Utter hypocrisy

It's no wonder that Labor didn't get very far with spending all of Parliament's question time yesterday trying to embarrass Peter Costello over his 2005 dinner comments.

Surely the public has learnt that, when it comes to talk of leadership and intended challenges, no politician from any party can be expected to be completely honest. It happens with every leadership challenge: denial, denial, denial, challenge.

Kevin Rudd's was no different. Everyone knows politicians lie when it comes to leadership issues.

Julia Gillard on Radio National this morning then tried to pretend it was the government that was swept up in worrying about leadership, when it was Labor that spent all of Question Time on it yesterday. I will get her exact words up later today when I can get them. It was a ridiculous response.

UPDATE: this is my transcript of the audio of the last question Fran Kelly asked Julia Gillard this morning:

Fran Kelly: Just quickly...is it time to stop worrying about who Peter Costello had dinner with two years ago and start focusing on policy issues that voters really care about?

Julia Gillard: I think that’s a question you should really be asking the government. It’s a stale and self obsessed government that is looking at all of these questions. It’s a stale and self obsessed set of ministers who are more worried about who is sitting in what chair more than anything else, they are certainly more worried about that than they are about the future of Australians working families, and it’s a self obsessed back bench that has lost touch with the needs of their constituents and is now much more enthralled by the internal dynamics of the Liberal Party and Mr Howard versus Mr Costello.

How rich is that, given their performance yesterday?

Doomsday machines

Dr Strangelove and the real Doomsday machine - Times Online

Here's an interesting review of a book about nuclear doomsday machines. One was imagined and not built (it's a little hard to see the political/military tactical value of ending all life on earth,) but the other was built in Russia and is, presumably, still in action. This later one is an automated "return fire" computer, and does indeed sound a bit of a worry.

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.

Henderson on lawyers and terrorism laws

Attack on freedom overstated - Opinion - smh.com.au

Worth reading. His earlier article on this topic was good too.

A good idea

Remedy for mistrust | The Australian

This article makes a case for having a national system of assessment for foreign doctors. Sounds sensible, doesn't it?

My polling commentary

Newspoll shows the coalition still stuck in the polls, but at least I take some consolation from the fact that a significant majority agree with the Haneef visa revocation, despite all the heat generated by left-y bloggers and the odd editorial campaign of The Australian against Andrews personally. Howard still leads in the "who would handle security better" question too.

As for the 10 point TPP lead to Labor at this stage: well it will just make the ultimate Coalition election victory all that more lauded!

Some reasons why I am not giving up on the Coalition yet:

* You would need to see polling on a State by State basis to see how many seats are in danger. Western Australian is still mentioned as not good for Labor, and there is fierce opposition to Beattie's out-of-the-blue council amalgamation plan in Queensland. It seems that the actual amalgamation process will be still underway during the Federal election, and it is bound to cause some vote changing in some rural seats at least. Maybe not much, but some. Meanwhile, the hospital decision in Tasmania might have worked for Howard in that one seat. (It's going to take a lot to win the election one seat at a time, though!)

* Is it possible for Rudd to be a smaller target than he has been in the last few weeks? If people like him for being "Howard lite," is there a chance they will actually switch allegiance back to Howard when it comes to a crunch? And I don't expect that people currently siding with Rudd in polls are thinking of Labor as a team at the moment. Wayne Swan does not seem to me to be performing well in interviews this year; I reckon there is danger that Peter Garrett is going to self-implode due to some guilt over having to sell his idealism to be part of the party; and I still think that Julia Gillard is not entirely loveable despite the various make overs and appearances on women's magazines indicate.

* There was some mention somewhere in the last couple of weeks that Tony Abbot's comment that the "darker aspects" of Rudd's political career may come to light was a reference to some journalistic digging that he knows about. It would have to be very dirty indeed, though, not to backfire. Still, if Rudd displays a glass jaw again, it may have an effect.

* John Howard seems certainly to have been right in his prediction earlier this year that he did not expect the polling to change significantly until the election is called. Still, that's little comfort to his supporters when even the betting is starting to go strongly against you.

The body electric

ScienceDaily: Electric Fields Have Potential As A Cancer Treatment

An interesting report on hopeful indications of low level electric fields to the head helping treat some forms of brain cancer.

The idea that electric fields could be helpful therapy has been around a long time (ever since electricity was understood, I guess.) It also gets a mention in science fiction every now and then, if I recall correctly. So its good to see there may be something in it after all.

Improbable research

Speaking out | eG weekly | EducationGuardian.co.uk

From the article:

In the 1990s, daring researchers finally tackled a question that was discussed everywhere except in formal academic settings. When someone's speech "sounds gay", what makes it sound that way?

Not exactly crucial to the advancement of the human condition, but it's good to see that I am not the only person to have wondered why (some) gay men sound so gay.

Sex and children

I’m single, I’m sexy, and I’m only 13 - Times Online

This article from The Times is a week old, but worth reading.

It's all about the ridiculously early sexualisation of young girls, especially young teenage girls.

It does cite some odd research, though, such as this:

The APA report also featured a 1998 study, in which the same researchers asked college-aged girls to try on either a swimsuit or a sweater, assess their appearance, then perform mathematical tests. The girls asked to wear swimsuits performed significantly worse.

“This is how sexualisation fragments consciousness,” says Dr Lamb. “These girls were so hung up on their appearance they literally didn’t have room in their heads to do maths. They learn that preoccupation from the women they look up to in the media.”

One psychologist explains the problem this way:

Though Dr Wilson believes flirtation and exhibitionism are natural for young girls, he says that clear lines must be drawn. “Children want to be looked at, but wearing items like thongs and revealing clothes sends the message that they are sexually available. It also implies knowledge of sexuality that just isn’t there,” he says.

As to the group think of girls, it also points out this:

But while criticism of the media is the answer Dr Lamb hopes for, it is girls criticising each other that is beginning to change attitudes among some groups. “There is a backlash beginning,” she says. “Girls quickly go from being popular to being derided for their slutty behaviour. It’s sad because they do all these things to fit in, but go too far and they are soon turned against.”

