The problems of cap and trade

Carbon Trading: Environmental Godsend or Giant Shell Game? DISCOVER Magazine

A very easy to follow article here on the problems with emissions trading schemes.

Something Islamic and cool

Dezeen - Museum of Islamic Art by I.M. Pei

Mark it on your calendar: this blog today has a post about something Islamic that is also impressive and cool. (Well, at least it's something in an Islamic country, whether or not anyone Islamic can claim that much credit for it is debatable, but let's stop quibbling and get on with it.)

Qatar has a new Museum of Islamic Art, and the architecture, on display in the photos at the above link, looks very impressive.

And yes, I see the architect is I.M. Pei, a Chinese born American. Ha.

Bad news for Indonesia

Megathrust earthquake could hit Asia 'at any time' - environment - New Scientist

A devastating "megathrust" earthquake could occur at any time off the Indonesian island of Sumatra, according to new research. Previous quakes have failed to release all of the energy that has built up over hundreds of years, leaving the fault zone vulnerable to another large earthquake.

An unlikely prospect

12 years to halve UK CO2 - The Independent

Britain should adopt the world's toughest climate change target and slash nearly half of its greenhouse gas emissions in the next 12 years, the Government's new climate advisory committee said yesterday in its first report.

Emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases causing global warming should be cut by 42 per cent on 1990 levels by 2020, as long as there is a new global climate deal in a UN meeting in Copenhagen a year from now, said the Committee on Climate Change.

The recommendation for what is a massively ambitious and world-beating target – and a costly one for electricity consumers, who will face higher bills, perhaps of up to £500 a year

An active retirement

Two elderly men arrested for robbing supermarket in Sapporo

Akinori Kawamura, 55, a used goods recycler, and Masanori Hanakawa, 66, unemployed, are suspected of forcing their way into the supermarket after it closed, shooting the manager with a gun and fleeing in a car.

Police said the pair admit to the charge. They were quoted as saying they wanted money to get by and to enjoy a few other things. Police found a modified handgun, four iron bullets, and a large number of fireworks in Kawamura’s home. According to police, Kawamura said he put the gun together and made the bullets himself.

Nothing like taking personal responsibility

So, Andrew Sullivan says of George W Bush: "because he cannot address homophobia and cannot even say the word 'gay' in public or address this issue directly, his legacy in America is actually an increase in HIV transmission".

This is all a bit rich, isn't it, coming for a HIV positive man who, 7 years ago, was actively seeking "bareback" sex?

(Yes, I know, he claims he was only going to have unprotected sex with another HIV positive person, but even that is behaviour not entirely without sexual health consequences.)

What upsets Sullivan is that he (Bush) didn't use the word "gay" in a conversation about HIV. He then goes on about how homophobia amongst blacks being the biggest HIV problem in America.

Funny, I thought the issue was that black men do not identify readily as "gay," and wouldn't assume George was even talking about them if he used the word. How does Sullivan think using the word "gay" is going to work magic within the black community?

By the way, that story from The Nation about Sullivan's dating strategies notes that Sullivan's ad indicated he was also into "bi-scenes" (as well as orgies generally.) I will take this as adding credibility to my personal theory of why Sullivan hates Sarah Palin!

UPDATE: just stumbled across a recent, very detailed, and very explicit, article in Huffington Post which argues that "barebacking" between the HIV positive is almost certainly encouraging mutated, drug resistant strains of HIV. It is very critical of the way the gay community is, to a large extent, taking the view that HIV infection is not such a serious matter now.

Embed problem?

I'm told that this blog is sending off anti virus warnings for some, and it appears to be related to embedded Youtube. (I actually got a virus warning from a science blog that appears to have no videos on it.)

I use AVG (paid version) and am not having any problems, and it seems not entirely clear whether it is a "real" problem or not.

Still, in the interests of safety, and not annoying people, I'll delete the embeds in the last couple of posts. Maybe they can be re-instated later.

More anti-Dubai

Why I'd rather die than visit Dubai | Sathnam Sanghera - Times Online

Most remarkable from the above opinion piece:

According to the Lonely Planet guide to the city, one British tourist was arrested at Dubai airport and sentenced to four years in prison after 0.03g of cannabis - an amount “smaller than a grain of sugar and invisible to the human eye” - was found on the stub of a cigarette stuck to the sole of his shoe. Meanwhile, a Swiss man was reportedly imprisoned after customs officers found three poppy seeds on his clothes (they had fallen off a bread roll he had eaten at Heathrow), and a British woman was held in custody for two months before customs officers conceded that the codeine that she was using for her back problems had been prescribed by a doctor.

A novel way of looking for aliens

No Dyson Spheres Found Yet | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine

Only now he realises this?

Jon Stewart: MSNBC Is The New Fox News (VIDEO)

Clever bike

Sanyo to launch new electric hybrid bicycle

Equipped with a rechargeable lithium-ion battery, the "eneloop bike" takes the crossover between a normal bicycle and a moped one step further, aiming to tap growing interest in tackling global warming.

The system harnesses energy from braking when the bike goes downhill, and can add extra power equivalent to double the rider's pedal force for going uphill, in line with relaxed government restrictions on such systems.

The eneloop bike can travel 1.8 times faster than conventional bicycles thanks to the motor powering its front wheel, the company said.

They need to get rid of the Japanese style shopping basket on the front, though, for it to look cool enough in the West.

Doctors behaving badly

Arrogant, abusive and disruptive — and a doctor - International Herald Tribune

"About 3 to 4 percent of doctors are disruptive, but that's a big number, and they really gum up the works." Experts say the leading offenders are specialists in high-pressure fields like neurosurgery, orthopedics and cardiology.

...every nurse has a story about obnoxious doctors. A few say they have ducked scalpels thrown across the operating room by angry surgeons. More frequently, though, they are belittled, insulted or yelled at — often in front of patients and other staff members — and made to feel like the bottom of the food chain.

Interestingly, one researcher blames the way surgeons teach themselves:

Norcross blamed "the brutal training surgeons get, the long hours, being belittled and 'pimped' " — a term for being bombarded with questions to the point of looking stupid. "That whole structure teaches a disruptive behavior," he said.

Vast international readership: you can post anonymously here your true life experience with a "disruptive doctor". Everyone likes those stories, don't they?

Tracking down CO2

Carbon Detectives Are Tracking Gases in Colorado - NYTimes.com

Good article explaining the research underway to get a better understanding of where CO2 comes from and goes (otherwise known as the carbon budget):

...researchers think about half of the CO₂ emitted into the atmosphere gets absorbed by oceans and land, but they do not know precisely where the gases come from and where they end up. This knowledge gap has serious policy implications; until it becomes clear where emissions are going, it will remain difficult to have verifiable credits for sequestering carbon.

“We need to make sure that carbon markets are affecting climate change, not just putting money in the hands of some companies and people,” said Lisa Dilling, an assistant professor of environmental science at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

A vexing challenge is that surface inventory assessments — based on measuring forests, agricultural fields and smokestack emissions, for instance — generally do not agree with atmospheric measurements.

This sounds like it may help a lot:

In January, the next frontier of atmospheric CO₂ measuring instruments will begin when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration launches the first carbon-scanning satellite, called the Orbiting Carbon Observatory.

Each day, the satellite will orbit Earth 15 times, taking nearly 500,000 measurements of the “fingerprint” that CO₂ leaves in the air between the satellite and Earth’s surface. The data will be used to create a map of CO₂ concentrations that will help scientists determine precisely where the sources and sinks are — showing differences in trace gases down to a 1 part per million precision against a background of 380 parts per million CO₂ equivalent.

Surprising they haven't had a satellite to do that before now.

Australia revisited

History in the Making: The Current Cinema: The New Yorker

Damn. The New Yorker had David Denby review "Australia" instead of Anthony Lane. Still, Denby took quite a strong and witty dislike to it, so the result is not too bad.

