshipping population of the Church of England is 1.7 million a month. That is actually a stable figure.”

But looking at the total numbers shows how very, very few Anglicans attend church:

Figures for 2005 show that there are 4.2 million Catholics in England and Wales, under one fifth the 25 million baptised Anglicans and double the number of Muslims.

If it's anything like here, the migrants are going to have to bring their own priests with them. It will also be interesting to see if it means a more conservative Church, and a more conservative influence on politics. I certainly get the impression that the Tories have virtually given up on espousing anything much resembling social conservatism.

On a meta-blogging note...

I find it odd that those posts which I consider most worthwhile are often the ones that attract the least comment, and do not get linked to anywhere else. It would be good if there was a simple way for readers to just mark how interesting they find a post, rather than having to comment.

Anyway, a blog like one is just as much use to myself in terms of keeping track of articles and thoughts as it is a popularity exercise. But it would be nice to have a better idea about what sort of posts I make that have the most interest to most people.

I must go over to Catallaxy and read the recent reader's analysis post. I haven't got around to that yet...

Hitchens and Hillary

If you missed Christopher Hitchens' recent Slate article about Hillary Clinton and her credibility problems over Iraq, you should have a read.