I wonder if anyone has looked at the comparative "early sexualisation" behaviour of girls from mixed gender schools and girls only ones.

Drive more and save the planet

Walking to the shops ‘damages planet more than going by car’ - Times Online

This is possibly the funniest thing Tim Blair would ever have read about greenhouse gases (with considerable justification , I might add), and he's missing out on blogging about it 'cos he's off on holiday somewhere.

Short version: raising cows makes so many greenhouse gases, you are better off driving the car to the supermarket than walking and having to replace those calories with extra intake of beef or milk.

But there's more:

Mr Goodall, Green Party parliamentary candidate for Oxford West & Abingdon, is the latest serious thinker to turn popular myths about the environment on their head.

Catching a diesel train is now twice as polluting as travelling by car for an average family, the Rail Safety and Standards Board admitted recently. Paper bags are worse for the environment than plastic because of the extra energy needed to manufacture and transport them, the Government says.

Makes me feel so much better.

As for flying, there seems to have been a bit of a backlash against the "the world must fly less" views of George Monbiot and others, and a good article in The Observer a couple of weeks ago talked about the difficulties of comparisons between different modes of transport.

And now for something completely different

Found by accident, here's some very innovative looking stage magic with (what looks like) laser light.



Very, very cool!

Things you never knew about whaling

This is one of those New Yorker book reviews of very pleasing length, where you end up up feeling that you have learnt a lot of things you didn't know before, with the added benefit that it seems hardly necessary to buy the book now.

The book in question "Leviathan", is a history of American whaling.

One thing it has taught me is that there was a fair bit left out of the movie version of Moby Dick:

Nor is there anything like skinning the whale’s penis, “longer than a Kentuckian is tall,” and wearing it as a tunic while you slice up the fat harvested from the rest of its body. Melville’s narrator, Ishmael, claims that the mincer of blubber usually wore such a tunic, in a clerical cut that made him look like “a candidate for an archbishoprick.” For “Moby-Dick,” Melville drew on scientific, historical, and journalistic accounts of whales, but he had a reputation for blurring the line between fact and fiction, and scholars have noted that for this chapter “none of Melville’s fish documents was particularly helpful.” In other words, he may have made the tunic up, for the sake of the archiepiscopal pun and perhaps, too, as a symbol.

It's a really interesting read. Go to it.

Revenge of the dolphins

Taiji officials: Dolphin meat 'toxic waste' | The Japan Times Online

Letting nothing get between them and a school of fish, the Japanese residents of Taiji kill hundreds of dolphins each year in a particularly gruesome fashion. Foreign Correspondent had a story about it in 2005. It was noted there that some of the dolphin meat is eaten locally.

The Japan Times story at the top says that this is a bad idea, because testing indicates it contains a very high level of mercury. All very unfortunate for the local school kids too, who have had dolphin meat put in the school supplied lunches.

The Japanese Fisheries bureaucracy remains hard to convince. God forbid that anything, even human health, should stop them killing and munching on whatever sea creature they like:

Tetsuya Endo, a professor and researcher at Hokkaido Health Science University's faculty of pharmaceutical sciences, affirmed the other doctors' condemnation of small-cetacean food products.

In a terse e-mail sent to this correspondent, Endo said, in reference to dolphin meat, "It's not food!"

In 2005, Endo published the results of a three-year study on random samples of cetacean food products sold throughout Japan, and concluded all of it was unhealthy because of high levels of mercury and methylmercury.

However, Hideki Moronuki, deputy director of the government's Far Seas Fisheries Division of the Resources Management Department, in an interview with The Japan Times, maligned Endo's study, calling it "misleading information." When pressed, though, he failed to substantiate his accusation.

The Japanese obsession with fish is a problem. As another Foreign Correspondent report (this one on massive Japanese overfishing of tuna off Australia and elsewhere) noted:

Japan has only two per cent of the world’s population yet Japanese eat a chunky ten per cent of the global fish catch. The national appetite seems almost insatiable.

Looking at Iran

Is Iran paranoid or does it really have something to hide? | Guardian Unlimited

This is a fascinating report on a recent attempt at PR by the Iranians for its nuclear industry.

It really sounds like a crazy government:

Petrol costs about 10p a litre, so Tehran is usually one continuous traffic jam. On Friday there is gridlock at midnight. And electricity is 70% subsidised. Seen from the air at nights, the capital burns as bright as any American metropolis. Because petrol is sold so cheaply, it makes no economic sense to build refineries in Iran, but because of the absence of refineries there is actually a petrol shortage. Rather than raise prices, the government has introduced rationing, handing out smart cards that limit most users to 100 litres a month. There was an initial wave of protests a month ago when the scheme was first introduced but those have since faded. The lull may be an illusion though. Many people have burned through much of the four-month ration on their initial smart card in just over 30 days. When the cards run out and people can no longer get to work, there is likely to be another bout of anger and frustration.

Geo engineering risks

'Sunshade' for global warming could cause drought

Read the linked story for some scepticism of one of the more plausible geo-engineering ideas against global warming (using sulphur particles high in the atmosphere).

Necks and blood pressure

How a pain in the neck could be bad for your blood pressure

This is an interesting little story about the possible connections (at least for some people) between the neck and high blood pressure.

I recall reading years ago in a Discover magazine (perhaps as far back as the 1980's) about some cases where experimental surgery on (I think) a nerve on the neck seemed to cure some cases of high blood pressure. I thought it interesting at the time, because of a relative of mine who has had high blood pressure from a relatively young age, yet has always led a healthy, active life style.

After that, I don't recall seeing anything about necks and blood pressure anywhere. Of course, it is not something I go out of my way to look for.

Homer's brain on display

Doh!

Very amusing to see that Homer Simpson's brain somehow made it onto a serious Chinese media report.

No one believes the Courier Mail?

Haneef caught in Groundhog Day, says lawyer | The Courier-Mail

Yesterday, the Courier Mail reported on what may have been in the undisclosed evidence that Minister Andrews has referred to in his Dr Haneef visa revocation decision.

