Or maybe there's just never enough?

Those warning we failed to heed | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog

I've already expressed skepticism about the immediate round of "not enough controlled burning" and "not enough fuel reduction" claims being made as soon as the destruction of last Saturday was finished.

Andrew Bolt has a column today on the topic in which he argues that the current Labor government in Victoria has been one of the worst for ignoring calls for such action from fire chiefs and the like.

He may be right for all I know from this distance.

However, I reckon he inadvertantly weakens the case when he goes and quotes the same line from a 1939 royal commission, and again in 1984.

Look, if after every major bushfire, every investigation says there was not enough fuel reduction in the disaster, it suggests that it is just always going to be one of the reasons for a bushfire. I suppose it is logical in a way.

Certainly, by giving us examples from well before the political influence of Greenies, Andrew is weakening the case against them now.

I remain very skeptical that, given the weather conditions for the whole month of January in Victoria, the never-likely-to-achieved "perfect" scheme of fuel reduction would have actually prevented major fires. I even doubt that different planning laws regarding the siting of houses may have made too much difference, given the distance ahead of the fire front that 100 kph gusts could send embers.

My intuition is that, if people like to live within a hundred meters or two of the edge of a forest (and fair enough if they do), then design standards of the house (including the enforced inclusion of a bushfire shelter) is more likely the answer.

There goes the neighbourhood

Continuing this blog's determined (yet curiously without obvious motivation) vendetta against Dubai, this article in the New York Times indicates that it is definitely not the place to be during a global economic downturn:

With Dubai’s economy in free fall, newspapers have reported that more than 3,000 cars sit abandoned in the parking lot at the Dubai Airport, left by fleeing, debt-ridden foreigners (who could in fact be imprisoned if they failed to pay their bills). Some are said to have maxed-out credit cards inside and notes of apology taped to the windshield.

The government says the real number is much lower. But the stories contain at least a grain of truth: jobless people here lose their work visas and then must leave the country within a month. That in turn reduces spending, creates housing vacancies and lowers real estate prices, in a downward spiral that has left parts of Dubai — once hailed as the economic superpower of the Middle East — looking like a ghost town.

OK, so the news is bad. (Real estate prices dropping 30% in the space of couple of months, for example.) How does the government there seek to improve things? By banning bad news, of course!:

Instead of moving toward greater transparency, the emirates seem to be moving in the other direction. A new draft media law would make it a crime to damage the country’s reputation or economy, punishable by fines of up to 1 million dirhams (about $272,000). Some say it is already having a chilling effect on reporting about the crisis.

Presumably, they want to ban rumours like this:

Dubai, unlike Abu Dhabi or nearby Qatar and Saudi Arabia, does not have its own oil, and had built its reputation on real estate, finance and tourism. Now, many expatriates here talk about Dubai as though it were a con game all along. Lurid rumors spread quickly: the Palm Jumeira, an artificial island that is one of this city’s trademark developments, is said to be sinking, and when you turn the faucets in the hotels built atop it, only cockroaches come out.

It was all built on sand: literally and metaphorically.

Nice mice

Mouse study reveals genetic component of empathy

From the report:

In the study, a highly social strain of mice learned to associate a sound played in a specific cage with something negative simply by hearing a mouse in that cage respond with squeaks of distress. A genetically different mouse strain with fewer social tendencies did not learn any connection between the cues and the other mouse's distress, showing that the ability to identify and act on another's emotions may have a genetic basis.

I'm mostly curious as to how you tell a strain of mice is "highly social". Do they spend a lot of time having friends over?

Carbon price sale!

What a slump in carbon prices means for the future - environment - New Scientist

Genius or not?

Oscar watch: Jerry Lewis is long overdue an Academy Award | Film | guardian.co.uk

Heh. The Guardian re-considers (in quite "high brow" fashion, it must be said) the history of the Jerry Lewis Wars: is he a remarkable auteur, or just an irritating schmuck? I like this part:

But, as the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has written: "Lewis's popularity in America is far greater than any French love of Lewis ... American denial of the American love of Jerry Lewis is pathological."

Let's just say that I feel he is now under-appreciated (indeed, probably virtually unknown by a deprived potential audience of children, even though nearly all of his movies are available for around $9 at Big W or K Mart.) Go on - at least get Artists and Models. Even if you are feminist, you can tell your children that Dean Martin was an evil man who should not be touching that woman without her consent.

As noted previously

'Apocalyptic predictions' mislead the public on climate change, say experts | Environment | guardian.co.uk

Basically, the British Met Office Hadley Centre makes the same point I have recently.

