Freakonomics at the NYT

Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog

For those who haven't noticed, the Freakonomics guys are now blogging at the NYT, and the range of topics covered is pretty impressive.

Go have a browse.

Clubbing and grumpiness

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | Charlie Brooker: Nightclubs are hell

Charlie Brooker really, really dislikes clubbing, and I am pretty much in complete sympathy with his amusingly expressed views.

As an aside though: what is it currently about England and these "grumpy or men/women" TV shows from the last couple of years. Even though I might agree with at least half of the views expressed, it just seems a real waste of TV to sit around watching to see if the grumpiness actually comes across as funny.

Islamism rallies

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Stadium crowd pushes for Islamist dream

See the link above for an interesting report on a recent Islamist rally in Indonesia.

I like this part at the end:

"The method used in Hizb ut-Tahrir is a change in thought patterns. We call it 'thought revolution'. When someone is given Islamic teaching - given the brilliant thinking of Islam - then they'll naturally undergo a thought revolution, and will see what is good and what is bad."

Java jive

Girl overdoses on espresso coffee

The BBC reports:

Jasmine Willis, 17, developed a fever and began hyperventilating after drinking seven double espressos while working at her family's sandwich shop.

The student, of Stanley, County Durham, was taken to the University Hospital of North Durham, where doctors confirmed she had overdosed on caffeine.

She has since made a full recovery and is now warning others about the dangers of excessive coffee drinking.

Ms Willis, who had thought the coffees were single measures, said the effects were so severe that she began laughing and crying for no reason while serving customers at the shop.

She developed a fever and began struggling to breathe after being sent home by her father.

"My nerves were all over the place.

"I was drenched. I was burning up and hyperventilating.

"I was having palpitations, my heart was beating so fast and I thought I was going into shock.

That's a type of overdose you don't hear about every day.

Sending food to China

Games for anything except this Chinese takeaway | The Australian

Interesting article about increasing exports of Australian food to China, mainly (it seems) for the middle class who worry about the safety scares with Chinese foodstuffs.

I knew we export a lot of wine around the world, but not this much:

Last financial year Australian wine exports topped $3 billion for the first time, pushed up by demand in China, which bought $51 million worth.

Ekka

On Sunday I went with the family to Brisbane's Royal Queensland Show, or Exhibition, but otherwise known as the Ekka.

While similar shows are held in all Australian capital cities, Brisbane people like to think that they have a special relationship with, and fondness for, their version. I think this is true, and may have something to do with the fact that when I was a child it coincided with a two week August school holiday, which helped ensure huge attendance numbers in proportion to the population of the city then.

The Brisbane showgrounds are also in the inner city, as Sydney's used to be. Despite being eyed off by the Council for many, many years for urban re-development, as far as I know the grounds are still being zealously guarded by the grandly named Royal National Agricultural and Industrial Association of Queensland. (I seem to recall that most or all of it is owned as freehold, hence the difficulty of the government ever forcing it to be sold off and turned into townhouses.)

I would be curious to know if any of my vast interstate readership (basically, Tim and Caz) have any comments about this. Do they have a strong sentimental attachment to their agricultural show, or know of others who do?

Last year I couldn't attend because of one or both of the kids being sick. The year before, I think it was, we went but I started to feel sick while I was there and we came home relatively early. This year, I was determined to go on the first weekend if all of the family was well, and to stay until the fireworks end it at 8 pm. My wife, not being from these parts, does not quite understand the sentimental attachment I have with the place, and so takes some convincing that spending all day there is a good idea. Yet when we get there she is happy to buy huge grocery "sample bags" containing everything from pasta sauce to baby octopus in oil, and makes me lug them around the grounds for the rest of the day.

Some idiosyncratic highlights of this year's visit:

* my family got to taste test Singaporean water recycled from sewerage. (Brisbane will do be doing this via their taps next year if summer rains fail again.)