The previous post here said it was a "spoiler" for the movie, yet it didn't actually deal with how the movie ends. (Oddly enough, over the weekend many people were coming to the post via searches for the movie spoiler.)

For those still interested, the real movie ending appears to be explained here, but David Denby also appears to give it away to a significant degree (and with a killer final line):

At the end, King George summons Nullah to a rite of passage, a walkabout. Nullah’s disappearance into the desert, leaving the whites behind, is framed as a triumphant anti-colonial moment, but Luhrmann confuses the issue by accompanying the scene with, of all things, the stirring “Nimrod” passage from “Enigma Variations,” by Edward Elgar, the composer perhaps most closely associated with the glories of empire. With the same degree of appropriateness, Luhrmann might celebrate Barack Obama’s Inauguration with a thundering rendition of “Dixie.”

If it weren't 3 hours long, I would be tempted to see to confirm my suspicion as to how bad I would find it. But life is too short for that. And in any event, it can almost certainly be written off as a box office flop, and will be making an appearance in the DVD rental shop sooner than they expected.

Always their fault

Egypt's Jew Haters Deserve Ostracism in the West - WSJ.com

Good article here about how even the supposedly liberal part of Egyptian media runs stories blaming the Jews for everything.

The Independent should expect letters

The kindest cut: How circumcision is the secret weapon in the battle against HIV/Aids - The Independent

Here's a long article about the success of circumcision in Africa as a preventive step to dramatically reduce HIV transmission:

Flooding Africa with condoms and trying to change sexual behaviour has had little demonstrable impact. Research on an Aids vaccine has foundered and an effective microbicide is still not in sight.

The toll from the disease is staggering – an estimated 33 million people infected with HIV, and 25 million dead. Even more alarming, however, is that new infections are growing by 2.7 million a year, outnumbering the annual two million deaths. For every two people put on drug treatment, five more become infected.

Against this litany of despair there is now, for once, a message of hope – a chance of curbing, and even reversing, the epidemic. Circumcision, if rolled out across the continent, offers the first real prospect of saving lives by preventing infection on a significant scale. Estimates suggest that if universal circumcision were introduced across sub-Saharan Africa, it could prevent 300,000 deaths in the next 10 years and three million deaths over the next 20 years. It is sometimes described as a "surgical vaccine" – with good reason.

What's the bet that this will still not satisfy the very strange anti-circumcision movement, the believers in which will no doubt be writing letters to The Independent this very minute.

Overexposed

Jamie Oliver to launch own magazine | Media | guardian.co.uk

I suppose I didn't mind watching a bit of Jamie Oliver's shows when he was new, but they became increasingly irritating over time. Although I don't watch him deliberately anymore, I still see enough from time to time to know what he's up to.

First it was all those happy music end scenes of the "mates over for lunch" in his London pad that grated (a feature of Nigella Lawson's shows too,) then the soap opera of his wife not liking the press making up stories, and the saintly fights to improve British school food. Recently, he did a series in which he showed Italian monks how to enjoy life again (while swearing and going on about some domestic drama about whether his wife was really going to turn up or not), and the latest seemed mainly to be about how good he was at growing his own vegetables.

Now, believe it or not, he is going to publish his own bi-monthly magazine.

I am just waiting for his new movie to be announced.

A failed suppression continues

Speaking of climate change, I am not the first to note this, but there continues to be a hell of lot of articles in the Australian press lately by warming skeptics complaining that their dissent is being suppressed.

It's starting to remind me of lefties complaining of suppression of dissent under the Howard government's sedition laws. It all has a bit of a Monty Python air about it, claiming suppression when everyone with ears in fact can hear what they are saying.

If their complaint is that they can't get published in peer reviewed journals, a large number of the vocal skeptics simply don't work directly in the field of climate research anyway. (Geologists are unduly represented, and while part of their knowledge is relevant to the big picture, I still wouldn't expect that they would be particularly knowledgable about studying what is happening in the atmosphere and oceans right now.)

The people at Real Climate have noticed this upswing in skeptic confidence too, and refer people to their Wiki as a resourse for information addressing the skeptic's arguments.

While my argument is that it is not even necessary to have a position on warming in order to believe that strong action on CO2 is warranted (due to ocean acidification,) I must say that I increasingly find the warming skeptics position irritating, in that they just ignore the reasonably put rebuttals by the climate scientists. (Real Climate has nearly always taken a moderate tone, in my opinion, although this latest post indicates that they are really just getting tired of being nice to skeptics.)

I'll give the skeptics the point that media reporting greatly favours any "alarmist" news, but this is not really something that affects the actual science. I am even happy enough to see a wildly inaccurate claim by Tim Flannery, for example, to be held up for ridicule by Tim Blair, but people shouldn't forget that he is just like the geologist skeptics in that there was never any reason to take his opinion particularly seriously anyway.

It is also true, as John Quiggin has noted, that being a conservative blogger who wants to see action on greenhouse gases is a very lonely position in Australia. It is actually very annoying to agree with Andrew Bolt's reading of federal politics about 90% per cent of the time, but then to find that he just runs with any skeptical argument on greenhouse gases and shows no sign of independently looking at the counterarguments.

It increasingly seems to me that many skeptics are now taking just as "religious" view of the issue as the Greens, with(for example), their belief that there is a vast quasi-conspiracy of climate scientists keeping quiet about the "truth" in order to keep their funding going.

Unfortunately though, it is the skeptic faith that seems likely to the one which is going to cause real problems for future generations.

Complicated oceans

North Atlantic cold-water sink returns to life : Nature News

Here's the opening paragraph from the above report:

Scientists have found evidence that convective mixing in the North Atlantic, a mechanism that fuels ocean circulation and affects Earth's climate, has returned after a decade of near stagnation – thanks, perhaps, to a dramatic loss of sea-ice in the Arctic during the summer of 2007.

From a global warming/greenhouse gas point of view, this appears to be good news. Certainly, the oceans are proving remarkably complicated to understand, probably because they are huge and hence hard to study:

Reduced convection should in theory weaken the entire Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (MOC) — responsible for carrying warm tropical water northwards — with far-reaching consequences for Earth's climate. But so far at least, scientists have not observed any significant changes to that large-scale circulation. Findings published in 2005 that seemed to indicate a big slowing of the MOC were later found to be in the range of natural fluctuations (see 'Ocean circulation noisy, not stalling').

One reason, says Fischer, is that the observational basis is still thin. The Argo programme, a global array of 3,000 robots that measure temperature, salinity and water pressure, has only last year become fully operational, for example.

But already it's clear that the response of the Atlantic Ocean circulation to high-latitude changes is much more complex than has been assumed.

(And by the way, I don't know that this has much influence on the issue of ocean acidification as a concern.)

Innovative team building activities

The art of the toilet in Japan

Yeah, I've gone on enough about the wonderful clever toilets of Japan. That's not why I've linked to the article, it's this part:

Japanese people do not see cleaning as a demeaning or shameful job....

Recently, I visited a small technology company in Osaka. The president, Mr Sugimoto, is trying to inspire his staff to work harder as recession takes hold.

He is noted for his drive and enthusiasm and that came across in a punchy presentation which he showed me on his laptop.

It included photographs of his staff on their knees scrubbing the urinals.

His point was that in preparation for a new project, the whole team had mucked in to clean up the workplace and this was clearly a source of pride to be included in the company's publicity.

Sad to say that in Australia you would have the newly invigorated ACTU interfering with such innovative team building exercises.*

* Just trying to be silly: no one should take it as sarcasm indicating any particularly sympathetic attitude to unions in Australia.

Modern policing

How to calm binge drinkers: get them all blowing bubbles

In England, a novel idea in babysitting. (Sorry, make that policing):

Drinkers will be encouraged to play with children's bubble blowers instead of picking fights, in a scheme to start next month in Bolton. Police will hand out the free toys as young people pour out of pubs and clubs in typically boisterous mood.