It's pretty major stuff: that Haneef had come to the attention of MI5 because he was in contact with radicals they were monitoring. The Courier Mail repeats it briefly today (see link above).

I heard this mentioned on Radio National Breakfast yesterday, not in the "news" but in the "what's in the papers today" section.

Yet, that is absolutely the only reference to the story I have heard anywhere else. Instead, the dodgy , just created Indian "dossier" got all the attention, and even Keelty seems to dismiss that as not very important.

Why would this story be being ignored? Does no other journalist in Australia trust the Courier Mail? Why has no one mentioned it to Keelty?

I find this very puzzling....

UPDATE: a Google news search confirms that this story is getting virtually zero attention. It seems to me that there has to be a reason for this.

Annabel's fun

Tortuous treats of old Silver Tongue - Opinion - smh.com.au

Since returning to Australia, journalist Annabel Crabb's brief appears to be to write as Fairfax's version of Matt Price. (Always humorous, but still insightful, political commentary.) She's doing a pretty good job too.

More questionable than I expected

Angry Toxicologist : Fluoride - it's not just for teeth anymore!

The anti-fluoridation crowd usually sound a little too much like cranks to me to pay them too much attention. Surely I can trust all those dentists who want the water fluoridated, can't I?

Brisbane's water supply is still not fluoridated, (I think), and the post above at a Seed science blog makes me think those against it may have more going for them than I expected.

A viral mystery

Effect Measure

See the link for an interesting article about how little is actually known about the details of flu virus transmission.

Interesting way to kill time?

Digital archive casts new light on Apollo-era moon pictures

There's a project underway to get extremely high quality scans of the Apollo era film photographs of the Moon on line. From the article:

....the grain of the original film is visible when scans are fully enlarged. The most detailed images from lunar orbit show rocks and other surface features about 40 inches (1 meter) wide.

I wonder just how carefully these photos have been looked at already (there's 36,000, after all.) What's the bet that some people might will be spending hours looking at them for an alien artefact that been missed so far.

Steinophilia

The Cornish giant | Food and drink | Life and Health

I have always liked Rick Stein's TV shows, and in particular, loved his last series set about a canal trip through France. He has always struck me as the most likeable of the British TV cooks, even though his recipes still often seem to follow an English tradition of involving either significant amounts of fats and oils, or types of fish you don't get here.

(His recipes are, however, nothing to compare with the amazingly dangerous food of the Two Fat Ladies. I wouldn't mind betting that a large part of their audience were people who watched simply in order to be amusingly appalled at how much lard, butter, duck fat, cream, etc they could cram into every single dish. Certainly, that was the main fun I got out of watching it.)

Anyhow, the link above is to an article in The Guardian about him, and it informs us that another TV series is on the way. Great.

Dr Haneef Part V

I've been busy fighting the good fight over at Larvatus Prodeo's latest thread about Dr Haneef, concerning the evidence disclosed yesterday that, to my mind, will convince a lot of people to give the government the benefit of the doubt about the decision to revoke Haneef's visa. (And remember, there is more evidence not disclosed.)

I don't think the fact that Haneef tried to contact the British police is at all conclusive on the issue of removing "reasonable suspicion". It would certainly help in a defence of a criminal charge, where all you have to do is raise a reasonable doubt, but that's not what we are talking of here.

I don't want to repeat the various points I have made over at LP; you can read the "Steve from Brisbane" posts if you like.

But I will repeat a couple of points here. My remaining criticism of Andrews is this: it seems to me that he could have avoided the "overriding the magistrate" criticism if he had been able to show that he made his decision before the Magistrate made her bail decision. As it was indeed a parallel process, I see no reason why he could not have made it beforehand, and put in place some form of proof as to when he made the decision, but then not announced it until after the bail decision. (To announce it beforehand would have invited criticism that he was seeking to prejudice the case before the Magistrate.)

This is still, I think, a relatively minor criticism in the scheme of things, and it is more about appearances than substance. The Australian is completely over the top in its editorial about this today, seemingly deciding that having put the boot into Andrews previously, it would look too embarrassing to now admit that maybe he was on solid grounds after all.

I am also thoroughly sick of the attitude that there must be strong criticism of the government to be found somewhere in all this. Now, some commenters and even papers have suggested "well, why did the government let him go. He could have been released into the community and watched." Surely this is forgetting that we are talking a non citizen here (admittedly one who was doing us a favour by working in our health system.) There are high costs involved in monitoring someone, and inherent risk involved that terrorist action may be attempted and not prevented.

The critics are the same ones who wanted to see him released into the community completely exonerated. Now it's "OK, maybe there was reason to suspect him, but you should have kept him here anyway."

Maybe, various critics, the answer is that you never knew enough about this to be making such confident judgements. And there is considerable hypocrisy in complaining about Andrews not disclosing all information when, in other circumstances, people would be complaining about breach of privacy if the Minister was releasing all "protected information" that led him to not issue (or revoke) a work visa.

UPDATE: the argument moved from LP to Club Troppo, where Ken Parish seems to have surprised most of his mates by siding with the Minister (while, like me, being fairly mildly critical of the timing of his decision.)

Iraq optimism for real this time?

TigerHawk

In all the kerfuffle within Australia about a certain Indian doctor, it may have gone unnoticed that there is some pretty serious revision of prospects of success in Iraq underway in American at the moment. Tigerhawk's post linked to above has extract from a New York Times article by a couple of Brookings Institute analysts who have been there recently. It's interesting reading.

In fact, even within The Guardian there have been a couple of cautiously optimistic reports from within Iraq in the last couple of weeks.

Problem is, car bombs against civilian targets are extremely hard to stop, and while ever you have a couple of them going off and killing scores of Iraqis every week or fortnight, it's hard to convince us in the West that things are improving overall in the country.

Still, it would be rather interesting politically for Australia if, by our Federal election, the belief in progress in Iraq as a result of the surge has actually caught on.

Why dutch?

From 'Dutch wives' to old wives | The Japan Times Online

The Japanese call sex dolls "dutch wives". The link above mentions a recent exhibition of this product in Japan.

