Attack of the cutes

Just so that this blog can't be accused of being too depressing lately, here's an attack of the cutes (and I don't even like cats):



(The second half is funnier than the first half.)

Deep sea CO2

There have been a few articles in The Guardian about sending CO2 to the deep ocean. It has certain advantages over pumping it underground, and the fate of such CO2 is more complicated than I realised:

First, in order to ensure that the injected CO2 has adequate time to mix throughout the deep sea, injection should be at depths greater than 3,500 metres - that is, the depth below which "liquid" CO2 becomes more dense than sea water.

Experiments conducted by Peter Brewer, of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, not only confirm that this is the case but also demonstrate that the CO2 injected rapidly reacts with sea water to form a solid clathrate, which is more dense than both liquid CO2 and sea water. Hence, the injected CO2 would end up on the sea floor as a slush. This would gradually dissolve, releasing the CO2 to the surrounding sea water, where it would react with the dissolved carbonate and borate ions to become chemically bound in the form of bicarbonate ion. As the concentration of carbonate and borate ions is small, the neutralisation would take place gradually as the CO2-rich sea water mixed into the surroundings.

But how much can you fit in the Pacific Ocean?:

Broecker says 480bn tonnes of carbon dioxide could be safely dumped directly into the waters of the deep Pacific, equivalent to the carbon pollution from about 16 years of the world's current fossil fuel use.

Not that much, really. And some say that it would increase the acidity of the deep ocean, which as we all know, may not be a great idea.

Just go back to nuclear sounds a much better option.

You should read this

Regular readers know that I keep referring to the worrying theory that the great mass extinctions in earth's pre-history are connected with high atmospheric CO2, and its effect on ocean chemistry. The Scientific American article which first brought this to my attention said that the great extinctions seemed to be associated with CO2 levels of just under 1000 ppm. That's a fair way from where we are now, but still within sight of a century or so of current CO2 increases.

However, there's now a paper here, found via the Ocean Acidification blog, which suggests that maybe the "unifying theory" for mass extinctions is a CO2 level that specifically interferes with the operation of a particular enzyme. The biology is a little complicated, but the big concern with this theory is that severe trouble for the ocean environment may actually start at only 560ppm CO2. That could easily be reached by the middle of this century.

It's not too hard to read the full paper (in .pdf format), and it is well worth the effort. The implications for the future are set out towards the end. I'll put it here in full, and break it up a bit to make it easier to read:

Over the next century, if anthropogenic CO2 emissions proceed at the rates predicted by the IPCC scenarios (IPCC, 2001), then the identified pCO2 threshold concentration of 560 ppmv may be exceeded as early as 2050 (Fig. 3). Whilst the direct climatic impacts of this overshoot remain difficult to quantify with certainty, simple extrapolation of the central tenets of the urease hypothesis suggests that there is little doubt regarding the disruption and mass mortality that it will initiate within organisms that are heavily reliant upon the urease enzyme.

Previous mass extinction events appear to have guided the evolutionary process away from urease-dependence in higher vertebrate animals, but the threat remains for the lower invertebrates and plant communities. Importantly, these at-risk ecosystem elements are fundamental to: (i) the productive food chains, (ii) the essential habitat, and (iii) the stable climate cycles, upon which the higher vertebrate animals (including humans) rely for their survival.

Of particular note is the potential for a collapse in ocean productivity to initiate rapid greenhouse warming (Rampino and Caldeira, 2005). In this case, the cessation of marine biological export of 25 organic carbon from the surface would cause an increase in surface-ocean dissolved inorganic carbon, some of which would leak into the atmosphere to increase atmospheric pCO2. Modelling results suggest that a cessation of productivity today would result in a rapid doubling of pCO2 (Rampino and Caldiera, 2005). It is therefore a plausible scenario that a collapse of ocean productivity occurring at 560 ppm could trigger a rapid “post-apocalyptic” rise in pCO2 levels beyond 1000 ppm – leading to rapid global warming of 3–6C.

Recovery of atmospheric pCO2 from such a perturbation would be governed by the time scale of equilibrium of the ocean chemistry 5 with the carbonate system (c 104 years) (Archer et al., 1997). Post-apocalyptic greenhouse spikes of similar duration have been associated with previous mass extinctions (Retallack, 2005), and may be responsible for triggering additional climate change dependent kill responses (Elewa, 2008).

