Pandas don't like it

Carbon trading is 'emission impossible', says WWF - earth - 14 June 2007 - New Scientist Environment

This very brief snippet indicated that even the WWF is sceptical of carbon trading as currently done by Europe.

But, but, those Europeans are so green, aren't they? (Actually, they just like exporting their problems elsewhere.)

The Gaza mess

Comment is free: The sorrow and the pity

This article from the Guardian is worth reading. She points out that the proposed British academic's boycott of Israel has no objective, and given the mess in Gaza, no possible point to the exercise exists.

Of course, this is a red flag to the bulls who read the Guardian. One writes:

the boycutt of Israel only lacks clear objectives in your mind. The objective is ENOUGH! enough, enough, enough.
Israel has spent the past 40 years screwing up the population it occupies. Now, Palestinian armed factions have finally turned against each other. It's a wonder it didn't happen before considering the mess they live in. ENOUGH! Israeli apartheid. Enough funding one group against another. Enough starving the population of Gaza. Enough bombing. Enough enough enough.
is that clear enough for you?

Err, no not at all.

Meanwhile, over at Tigerhawk he had this interesting discussion of why Arab countries, to put it mildly, don't seem all that good at governing themselves. One comment makes this point:

I would most enjoy seeing the Eypptian military roll into Gaza, decimate the Hamas fanatics and re-assume control of the territory. This would be politically acceptable around the globe and could lead to the most satisfying solution. It would also give the US something for its investment in Egyptian aid -- finally. Nothing would silence the antiZionist euro-brigade more than a Gaza under Egyptian control.

The solution to many of the problems we read about are very near at hand. Egypt to Gaza will quiet a lot of noise. The West Bank will be eminently more manageable.

Initially this sounds like a semi-plausible idea. But, I assume this would not go over well with the radicals in Egypt, and then that country may fall into chaos.

So, no clear end in sight.

UPDATE: a good article in Slate about this, which lists the following problems with all possible solutions:

It's no wonder that everyone involved in this issue is now madly seeking "new ideas." A state in the West Bank only, leaving Gaza to its fate? (Would that state be viable, and who would take care of Gaza?) A three-state solution? (Why give Hamas a base from which it could cause trouble?) A return to the Jordanian-Egyptian solution? (Let them deal with the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, respectively. There's one problem: They aren't interested.) An international force? (Hamas promised to treat such a force as an "occupying power." Any volunteers?) Start talking to Hamas? (This won't solve the internal Palestinian problems.) Keep fighting for Gaza? (Fatah seems to be losing its appetite for conflict, and, even with the support it has received from the West, doesn't have enough muscle to stay in the fight.)

Inner city living worth that much?

Yesterday I was walking around the city along a route which took me past a few relatively new high rise apartment blocks. Some of these have "for sale" signs near the entrance, and thus I found myself considering the price of inner city living.

For example, in a year-old block, there was a two bedroom, one bathroom apartment (on the 13th floor, I think) for sale for $460,000. It had two car parking bays too. 87m2 size, I think. Other two bedroom units with ensuites (which are much more common) and on higher floors were for sale for about $600,000.

I know also that "off the plan" contracts for Vision, a very tall high rise planned to be finished in 2011, are selling one bedroom apartments of 67m2 for around $430,000.

I live about 18 km from the city in a pleasant suburb, and am certain that a price in the same range as these units would get you a four bedroom house with a main bathroom, ensuite, and second toilet or bathroom downstairs, probably on around 600 - 700 m2 of land. Sure, it might be 15 -20 years old, but houses of that age are often still of pleasing appearance. During the middle of the day, it takes me about 25 minutes to get to the heart of the city. A house owner also does not pay $2,500 - $3,000 in body corporate levies per year.

It seems to me that inner city living is overvalued, even in Brisbane.

What will Labor say about this?

Taxation take is helping Howard battlers | News | The Australian

Presents quite a conundrum for Labor in deciding how to question this.