While both sides are at fault, I get crankier with the skeptics now because it is not as if there are no websites out there that are "moderate" in their claims, yet can point out the flaws in most skeptic arguments. Yet it seems increasingly clear that prominent media skeptics do make the attempt to read the other side. Indeed, as I have also complained recently, they just don't care about the issue of qualifications or experience of the skeptics.

Real Climate, although much derided by the likes of commenters at Marohasy's blog, has often had posts complaining about exaggerations or mis-reporting on the AGW side of the coin. (However, I have to admit, my recollection of their post on An Inconvenient Truth was too soft on big Al.)

Another noteworthy first hand account

ABC Online - ABC Bushfire Community - Billowing mass of Hell

This one is by one of the firefighters, who found themselves simply unable to do a thing for the doomed town of Marysville:

We knew this was something serious, something far beyond what we had ever seen before. The conditions were absolutely extreme. The winds were hurricane strength.

We proceeded into Marysville. This was a little tourist town of 1500 people surrounded by mountain ash forest, tree ferns and waterfalls. It was a town built around that environment. It had a commercial centre, guesthouses, all the trappings of tourism

We got to Marysville and day turned to night. There were burning embers and pieces of bark landing and starting numerous spot fires. Our intentions were to put out the spot fires, find houses and save them. That's what we are trained for: to save life and property. ...

it became clear very quickly that the scope of the fire was beyond what we were capable of. The apparent conditions were so extreme that everything was impossible. No form of active fire fighting was possible.

Our training told us that we had a resonsibility to save our own crew and it was obvious that was what we needed to do.

We made our way back to the anchor point at the oval. It was a typical country oval - a patch of clear ground. We had to sit it out. There was 30 minutes of intense stuff and we sat there for four or five hours as the town burned around us. There were houses burning everywhere we looked.

It was very confusing. A lot of residents were attempting to leave. It was pandemonium. People were pleading with us to help them free friends and family who were trapped in their houses.

A nightmarish situation.

This'll be interesting

Iran's Ahmadinejad 'ready' to talk with America | csmonitor.com

Determined chants of "Death to America" rang out in city after city in Iran Tuesday, even as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told a mass rally in Tehran that Iran was "ready" to talk to its arch-enemy if the US showed "real change."

Speaking as Iranians marked the 30th anniversary of the Islamic revolution, Mr. Ahmadinejad declared Iran to be "officially … a real and genuine superpower," and that the "shadow of threat has been removed forever" from the Islamic Republic.

"From now on, which power in the world can be found that has the courage to threaten the Iranian nation?" Ahmadinejad asked to cheers.

Hint: it probably starts with the letter "I".

But back to the basis on which the Iranian public appears to want "dialogue":

Despite the nod toward dialogue, the message from state-run TV was unrelenting. The afternoon news broadcast on IRIB Channel 1 devoted 25 minutes to scenes of Tehran and huge rallies across the country, with primary emphasis in every city on the "Death to America" chant.

Great line

Andrew Norton - Labor and ‘neoliberal’ policy

Andrew Norton has a great line in his post about Kevin Rudd's attack on "neo-liberalism" (which Andrew writes after pointing out the obvious problem in Rudd's argument is that it was Labor that brought in the fundamental reforms he complains about):

Apparently when the Coalition introduces a market reform it is ‘economic fundamentalism’, but when Labor implements a market reform it is ‘economic modernisation’.

Bottlenecks to watch out for

Why sustainable power is unsustainable - tech - 06 February 2009 - New Scientist

While we are talking clean energy, this recent New Scientist article outlined some of the natural bottlenecks that may be involved in some clean energy ideas.

Newt's ideas

GINGRICH: Where does the conservative movement go from here?

Newt Gingrich is notable for being a Republican identity who takes greenhouse issues seriously. He thinks the "Bush-Obama" stimulus is all wrong, and argues:

At American Solutions, there is an American Energy, Jobs and Prosperity plan being built that will turn American energy assets (including clean coal, ethanol, more production of oil and natural gas, new technologies from hydrogen to wind and solar and a vastly expanded nuclear-power program, as well as a dramatic modernization of the electric grid and an expansion of conservation) into money that stays here at home.

The next building boom ought to be in America instead of the Middle East, and the future of American energy consumption should be built on paying Americans rather than paying Venezuela, Iran, Russia or any other unreliable foreign country. OPEC's efforts to cut production and raise prices should remind us that the time to invest in new energy resources is now, before the next crisis.

It's a wonder Bob Brown and the Greens here are not arguing along similar lines for a big redeployment of the next stimulus package into energy issues (other than mere insulation.)

This is modern art: Part II

'Angel of the South' to be giant white horse - News, Art - The Independent

Maybe I should be torn. I can be quite awed by big statues, but like all sensible people, I also know that horses are inherently evil.