Clearly, the urease hypothesis forewarns of the global imperative that atmospheric pCO2 levels are stabilised well below 560 ppmv. This will require the development of technologies and solutions that are presently unavailable – thus demanding our immediate attention and resources.

Now, this is clearly presented by the author as a hypothesis, and it is called a "discussion paper". The author is a researcher from the Australian Institute of Marine Science in Townsville, but his exact qualifications are not clear. However, it certainly sounds like an idea worthy of some pretty intense investigation.

It is consistent with my position that arguing about whether the earth is currently warming or cooling is irrelevant to the issue of whether keeping CO2 levels down is a good idea.

What's more, the climate change sceptics are still largely silent on the issue of ocean changes as a result of high CO2. (Pointing out that corals have re-established in nuclear test lagoons is hardly relevant.) I don't think they can find any credible scientist who has compelling arguments as to why such concerns are not worthy of being taken seriously. Correct me if I am wrong, Jennifer Marohasy. (I note that she ran with suggestions earlier this year that the cooling temperature would see the alarmists start to run with ocean acidification instead. This is not an answer to the actual concerns, however.)

On the gay front

Widespread reporting today of one study indicating similarities between gay brains and those of the opposite sex. One part that surprised me:

The researchers said that the study cannot say whether the differences in brain shape are inherited or due to to exposure to hormones such as testosterone in the womb and if they are responsible for sexual orientation.

But this is something they plan to look at in a further study of newborn babies to see if it can help predict future sexual orientation.

Would such a study be ethical? Are PET scans completely without risk, and just how important is it for science to pin down when such brain changes (if this study is correct) are formed?

As other people have argued before, it's not even certain that it is helpful for the gay lobby to encourage a belief that it is innate. On the one hand, they can argue against discrimination because it is not something they can choose (a cultural idea that has widespread currency already in the West;) on the other hand, it can still be taken that they are, in a sense, a biological mistake. If it is clear that babies are born that way, would a course of the right hormones be able to "cure" them?

And how would such studies also make sense of the (apparent) widespread bisexuality of Ancient Greece? The question of what exactly was going on in Greece, and a couple of other ancient civilisations, is perhaps a little difficult to be sure of from this point in time; but still, given that their neighbours at the time even thought they were strange indicates that they probably were.

On a related matter, the New York Times last week ran an article on how gay marriage is panning out in Massachusetts. I think it has been found in all places allowing it that there is an initial rush to the registry by couples who have been together for years anyway, followed by rapidly dwindling numbers. In Massachusetts:

Of the more than 10,500 same-sex couples married here since May 17, 2004, 6,121 wed in the first six months. There were 2,060 weddings in 2005; 1,442 in 2006; and 867 in the first eight months of 2007, the most recent data show.

More figures of interest:

The Census Bureau recorded 23,655 same-sex households in Massachusetts in 2006.

Nearly two-thirds of the weddings have been lesbian marriages, including one between two women named Melissa McCarthy. And while nearly half of straight people marrying are under 30, more same-sex married couples of both sexes are older — nearly a third are in their 40s.

So it sounds like about half of gay couples living together there are married now, but with the diminishing numbers who are getting married annually, will that really continue to be the case?

As for the view of the meaning of marriage that some gay males have:

Eric Erbelding and his husband, Michael Peck, both 44, see each other only every other weekend because Mr. Peck works in Pittsburgh. So, Mr. Erbelding said, “Our rule is you can play around because, you know, you have to be practical.”

Mr. Erbelding, a decorative painter in Boston, said: “I think men view sex very differently than women. Men are pigs, they know that each other are pigs, so they can operate accordingly. It doesn’t mean anything.”

Still, Mr. Erbelding said, most married gay couples he knows are “for the most part monogamous, but for maybe a casual three-way.”

Well, I'm glad we overturned millennia of humanity's understanding of marriage so that some gay men who want to continue to openly play the field can still get the financial benefits of having a favourite boyfriend. (Yes, I know, we don't criticise heterosexual marriage as an institution because some - very, very, few I suspect- enter into "open" marriages. But if such attitudes are widespread amongst married gay men, I think it does mean they don't treat marriage seriously, and it weakens the case as to why they should be accommodated.)

It also makes a bit of a joke of the "conservative case" for gay marriage, which I have heard Justice Michael Kirby (amongst others) argue. Let them marry, they say, and it will encourage monogamous relationships and stable families and that is a good thing as far as conservatives are concerned.