Why Kevin Rudd should not be Prime Minister

A snippet from Matt Price's column:

Although it’s no secret the Labor leader is something of an expert at yin and yang, he’s not bad at ping and pong either. Bloody competitive, though: “Not that I was counting but we won 21-16,” he bragged.

Hmmm. Such a minor thing, but still noted in my little black book of likely character defects of the man who would be PM.

Update: yes, as my commenter indicates, my post did not make it clear he was playing aged pensioners. And keeping careful track. Couldn't he have let them win?

Hitchens on Paris (so to speak)

The creepy populism surrounding Paris Hilton and Scooter Libby. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine

Christopher Hitchens opens this column as follows:

There is a huge trapdoor waiting to open under anyone who is critical of so-called "popular culture" or (to redefine this subject) anyone who is uneasy about the systematic, massified cretinization of the major media. If you denounce the excess coverage, you are yourself adding to the excess. If you show even a slight knowledge of the topic, you betray an interest in something that you wish to denounce as unimportant or irrelevant.

True.

Mr 22%

Sperm - Sleek, Fast and Focused: The Cells That Make Dad Dad - New York Times

This light-hearted look at sperm cells explains why men have to make so many of them:

...the majority of sperm couldn’t fertilize an ovum if it were plunked down in front of them. “Only a perfectly normal sperm can penetrate an egg,” said Dr. Harry Fisch, a urologist at Columbia University Medical Center, “and the majority of sperm are abnormally shaped.” Some may have pinheads, others have two heads, some lack tails, a third don’t move at all. As a rule, Dr. Fisch said, a man is lucky if 15 percent of his sperm are serviceable. “One guy I saw had 22 percent,” he said, “but that’s rare.”

I didn't realise the figure was so low, even for fertile guys. Still, even with, say, 10% being effective, the article points out that the average ejaculation presents 150 million in total. So that's 15,000,000 good quality, potentially egg breaking, sperm each time.

Still sounds like very inefficient design.

The truth about the 1960's

The hippies were wrong: money can buy you love-TimesOnline

David Finklestein's column is an interesting take on the 1960's and the most important thing about it (namely, it was the start of the post war era of abundance.)

I see that he doesn't mention specifically the start of the change in sexual mores, and the role that better contraception played in that. But it's a good read in any case.

The presumptuous Gittins

Back-scratching at a national level - Opinion - smh.com.au

I don't read Ross Gittins regularly, but in the SMH today he makes some very snide and questionable claims about Howard and immigration:

There's a saying among journalists that news is anything someone doesn't want you to know. So let me tell you all about John Howard's immigration program. It's a key part of the Government's economic policy, but one it rarely talks about.

Why? Because Howard wants his Battlers to think he shares their dislike and distrust of foreigners, especially boat people. And it wouldn't help his image for people to know he's running the biggest immigration program we've ever had.

Well, Howard has certainly made a repeated point about the size of the "official" refugee program. And after the Hanson fizzle, I just don't see that the Australian public has much interest in the level of Asian immigration, unless it has a strong Muslim flavour. (An understandable consequence of 9/11 and the West's increased interest in what that religion is about.) If anything, I suspect the concern about Muslim immigration has probably made most people see other Asian immigrants as benign.

In fact, Gittins provides another reason why "battlers" might not have the same concerns that they used to about immigration generally. He points out that:

The emphasis on skill means that permanent immigrants are a lot younger than the population they're joining. More than half are aged 15 to 34, compared with 28 per cent of our population. Only 2 per cent of permanent immigrants are 65 or older, compared with 13 per cent of our population.

Younger people from non-English speaking backgrounds are naturally going to assimilate faster than older, non-skilled migrants. Pauline Hanson used to complain about street signage in some areas being in foreign language only; skilled migrants who come here to work don't need that.

Gittins also claims this:

The Battlers' eternal objection to immigrants - which I believe was a big part of the strong public support for our shameful treatment of people on the Tampa - is that "these people will take our jobs".