As to why "Dutch wives", Wikipedia offers an explanation, but I am not sure it makes sense:

Silicone dolls are quite popular in Japan, where they are known as "Dutch Wives" ('datch waifu'). Their name originates from the term, possibly English, for the thick rattan or bamboo bolster, used to aid sleep in humid countries by keeping one's limbs lifted above sweaty sheets.

I just thought that maybe it was internationally recognized that the Dutch were the world's first perverts.

But back to the Japan Times link, talking about the exhibition in Japan:

A completely bald man with a cane, who appeared to be in his 70s, entered the gallery and, after fondling a fake female, chuckles and remarks, "Their hair's black — I like that. These days young women all dye their hair."

The gent fired a series of questions at the staff, apparently hoping they would ship a doll to him disassembled so he could sneak it into his house. The man was encouraged to visit Orient Industry's sales showroom in Ueno, but he settled onto a nearby couch and wistfully gazed at the dolls.

So, if you are in Japan and see some old codger bringing into his house what looks like a series of dismembered limbs, there may be a perfectly innocent explanation. (Depends how you define "innocent", too, I suppose.)

OK, now that I have brought this to your attention, you can go back to work.

So that's what Griff's been up to..

Travels with Griff Rhys Jones - Times Online

Only the other day I wondered what happened to the British comedian Griff Rhys Jones, who I used to find very funny.

Turns out he has done a bit of a Michael Palin and been doing travel shows and books. As far as I know, they haven't appeared here.

The article above contains some mildly amusing anecdotes, but overall, it seems to me not very well written.

Dr Haneef Part IV

Some more points I want to make about Dr Haneef's case:

1. Talk about not being able to win with journalists no matter what you do. This morning on Radio National Breakfast, The Age's Michelle Gratton said that Immigration Minister Andrew's suggestion that he may now be able to release the extra information on which he decided to revoke Haneef's visa raises the question of why he could not release it previously.

Bloody hell. At the press conference when he announced the revocation decision, the journalists were immediately asking him questions along the lines of "well, now that you've found him to be of bad character, how do you expect him to get a fair trial." You can imagine the journalistic outrage if he had actually gone into the extra information in detail at that press conference.

The difference, Michelle, is that the criminal case is now gone. Bleeding obvious that this may make a difference, isn't it?

I also heard mention on some other news report this morning that Peter Russo had indicated there may be a "legal problem" with the release of the additional information. Is this because the Federal Court case will still be heard?

2. As the doctor's 60 Minutes interview: I note that a Sky News poll on whether he should get his visa re-instated is close to a 50/50 split. I think that a Sunrise one this morning had a majority against.

Subject to my normal major reservations about such polls, it still seems that the interview did not overwhelmingly convince the Australian population that he should get his visa back.

I wonder whether this is to do with a cultural difficulty in judging the sincerity of Indians. Their politeness, body language and facial expressions are different from ours, and I think the end result can be uncertainty as to how to "read" them. I have found this in my professional dealings with people from the subcontinent. I don't raise it as any excuse for clear mistakes made by the Federal Police/DPP; it is simply an observation.

3. I was initially puzzled at the Minister's decision on Friday to let Haneef stay at "residential detention", which was clearly inconsistent with the earlier decision that he should go into Villawood (at least if he ever availed himself of the bail that had been granted.) However, the reasons now seem clear: Dr Haneef met with immigration and indicated he would be leaving the next day, after giving an interview with media. There simply was not much point in sending him to Sydney prior to his departure, given the timing.

4. Any lengthy inquiry into this case would seem rather a waste of time to me. Investigations into who leaked what when there are many possible sources (and there were hundreds of police involved in this) are not likely to come to any firm conclusion. Evidence of mistakes being caused by wrong information given to the Federal Police from the British would be interesting, and might go some way to partially restoring the Fed's image. However, I think it is already clear that the stuff up was shared by the Federal Police, the DPP and its barristers.

But all this talk of it creating a crisis of confidence in the ability to handle terror cases is just journalistic overkill.

At worst, some guy who deserved to have his connections to terrorism investigated was detained for a month, and released after a poorly considered charge had been laid but then quickly dropped.

You can go on about the political "interference" in the visa revocation decision, but again at the end of the day some non citizen has had a working visa lost in circumstances which many people think unfair. I would expect that a significant number of other people have been rejected for visas in circumstances that may also be considered unfair by half the population if you let them see the information on which the decision is based. It happens. It is not the worst form of injustice in the world, or indeed the country.

People should just keep what has happened in some perspective here.

I would even include terrorism law supporter Peter Faris in this: on Friday I heard him suggest on radio that Dr Haneef should be paid a million dollars in compensation! Just overkill.

5. As I have mentioned me before, what annoys me about journalists' role in this is that they do not acknowledge that they themselves are part of the problem when they choose to publish unsourced leaks from the Federal Police or elsewhere. The media is a willing party to the attempted public manipulation of events; they have the ability, yet not the ethics apparently, to chose not to publish information which they must know is being leaked to prejudice opinion in favour of the police.

Yet it seems to me that the media will not criticise its own for doing this. Instead, it will only seek to take credit for leaking the defence material in rebuttal of rumours the media should never have published in the first place.

Journalists deserve the low reputation they have.

Changing their tune on marijuana

Medical opinion comes full circle on cannabis dangers

You have probably read newspaper reports of this latest study, but the news@nature version linked to above (which, annoyingly, will likely disappear soon) makes this point which I have not seen elsewhere:

The finding, which comes from a new study that combines results from 35 previous surveys, represents a significant U-turn from previous suggestions that cannabis is harmless to mental health. The analysis is published in medical journal The Lancet, which in 1995 began one of its issues with the sentence: "The smoking of cannabis, even long term, is not harmful to health."

Now their tune has changed, with the latest study having this dire conclusion :

This suggests that 14% of all psychotic illness in Britain is caused by cannabis use.

Yes, how dare one question the Lancet on anything, hey.