Sounds nice in principle, but really, it doesn't realistically take into account nature. As a rule, men (both gay and straight) find sex without commitment easy, and evolutionary biology plausibly explains why. Even with modern young women willing to have purely recreational sex, it still carries more risk of emotional or procreative complications compared to 2 men who meet purely for sex. Making gay marriage available is not somehow going to suddenly make the great majority of them think that they would be better off getting into monogamous relationships any time soon.

Gay women, on the other hand, still seem to have the nesting instinct even when their partner is another woman. Not much of a surprise there. They didn't need any encouragement to "settle down".

But worse than all of this, as far as I am concerned, is the procreative interests of gay couples. That lesbians use artificial insemination to have babies seems to me far more offensive to the conservative viewpoint than the nature of the relationship between the adults. That argument, however, seems to be lost in the West, at least for now.

UPDATE: a reasonably well argued conservative commentary on the topic is at American Spectator.

Something to wonder about

Sewage disaster leaves over 700 gallons of human feces in Kingston woman’s home

I only post about this because of this part of the report:

"This was completely flooded with feces and water and pee, and of course I smelled it. When I came in and I called the city guys and it’s estimated at 786.24 gallons of human feces got backed up into my house," Riley says.

Well, just lucky it wasn't 786.45 gallons. (Why on earth is that figure so precise?)

More religion

Bush 'may convert to Catholicism' - The Independent

Tony Blair and now George W? How interesting.

Meanwhile, Liberal Anglicans are doing their best to stop their church resembling anything even vaguely unified by holding a prominent "marriage" of two gay priests. Despite the priest who led the ceremony denying that it was provocative, it was liturgically as close as a marriage service as possible. According to The Times:

Had it not been two men standing at the altar, any observer would have taken the service for a traditional wedding. The service – at the Church of St Bartholomew the Great in the City of London – began: “Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God . . . to join together these men in a holy covenant of love and fidelity.” After a confession of sin “through our own deliberate fault”, the congregation heard a lesson from 1 Samuel 18, a Bible passage about the love between David and Jonathan.

Dr Lord was asked: “David, wilt thou take this man as thy partner, in the sight of God? Wilt thou love him, comfort him, honour, and keep him in sickness and in health, and, forsaking all others, keep thee only unto him, so long as ye both shall live?’” to which he responded: “I will.”

They also pledged to love each other physically, as in the traditional Anglican marriage service, stating: “With this ring I thee bind, with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow.”

Oh no, that's not provocative at all!

What fun the Lambeth conference will be this year. Rowan Williams may as well be looking at how to formally end the worldwide communion right now.

Prince Caspian

For those readers who have been dying to know what I thought of Prince Caspian (cue crickets chirping), here it is.

Reviews for Prince Caspian fall into 3 broad categories:

1. The irreligious who can't stand CS Lewis' use of fantasy as an allegory for Christianity, and therefore cannot bear any of the Narnia films due to their quasi-proselytising nature.

2. The irreligious who feel that Prince Caspian works as adventure and is more enjoyable than The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe because it's allegorical content is considerably diminished compared to the first movie. A lot of Australian reviews I have read fall into this category.

3. Those who who admire CS Lewis and his aims, and are therefore a little disappointed that the movie does seem to soft peddle the serious side.

I'm not entirely sure that I have read any review that clearly falls into category 3, but that was my reaction. I suspect that (apart from the appalling timing of releasing it a week before Indiana Jones in the States) there are probably significant numbers of American Christians who share the view, and this is a partial explanation for why it seems destined to make barely half of what the first movie made. (Still, as far as I can tell, it won't lose money.)

On the positive side: it looks fantastic, and the use of computer effects is kept to a level where it is not making you think "look at those 50,000 combatants who are obviously all CGI". (I'm looking at you, "Lord of the Rings".)

The story also has the benefit of real humans playing real characters (contrast, again, LOTR) and the acting is fine. Also, Andrew Adamson is really a talented director.

On the downside, Aslan comes and dispenses wisdom and assistance only a couple of times. It's been so long since I read the book (if I did at all; I can't even recall clearly which I have read beyond three titles,) that I am not entirely sure if it is the same there. Certainly many reviewers have noted that the book is perhaps the least interesting of the Narnia series.

I certainly don't want to put anyone off seeing it: it is a fine movie; just one that feels a little lacking if, like me, you loved the first one. (By the way, you can always tell a movie has impressed people when a fair few stay in the cinema watching the credits. That did happen at the screening I went to.)