But the initiative has been condemned as a 'nursery school gimmick' and a waste of taxpayers' money. The blue and orange bubble blowers, which double as pens, will be handed out by police community support officers and town centre ambassadors on Saturday nights. Elaine Sherrington, a Bolton councillor, said: 'They are a great idea to keep things light-hearted. Revellers will have something fun to focus on as they leave pubs and clubs.

I don't get it. Will these bubble blowers come with a little bottle of detergent too? If so, how many fights will be started by some drunk bumping another and causing detergent to get in the eyes?

Are the Japanese noticing?

Faroe islanders told to stop eating 'toxic' whales - New Scientist

The Faroe Islands got a mention here earlier this year, when Foreign Correspondent ran a story about them. (The direct link is here.)

Their whale eating habits will have to change, though:

Chief medical officers of the Faroe Islands have recommended that pilot whales no longer be considered fit for human consumption, because they are toxic - as revealed by research on the Faroes themselves.

The remote Atlantic islands, situated between Scotland and Iceland, have been one of the last strongholds of traditional whaling, with thousands of small pilot whales killed every year, and eaten by most Faroese....

But today in a statement to the islanders, chief medical officers Pál Weihe and Høgni Debes Joensen announced that pilot whale meat and blubber contains too much mercury, PCBs and DDT derivatives to be safe for human consumption.

"It is with great sadness that this recommendation is provided," they said. "The pilot whale has kept many Faroese alive through the centuries."

The curse of Saturday night TV, and songs of previous decades

Saturday night from 10pm has been the dead zone of Australian television since about, I don't know, the invention of television.

Having children of a certain age means few outings at that time currently, and once again I am facing the problem that television assumes that its potential audience is either oldies who are already in bed by 9.30pm, or youngsters who are out on the town or already having sex. (I say "once again" because, while single in the 1990's, it was not all that uncommon to find me sponging a Saturday night dinner from married friends, which would end with us channel surfing and noting how there was absolutely nothing worth viewing - even with cable.)

About the only times I can remember Saturday night TV being something to look forward to was when the ABC ran (I think) D Generation in a fairly late night timeslot (or was it another show from the same Working Dog group?) It would appear that this was in 1986 and 1987. Mark those years down as possibly the only ones this nation will ever see for fresh comedy on a Saturday night. (Well, Mick Molloy made his disastrous forays with his own show on a Saturday too, I think, but the less said about them the better.)

Still, I must admit that I am now quite taken with Rockwiz on SBS. (It provides 40 minutes of entertainment til 10pm at least.) You probably have to be in your 40's to enjoy it, being mainly based on nostalgia for music from the 80's and 90's, but it is terribly good natured, and it's hard not to like Julia Zemiro's as host.

Speaking of songs of previous decades, I was surprised to see an article on Lisa Loeb in The Japan Times today. As far as I knew she was a one hit wonder, and while it appears that she's had nothing approaching the huge success of her first single ("Stay"), she has managed to make a career out of music after all. Oddly, she's had some success with songs for children, although it would appear from her Wikipedia entry (and this), that she may be an example of the modern young woman who dawdles in semi-committed relationships so long that they never get around to having children. (I could be wrong here, but it sounds as if she has no kids.)

Anyhow, like millions of others, I really liked "Stay," and how can any male resist her cute, vulnerable, librarian vibe in the video clip? (Well, maybe rugby league players can, with their more lurid sexual fantasies and realities than mine, but we can't all be into toilet trysts.)

Loeb looks like the Anti-Winehouse, or Anti-Madonna if you like. (By the way, I wouldn't even recognise a Winehouse song if I heard one on the radio; I only know of her due to the appalling tatts and druggie look.) It's been ages since I've seen Loeb's cheap but charming video, but here we go. Enjoy:

Deleted due to virus warning - may be back later

At last...

IR reforms asking for trouble | The Australian

Finally, Paul Kelly finds something about which to actually criticise the Rudd government. (It's the new, union-enhancing IR laws.)

Maybe these laws signal the end of many in industry cuddling up to this Labor government. (My pet theory is that so many of them have become used to not dealing with unions that have forgotten how intrusive they can be.) The laws are also coming at exactly the wrong time in the economic cycle.

Let's see what happens.

Well, it made me laugh

Embed deleted for now due to virus warning - maybe back soon

Of little interest soon

Can't we hold torturers accountable and still find out the truth? - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine

By the sounds of this article, an Obama administration is not going to try to prosecute Bush administration figures over their involvement in counterterrorism policies. (Assuming that they even can if the expected presidential pardons are made.)

They will instead hold a 9/11 style commission.

This prospect annoys many liberals as being too soft on Bush and co, but surely they should see that if indeed Obama is "tested" by more terrorism against Americans (and the Indian attacks are giving us a taste of this), public interest in how many people might have faced a waterboard under a Bush administration is going to be very, very low. (There is also going to be the distraction of a very severe recession.)

In other terrorism related stuff, John Quiggin takes the opportunity to make a statement of the obvious about a phrase which I thought had long gone out of use by all but the most stupid anyway:

As the cycle of war and terror has gone on, it’s become increasingly clear that the kind of easy evasion involved in slogans like “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” is no more tenable than the bogus arguments for war put forward by Bush and his followers.

Spoiler warning: Australia

Being allergic as I am to all Australian movies, it seems a fair assumption that "Australia" would cause a breakout of hives even if I walk past the cinema door while it's playing.

There is no doubt at all that many Australian critics are giving it an extra star or so just for being a large scale film by Baz Luhrmann; a director who, although married, has always seemed to display a "gay sensibility" in his movies. (He works in "operatic style" is how they put it on At the Movies last night, where both critics spent a lot of time on the faults but still ended up giving it 3 1/2 stars each.)*

Anyhow, apart from every review, whether good or bad, agreeing that the film is riddled with cliche, there is no doubt that the way the film deals with aborigines is going to attract a lot of derision from some quarters. This will be well deserved if these comments by Roger Ebert (who liked the film overall, but his judgment is wildly erractic) are anything to go by:

Luhrmann is rightly contemptuous of Australia's "re-education" policies; he shows Nullah taking pride in his heritage and paints the white enforcers as the demented racists they were. But "Australia" also accepts aboriginal mystical powers lock, stock and barrel, and that I think may be condescending.

Well, what do you believe? Can the aboriginal people materialize wherever they desire? Become invisible? Are they telepaths? Can they receive direct guidance from the dead? Yes, certainly, in a spiritual or symbolic sense. But in a literal sense? Many of the plot points in "Australia" depend on the dead King George's ability to survey events from mountaintops and appear to Nullah to point the way. The Australians, having for decades treated their native people as subhuman, now politely endow them with godlike qualities. I am not sure that is a compliment. What they suffered, how they survived, how they prevailed and what they have accomplished, they have done as human beings, just as we all must.

The film is filled with problems caused by its acceptance of mystical powers. If Nullah is all-seeing and prescient at times, then why does he turn into a scared little boy who needs rescuing?

Amongst the bad reviews that are out there (it scores a 51% on Rottentomatoes), I like the start to the one by Dana Stevens in Slate:

It's a mystery to me how Baz Luhrmann continues to be regarded as a director worth following. A long time has passed since I've regarded his lush, loud, defiantly unsubtle output with anything but dread.

As for the aboriginal content, she writes:

I guess I don't know enough about Australian racial politics to opine at length on this movie's vision of its aboriginal characters, but I will say that if my people were subjected to this simultaneously idealizing and condescending "magical Negro" treatment, I would seriously consider aiming a boomerang at Baz Luhrmann's head.

I certainly hope Anthony Lane writes the New Yorker review: I can imagine him being very witty about this.