* I spotted Senator Andrew Bartlett looking his usual glum self while eating something from the International Food section. (He is probably the least "country" senator I can think of.)

* Local gourmet food and wine has taken over an entire building now, and really, a couple of adults could happily spend 3 or 4 hours just there if you want to taste the many Queensland wines, cheeses, olives, and even chocolate available. (Yes, I discovered that someone is growing cocoa beans in North Queensland.) As I had children to entertain, and they don't like Verdelho yet, we had to move through faster than that.

* The fireworks are still deeply impressive, mainly because you can sit very close to the action. (We also sat downwind of them and had to avoid the occasional still glowing ember as they drifted down. As no clothes caught fire, and only a bit of ash got in our eyes, it was deemed a great display by the kids - and even the wife.)

I would post photos, except that my kids are in all of them. Sorry.

UPDATE: Andrew Bartlett has his report on his day out here. As I kind of expected, he is not exactly a True Believer in the institution, revealing that he had not been there for 20 years. Way to impress the large rural population of Queensland that you also represent, Senator! He seems only to be attending again now because of his child.

I, by contrast, have been happy to attend at every stage of life.

(Idea for another bad Australian sitcom: ultra urban politician loses seat and is forced by family circumstances into a rural community. His first steps in town include setting up an outreach program for disaffected gay and transsexual youth, ensuring that the local shops will sell goth colours in their cosmetics range, and freeing the gay ram who was being sent to the slaughterhouse.)

He also takes time to get a bit grumpy about how many of the farm animal displays gloss over modern animal husbandry. (Battery cage hens in particular.) But here, I have to say that I have some sympathy to his views. It's not a topic I dwell on much, but I tend to agree that the way hens, pigs and some other animals are raised now just seems inherently cruel, and doesn't allow them the limited natural pleasures that would at least compensate for being turned into our food. I am tempted sometimes to get a couple of chooks for backyard eggs, but the dog may not take too kindly to them.

At the end of the day, however, the Senator talks about the sentimental aspects of the Show in much the same way I did, so he's not all bad.

Bah...

Brad Pitt tames Angelina Jolie's lesbian libido | The Courier-Mail

Must News Ltd treat crappy magazine gossip as it is news??

And while I am at it (I have been meaning to ask this for months): why does anyone know who Lindsay Lohan is, anyway? Until she started drink driving and being found with cocaine, etc, I knew of her only because of reports that her bust had to be digitally reduced in in the kid's movie Herbie: Fully Loaded. (OK, so she's been in a couple of more notable films, apparently, but nothing that has set the world on fire.)

I can (kind of) understand prurient interest in the downfall of major movie stars or the otherwise talented and famous. What I don't get is the interest in the downfall of relatively minor celebrities.

All talk

Revealed: cover-up plan on energy target | Environment | The Guardian

Presumably, Labor supporters here would think Labour in England was a good example to follow in terms of greenhouse action. But:

Government officials have secretly briefed ministers that Britain has no hope of getting remotely near the new European Union renewable energy target that Tony Blair signed up to in the spring - and have suggested that they find ways of wriggling out of it.

In contrast to the government's claims to be leading the world on climate change, officials within the former Department of Trade and Industry have admitted that under current policies Britain would miss the EU's 2020 target of 20% energy from renewables by a long way. And their suggestion that "statistical interpretations of the target" be used rather than new ways to reach it has infuriated environmentalists.

An internal briefing paper for ministers, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, reveals that officials at the department, now the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, think the best the UK could hope for is 9% of energy from renewable sources such as wind, solar or hydro by 2020.

It says the UK "has achieved little so far on renewables" and that getting to 9%, from the current level of about 2%, would be "challenging". The paper was produced in the early summer, around the time the government published its energy white paper.

Run away!

Let's talk about sleepovers - National - smh.com.au

This is a long, mildly interesting, article about Australian teenagers and sex today. It notes that:

Three-quarters of teens in year 10 remain virgins, says a national survey of secondary students in 2002, and the adolescents themselves tend to think this is a good thing.