Of course, one of the most disgraceful things is that Sex and the City beat it at the Australia box office on opening weekend. Can't the Pope issue some sort of condemnation of that film? If we lived in Old Testament times, I would expect God to demand the human sacrifice of Sarah Jessica Parker (on an altar erected in front of some fashion house in New York, the contents of which would form the funeral pyre for her body) as a condition of letting the rest of humanity survive. And that would sound perfectly reasonable to me.

Aussie fuel cells

I've mentioned before that in Japan they are using natural gas fuel cells for household electricity.

On Saturday Extra on Radio National this weekend, they were talking about an Austalian company which is developing them too. There is no transcript available, but you can listen to it on streaming audio here. (It starts about half way through that segment.)

The link to the company itself is here. I don't think it is not mentioned on their site, but was in the interview, that it is CSIRO research which the company is trying to commercialise.

We won't be seeing them anytime soon in Australia, however. According to the interview, they are being commercialised for the European, Japanese and North American markets. This is because the cost of electricity here is such that they are not yet cost effective.

Just what the world has been waiting for...

...robots that make smells:

Pomi (Penguin Robot for Multimodal Interaction) can see, hear, touch and emit smells as well as making faces, Friday's Korea Times reported. It was developed by the state-run Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) which plans to put Pomi to commercial use. The institute said Pomi's software, which imitates human expressions of emotion, will be available on the market by the end of next month. The robot can move its lips, eyebrows and even pupils freely to make faces and can emit two kinds of fragrances to match its emotions.

Let's all pray that the Korean's never design a kimchi eating penguin robot that can "emit" smells.

The strength of a weed

Health - Life & Style Home - theage.com.au

The link is to a story about very thorough sounding research in the US which shows that marijuana is indeed much stronger than it used to be in its THC levels:

The latest analysis from the University of Mississippi's Potency Monitoring Project tracked the average amount of THC, the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, in samples seized by law enforcement agencies from 1975 through 2007.

It found that the average amount of THC reached 9.6 per cent in 2007, compared with 8.75 per cent the previous year.

The 9.6 per cent level represents more than a doubling of marijuana potency since 1983, when it averaged just under four per cent.

I note that it is talking averages too, so presumably a significant amount in use is above that level.

Last year, The Guardian reported that tests in the UK indicated the average there was 14% (with a small number of samples at 20%).

I'm not sure if similar research is done in Australia. Will have to look around some other time.

Analysing Japan

Pajamas Media : What’s the Matter with Japan?

This commentary on the social problems within Japan (viewed in light of the recent Akihabara killings) is spot on.

A key thing that they have to change is the cultural attitude to mental illness and depression. I may have mentioned before, but an Australian friend who lives in Japan (and until recently worked in an administrative position in an english language school) told me that they always did whatever they could to avoid their foreign teachers being taken by police to a psychiatric hospital, because once in there was no telling when they would ever get out. Involuntary admission to a Japan psych ward is something to really fear, apparently.

Even non-psychiatric medicine can expect patients to be stoic to an extent that we haven't seen in the West for many years. A few years ago I was told by a Japanese specialist who performed stomach endoscopies that they were done without any anaesthesia, and as a result were very unpleasant for the patient. (He said he would take a lot of convincing to ever undergo one himself, as he knew how awful they were. I don't know that your gag reflex ever properly stops while you've got a tube down your throat into your stomach.)

As it happens, I had a stomach endoscopy once in Australia in the early 1990's, and knew nothing about it until I woke up. He could not really explain why Japan did not believe in anaesthesia for this procedure. I am sure that he knew that this was not just a peculiarity of the hospital he worked in.

One thing I did not know is that, according to the article, Japan's relatively generous medical insurance schemes do not cover psychiatric treatment.

Amazing, hey?

Real life ocean acidification

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Natural lab shows sea's acid path

Here's a very interesting recent report on some science being done in ocean areas near Italy that already are more acidic due to volcanic CO2 bubbling through the sea.

As expected, the news does not look good for corals, sea urchins, sea snails, and mussels. (I assume that oysters, although they don't get a mention, would also not fare well .) One thing that does well appear to do well is seagrass. I suppose that might mean that one winner out of ocean acidification might be dugong/manatees. I don't know whether they taste any good, though.