I reckon the jobs issue had next to nothing to do with public attitudes about the Tampa. It was about the method by which a bunch of claimed refugees sought to get into Australia when they were in no danger at their last "staging post", and they were displacing other refugees who went through a long process of formal assessment.

Anyway, today, at current unemployment levels, even the "battlers" are unlikely to be concerned about that.

The fact is that the immigration issues have moved on from the 1980's and 1990's concerns, yet Gittins seems to think that the "battlers", having decided that they don't like immigrants of any kind, are still stuck on that position. I think this is treating people as unthinking dills.

As to whether Howard uses immigration cynically: I suppose it is easy to claim this if you don't live areas of Sydney where the question of Muslim attitude to women is not a matter of frequent real life concern. I don't agree with everything the government suggests about how to go about making sure all immigrants accept the social standards of their new country, but I don't feel that Howard's motives in wanting to deal with this should be seem as being purely cynical either.

England follows Australia

Marriage works. Accept no substitutes-Comment-Columnists-Libby Purves-TimesOnline

It's surprising to realise that Britain is only now contemplating de facto couple property rights of the kind which are now standard in (I think) every Australian State. That is, if a couple lives together for a certain period, or if they have children, their rights to "matrimonial" property may be divided by the courts using very similar principles to those that would be used by the Family Court in a real marriage.

I share much of Libby Purves' views about these laws. As she says:

Divorce is now so accessible that anybody who wants the protections of marriage can get them – unless their cohabiting partner doesn’t agree, in which case, caveat emptor. You need not affront your Dawkins principles by going to church, or betray your anarchist instincts by entering a register office. You can now marry in a bingo hall or a Sea Life Centre. A licence costs only £63.50.

Some couples – I know and love many – jointly decide not to marry. Good luck to them. They don’t whimper for new laws; if they are wise they make legal arrangements about property ownership (like becoming tenants-in-common with appropriate shares) and ensure joint responsibility for children. If they are not wise, then by definition they are fools. You cannot frame every law to suit fools, even fools for love.

Women – who traditionally get the short end of the stick – should be aware that marriage is a safer basis for scaling down work to raise a family, and that if they eschew it or are denied it, then they had better make arrangements. Men, these days, should do the same. If you hippyishly reject marriage because “it’s just a piece of paper”, don’t expect the nanny state to provide you with an equally safe piece. There are limits to how far government should protect adults from one another’s rapacity or flakiness. You make your bed, you lie in it.

Well said.

Blue sect with sex on its mind

In God's name

It's rare that I would recommend anything from 60 Minutes, and now that I do they have no transcript or video on their site. Grrr.

Anyway, the story that caught my attention on last Sunday was about the Cooperite Christian sect of New Zealand, which was a new one for me. The link above will at least show you the form of dress that the women wear.

This is one creepy sect. The aging founder, Neville Cooper, is from Queensland, and has had umpteen kids from 3 wives. (He is currently on wife number 3, apparently, and the show did not make clear what happened to the first 2.)

According to WikiChristian, which also has very little information about them, there are now 400 members, many of them children because Neville believes all women should pump out as many children as possible. (OK, maybe Catholics of barely 50 years ago could be accused of having a similar teaching, but the young women Cooperites on the show indicated that they actively desired heaps of children - 10 or 12 seemed the bare minimum they wanted. Catholic women were not in the same league, and their desire to limit the number of children became clear in practice when the pill became available.)

The weird side of the cult is that it is both very conservative and adopts a puritan-like and uniform standard of dress (mostly blue, for some reason), but its leader seems to encourage a ridiculous amount of openness in sex within marriage. (His son claims that he frequently saw his parents having sex, who saw it as an educational thing to do for the children. He also says he was molested by his father at age 17. It sounded like it was some "hands on" teaching scenario, although the son did not elaborate.)

The son has since left the cult, but his wife went back, and she and their children will have nothing to do with him ever again.