* well it took a couple of attempts with different search terms, but it would appear that Luhrmann has not only admitted to a gay sensibility, but to active bisexuality.

UPDATE: Andrew Bolt points out Luhrmann's blatant dishonestly in one key plot point in the film. I wonder if this was co-writer Richard Flanagan's idea? Here he is, going on in great seriousness about the film.

The Indian attacks

Analysis: a new tactic by Islamist militants - Times Online

Some early analysis here, which also discusses more broadly the range of terrorist groups and issues within India.

Too much information: the Dutch method

Sex education: why the British should go Dutch - Times Online

Well, if all of this article is correct, the famous Dutch openness in sex education is enough to make every Australian parent I know squirm:

Next year, 12-year-old Sasha explains to me, they will learn how to put a condom on a broomstick (she says this without a trace of embarrassment, just a polite smile). Across the city, nine-year-old Marcus, who lives in a beautiful 18th-century house on a canal, has been watching a cartoon showing him how to masturbate. His sister, 11, has been writing an essay on reproduction and knows that it is legal for two consenting 12-year-olds to make love. Her favourite magazine, Girls, gives advice on techniques in bed, and her parents sometimes allow her to stay up to see a baby being born on the birthing channel.

Then there is Yuri, 16, who explains to me in perfect English that “anal sex hurts at the beginning but if you persevere it can be very pleasurable”. When I ask whether he is gay, he says “no” but he has watched a documentary on the subject with his parents.

Such mind-boggling openness is what is often credited for the remarkably low teen pregnancy and abortion rate in the country. And it's not that they are having "safe sex" early either: they actually start much later on average too.

The article becomes less salacious when it starts discussing the other social reasons why teen pregnancy is not so common there, and oddly enough, these are consistent with a more conservative ideology:

Another reason why the teenage pregnancy rate is so low may be that in the Netherlands there is still a stigma attached to having a child before the age of 20. In Britain, a baby who can offer unconditional love, a free home away from parents and a cheque every month is not considered a disaster for a teenage girl. The Dutch Government still penalises single mothers under 18, who are expected to live with their parents if they become pregnant. Until six years ago the Government gave them no financial support. ...

Braeker was shocked when she first came to Britain. “Young girls here seem to have babies to prove that they are adults. In the Netherlands it would just prove how uneducated and naive you are,” she says. “There you can have a boy as a friend, here it's almost always about sex.”

The other reason given is that families are closer because they are somewhat similar to the much derided ideal of a 1950's Australian nuclear family:

Dutch children are five times less likely to be living in a family headed by a lone parent, divorce rates are far lower and fewer mothers are in full-time employment.

“I think my eight-year-old son has probably learnt more about sex from David Attenborough than from school,” she says. “It is the family that makes the difference. Parents leave the office by 5pm in Holland and eat dinner with their children at 6pm. They then watch TV or play sport together, so they tend to be closer to their children and can guide them to do the right thing.”

Mind you, we then veer into the hard-to-believe openness again:

Trudie, a fashion stylist, has always talked about sex with her daughter. When, at 16, her daughter asked her what sperm looked like, Trudie asked her husband to provide a sample.

Bloody hell, whatever happened to having a couple of mice in a cage to teach the kids about reproduction?

Well, here's hoping that its possible to have the social change of kids believing that it's dumb to have sex too early, but without the addition of masturbation videos for 9 year olds.

Obama and FOCA

Obama's threat to Catholic hospitals and their very serious counterthreat. - Slate Magazine

Here's a good article on the issue of Obama, the highly contentious Freedom of Choice Act, and the Catholic Church's threat to close hospitals if it goes through.

I reckon Obama will secretly be hoping that there are enough Democrats in Congress with reservations to prevent it getting through, so that he doesn't have to sign it after all.

Janet & Ziggy today

Janet Albrechtsen has been to Israel (as a guest of the government and a Jewish group), and writes on a topic mentioned here many times before: the near impossibility of a long term solution if the Palestinians keep educating their kids to hate the Jews and not think seriously about accommodating Israel. She writes:

Look at the geography books for Palestinian children that encourage children to see no Israel, books that feature maps of Israel in the colours of the Palestinian flag, and described as Palestine. Learn about the May 2008 soccer championships for young boys in honour of terrorists such as Samir Quntar and Muhammad al-Mabhuh. Or the July 2008 summer camp held for young girls named in honour of female suicide bomber Dalal al-Mughrabi, who hijacked a holiday bus in 1978, murdering 12 children and 25 adults. Listen to Fatah-funded children’s television where children are taught to continue the way of the shahids (the suicide bombers) and quizzed about Mughrabi. She is presented as “the beloved bride, child of Jaffa, jasmine flower”. Or quizzes where children routinely identify Israeli landmarks, towns and ports such as Haifa, Ashdod and Eilat as Palestinian.

This was something I hadn't heard before:

According to the PMW, more than half of the Palestinian educators in the teachers’ union are affiliated with Hamas.

In other opinion in The Australian, Ziggy Switkoski continues his lonely promotion of nuclear power as a serious option for Australia. He never mentions pebble bed reactors, or other new technology, though.

The dark continent

It's amazing the extent of bad news that Africa is generating at the moment. The current "highlights" include:

1. Zimbabwe is on "the brink of collapse" (so they say; unfortunately, the government has hovering on the brink for an awfully long time). Cholera is the latest misery being added to the appalling government generated problems:

About 6,000 people have contracted cholera in recent weeks, according to the UN, and almost 300 have died. A chronic shortage of medicine has sent hundreds of people south to seek treatment in South Africa....

In the meantime, the economy has disintegrated and the health system is close to breakdown. Four big hospitals, including two in Harare, have effectively closed their doors to new patients owing to a shortage of basic supplies and running water

2. Ethiopia. Foreign Correspondent tonight had a story on famine in Ethiopia. (The video is not up on the website yet, but should be by the end of the week.)

It was odd to see that the countryside looked incredibly green and lush after recent rains, but apparently the failure of last year's crops still means there is not enough food now. The population was said to be about 80 million, which was much higher than I would have guessed.

The story was also noteworthy for showing up the questionable reliability of World Vision. The journalist visited a 14 year old girl that he had been sponsoring for years. It appeared that she had been barely aware that she was being sponsored until recently, when she was given a jacket and a pen. Certainly, the feedback that World Vision supplies as to what the sponsored child is doing (learning english, for example) does not appear reliable.

World Vision apparently said that the sponsorship money goes to community projects that benefit the children, but it was not clear in this story what they may have done for this child's community. It was not a good look, and World Vision will certainly be hoping that this does not get much coverage.

While watching undernourished people living in the lush green countryside, it was hard to avoid the thought that this was a country that really needed help with developing modern, efficient farming. According to Wikipedia, the problems range from the small farm size, to some of the farm practices:

Since the land holdings are so small, farmers cannot allow the land to lie fallow, which reduces soil fertility.^[114] This land degradation reduces the production of fodder for livestock, which causes low amounts of milk production.^[115] Since the community burns livestock manure as fuel, rather than plowing the nutrients back into the land, the crop production is reduced.^[116] The low productivity of agriculture leads to inadequate incomes for farmers, hunger, malnutrition and disease. These unhealthy farmers have a hard time working the land and the productivity drops further.

These are problems that are in principle solvable, but it would seem none of the necessary reform is happening.

3. Somalia continues to be pirate capital. The Economist paints this grim picture:

With no proper government since 1991, it has been a bloody kaleidoscope of competing clans and fiefs. More than 1m, in a population once around 10m, have fled abroad; this year alone, the UN reckons, some 160,000 have been uprooted from Mogadishu, the capital, which has lost about two-thirds of its inhabitants over the years. The country is too dangerous for foreign charities, diplomats or journalists to function there permanently. Thousands of angry, rootless, young Somalis are proving vulnerable to the attractions of fundamentalist Islam in the guise of al-Qaeda and similar jihadist brands. The cash from piracy is probably fuelling the violence.