No, actually I am not torn at all. This planned giant white horse, standing in a nondescript field surrounded by electricity towers, would have to take the award for stupidest big public art installation ever. And it is the winner in a design competition for a work that is to be called "Angel of the South"? Is there something funny leaking into the water in that part of England?

Incidentally, the other two shortlisted entries "included a steel latticework "nest" by Richard Deacon and a tower of stacked cubes by Daniel Buren. " Hardly angel-like either, one must concede.

I see that England already has an "Angel of the North", but at least one can some influence of the concept of "angel" in it.

Great Britain's decline continues. Further updates coming.

Woops

CCTV apologizes for fireworks that burned Beijing hotel - International Herald Tribune

It was a big building too: go to the link to see the photo.

The story is also of interest for the way China effectively censored the image from its public:

There were no pictures on the front page of The Beijing News. On Tuesday morning, the home page of Xinhua, the official news agency, featured a photo from another tragedy: a stampede in South Korea that left four people dead. Throughout the morning, CCTV's brief bulletins about the blaze omitted footage of the burning tower. By evening, the newscast skipped the story entirely.

Even before the flames had been extinguished early Tuesday, pictures of the burning hotel had been removed from most of the main Internet portals serving China. In the afternoon, the story had been largely buried, but by the evening, news of the fire was accessible via the Xinhua and CCTV Web sites.

The network's unusual public apology and the media's skittish approach to covering the fire suggested that the authorities were struggling with how to deal with a sensitive news event in the age of cellphone cameras and YouTube.

The concept of "openness" in that country has a bit of a way to go.

Further proof that no one is wrong all of the time

Pharyngula: Singularly silly singularity

The rabidly and offensively anti-religion scientist PZ Myers takes down Ray Kurzweil's silly "singularity" idea.

I have never taken Kurzweil seriously, but it's good to read another scientist's explanation of why my intuitive dismissal of the concept was well founded.

High brow author with high brow squeeze

Salman Rushdie steps out with statuesque actress half his age

Forward planning needed

Asteroid bound for Earth! Warn your grandchildren - New Scientist

AN ASTEROID that had initially been deemed harmless has turned out to have a slim chance of hitting Earth in 160 years. While that might seem a distant threat, there's far less time available to deflect it off course.

Asteroid 1999 RQ36 was discovered a decade ago, but it was not considered particularly worrisome since it has no chance of striking Earth in the next 100 years - the time frame astronomers routinely use to assess potential threats.

Now, new calculations show a 1 in 1400 chance that it will strike Earth between 2169 and 2199, according to Andrea Milani of the University of Pisa in Italy and colleagues (www.arxiv.org/abs/0901.3631).

With an estimated diameter of 560 metres, 1999 RQ36 is more than twice the size of the better-known asteroid Apophis, which has a 1 in 45,000 chance of hitting Earth in 2036 (New Scientist, 12 July 2008, p 12). Both are large enough to unleash devastating tsunamis if they were to smash into the ocean.

Although 1999 RQ36's potential collision is late in the next century, the window of opportunity to deflect it comes much sooner, prior to a series of close approaches to Earth that the asteroid will make between 2060 and 2080.

Maybe, this asteroid will be the target of the world's first attempt to nudge one out of harm's way.

No one is wrong all the time

Germaine Greer: From its artificial islands to its boring new skycraper, Dubai's architecture is beyond crass

Well, after just dissing Germaine, I'll now quote her dissing Dubai (a place I admittedly have never visited) with approval.

Research where it hurts

Cannabis linked to testicular cancer

The physicist and the novelist

Pajamas Media John Updike and Me

Oh good. My favourite physicist Frank Tipler has an article about his difference of opinion with the late John Updike.

Tipler sounds sensible in the article. As I have mentioned before, this is what makes him so fascinating. One minute it's Jesus walking on water via neutrino beams from his feet, the next he sounds quite reasonable.

Dubious

State of Victoria's forests fanned bushfire inferno | The Australian

David Packham, a researcher from Monash University's climatology group who has specialised in bushfires, said governments had abandoned responsibility for the one control they had over wildfires -- the state of the forests that fed the flames.

"Due to terribly ill-informed and pretty well outrageous concepts of conservation, we have failed to manage our fuel and our forests," Mr Packham said. "They have become unhealthy, and dangerous."

I could be wrong, I admit, but from the television images and descriptions of events in the media, it sounds rather like twaddle to be blaming poor forest management for the Victorian fires.

The impression one gets is that you would have had to perform precautionary clearing/burning of an absolutely huge area of forest to significantly reduce fires fanned by 100kph wind gusts after a bone dry month of heat wave conditions.