Antibiotic harm

Prescribing of antibiotics to children still at a level to cause drug resistance, warn experts

From the article:

A paper published in 1999 reported that over half (55%) of children aged 0-5 years in the UK (the group of patients who receive most antibiotics in the community) receive an average of 2.2 prescriptions for a ß-lactam antibiotic like amoxicillin from their general practitioner each year.

Although a reduction in prescribing (and the strategy of recommending a 24-48 hour delay before filling antibiotic prescriptions) has probably resulted in about a 40% fall in consumption since then, unpublished data suggest that community antibiotic prescribing is again rising, they say.

I would be curious to know how much Australian prescriptions have dropped over the last decade.

How to make space tourists nervous

Three die in Branson's space tourism rocket tests

This could be one of the shortest commercial tourism ventures ever.

Continuing the rat theme...

Lefties like to call our PM "the rodent, " as if that is an insult. But really, have a look at this video of an endearing rat:



One disturbing thing I have noticed while looking around Youtube rodent related videos are some showing snakes being fed live mice or rats. There is even an extremely gross video of a giant ugly pet frog eating live mice. (I am no fan of frogs at the best of times.) I will not link to it.

I really wonder about people who keep snakes and such like that (apparently) need to be fed live animals. You can't tell me that a snake, lizard or frog can respond to their human keepers in the way even a rat can, so I suppose they are kept mainly due to some sort of appreciation of their looks, or more likely, just for novelty value. But when such a pet involves the owner regularly feeding them other live animals, it just seems that it must involve some desensitising to cruelty.

The Grim Purrer

Oscar the cat 'predicts deaths' - World - smh.com.au

From the report:

Oscar the cat seems to have an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients are going to die, by curling up next to them during their final hours.

His accuracy, observed in 25 cases, has led the staff to call family members once he has chosen someone. It usually means they have less than four hours to live.

"He doesn't make too many mistakes. He seems to understand when patients are about to die," said Dr David Dosa in an interview. He describes the phenomenon in a poignant essay in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Yes, Oscar is a clever cat, but dogs are more useful in that they can detect cancer before you die from it, you know.

Teenagers of all species a worry

Adolescent rats enjoy cannabis more than their elders - health - 25 July 2007 - New Scientist

Heresy

Renewable energy could 'rape' nature - earth - 25 July 2007 - New Scientist Environment

Quote:

Ramping up the use of renewable energy would lead to the "rape of nature", meaning nuclear power should be developed instead. So argues noted conservation biologist and climate change researcher Jesse Ausubel in an opinion piece based on his and others' research.

Save it for the gin and tonic

Lemon douche is a cervical cancer risk

From the report:

Lead researcher Dr Atiene Sagay, from Jos University in Nigeria, told the International AIDS Society conference in Sydney that women douched to avoid infection but it was totally ineffective.

"People suggested it could be a microbicide (but) we know much better than that now," Dr Sagay said.

He said the practice was not an effective contraceptive measure either, as semen kills the citric acid.

Dr Haneef, part III

New English PM Gordon Brown is proposing doubling that country's current limit for detaining terror suspects without charge from 28 to 56 days:

Mr Brown said an extended detention limit was necessary to sift through the volume of evidence needed in terrorism cases...

Mr Brown said that extensions beyond 28 days would be subject to scrutiny by a high court and by parliament in specific cases.

Quite the contrast to Australia, where a frenzy of complaint erupted in certain quarters over Dr Haneef being kept in custody for a fortnight, and only then with the apparent reluctance of the court, which was only approving extensions for days, not weeks, at a time.

The Australian terrorism detention laws may have no set time limit for total detention. But in practice, as it is supervised by a court from the start, there is no realistic prospect of it being endless. To think otherwise means you have to be paranoid enough to believe that the Federal government could control a State appointed Magistrate.

The DPP today advised that it would review the evidence relating to the criminal charge against Dr Haneef. Even if the charge is dropped soon, as many suspect it will, it should be no reason to question the reasonableness of our pre-charge detention laws, which the British example indicates are far from draconian by international standards.

Dr Haneef's lawyer Peter Russo says that, apart from the issue of reviewing the criminal charge, the immediate issue is getting his client out of custody. I saw Dr Haneef's cousin, here to visit him, confirming on TV tonight that the doctor is being kept alone in his cell for 23 hours a day.

I will say it again: as far as I can tell, if Dr Haneef had arranged for the $10,000 bail surety to be paid (and even members of the public were offering to do this, although I am not sure if that is acceptable to the court), he could have avoided being in a cell in a real jail for 23 hours a day, and been kept in the much more relaxed form of detention in the immigration detention centre in Sydney, where he could mix with people who are not criminals and have had access to many recreational facilities not given to any type of prisoner.

If he is stressing out over the kind of detention he is being kept in now, it appears to be his own decision, and one that makes less and less sense the longer the review/trial process goes on.

All you wanted to know about bonobos

Our Far-Flung Correspondents: Swingers: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

This is a long (12 page!) article from the New Yorker about bonobos, the (supposedly) sex-loving hippy apes of the Congo.

As you may expect, all is not what it seems. The first page of the article is very amusing, pointing out the seriously weird attitude that some people have of bonobos as societal role models. At a fund raiser for bonobo conservation, the writer meets "Wind":

I spoke to a tall man in his forties who went by the single name Wind, and who had driven from his home in North Carolina to sing at the event. He was a musician and a former practitioner of “metaphysical counselling,” which he also referred to as clairvoyance. He said that he had encountered bonobos a few years ago at Georgia State University, at the invitation of Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, a primatologist known for experiments that test the language-learning abilities of bonobos. (During one of Wind’s several visits to G.S.U., Peter Gabriel, the British pop star, was also there; Gabriel played a keyboard, another keyboard was put in front of a bonobo, and Wind played flutes and a small drum.) Bonobos are remarkable, Wind told me, for being capable of “unconditional love.” They were “tolerant, patient, forgiving, and supportive of one another.”...

It was Wind’s turn to perform. “Help Gaia and Gaia will help you,” he chanted into a microphone, in a booming voice that made people jump. “Help bonobo and bonobo will help you.”