4. The Congo. I am currently reading "Congo Journey" by Redmond O'Hanlon, about his mid 1990's trip into the Congo. (Currently this is available as a $10 "Popular Penguin" edition in Australia.)

The corrupt, dangerous place that O'Hanlon writes about is in an even worse state now. In May this year, The Economist wrote about widespread use of rape as a weapon of war, and now the 17,000 strong UN peace keeping force needs re-enforcements that it is unlikely to get, and there is talk the place looks primed for a Rwandan style genocide.

What a depressing continent.

UPDATE: In an effort to be more upbeat, people could do worse, I suspect, than to donate to Catholic Relief Services, which appears to do a lot of work in Africa. It may just be my bias, of course, but I suspect that Catholic agencies would be pretty credible in the efficiency with which donations are used.

Out of curiosity, I just did a search for Islamic charities, and turned up Islamic Relief Worldwide, which currently features on its front page a graphic headed "donate now" that points out that "The practice of sacrificing an animal at Eid ul Adha acts as a reminder of the Prophet Ibrahim's obedience to Allah". Hmm.

UPDATE II: the BBC has this recent feature on the problem with foreign aid for Africa.

Your next weekly dose of bad ocean news

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Marine life faces 'acid threat'

Man-made pollution is raising ocean acidity at least 10 times faster than previously thought, a study says.

Researchers say carbon dioxide levels are having a marked effect on the health of shellfish such as mussels.

They sampled coastal waters off the north-west Pacific coast of the US every half-hour for eight years.

The results, published in the journal PNAS, suggest that earlier climate change models may have underestimated the rate of ocean acidification.

To be fair, some reported comments of one of the researchers involved are misleadingly expressed:

"Many sea creatures have shells or skeletons made of calcium carbonate, which the acid can dissolve," said Catherine Pfister, Associate Professor of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago and a co-author of the study.

That could easily be taken to mean the ocean is actually turning into an acidic pH, but ocean acidification at its worst will still leave the ocean alkaline (just significantly less alkaline than it used to be.)

Anyhow, it's still bad news, by any interpretation.

The eternal critic

Robert Fisk: Once more fear stalks the streets of Kandahar

So, Robert Fisk is reporting from Afghanistan at the moment, noting the misery suffered by the population caught between the Taliban and Western forces. (Acid throwing on girls attending school has made a recent re-appearance.)

Fisk ends the above account by the spurious advice:

Barack Obama wants to send 7,000 more American troops to this disaster zone. Does he have the slightest idea what is going on in Afghanistan? For if he did, he would send 7,000 doctors.

A letter writer to the Independent responds appropriately:

....in the absence of western forces, what is not explained is how medics and civilian contractors might operate in a region ruled by well-armed fanatics who don't want redevelopment, and who don't want schoolgirls they've maimed with acid to be treated. Even worse is the suggestion that we leave fellow members of the human race to such an appalling fate, when it is within our powers to try to help them.

But a comment made after the original article sums up Fisk perfectly, even if the spelling is lacking:

What you do Mr Fisk with your baby shaking naarratives that tunnell in on the details to obscure the big picture truth is preach a counsel of despair so the truly uncaring people of the world can continue to walk by on the other side of the road.

Exactly.

About Hillary

The last thing we need is a Clinton in charge of foreign policy. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine

Actually, given his intense dislike of all things Clinton, I think Hitchens sounds slightly restrained in this criticism of Hillary as Secretary of State.

A bunch of stuff to keep you going

Here's a quick post of links to this and that:

* Bryan Appleyard is back, and posting in amusing fashion about the rich and travel, the BBC and "risk taking", his ailments, and John Lennon's "Imagine" (he dislikes the song; so do I).

In fact, I seem to be in basic agreement with him about everything since his return. If only he didn't have that strange aberration of enjoying Olbermann!

* I have no idea whether the author of this article is a reliable pundit on China, but the picture he paints of the dramatic consequences of a serious economic slow down in China sounds plausible enough. (Basically, it's of social disruption on a pretty massive scale, as former factory workers return to the countryside to eke out a living in agriculture, or whatever.) I do get the impression that the West is overly optimistic on China being able to spend its way out of trouble.

* Victor Davis Hansen makes a list of ten politically incorrect complaints about America. Points 3 (about Hollywood being in a terrible creative slump at the moment) and 6 (about the American male accent not being what it used to be) are the most interesting. Here's a sample:

.....increasingly to meet a young American male about 25 is to hear a particular nasal stress, a much higher tone than one heard 40 years ago, and, to be frank, to listen to a precious voice often nearly indistinguishable from the female. How indeed could one make Westerns these days, when there simply is not anyone left who sounds like John Wayne, Richard Boone, Robert Duvall, or Gary Cooper much less a Struther Martin, Jack Palance, L.Q. Jones, or Ben Johnson? I watched the movie Twelve O’clock High the other day, and Gregory Peck and Dean Jagger sounded liked they were from another planet.

Certainly, having read this, I could not think of one convincing, male action hero who is currently in his prime and particularly "manly" in the way Hansen complains. Matt Damon? I don't think so.

* A lot of his commentors to this post by John Quiggin think that a carbon emissions trading scheme is too open to the abuses of a trading market, and argue a carbon tax avoids this problem. JQ does not answer them. (He may have elsewhere, but he - and nearly every other economist - just seem to be taking an ETS instead of a tax as a "given".)

* Finally: did you know that Japan has an all woman musical theatre troupe, owned by a train company (!) that has been doing large scale shows for nearly 100 years? The women play the male roles, and about 90% of the audience is women (causing much speculation as to what it is the audience is responding to.)

Anyhow, I had never heard of the Takarazuka Revue before, but there is a detailed Wikipedia entry. The shows they have put on have included such oddities (remember, it's women playing men) as adaptions of The Great Gatesby, Tom Jones, and (from "normal" theatre) The Sound of Music and West Side Story.

Very strange if you ask me.

Otherwise occupied...

For a day or two, is my guess.

Impressive storm video

Brisbane's been getting international attention for its storms this week. Fortunately, my side of town has missed the worst of it, although there is still tonight to worry about. If you want to see how bad it was in the worst hit part of town, have a look at this video. (Don't be misled by the first 90 seconds. Things really get going after that.)

Embed deleted for now.

The robot director

As I type this, SBS is showing Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange."

Not having seen it before, I have watched about 45 minutes now. It is one seriously strange movie. That great movie critic Pauline Kael hated it. Even without seeing it all, I can tell that much of her assessment seems correct.

But the main comment that I wanted to make here is this: did Stanley Kubrick ever make a movie in which the actors seemed like real humans? (I haven't seen Barry Lyndon: maybe he made a breakthrough there.)

From his work that I have seen, their most distinctive characteristic is that he always seemed to be able to get the actors to make their character appear not quite human, rather as if they were robots acting as humans. In 2001, I thought that this was perhaps deliberate, since a certain blurring of the line between human and artificial intelligence played well into the subplot about HAL . Maybe Dr Strangelove, as a black satire, didn't need good acting either. As far as I can recall, Nicholson was pretty good at acting mad in The Shining , although I caught a little of it again the other night, and some of the supporting actors had the Kubrick "not quite there"-ness about them.

The same artifice was in Eyes Wide Shut and Full Metal Jacket, when they certainly could have benefited with more naturalist acting. (The former was eccentrically memorable, if far from realistic. The latter I thought a complete failure.)

It's actually a bit puzzling as to how he achieved the robotisation of his actors. Was it because of his famous willingness to shoot the same scene tens of times over, trying to achieve some kind of perfection in detail that only he could see? One can imagine that this would drain the actors ability to appear human.

Or was it just a certain clumsiness in his scripts?