Here's the abstract in Nature, but the article itself is behind a paywall. Grrr.

It's also interesting to note the recent stories about the surprising number of bacteria found to be living in the earth's crust under the oceans. The exact role of these in carbon cycling is unknown, but would seem to be potentially very significant. Kind of hard to study bacteria that live best under great pressure, though.

I assume that bottom living bacteria would be very significant to the feared production of poisonous gas if the ocean becomes warm and acidic enough. All a worry.

UPDATE: I hope the tone of my post didn't sound too dismissive of concerns about this.

The Nature paper attracted attention in The Times and The Telegraph. Here's what one of the scientists said in the latter:

Dr Hall-Spencer said: "What we saw was very dramatic and shocking.

"All the predictions made in lab experiments about acidity causing the disappearance of species is coming true.

"When we looked in the field it was already happening.

I must admit I though a lot of the claims being made about species disappearing amounted to scaremongering but now I have seen it with my own eyes.

"Our field studies provide a window on the future of the oceans in a high CO2 world. We show the dramatic ecological consequences of ocean acidification including the removal of corals, snails and sea urchins and the proliferation of invasive alien algae."

"Our observations verify concerns, based on laboratory experiments and model predictions, that marine food webs will be severely disrupted and major ecological tipping points are likely if human CO2 emissions continue unabated."

Also, I note that, although there was a lengthy Sydney Morning Herald story on ocean acidification on 7 June, it did not mention this paper. In fact, I can't see from Google that it has been reported anywhere in the Australian media. Sort of odd, isn't it, given the implications for the Great Barrier Reef?

Why Israel must survive...

Because it seems to be the only Middle East nation with a sense of humour.

This Time blog link explains all:

Iranian Prez stars in Israeli TV Ad - The Middle East Blog - TIME

But oddly, one of the comments about the post thinks that the fact that Israel TV carries a parody about Ahmadinejad threatening nuclear destruction means that "it shows how the "threat" from Iran has been so indoctrinated into Israeli culture that it is accepted as common and undisputed fact."

I would have thought the opposite is more likely; if the population really fears immediate destruction, they presumably wouldn't find the ad funny. (That's not to say they don't fear a nuclear threat in the future.)

Anyway, as I am sure I have said before, can those who make excuses for Iran having nuclear weapons ever point to any Israeli leader talking about the imminent disappearance of one of their neighbours?

As for the ad itself, here's the Youtube link.

Stand on the scales, please

To Save Fuel, Airlines Find No Speck Too Small - NYTimes.com

This article explains what steps the airlines are taking to try and economise on fuel. Some of it I find hard to believe:

Up in the cockpit, Delta is studying whether it is feasible to divide the heavy pilot manuals required on each flight between the captain and first officer, so pilots are not toting duplicate sets of five or six books that each weigh about a pound and a half.

On the other hand if this is true:

“Every 25 pounds we remove, we save $440,000 a year,” Mr. McGraw said...

airlines in countries with significant populations of the obese must be really suffering! Why shouldn't airlines be offering cash back offers for passengers under the national average weight if they are willing to stand on the luggage scales before boarding?

UPDATE: at the risk of referring to the Colbert Report just a little too much, he covered this possibility in last night's show (which I saw after my post):



Also on that episode, he had an interview with a guy who has a book out on the 1950's "comic panic" in America. I had referred to this recently when talking about the Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis movie "Artists and Models". If the topic interests you, the interview is both interesting and funny. (You can find it at Colbert Report website yourself.)

A Wednesday compilation

* The amazing adventures of Kevin Rudd: Last week, Labor figures were saying "no, no, no, the Japanese don't think we have snubbed them." This week, the PM being questioned at length about this in Japan (by Japanese journalists) makes that argument just a little hard to sustain. And is it really a good idea to come across as a smart arse by saying "well, you didn't visit us either."?

Andrew Bolt has covered well the silliness of giving money to Toyota to do what they were going to anyway. I expect the next question time in Parliament will go on about this at length, and rightly so.

* Crab scam: Also in Japan, the fraud is of a fairly esoteric nature. Read about the great Japanese crab scammers here.