Yes, no doubt, if we all lived like bonobos, there would be no global warming.

The problem is, a lot of bonobo research was based on captive groups:

Captivity can have a striking impact on animal behavior. As Craig Stanford, a primatologist at the University of Southern California, recently put it, “Stuck together, bored out of their minds—what is there to do except eat and have sex?”

Bonobos in the wild are not always nice. For that matter, nor are bonobos in zoos:

“I once saw five female bonobos attack a male in Apenheul, in Holland,” he said. “They were gnawing on his toes. I’d already seen bonobos with digits missing, but I’d thought they would have been bitten off like a dog would bite. But they really chew. There was flesh between their teeth. Now, that’s something to counter the idea of”—Stevens used a high, mocking voice—“ ‘Oh, I’m a bonobo, and I love everyone.’ ”

Stevens went on to recall a bonobo in the Stuttgart Zoo whose penis had been bitten off by a female.

I'll stick with the humans for the moment.

An insight into Hawking

Not Even Wrong - My Life With Stephen

Peter Woit's blog (Not Even Wrong) has a very interesting post summarising some of the memoirs of Jane Hawking, the ex-wife of Stephen Hawking. Go read.

More rat facts

Smart, Curious, Ticklish. Rats? - New York Times

It is the ongoing duty of this blog to point out the positive features of rats. This New York Times article summarises some things that have been mentioned here before (eg, rats can be tickled) but contains some information that's new to me:

When it comes to sex, the analogies between rats and humans are “profound,” said James G. Pfaus of Concordia University in Montreal. “It’s not simply instinctual for them,” he said. “Rats know what good sex is and what bad sex is. And when they have reason to anticipate great sex, they give you every indication they’re looking forward to it.”

They wiggle and paw at their ears, hop and dart, stop and flash a come-hither look backward. “We imbue our desire with words and meaning, they show us through actions,” he said. “The good thing about rats is, they don’t lie.”

I wonder how you give a rat "reason to anticipate great sex", as opposed to perfunctory sex with a partner they don't even like.

Anyway, there's more:

Rats have personalities, and they can be glum or cheerful depending on their upbringing and circumstances. One study showed that rats accustomed to good times tend to be optimists, while those reared in unstable conditions become pessimists. Both rats will learn to associate one sound with a good event — a gift of food — and another sound with no food, but when exposed to an ambiguous sound, the optimist will run over expecting to be fed and the pessimist will grumble and skulk away, expecting nothing.

I wonder if a glum rat can still be tickled to help cheer him up.

Monbiot making some sense

Ethical shopping is just another way of showing how rich you are

George Monbiot may be one of the biggest doomsayers about global warming, but at least he calls a spade a spade when it comes to eco-consumerism. Here's an extract from his column above:

Dozens of new books seem to provide an answer: we can save the world by embracing "better, greener lifestyles". Last week, for instance, the Guardian published an extract from A Slice of Organic Life, the book by Sheherazade Goldsmith - married to the very rich environmentalist Zac - in which she teaches us "to live within nature's limits". It's easy. Just make your own bread, butter, cheese, jam, chutneys and pickles, keep a milking cow, a few pigs, goats, geese, ducks, chickens, beehives, gardens and orchards. Well, what are you waiting for?

Her book contains plenty of useful advice, and she comes across as modest, sincere and well-informed. But of lobbying for political change, there is not a word. You can save the planet from your own kitchen - if you have endless time and plenty of land. When I was reading it on the train, another passenger asked me if he could take a look. He flicked through it for a moment, and then summed up the problem in seven words: "This is for people who don't work."...

Green consumerism is becoming a pox on the planet. If it merely swapped the damaging goods we buy for less damaging ones, I would champion it. But two parallel markets are developing - one for unethical products and one for ethical products, and the expansion of the second does little to hinder the growth of the first. I am now drowning in a tide of ecojunk....

And this line:

Ethical shopping is in danger of becoming another signifier of social status.

He is being too polite when he says it is "in danger of becoming". I thought it was pretty clear that it's already here.

Go read all of his column, he gives many examples of silly eco-consumerism.

40% achieved

Hey, I know it's all statistically irrelevant when you consider a margin of error, but psychologically it is encouraging to see a poll where the the primary vote for the Coalition is back up to 40%. That "4" looks a lot better than a "3".

Pity the "Unnamed Family Member"

I stumbled across some Muslim blogs on the 'net today, and found this one: "A Muslim Wife". She lives in Florida, has not been married long, and wears the niqaab. I can't actually tell if she is an American convert to Islam, but given some of her expressions, I think that's likely.

She sounds a like a lively enough woman who really, really loves being a serious Muslim. From this post of a few months ago, she talks about how much she enjoys her friendship with the wife of one of her husbands friends:

I am especially fond of this couple; the brother is one of hubby's best friends and his new wife is also a niqaabi. It felt so good to be with someone - go out with someone, get ready with someone, talk with someone, walk with someone - who I can really relate to. Just the small things like knowing to talk in a whisper when the hubbies are around. Or when in public, to go out of our way so we don't have to walk near a man, or serving our husbands first, etc. Just all the little things that matter so much, that have become second nature to us, that are apparently FOREIGN to other sisters.

Hmm, yes I suppose wearing a niqaab in the stifling humidity of Florida is not enough to convince any man in the street that you are definitely off limits. You also have to go out of your way to cross the street to get away from them. Excuse me while I roll my eyes.

But, spare a thought for her relatives. This post caught my attention. Called "Private Conversations," she relates some snippets of conversation with a family member who (by the sounds of it) is not a Muslim at all (or is one who doesn't worry about what angels think of dogs):

Dog: bark! bark!
Me: "So we talked last time about your dog, I see you didn't get rid of it yet?"
Another Unnamed Family Member: "Nope, I didn't. I can't have him killed."
Dog: bark! bark! bark!
Me: "(laughing) No one said kill him, just get rid of him. Give him to a shelter or something."
Another Unnamed Family Member: "I can't (the baby) is so attached to him, he'll be sad."
Me: "Oh. Well you know the hadith I mentioned last time, about the angels not entering your home and the loss of mountains of good deeds for every day you keep him."
Another Unnamed Family Member: "(looking over my shoulder into the distance at anything more interesting than me) Mmm hmm. "
(followed by cold shoulder for the remaining of the week).