Of course, the issue of artificial intelligence was again dealt with in the Spielberg collaboration "AI". It's another peculiar movie in many respects, but A Clockwork Orange certainly removes any doubt that its strangeness sprang from Kubrick, not Spielberg. But you can see from AI that Spielberg is like the reverse Kubrick: he can get actors playing robots appear very human!

Spielberg has said in interviews that Kubrick told him the project needed his (Spielberg's) touch, and if his goal was to have the audience sympathetic to the plight of robot intelligences, this was certainly true.

Kubrick was an interesting film maker, and for all of his deficiencies, 2001 was a remarkable achievement. It's just a pity that in his other films, he showed so little sign of being able to replicate convincing human behaviour on screen.

But the Olympics looked good

ABC News: Mom in China Freed Without Forced Abortion

A six-month pregnant mother of two who faced a forced abortion by Chinese authorities has been freed and allowed to continue her pregnancy, according to Radio Free Asia. The case had attracted international attention and outrage.

The case was reported in The Age some days ago, but I had missed it.

Last year, NPR reported on a spate of forced abortions in at least one part of China, some very late term. The report notes a possible reason for such draconian action:

...the Baise government missed its family planning targets last year. The recorded birth rate was 13.61 percent, slightly higher than the goal of 13.5 percent. This is significant because the career prospects of local officials depend upon meeting these goals.

And people wonder why the Olympics left me cold.

Confusion and the Quran

A new translation of the Quran. - By Reza Aslan - Slate Magazine

I've noted before that the Quran is difficult to read as it is not a narrative, or laid out in any other logical or consistent style. This article in Slate goes into more detail about its confusing and highly uncertain nature.

I hadn't heard this before:

....Sura 4:34, which has long been interpreted as allowing husbands to beat their wives: "As for those women who might rebel against you, admonish them, abandon them in their beds, and strike them (adribuhunna)." The problem, as a number of female Quranic scholars have noted, is that adribuhunna can also mean "turn away from them." It can even mean "have sexual intercourse with them."

Well, to say the least, that's a rather wide range of possible interpretations. (Rather like the issue as to whether the martyrs are to expect virgins or grapes in Heaven.)

The article notes that an author of a new translation tries to paint this confusing and mystifying nature of the book in a positive light:

It is through the attempt to make sense of our confusions, to work through them with reason and with faith, that the Quran's dramatic monologue transforms into an eternal dialogue between humanity and God. Indeed, of all the sacred texts of the world, Khalidi argues that the Quran is perhaps the one that most self-consciously invites the reader to engage with it, to challenge it, to ponder and to debate it. After all, as the Quran itself states, only God knows what it truly means.

Well, if true, this would suggest that it's a religion primed for liberalising interpretations. But the situation in the real world is quite to the contrary.

It also seems a bit mean-spirited of God to deliver his word via a language which is (apparently) especially capable of misinterpretation.

Next action: suring for the right to leg space

Obese have right to two airline seats | Oddly Enough | Reuters

From the report:

The high court declined to hear an appeal by Canadian airlines of a decision by the Canadian Transportation Agency that people who are "functionally disabled by obesity" deserve to have two seats for one fare.

Anything in the decision preventing an airline charging a premium for the extra weight, though? Extra weight means extra fuel costs, and they already offer discounted fares for those who limit the weight of their luggage.

Indian journalism: a continuing series

Time for more examples of Indian journalism, with its amazing disregard for any sense of privacy, and delicious deadpan delivery:

1. A man diagnosed with HIV commits suicide by jumping out of a hospital window. Are you wondering why?:

Investigating officials said that they recorded his wife's statement in which she has mentioned that Jhatak had lost interest in everything and wanted to die. "It could have been the reason why he took the extreme step," said officials.

2. A nurse commits suicide in another city. Curious as to why?:

The exact reason for the suicide could not be ascertained, but her mother Mordi Devi alleged that Jagbir [the late woman's husband] was having an extramarital affair and that was why her daughter was depressed.

Jagbir says: "Thanks for sharing, mother-in-law."

3. OK, this one doesn't have anything to do with privacy, but take note. When in Delhi, watch out for the Blueline buses:

More than 70 people have been killed this year under the wheels of Blueline buses.

Last year, at least 120 people were run over by Blueline buses.

They should never have shown Death Race 2000 in India.

4. Finally, this story puts me very much in mind of Bonnie & Clyde, with the added element of pigs:

A 48-km chase for four hours and firing of 10 rounds by the police, breaking of barricades as well as running over police vehicles, and pigs being hurled at the police vehicles preceded the arrest of two suspects who allegedly stole pigs from a piggery at Sutardara.

The details are worth reading. I suspect the police actually found it kind of thrilling:

When sub-inspector Satish Shinde tried to stop the thieves by placing his jeep in the middle of the road, the tempo dashed the jeep and sped off. Near Warje octroi post also they ran over a police block and constable Amol Tanpure fired six rounds at the tempo.

"During the chase, the suspects threw stones and the stolen pigs at the police vehicle. Meanwhile, several police vehicles joined the chase.... The Dattawadi police had blocked the road near Rajaram bridge. But the tempo driver sped over the block and sub-inspector Ramakant Shinde of Dattawadi police station fired a round at the tempo," Deshmukh said....

Speaking to TOI, constable Amol Tanpure said, "We were chasing them from Sutardara. When their tempo reached the Warje octroi post, "I fired four rounds, but they managed to flee. I chased them and again fired two rounds at them."......

Sandip Mane, a relative of Jadhav, who was driving the car which was chasing the thieves, said: "At first the thieves pelted stones at my car, damaging its windscreen. Later, they hurled pigs towards us at Chandni Chowk, near Warje octroi post and on Sinhagad road. All the pigs died as they came under the wheels of the police vehicles. They even hit my car twice."

Defending Disney

Defend Disney from his Mickey Mouse critics | Daniel Finkelstein - Times Online

Finkelstein gives a spirited defence of Disney the man (and the corporation too, by the way.)

I haven't talked about Tokyo Disney yet. This weekend, maybe. Yes, I know you can't wait.

A new skin cancer fighting compound

Vitamin helps prevent skin cancer (ScienceAlert)

Ain't democracy grand?

Power Line - How Obama Got Elected

A funny/slightly disturbing article at Powerline about what Obama voters apparently knew about certain issues.

The only thing against worrying about this sort of stuff, I suppose, is that either side of politics can benefit by popularly held but mistaken beliefs. (Also, there is only so much that can be done to stop people being mistaken. I mean, do we expect the media or the Republicans to even realise that they have to keep reminding people that the Republicans already don't control Congress?)

Obama is the beneficiary of this time, but its probably all swings and roundabouts in the long run.

Avoid, avoid

Club Troppo - Another thirty minutes with Barrie Kosky

Many people who read me would also read the much more widely known Club Troppo, but in case you missed it, Nicholas Gruen's description of the 60 minutes he has accidentally seen of Barrie Kosky directed shows is pretty funny. Well, at least if you find descriptions of self indulgent modern theatre funny.

A bit of history

The Last to Die | Military Aviation | Air & Space Magazine

Air & Space Magazine has a sad but interesting story about the last American killed in air combat in World War II. It was above Tokyo, after Japan had surrendered.

(That magazine is of such high quality, and puts a lot of its content on line. Thanks, Smithsonian!)

Your weekly dose of bad ocean news

Marine dead zones set to expand rapidly : Nature News

Rising levels of carbon dioxide could increase the volume of oxygen-depleted 'dead zones' in tropical oceans by as much as 50% before the end of the century — with dire consequences for the health of ecosystems in some of the world's most productive fishing grounds....