* A new way of saying "when Hell freezes over": "when Tim Blair becomes a hypermiler": Wired has an article about "hypermilers" (being people who have become obsessed with driving in such a way as to get maximum fuel economy from their cars.) Some of the methods are just nuts:

Fulton routinely gets 55 mpg from his 1997 Toyota Paseo, a car the EPA rates at 29 mpg. He started hypermiling about 18 months ago when he landed a new job 37 miles from home and got tired of burning so much gas. He mastered "pulse and glide" -- turning off the engine and coasting while driving. "This technique alone dramatically increased my mileage from 38 mpg to 47 mpg on my first tank," he says. "I was blown away."

Well, let's just sit back and wait for the first manslaughter conviction for a hypermiler who couldn't use his power steering to help avoid a deadly collision.

* Indiana Jones and the Green Left Weekly: Just what you were waiting for: a socialist left critique of Indiana Jones! The reviewer complains:

The indigenous people who help Indy in his exploits are sympathetically portrayed, but those who resist are seen as ignorant and superstitious. And some really nasty racism rears its ugly head.

An audience survey of the most popular scenes in Raiders revealed that most people’s favourite scene was when Indy guns down a sword-wielding Egyptian man with a pistol in a crowded square. What if the situation was reversed and a sword-wielding white man was gunned by an Arab? Would it still be the public’s favourite scene? I don’t think so.

That's what I like about the po-faced Left: the way they attempt to crush the simple enjoyment out of life. (It is also analysis like this that made the first Austin Powers movie very funny. You know - the part where suddenly the movie veers into looking at the effect on the bad guys' families after they're killed.)

Monday compilation

Here are some stories that caught my attention recently:

* How unlucky can you be? To be born albino is pretty unlucky. But to be born albino in certain parts of Africa is taking things to a whole new level. A pretty amazing story in The New York Times explains that albino people s are being killed in sub-Saharan Africa because of magic:

....recently in Tanzania...at least 19 albinos, including children, have been killed and mutilated in the past year, victims of what Tanzanian officials say is a growing criminal trade in albino body parts.

Many people in Tanzania — and across Africa, for that matter — believe albinos have magical powers. They stand out, often the lone white face in a black crowd, a result of a genetic condition that impairs normal skin pigmentation and strikes about 1 in 3,000 people here. Tanzanian officials say witch doctors are now marketing albino skin, bones and hair as ingredients in potions that are promised to make people rich....

In early May, Vumilia Makoye, 17, was eating dinner with her family in their hut in western Tanzania when two men showed up with long knives....

When Vumilia’s mother, Jeme, saw the men with knives, she tried to barricade the door of their hut. But the men overpowered her and burst in.“They cut my daughter quickly,” she said, making hacking motions with her hands.

The men sawed off Vumilia’s legs above the knee and ran away with the stumps. Vumilia died.

Darkest Africa indeed.

* God gets challenged again: Theodicy gets another discussion in this book review in the New Yorker. Interesting, even if nothing especially new in it.

* I always wanted to live in a dome: It turns out that Buckminster Fuller, famed for coming up with the geodesic dome (and some much sillier designs for all sorts of stuff) was quite the eccentric. Read all about him in a very entertaining article in the New Yorker. Here are some of my favourite sections:

With no job and a new baby to support, Fuller became depressed. One day, he was walking by Lake Michigan, thinking about, in his words, “Buckminster Fuller—life or death,” when he found himself suspended several feet above the ground, surrounded by sparkling light. Time seemed to stand still, and a voice spoke to him. “You do not have the right to eliminate yourself,” it said. “You do not belong to you. You belong to Universe.”...

Castro-like, Fuller could lecture for ten hours at a stretch. (A friend of mine who took an architecture course from Fuller at Yale recalls that classes lasted from nine o’clock in the morning until five in the evening, and that Fuller talked basically the entire time.) Audiences were enraptured and also, it seems, mystified. “It was great! What did he say?” became the standard joke....

Fuller championed, and for many years adhered to, a dietary regimen that consisted exclusively of prunes, tea, steak, and Jell-O. (!!!!!!)

One idea that he came up with was for the "Dymaxion Bathroom—a single unit that came with a built-in tub, toilet, and sink". In fact, I believe this how bathrooms for apartments for Japan are made. Japanese bathing style requires that the entire small bathroom can get wet, so for apartments they are like sealed plastic units that come prefabricated to incorporate into the building.

Once you read the article, have a look at the slide show taken from an exhibition that inspired the New Yorker article.

* Justifying affairs: Across the Atlantic, and Zoe Williams in The Guardian takes a sarcastic look at a book entitled "When Good People Have Affairs". Her favourite of the 17 motivations listed therein: breaking out into selfhood.