It seems rare to have such a strange mix of a conservative, isolationist, Christian sect, combined with an emphasis on educating children on sex, and encouraging them to start as young as possible. (They marry as teenagers, and the report showed a newly married teenage couple snogging for the camera while being carried to the honeymoon room in a silly carriage with heart shaped windows, with children throwing flowers on the path in front of them. It was a very strange scene.)

I can't imagine that it will survive the death of Neville Cooper for long, as surely internal power struggles will ensue.

I would like to know more about their attitude to modern medicine and things like that, but there seems no way of finding out more.

Sorry if you missed it.

Fatwa frenzy

A fatwa free-for-all in the Islamic world - International Herald Tribune

The above article explains the problem with Fatwas.

It notes:

Technically, the fatwa is nonbinding and recipients are free to shop around for a better ruling. In a faith with no central doctrinal authority, there has been an explosion of places offering fatwas, from Web sites that respond to written queries, to satellite television shows that take phone calls, to radical and terrorist organizations that set up their own fatwa committees.

"There is chaos now," Megawer said. "The problem created is confusion in thought, confusion about what is right and what is wrong religiously."

In Egypt, there are two official institutions responsible for religious interpretation. The House of Fatwa, or Dar al-Ifta, which technically falls under the Ministry of Justice, and Al Azhar. All court sentences of death must be approved by Dar al-Ifta, for example.

I like the name "House of Fatwa". Is it anything like the House of Blues, I wonder?

Danger watch on CERN continues

I haven't posted anything new for a while that appears particularly relevant to the issue of whether the Large Hadron Collider will cause the premature end of the Earth, or indeed the universe.

However, I seem to have missed this odd one which first appeared a couple of years ago on arxiv, but has recently been revised.

Now, this appears to be one of the more "off the wall" papers on arxiv, as it is written by a Hungarian with some physics background who works in oncology at a hospital. (He may also have an interest in UFO's, if his email address is anything to go by.)

As far as I can make out, he thinks quark colour changes are relevant to the big bang, and he has a concern that the LHC could instigate the same thing. I think this means "end of the universe".

Despite the amateurish look of the paper, and although I do not know whether all the terms used are genuine or not, my guess is that it is just cogent enough to indicate he is not mad. In any event, I have never understood how arxiv papers are chosen.

The CERN answer to such theories of catastrophe from the LHC is to say that cosmic rays have been causing more energetic collisions in celestial bodies for billions of years, and the universe has not disappeared, so we can't do any worse on earth. I think this paper makes some reference to cosmic ray measurements being mistaken, and so might contain an answer to that.

Anyway, someone who can follow esoteric physics better than me should read it and tell me if he is mad, or not.

Murder he wrote

OpinionJournal - Five Best

This list of Theodore Dalrymple's "favorite books on the criminal mind" brought to my attention some mass murderers of whom I had not previously heard.

This one is very Alfred Hitchcock material (except it may be hard to fit in a blond female protagonist in a film about a homosexual killer):

The serial killer was a man called Dennis Nilsen, who used to pick up stray homosexuals in London, take them home, strangle them and then watch television with their corpses beside him on the sofa. As we doctors put it in our special, technical language, he was a bit odd.

But the story which interested me most was the one about the mad French Dr Petiot:

The Occupation during World War II gave him his opportunity to become one of the most prolific serial killers in French history. He offered Jews an escape to Argentina for 25,000 francs, but when they came to his house to deliver the money he killed them and incinerated them.

His story must have a following of sorts, because he has quite a lengthy Wikipedia article. It explains the murder method, and body disposal, as follows:

Petiot claimed that he could arrange a safe passage to Argentina or elsewhere in South America through Portugal. He also claimed that Argentinean officials demanded inoculations and injected his victims with cyanide. Then he took all their valuables and disposed of the bodies. People who trusted him to deliver them to safety were never seen alive again.

At first Petiot dumped the bodies in the Seine, but he later destroyed the bodies by submerging them in quicklime or by incinerating them. In 1941, Petiot bought a house at 21 rue le Sueur.