A team led by Andreas Oschlies of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany, has now used a global model of climate, ocean circulation and biogeochemical cycling to extrapolate existing experimental results of the effects of altered carbon and nutrient chemistry on dissolved oxygen to the global ocean1. They found that a CO2-rich world will only have a small impact on waters at middle and high latitudes. But in all tropical oceans the volume of 'oxygen-minimum' zones will substantially increase as ocean bacteria feed on the algae that will flourish as a result of the elevated CO2 levels.

"Carbon dioxide fertilizes biological production," says Oschlies. "It's really like junk food for plants. When the carbon-fattened excess biomass sinks it gets decomposed by bacteria which first consume the oxygen, and then the nutrients."

In one of my earlier posts on ocean acidification, I had questioned whether algal blooms caused by more CO2 might be a bad thing for this very reason. (Some sceptics argue that more algae operating as a carbon sink will be a good thing. But obviously, it has a massive down side.)

Again, as far as I can see, this is an ocean danger story that is getting little press attention. Bah.

A danger sign hard to foresee

It takes courage to say the f-word: failure - Alan Ramsey

Hey, Alan Ramsey did us a favour last weekend by printing something I had missed earlier. Ken Henry (head of Treasury) had this to say at his Press Club lunch during the week:

"The array of financial instruments deployed within the global financial system has become so complex that it defies understanding. It's not just that nobody, no one person, understands the whole system. That would be hardly surprising. What is worrying is the very large number of senior finance sector executives who don't appear to understand the consequences of even their own decisions, of their own actions.

"The second dimension is closely related.

"It has to do with risk, it has to do with uncertainty. Complex financial instruments have been traded globally in ways that were thought to provide a more comfortable sharing of risk across the world. Instead, what they've shared is fear. People now not only don't know who they can trust, they don't even know who they need to be able to trust.

"And the third dimension I want to identify is the role played by regulation and, more broadly, the role played by governance systems. For decades to come, policy makers around the world are going to be asking why those with sufficient authority didn't, at some point, stand above the buzz of the financial markets and declare, in simple language, that all of this simply doesn't make sense."

It's the first bit about the complexity reaching a level that no one can understand that is the most interesting.

I mean, how do you judge exactly when that has happened? Which world famous economist is going to be the first to admit that he can't understand it all?

The future foreseen

One day, when the giant flying saucer arrives, it will beam an announcement to all TVs and radios, informing us that they are from the Pan Galactic Eugenics Society, and the world's smartest human must be delivered for intelligence testing via the most devious, intricate and maddening puzzle that has ever been devised. The fate of the earth will rest in that person's hands.

Inside the saucer, the chosen brainiac with mad scientist hair waits anxiously. "Here" booms the alien voice, "is the test." A curtain starts sliding open silently. "Assemble this!"

Behind the curtain is a digital flat screen TV the size of a house with 50 speaker surround sound system, disc player, three different types of media recorder and cable connection.

This is how the Earth will end.

A short, jumbled note

For a variety of reasons, not the least being the state government's refusal to do anything about daylight saving in Brisbane, so that at this time of year the sun is actually making it all bright and cheery (ha!) by rising at 4.45am, I am not getting enough sleep lately.

Maybe this is why I was having a peculiar dream last night in which I was busy investigating a rice throwing poltergeist which seemed to be connected with some bodies buried under a building, except that when I dug them up they weren't real bodies at all but dummies, which then led me to suspect that some engineers I knew were behind it all, and so on.

Usually, I can work out pretty quickly what it was that I had recently watched or read that caused me to have a jumbled dream, but I can't remember reading anything about poltergeists for quite a while. I suppose I idly think about the personality deficiencies of engineers I have known from time to time, though.

Anyhow, to continue the jumbled theme of this post, I note that time devoted to the internet is actually interfering way too much with my vague attempts to make money lately. I'm going to attempt to insist on limiting posts to the evenings for a while. Maybe this software will help in my task.

Meanwhile, please admire the giant playground robot in the last post, and tell me if you have seen anything better.

Unusual photos of Japan

Here's some of the more unusual photos from my recent Japan trip:

First, the impressive giant playground robot:



I am not sure how many of these may exist in Japan; it looked a little old but not in bad condition. The only semi-equivalent thing I can remember from Australia was a cage like three level rocket ship which used to grace the kids playground at Toombul Shopping Town in the late 60's. This giant robot was in a rather out of the way location in Japan, which I am willing to divulge for the right amount of money to any eccentric reader who wants to use it when videotaping their own fan version of The Wicker Man.

Secondly, breaking my rule that it's too cheap to make fun of foreigners and their English spelling mistakes:



Next, a sign encouraging people to dispose of their cigarette butts carefully, because if you don't, it'll upset the sewer rats (as always,click to enlarge):


Another sign, this one hard to read in full, but it encourages good behaviour on the trains, with some fairly obvious suggestions (which may be paraphrased as "smoke spreads" and "don't sit with your legs too far apart"):


(I have a feeling that I have seen this series of posters blogged about somewhere else some time ago, but haven't gone looking yet.)

Finally, the hungry, hungry fish:


OK, not the funniest photo to finish with, but it's late, alright?

Charles on cars

RealClearPolitics - Articles - A Lemon of a Bailout

Charles Krauthammer looks at the issue of saving the American car industry. All rather relevant to Rudd's plans too.

Unintended consequences

Neb. Parents Rush to Abandon Children - NYTimes.com

Silly legislators.

Urgent therapy needed

Jules Crittenden Why Palin Matters

I don't normally read Andrew Sullivan, but it's hard to avoid dropping in every day or two now to see whether his absolute obsession with crushing any political future for Sarah Palin is continuing.

Indeed it is! (If I am counting correctly, there are 10 separate posts dated 13 Nov referring to Palin in one way or another. Even after his readers have told him he is being obsessive - hence his posts seeking to justify why he is still writing about her.)

Jules Crittenden post about this (see above) it is amusing and to the point.

But it doesn't go far enough. If it's good enough for gays to always be claiming there's a hidden psycho-sexual reason behind things like opposition to gay marriage (you know, it's the repressed homosexuality that leads to homophobia that leads to...etc,) Andrew Sullivan seems to be a much more convincing case for hidden motives for hostility.

Jim Treacher has already gone partly this way in his comment to Crittenden's post: "Sullivan hates her because she’s obviously better at making a man happy than he is."

Possibly, but I think Sullivan has been having recurring dreams in which he's aroused by finding Sarah in his bed, beckoning him. The shame, the shame.

The talented neighbours from hell

Review: The House of Wittgenstein by Alexander Waugh

Terry Eagleton reviews a new book on the Wittgenstein family. They were brilliant, rich, and absolutely brimming with mental disorders and argument.

In Australian we generally expect renting neighbours to be more noisy and troublesome that owner-occupiers. This clearly did not apply in Austria, at least when it came to this family.

Is it OK to find this section blackly funny (especially the part about Hans' first word)?:

The sons of the household had a distressing habit of doing away with them selves. Handsome, intelligent, homosexual Rudolf strolled into a Berlin bar, dissolved potassium cyanide into his glass of milk and died in agony on the spot. Two years earlier, Hans Karl had disappeared without trace and is thought to have killed himself at sea. He was a shy, ungainly, possibly autistic child with a prodigious gift for maths and music, whose first spoken word was "Oedipus". He, too, was thought to be gay. Kurt seems to have shot himself "without visible reason" while serving as a soldier in the first world war. The philosopher Ludwig claims to have begun thinking about suicide when he was 10 or 11.

Paul, a classmate of Adolf Hitler, became an outstanding concert pianist. Unusually for male members of the family, he was robustly heterosexual. The Wittgenstein ménage was more like a conservatoire than a family home: Brahms, Mahler and Richard Strauss dropped in regularly, while Ravel wrote his "Concerto for the Left Hand" specially for Paul, who had lost an arm in the first world war. Paul thought his brother Ludwig's philosophy was "trash", while Ludwig took a dim view of Paul's musical abilities. The Winter Palace resounded with constant yelling and vicious squabbling.