On Colbert Report tonight, there's a slightly amusing interview with an writer who has also written about why people have affairs. I suspect that (towards the end) Colbert's personal conservative-ish views are on display here (which is fine by me, of course):



* Books for husbands to buy their wives: Back to the New York Times, and there's a review of two books by couples who tried to help their marriages by having sex every day. What's not to like about that idea?

How to annoy the neighbours

PM visits Hiroshima memorial - TVNZ Portable - tvnz.co.nz

The Australian media is widely reporting today that our PM Rudd is the "first serving Western leader" to visit Hiroshima.

I had my doubts this was true. In fact it only took a visit to Wikipedia to show it's wrong. New Zealand PM Helen Clark was at the Peace Memorial Museum in 2001, as the link above shows.

I think the mis-reporting may be due to Rudd being the first to visit a certain part of the memorial.

So sorry about that, Helen.

Blogging slowdown

It was a nice, basically lazy, long weekend in Brisbane. The family went to the Lifeline book sale. Doesn't Lifeline do this in any other capital city? It is huge, and I assume that Lifeline makes a lot of money out of it.

The record sales area there is a sight to behold, with lots and lots of vinyl LPs from my younger years to be found. My wife actually got some classical music LPs, which meant I spent some time turning them into CD's for the rest of the weekend. I got to hear most of Aida that way. It's mostly dull, I've decided.

The family also saw Prince Caspian yesterday. I will do a separate post about it sometime soon.

But generally this week, posting will be lighter than normal. I need money, as does the tax office, and as much as I enjoy posting intermittently all day, I really have to stop that habit.

(Of course, my invitation to mad benefactors is still open. I would mention you very favourably!)

Aboriginal issues revisited

Northern Territory News

Go the link for a disturbing story of apparent cultural norms in remote aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. Short version: an Aboriginal community officer accepted his 13 year old daughter sleeping with a 20 year old bloke, who has since gone to jail.

The officer (who the newspaper calls a police officer, so I take it that is technically correct) will just face some internal discipline. As for the poor daughter:

The court heard the girl had contracted three sexually transmitted infections and that her baby had died in-utero.

What I also find irritating about the story is this statement by the NT Police deputy commissioner:

"Following the Chief Justice's comments that Aboriginal leaders in communities should demonstrate leadership to prevent the practice of tribal marriages to underage girls, the Northern Territory police are developing an internal information package to assist not only Aboriginal community police officers, but police generally in this regard,'' he said.

As I said back in June last year, what exactly is the insurmountable difficulty that any government has in making sure that aboriginal communities know a few basic laws? As I said then:

....this is an area where I think most people should rightly react along the lines: "forget cultural sensitivities when it comes to knowing what is child (or even adult) sexual abuse. They just need to be told in English (or if they don't understand that, their own language) a few key points: incest is illegal at whatever age; sex between adults and children is illegal. Sex without consent is always illegal too, no matter what age. No one who has an STD should have sex with anyone until it's cured. "

The basic rules just aren't all that complicated, surely.

Meanwhile, I've had some interesting talk with my relatives in Far North Queensland about how things are going in the Aurukun/Weipa area. The tavern at Aurukun now apparently only sells light beer, and this has not gone over well. Grog is smuggled in both overland and via boats. The police search vehicles driving into the township regularly, but grog is dumped in the bush for later retrieval when the residents can see that the polices cars are all back at the station. It is also smuggled in by boats (operated by aborigines, not whites.)

Meanwhile, I am told that Weipa is now not safe to walk around at night. The places that sell alcohol at Weipa cannot refuse to sell to aborigines, and in fact much of the alcohol that ends up in Aurunkun comes from there.

What a nightmare.

Jews out of Egypt

'Egypt is trying to deny our existence' | Jerusalem Post

Interesting story about Jews who were "exiled" out of Egypt since the creation of Israel:

In 1948, around 100,000 Jews lived in Egypt, but by 2007 that number had dropped to between 20 and 100.

Some Jewish groups have sought documents from Egypt relating to the history of the former Jewish residents:

However, Egypt has refused to release the documents to the historical society. Sakkal said this was a consequence of the Egyptians' fear of restitution claims.

The Egyptian government is just a little sensitive about the issue:

On May 10, Egyptian Culture Minister Farouk Hosni said during a parliamentary conference that he "would burn Israeli books myself if found in Egyptian libraries."