But barely a few sentences later:

The average age for first intercourse among men 40 years ago was 18, and for women, 19. It has dropped to 16 for both sexes.

By year 10, most kids are deep kissing and genital touching. Roughly a third experience oral sex, with the practice widely seen as a safer alternative to intercourse. This development is new. Before the porno flick Deep Throat popularised fellatio in the 1970s, it tended to be the preserve of married couples.

Hmm. That's what we have to thank porn for; increasing this activity amongst 15 year olds?

Anyway, here is the section that is the reason for my title for this post:

Kids already know about bestiality, anal sex and the turkey slap, but they could use a word or two on how real intimacy might feel. Professor Susan Sawyer, a leading pediatrician who directs the Centre for Adolescent Health at Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital, thinks parents ought to start the conversation with their kids by giving condoms and the morning-after pill on their 15th birthday. Not as a green light, but as a reality check and an opening to confide. "By the time they're 16, kids ought to have opened up a condom, blown it up and played with it."

What an understatement opens the next sentence:

This won't be everyone's style...

Given the frequent perversity with which teenagers don't exactly follow their parents' world views, I can imagine that the (surely rare!) sort of parent that wants to play condom balloons with their son or daughter on their 15th birthday will sometimes find said child recoiling with horror at the affront to their desire to remain a virgin until married.

This has also just reminded me of the Malcolm in the Middle episode where Malcolm's mother horrifies and sickens him by holding him hostage in the car while he gets an extremely detailed talk on sex and relationships.

Oh - which reminds me of one of the funniest scenes in that show, at least in the later series, and it's on YouTube!

Here's the background: the evil girl in this episode has set up both Malcolm and his brother Rhys by lying to both of them that their brother has confided to her that he is gay. The brothers are both shocked, but nice enough to try to be "supportive" of their brother's apparent secret, leading to some very odd behaviour in front of the rest of the family. This scene is after the family has come back from seeing "Mama Mia" (again, I think it was the girl's suggestion):



It cracks me up.

Hitchens reviews Potter

Christopher Hitchens: To Harry Potter, what would Orwell say?

He's about the last person I would have expected to be called upon to review the last Harry Potter book.

Giving terrorists ideas

Last December, I noted how the use of polonium in the Litvinenko murder in London had raised concerns about how this very dangerous substance could be used to create a really devastating dirty bomb.

Security experts are still worrying about this:

The authors call such methods I3, for inhalation, ingestion and immersion. One of the writers, Peter Zimmerman, a nuclear physicist, said yesterday that a well-planned radiological attack "would be capable of killing several hundred, maybe upwards of a thousand, and paralysing a city without any question at all."

The article does not provide details of the most devastating method of attack the authors have conceived, for security reasons, but Professor Zimmerman described one scenario using a water-soluble radioactive isotope widely used in hospitals and industry: "I can then tap into the anti-fire spray in a theatre, and if I can trigger the spray, I can soak everyone in the room."

Polonium-210, which was used in Mr Litvinenko's murder, is even more deadly because it emits alpha radiation, which is not picked up by radiation sensors.

It's a worry.

You can lead a horse to water....

75% of the people who download Firefox don't become active users | Technology | Guardian Unlimited

That figure is pretty surprising. I just can't imagine why anyone doesn't use the incredibly customisable Firefox as their preferred browser. (I particularly like adding specialised search engines to it.)

Moon architecture

What will future lunar bases look like? - New Scientist Space

It takes me back to my childhood, reading about actual plans being made for lunar shelters and permanent bases. In the 1960's, there seemed no reason at all to imagine that the manned space program would come to a screaming halt for 50 years, at least as far as the moon is concerned. Books I read then were full of designs and ideas for all types of rockets, spacesuits, emergency re-entry gear, and so on. It seems to me now that a lot of ideas are being re-invented, or perhaps it is just that they are only now moving from concept to actual material prototypes.