Oh dear. I say give the "Unnamed Family Member" a medal for keeping the response to "mmm hmm" and a cold shoulder for a week.

Karen Armstrong and the Deathly Religion

Karen Armstrong has a peculiar sense of priorities. In her latest "Comment is Free" article, she notes the several absurd inconsistencies in modern Islam, starting with the surprising finding that although she was invited by the government of Malaysia to give public lectures there, she found on arrival that three of her books had been banned.

Yet she is always keen to try to show that the West also has "double standards":

For Muslims to protest against the Danish cartoonists' depiction of the prophet as a terrorist, while carrying placards that threatened another 7/7 atrocity on London, represented a nihilistic failure of integrity.

But equally the cartoonists and their publishers, who seemed impervious to Muslim sensibilities, failed to live up to their own liberal values, since the principle of free speech implies respect for the opinions of others. Islamophobia should be as unacceptable as any other form of prejudice. When 255,000 members of the so-called "Christian community" signed a petition to prevent the building of a large mosque in Abbey Mills, east London, they sent a grim message to the Muslim world: Western freedom of worship did not, apparently, apply to Islam.

She made a pretty fundamental mistake there when she argued that free speech implies "respect" for the opinion of others. As several comments note, it only implies toleration of the expression of different opinion. No one has to "respect" the opinions of holocaust denier or 7/11 conspiracy theorist.

It's also pretty facile to argue that objection to a large mosque (seating up to 12,000) in London is an actual "attack" on freedom to worship in a Western country. The decision whether to let it be built is presumably going to be decided on planning laws, and one suspects that regardless of the motivation of the petitioners, "Islamophobia" will not be what actually decides the matter.

Contrast this to the actual situation on "freedom of worship" in countries with an even moderate version of Islam like Malaysia. Reuters reported last year that Malaysia was having a spate of Christian churches being actually demolished on flimsy grounds. Perhaps even more importantly, the article claimed this:

The issue of religion has also been controversial for Muslims. They are not allowed to formally renounce Islam, and apostates are sent for counselling and, ultimately, fined or jailed if they do not desist.

Lina Joy, a Muslim by birth who converted to Christianity, recently lost a six-year battle to have the word "Islam" removed from her identity card.

Karen Armstrong typically ended her article with this:

When Gallup asked what the west could do to improve relations, most Muslims replied unhesitatingly that western countries must show greater respect for Islam, placing this ahead of economic aid and non-interference in their domestic affairs. Our inability to tolerate Islam not only contradicts our western values; it could also become a major security risk.

The thing which Armstrong seems to never want to admit, even in an article like this one where she does criticise Islamic governments, is that the Western "lack of respect" is not institutionalised and is actually very minor when compared to legally enforced intolerance to freedom of religion that is evident in even moderate Islamic countries.

PS: That very last line of her article is quite a doozy too, isn't it? The clear meaning seems to be that the West had better learn to tolerate the (by her own admission) rather intolerant Islam, otherwise it will be its own fault if it is subject to terror attacks for showing such lack of respect.

Dr Haneef Part II

If the criminal case against Dr Haneef is as weak as media reporting is tending to suggest (but bearing in mind that there may be some evidence about which we have heard nothing yet,) then the proper thing his lawyers ought to be doing is making submissions as soon as possible to the DPP to consider not proceeding with the charge.

The DPP (and indeed the Federal Police, although having come up with the charge they cannot be the ones seen to make the decision to withdraw it) would surely have some sensitivity to their ongoing credibility if the case is one with a high likelihood of crashing and burning in a spectacular fashion.

If the charge is withdrawn, the main party that I see losing face would be the Federal Police. That would be no bad thing in its way; it would make them more careful and more cautious in future. It may make whoever it is who seems to have leaked wrong information to re-consider the tactic in future. It doesn't hurt for the Police to get a slap down, every now and then.

Meanwhile, I continue to see no substantial advantage to the refusal of the surety being paid so as to allow Haneef to be released on bail and held in Villawood in Sydney instead of as a terrorist on remand in Brisbane. I do not think the issue of getting instructions and providing him with legal advice in Sydney is that big an issue. There would appear to be little extra that Haneef can currently add to his Federal Court appeal, and the cost of getting instructions on the criminal case (even if it involved a personal visit for a day to Sydney) would surely not be huge.

Instead, it seems pretty clear that keeping him in Brisbane in normal remand is a matyrdom tactic of his own lawyers, who want political pressure to come to play on the visa revocation issue. In my view, Haneef would be better served by having lawyers who refused to play the media/political game, and took a quieter approach to ending quickly the incarceration of their client.

If the DPP did pull the criminal charge, then the astute thing for Minister Andrews to do would be to say that he has reviewed the case, and be more explicit as to whether it is the "secret" evidence alone which is sufficient to justify his decision to revoke the visa. If it is, then it's goodbye Dr Haneef and he can be deported. He has no inherent right to be here, and he would presumably be glad to be gone.

My current opinion remains that it is the Federal Police and Haneef's lawyers who have both played games here, with the media acting like a cheerleader to both sides of a game. (First half spent gee-ing up the crowd for the Federal Police, second half crossing over to the other team.) Of course the media has a job to do in reporting on justice issues, but I get peeved when they act as if it is a particularly noble role.

The history of losing your head

Earlier this week, I noted how I was enjoying reading "Across the Nightingale Floor", a story set in medieval Japan. I also said it would make a good movie.

I have now finished the novel, and I can see the difficulties of making this into a movie. (In fact, in the last 1/3, the whole story becomes very Japanese, in that most major characters want to kill themselves!) I don't want to give the plot away entirely but:

SPOILER WARNING ! SPOILER WARNING !

a pretty crucial plot point happens when a major sympathetic character gets beheaded in a way which was, apparently, not unknown in medieval Japan, but it was quite shocking for me with my Western sensitivities. It's not the technical means of the beheading as such, it's the circumstances.