What Petiot failed to do was to keep a low profile. The Gestapo eventually found out about him and, by April 1943, they had heard all about his "route." Gestapo agent Robert Jodkum forced prisoner Yvan Dreyfus to approach the supposed network, but he simply vanished.

When he was found with many bodies and body parts in his house, the doctor claimed it was because he was a member of the French Resistance, and the victims were "enemies of France".

He was finally convicted in 1946 and:

On May 25, Petiot was beheaded, after a stay of a few days due to a problem in the release mechanism of the guillotine.

It would appear from the Wiki article that no one has every made a film of this story, which is pretty surprising. Given the jewish connection, I see it as Spielberg material.

Tipler again

He thinks physics proves Christianity | Inquirer | 06/10/2007

How pleasing. Bryan Appleyard has a review of Frank Tipler's "The Physics of Christianity" at the link above.

Not sure if I am back to regular blogging yet. There still seems to be just less around that I want to comment on lately.

Short-ish break needed

This June is shaping up as a very busy work month, and blogging is proving to be just too distracting. (In fact, it's the whole WWW that is the problem, but blogging compounds it by causing me to spend too much time just looking for something I think is worth bringing to readers' attention.)

Today I got to bag Phillip Adams and Paul Keating, mentioned Frank Tipler, particle physics, and my intense dislike of Big Brother. (Not for the first time I wonder whether this blog is just too eclectic for a large readership. Still, I like it that way.)

In any case, it's a pretty good spot to call a short break of uncertain duration to allow me to concentrate on work.

I think a week or two should do it. Don't forget me. I will still check this blog in the evenings to see if there any pleas from the multitude begging me to resume posting.

Money for nothing?

Why the rumored discovery of the Higgs boson is bad news for particle physics.

So, maybe the Higgs boson has been discovered already before the Europeans even get to turn on the Large Hadron Collider. That would be funny; sort of.

Reality TV run its course?

Bryan Appleyard hates reality TV about as much as I do. He makes this excellent point about those who think criticising Big Brother and its ilk is elitist criticism of popular taste:

...the pop-elitist defence is always the same – we’re giving the people what they want. This is, of course, ridiculous. It implies that, before Big Brother, viewers were sitting around thinking, “Hmmm, now what I’d really like is a show about a bunch of dysfunctional freaks stuck in a house for three months.”

The truth is that the show and its popularity are an invention of its makers. They choose to make it, they are not compliant servants of popular taste. They don’t like to hear this because it jerks them out of their cool, postmodern amoral-ity by dropping the moral buck right back on their desks. But let’s get real: you did it, you’re responsible.

From what little I notice of its coverage, the current Australian series of Big Brother is being seen as terribly dull. I would guess that it may have one last season to go before even its fans tire of the format completely.

The God will let it rain on South East Queensland again. (That is just my private theory.)

Tipler and his scientific Christianity

I mentioned in March that mathematical physicist Frank Tipler had a new book coming out called "The Physics of Christianity".

It's now published, and, as predicted, it comes in for some severe rubbishing from other scientist types. You can read about it on a post at Cosmic Variance here.

Some commenters still have some sympathy for Tipler, which is nice to see.

The love-in continues

Phillip Adams writes another love letter to Paul Keating today. A new addition to Keating: The Musical (which, according to Adams, ".. is a phenomenon, packing every venue it has played") should be it ending by Adams in drag playing the fat lady singing to Keating waving from a balcony, Evita style.

Does Keating actually ask for this? I heard Adams say on his radio show last week that Keating had rung him that day, not happy with the comparisons being made between him in 1996 and Howard today.

Barely a week later, and Adams has a column complaining on Keating's behalf how the great Paul is still adored by the public, yet not given the respect he deserves.

If Howard does win another election, I would hardly be surprised if Keating were found dead alone in his study, by the use of some antique French pistol, with his scrapbook of his achievements open in front of him on the last page. Not that I wish him ill; he just seems unhealthily obsessed with his place in history.