Anyhow, this New Scientist article talks of some ideas at the moment, and re-publishes a photo of a little mock up of an inflatable shelter design that I have seen somewhere before. As the article says:

The team is now weighing several options: an inflatable home that could be packed for launch and then inflated on the Moon's surface using oxygen transported in tanks, a rigid structure, or a combination of both. ...

All that’s needed to shield astronauts from deadly onslaughts of high-energy protons spewed from the Sun during solar flares, Thomas says, is a 5-centimetre layer of water. This could be integrated into an inflatable structure using a bladder-like layer filled with water, sandwiched into a rigid structure, or simply stacked on top of the habitat in tanks.

Used packing materials and other waste could be piled against the structure to provide even more protection. Meteorites larger than dust-sized grains could be deflected by aluminium or Kevlar shields like those used on the International Space Station.

I don't know. One of the prime things I would be looking at would be long lines of sight inside, rather than moving from one time cramped bubble of a spaceship into another tiny cramped bubble of a shelter for a couple of weeks.

I would have thought that an easy to erect, low slung geodesic dome framework supporting an inflatable shell would have a lot going for it. Being able to bury it with a foot or two of lunar dirt would be a good idea, and again (I imagine) a geodesic frame would be good at distributing the weight evenly all around the perimeter. As to how to get the dirt over it: some sort of mechanical aid would be needed, and one thing I don't know is how easy it may be to dig up the first inches of the lunar surface. (Given the footprints left around the Apollo landers, it isn't rock solid, but how compacted after 10 cm?)

This probably would count as my ideal fantasy job if I had my life to live over: actually being paid to come up with concepts for lunar shelters, knowing that they will be built and used.

Nice to be noticed

Back to whales.

Following my recent post on the New Yorker review/essay about Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America, I was pleased today to receive a short e-mail from the author, Eric Jay Dolin, which I re-print here:

Thanks for mentioning my book..... Although I enjoyed the New Yorker Review, reading it barely scratches the surface of what my book contains. I hope you have a chance to delve a little deeper into the history of American whaling. LEVIATHAN will be coming out in Australia soon. If you have any suggestions for getting the word out about it in your part of the world, please let me know.

I had cheekily suggested that reading the New Yorker review made it unnecessary to actually read the book. Of course, I don't want to cause authors of interesting books to lose money, so I think we should all trust Eric's promise that there is much to be gained by reading the book, and go and buy it when it appears here.

As for publicity, I suggested that there would probably be a few ABC Radio National shows that would like to interview him, and they tend to have a very "bookish" audience too. Anyone with a better suggestion can add it below.

I see from Mr Dolin's website that the book has received quite a few favourable reviews. He also has a list of links that lead to a heap of free on line information about the history of whaling. You can read an 1839 magazine article telling the story of Mocha Dick, the real life inspiration for Moby Dick.

All fascinating.

How not to improve your public image

Priest charged over nude school jog - World - theage.com.au

Just what the archdiocese needed.

Fish Vs Malaria

Edible African fish could help beat malaria, study says | Science | Reuters

From the report:

Researchers have long known that the Nile tilapia feeds on mosquito larvae but the study was the first to test its potential to fight the disease in the field, said Francois Omlin, a researcher at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology in Nairobi.

"A fish in the field may act differently than a fish in an aquarium and it was important to test how effective it could be," Omlin, who led the study, said in a telephone interview. "The tilapia species was never tested in the field for its ability to eat mosquito larvae."....

In the study, the team cleared three ponds of fish and vegetation in the highlands of Western Kenya and measured the mosquito population before introducing young tilapia.

Ten days later, no malaria mosquito larvae were recorded compared with a similar pond with no tilapia, and 41 weeks after the fish were introduced the number of mosquitoes fell by more than 94 percent, Omlin said.

Seems to have taken an unusually long time for someone to get around to testing their effectiveness.