Only in Japan

Aso's fish slip gives game away | The Japan Times Online

Read the story for an amusing, and particularly Japanese, controversy about their Prime Minister.

Gunfight at the Catallaxy Corral

Obama the rorschach president at catallaxyfiles

Watch the bullets fly in the comments section between CL and Jason.

And further down, JC makes this comment, which sounds about right. It's hard to see why anyone would want to be president this time around, but I guess they didn't realise that 'til they were too far in.

The sad numbers game

Fears over shortage of sperm donors

The article is from The Independent, and is about the shortage of sperm donors in the UK, following changes to the law that gives adult children the right to trace their father.

The figures are surprisingly high:

The doctors said around 4,000 UK patients needed donor sperm each year.

Therefore, a minimum of 500 new donors were needed each year to meet demand, they argued.

Compared to how many abortions per year?: around 194,000.

One donor in Britain is allowed to father 10 children. Sounds high to me, but the doctors say this level is "very, very safe".

Even more surprising, however, is that the Dutch allow up to 25 children from one donor father (and that is in a population of only 16,000,000.) France, by comparison, allows only five, and it would appear that in one State of Australia it is 10.

Meanwhile, one "freelance" idiot in Australia is believed to have fathered 30 children (to lesbian mothers), and mostly in the one city.

I can't quickly find how many sperm donor births there would be overall in Australia, but the total number of "assisted conception" babies is now around 10,000 a year.

And in comparison, the number of babies put up for adoption in Australia last year: about 60. (Remarkably, you will see from page vii of that link that there were only 568 adoptions in total in Australia in 2006-07. Of these, 70% were from overseas.)

No one knows accurately how many abortions there are in Australia each year, but the guesstimate appears to be anywhere from 80,000 to 100,000.

Seems to me that it's about time some effort was put back in to suggesting adoption might be a preferred solution to the wild mismatch of reproductive desires that these figures indicate.

A useful clarification

Uncertain Principles: Many-World vs. Multiverse:

The Many-Worlds Interpretation talks (in its popular formulation) about "alternate worlds" in which particular measurements had different outcomes. It's not quite right to talk about these as separate universes in their own right (really, they're just different parts of the same universal wavefunction), but that's the basic idea-- there is a branch of the wavefunction corresponding to each of the possible outcomes of any particular measurement, and those branches are inaccessible to one another.

Multiverse Cosmology, on the other hand, posits the existence of other "universes" in which the constants of nature have slightly different values. Depending on which flavor of it you're dealing with, these may be completely separate parallel worlds (other Big Bangs leading to other universes) or "bubbles" within a single cosmos, stemming from the same Big Bang.

The comments that follow that post are also of interest.

Probably not a kimchi factory after all

Row over claims of Syrian nuclear find | World news | The Guardian

Unnamed diplomats said on Monday that samples taken by UN inspectors from Kibar in northern Syria contained traces of uranium combined with other elements. The uranium was processed, suggesting some kind of nuclear link.

"It isn't enough to conclude or prove what the Syrians were doing, but the IAEA has concluded this requires further investigation," said a diplomat with links to the Vienna-based watchdog.

For some reason, the Guardian story does not remind us of the North Korean connection. (Hence the title of this post.)

So that's why the British go there

Dubai hotel issues etiquette guide after sex on the beach scandal -Times Online

Dubai has been attracting a lot of attention for all the wrong reasons lately, and given that the weather is hellishly hot for most the year, and it appears to have no significant natural beauty (sand desert holds no interest for me at least), I am curious as to why people go there.

The above article may explain one reason:

Brunches take place across Dubai every Friday, the first day of the Dubai weekend, and are heavily promoted in Dubai's Time Out and enjoyed to the full by expatriates.

The lavish affairs last from late morning into the early evening when diners can enjoy unlimited food and alcohol for a fixed entry fee.

In the case of the Madinat Jumeirah the charge is £88, which includes bottomless champagne, cocktails and wine between 12:30pm and 4:30pm.

I like one of the comments that follow the story:

Oh dear, - I've been, I've seen and I won't be going back. A nauseating mix of Las Vegas and the 12th Century...

A day late

Truth and the casualties of war - Gerard Henderson - Opinion - smh.com.au

I meant to post this yesterday, but Gerard Henderson's column about the swings in the perception of Australia's role in WW1 seemed pretty good.

He referred to the Four Corners program on Monday evening, most of which I saw. One simple thing I noticed about it was that the historical black and white film looked unusually clear and sharp to my eye: perhaps it had been cleaned up recently with some software?

There was one historian who made comments that I did not agree with, but most of the comments in the show seemed fair enough.

There is so much complexity, ambiguity and revision about World War 1 that it is a topic I have always been reluctant to delve into too deeply. At least things got much, much clearer by the time of World War 2, and having parents involved in that makes it much more directly of interest.

Wind and the grid

If You Love Wind (and Solar)… - Dot Earth Blog - NYTimes.com

Here's another post about the problems that the current highly variable output from renewable energy can cause the electricity grid.

The parasite of love

Dopamine is key to a parasite’s ability to unite rat and cat, researcher says

Regular readers may well recall that it's been know for some time that rats infected with toxoplasma gondii lose their fear of the smell of cat urine.

What appears new to the story, however, is that the smell of cats not only doesn't worry them, it:

...also makes them mentally and sexually aroused each time their tiny pink noses detect cat smells. ...

"What this damn parasite knows how to do is make cat urine smell sexy to male rats," Sapolsky said. After being exposed in laboratory tests to different cat scents, infected male rats showed a spike in testosterone levels and their testes became engorged.

Not only that, but female rats find infected male rats pretty sexy too:

....female rats also responded to the change in hormone levels by showing preference toward infected males approximately 95 percent of the time, Sapolsky said, which came as another interesting find.

"One of the rules of evolutionary biology is if you're an animal, you don't want to mate with anyone full of parasites," Sapolsky said. "Somehow that doesn't happen with T. gondii infection."

Well then, maybe we are lucky that toxoplasma gondii didn't work out how to make the evolutionary proto-human males of Africa sexually aroused by lions.

(I can see the basis for some good science fiction in this story too.)

The Doctor Fizzles

I was away when the last episode of the last series of Dr Who screened here, and I finally saw it on tape last night.

I know from LP that it attracted criticism for the perceived anti-feminist way it treated Donna, but really, that was the least of its problems.

The last two episodes were pretty much a complete mess. Russell T Davies had really hit some sort of creative block, I reckon, in trying to wrap it all up. Here are my complaints:

1. it took the usual deus ex machina feature of the show to pretty ridiculous heights. Having a fake regeneration as a link between the last two episodes was a paticularly cynical trick, in my books.

2. the special effects (the 27 planets, the thousands of Daleks) all looked unusually cheesy. (Computer generated effects which mulitply anything too much - be it soldiers, ships, spaceships - just automatically look too fake to my eye.)

3. Rose still had the distracting bizarre thing where she couldn't seem to remember exactly how she used to speak. Her upper and lower teeth at times just seemed weirdly misaligned (or something) in her mouth. I find this all very odd.

4. All of the initial crying and carry on by the Doctor's pals when they saw it was the Daleks who had moved the earth seemed out of character defeatism.

5. The blaring music, which I have noted before is often what sells the excitement in the show, was really so continuous this time that it was annoying.

6. Bringing all the Davies created characters together was a nice idea, but it still did not allow enough time for each of them to impress. The sudden appearance of K9 seemed especially stuck on in a "tick the box" kind of manner.

7. Both Donna and Rose were just getting a bit too soppy about their relationship with the Doctor, if you ask me. For characters that are nearly killed in every episode, can't they take a bit more comfort in a return home and the occasional visit from the Doctor for a cup of tea?

There are probably more points, but that's all I can recall for now.