I have always felt particularly repelled by the idea of watching a beheading, even a fictional one in the movies. The novel was written before the recent spate of Islamic beheadings in Iraq, and this renewed appearance of the activity in the real world is unfortunate timing for someone having the film rights to a book in which this act plays a central role.

This made me wonder whether someone has written about beheadings as a cultural issue, and indeed Wikipedia has a gruesomely interesting entry for "decapitation". (In fact, it is this entry which makes me think that what happens in the novel sounds culturally and historically plausible.)

Maybe it is modern Western urban sensibilities that find it so appalling as an act: I imagine that people who live in countries where the open slaughter of animals by throat cutting is commonplace find the idea of killing people the same way not so extraordinary. (My witnessing the killing of some chickens as a young child hasn't desensitised me, though. I don't clearly remember the chopping, but do remember my mother cleaning out the entrails. The not completely formed eggs were interesting.)

Still, I don't like thinking about the act, and wish all heads to be kept firmly in place in novels and movies.

Howard, Costello, etc

The 7.30 Report - ABC

It seems to me that the media, and the ABC in particular, is disproportionately salivating over the issue of just how much Costello and Howard like/dislike each other.

The bottom line is this: Costello has felt hard done by for years, and we already knew that. But, for whatever reason, Costello polls very poorly in preferred PM stakes compared to Howard. No one in their right mind, including Costello, would think that means its a good idea to do a leadership swap now.

The only issue of relevance to the election is Howard being put under pressure to declare that he will really hand over the leadership in the next term. But, surely this time, that's a given anyway.

So Kerry, Tony, Michelle, that's about it really. Go have a Bex and a good lie down and find something else to talk about.

Unfortunate positioning

Quake-hit atomic plant sits atop a fault line | The Japan Times Online

From the article:

The fault along which Monday's magnitude-6.8 earthquake occurred appears to extend right beneath Niigata Prefecture's Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant, the world's largest atomic power complex, an analysis of aftershock data by the Meteorological Agency showed Wednesday.

Seems to me to be a good argument for the modular, smaller Pebble Bed Reactor. To get a big power station, you just string a half dozen of them together, and the modular design (I imagine) would mean less risk of all of them being taken out at once in one earthquake or other disaster.

Dr Haneef

There's a couple of things about this case that I haven't noticed being said yet:

1. One of the consequences of Dr H deciding to fight the Commonwealth's decision to revoke his visa is that the surety has not been paid and he is spending the next few weeks in remand in Brisbane instead of at Villawood Detention Centre in Sydney (where people undergoing immigration detention are kept.) The detention in Brisbane is described in The Age as follows:

Queensland Corrective Services Minister Judy Spence said Haneef would face a different regime to other prisoners.

He would be allowed no contact with other inmates and would be given an hour a day to exercise. Ms Spence said Haneef would be managed as a terror prisoner under terrorism legislation.

"Anyone who is charged under terrorist legislation is obviously seen as a greater threat to the good order of our society than other type of prisoners," she said. "A terrorist prisoner is required to be held apart from the mainstream prison population, so he will be held in a segregated environment."

It seems certain that the Villawood detention centre would have conditions nothing like this, as he would be bailed on the criminal charge and simply be there as a visa-less person awaiting his ticket overseas after the trial on the Brisbane charge.

I wonder whether his lawyers have made this clear to him, as spending a few more weeks in custody as a terrorist subject is a serious issue. (There is also the issue of the ease with which he can get access to lawyers when in Villawood. However, it's not like Sydney is a million miles from Brisbane, and I expect telephone contact is readily available. Who is paying for his representation anyway? That has never been made clear to me.)

2. I am curious as to what people think about this hypothetical: if the doctor were lodging his visa application today, after the attempted attacks in England by the relatives he has obviously been close to, should the government approve his visa? What would the media reaction be if it was disclosed that he had been approved to come here, despite the family connections, and sharing the same profession?

Should the government in that circumstance simply accept the applicant's claim that he knew nothing of his relative's plans, and only ever had "innocent" association with them?

If you think that the government in that hypothetical situation should not approve the visa application, acting on a precautionary principle, then how could you really complain about the government revoking his visa now?

There is too much hot air blowing around this case, mainly from lawyers. I don't like the media and other's role too (whoever was leaking before the barrister did too.) It's reflecting badly on both sides if you ask me, but I still don't think the government is going to (or should) lose on the issue of deporting him.

How England became England

New Scientist reports how the English Channel appears to have been carved out in a giant "mega flood".

Such stories of spectacular geological events are always interesting. The English Channel event was about 500,000 years ago, though. The flooding of the Black Sea is more interesting due to its affecting people.

The famous playwright

Dazzled again by Stoppard's big ideas

I wish Tom Stoppard plays were produced more often in this country. He seems to be the only English playwright of the last 30 years who deserves fame for having such a combination of wit and intellect.

But he's turning 70! I don't know that there is really anyone on the horizon who is likely to replace him.

From the "only in Japan" files

Sex seems to be the topic of quite a few posts here so far this week, and it's not even spring yet. Still, who can resist looking at some highly amusing packaging for Japanese condoms? (I think I may have seen some of these around the web before, but here they are together with some funny commentary.)

Found via the entertaining Japundit.

Questioning everything about CO2

In a series of posts late last year, I explained that the effect of increasing ocean acidification from the rapid rise in CO2 levels over the next century was enough for me to drop scepticism about the worthiness of programs to seriously reduce CO2 emissions. The benefit of this approach means you don't really have to continue worrying about who is right in terms of how much the temperature will increase, and what effect it will have on climate generally.

Still, it is interesting to see that arxiv has published last week a very lengthy article arguing that the physics of CO2 warming is completely wrong. (Maybe this argument has already been discredited, as I haven't followed all of the skeptics arguments all that closely over the years. It is hard to believe that thousands of other scientists are wrong.)

In any event, it would be nice if we didn't get as hot as predicted because of misunderstood atmospheric physics.