Paris goes cycling

Parisians show their va va voom as city rolls out 'freedom' bike scheme - Times Online

I didn't realise Paris was trying a new "self service" bicycle scheme. It's a pretty interesting concept:

Subscribers must pay €29 (£20) a year, give their credit card details and leave a €150 credit card deposit to join the Vélib scheme. This buys half an hour’s pedalling a day and a card to lock and unlock bicycles from automated stations spaced every 300 metres in the city’s centre.

A simple swipe releases the bike and secures it at the other end, where a computer charges users on a sliding scale for any time over the first 30 minutes. This ensures that Vélib bikes are used for short journeys. Bikes are redistributed daily by electric trailers to avoid stations becoming empty or full.

I find it difficult to imagine the scheme working in Brisbane, or Sydney for that matter, simply because of the narrowness of many inner city streets.

Cycling is more popular in urban Japan than in many Western countries, and as with the Parisian bikes, everyone uses the "women's" style for commuting purposes. They are also more relaxed about riding on the footpath when necessary.

In Australia, Melbourne and Adelaide are more likely prospects for the Parisian style scheme, I expect. They are both pretty flat, and less humid in summer.

Dr Skippy

Scientist to treat lung cancer with bacteria from roos ABC Queensland

From the report:

A Queensland scientist has won a $750,000 fellowship to develop a lung cancer treatment from a bacterium found in eastern grey kangaroos...

Dr Wei says his research involves spores of bacteria that target cancer cells.

"By injecting the spores into the blood, the spores can get into the centre of the tumour and that would work as a live active and tumour seeking agent that destroys tumours from the inside," he said.

Let's hope the side effects don't include sleeping most of the day and then a strong urge to jump in front of cars in the evening.

Janet and Michael

Jihadists owe Kirby a thank you | The Australian

Janet Albrechtsen swings out a Justice Michael Kirby in a very satisfying way in her column today.

Kirby seems to have become the new Lionel Murphy, in that he seems continually to be in the minority in High Court, at least in cases that attract a high profile. The difference is that (from memory) Murphy's judgements used to be pretty short and along the lines of "This is unjust and its about time the Court recognised the injustice in these cases, and so I find for the [insert appropriate party]."

Kirby spends a lot of time on how he explains his decisions, but they still seem to come down to exercises in justifying a gut reaction.

(Of course, some people would argue that is how all judges really work, but I am not so sure.)

His need to see everything through the prism of a gay perspective is getting very tiring with Kirby, though. His comments in court about HIV killing more people than terrorism were justly criticised by Gerard Henderson in the articles I posted about yesterday. (Oh, and I know it's not a "gay disease" for most of the world.)

Back to whales

A few posts back I referred readers to a very interesting New Yorker article about the history of American whaling.

Reading about sperm whales made me realise I had a knowledge gap: why are they called that? The New Yorker review also mentioned spermaceti as being a whaling product, and I didn't know what that was. (Ambergris I knew about: it was featured in an Uncle Scrooge comic I read as a child.)

So Wikipedia to the rescue. Spermaceti is:

... a wax present in the head cavities of the Sperm Whale (Physeter macrocephalus) and in the blubber of all whales. Spermaceti is extracted from whale oil by crystallisation at 6 °C, when treated by pressure and a chemical solution of caustic alkali. Spermaceti forms brilliant white crystals that are hard but oily to the touch, and are devoid of taste or smell, making it very useful as an ingredient in cosmetics, leatherworking and lubricants.

As for why sperm whales have it in their head, this is rather interesting:

One function of the spermaceti organs is a buoyancy or diving organ. Before diving, cold water is brought through the organ and the wax is solidified . The increase in specific density generates a down force (approx 40 kg equiv) and allows the whale effortless sinking. During the chase in deep levels (max 3km!) the stored oxygen is consumed and excess heat melts the spermaceti. Now only hydrodynamic forces (by swimming) keep the whale down before effortlessly surfacing.

Knowledge gap filled.