UPDATE: Germaine Greer, who seems to be regarded by the British media as the expert on absolutely everything Australian despite not having lived here for what, 4 or 5 decades?, says it is indeed poor forest management that is at fault. However, it also seems that the reason she is writing this is mainly to point out how clever the aborigines were in their fire management of forests.

No wonder there are fights over forestry management when there are such differing agendas swirling around the issue.

A fun career

This Doctor Makes 'House' Calls - WSJ.com

The article is about the young doctor who spends his time coming up with the rare and readily misdiagnosed diseases for "House" episodes. What a fun job that must be.

I rarely get to see the show now, but the medical mystery format is one that I have always enjoyed, even back to Qunicy.

For some reason, there is one episode of Quincy which I can remember clearly - some bad chilli was getting sucked back up via a hose connected to a tap into the water pipes at a sports stadium, causing those getting a drink at a particular water fountain to get botulism. To this day, I do not leave hoses attached to taps sitting in buckets full of rotting food for this very reason.

Odd

Boy, 5, taken by crocodile in Daintree, Queensland

It's a tragedy, no doubt, but it does sound surprising that the kids were allowed to play there at all:

A QUEENSLAND tour guide plunged into a croc-infested mangrove swamp in a desperate bid to save his five-year-old son snatched by a 3m crocodile.

Steve Doble, who owns Daintree Rainforest Rivertrain, flung himself into the waist-deep floodwaters only to find his youngest boy had vanished.

He was alerted by the screams of his older son Ryan, 7, who had to be treated for shock after witnessing the attack.

Jeremy Doble, 5, is missing feared dead after he was taken by the crocodile, believed to be the dominant resident male Goldie, in the swamp behind his family home about 9.15am (AEST).

Locals said the "sweet, gentle-natured" child and his older brother were playing on a boogie board as their father fixed a broken mangrove boardwalk nearby, The Courier-Mail reports.

UPDATE: I should have guessed. The version in the Cairns Post is quite different:

Mr Doble was working on the boardwalk when Ryan’s screams alerted him to the tragedy. The boys were chasing their pet dog and Jeremy jumped into the flooded creek after the animal. Ryan told police he saw a large croc immediately after his brother vanished.

It also says that there were "unconfirmed reports" that the father jumped in after his son.

Such is journalism.

David Byrne in Brisbane (and elsewhere)

Regular readers may recall that one of my not entirely "conservative" features is my high regard for David Byrne and nearly anything he does. (OK, I don't automatically buy every new CD any more, but his lifetime body of work is incredibly strong.) I recommend his journal again for the quality of the writing and breadth of interest he shows, although he has become a bit slack in updating it lately.

So, proving again that I must be the coolest conservative-ish blogger in Australia (ha ha), I went to his Brisbane concert on Saturday night.

This particular tour, featuring his songs with producer Brian Eno, has been on for a good few months now, getting positive reviews everywhere, and with good reason. It is a more theatrical show than his last tour, with three dancers often on stage doing what might be called somewhat whimsical choreography. David often joins in too, and the effect is a bit like a smaller scale "Stop Making Sense".

I guess I enjoyed the last show a little more, as some Brian Eno produced songs from Talking Heads are not amongst my favourites. On the other hand, some of the songs from their just released CD are immediately appealing. Have a look at this one, for example, and just ignore the first jiggling 15 seconds, it settles down after that:



And here's a still photo I took during Burning Down the House (err, no bad taste intended, Victorians) performed for some unexplained reason with everyone on stage wearing a tutu:


Someone at the concert has posted a very clear and up close video of a new song which featured some very David-esque choreography. You'll like it if you like that sort of thing.

Ah I can't help myself. Finally here's a very good quality clip from the recent Singapore concert of an old favourite, "Heaven":



OK. I'll stop now.

The slowly revealed tragedy

It's slightly surreal how the death toll from the Victorian fires has risen during the day. Last night it was 40 feared dead; by tomorrow, it seems a good chance that a 100 or more will have been found.

It would seem that there is considerable way to go in educating people who live in high fire danger areas how to react appropriately when a fire is approaching. Still, I guess that even doing the "right" thing and not fleeing in a car when the fire front was too close did not save many people who perished in their houses. (Some areas, such as those suburban areas close to Bendigo, also might not really have been considered by the residents to be at high risk of such devastation.)

Scary photos are over at Caz's. Sympathy and prayers are offered.

Can someone explain this?

Donor - Annual Returns

(It shows the Law Society of NSW donating $16,000 to NSW Labor last financial year. They made no donation to any other party, apparently.) I know some people say that Law Societies are like solicitors unions, but I never expected that they would see any particular benefit in not being at least even handed in political donations.

While we are at it, the page for donations to the Queensland Labor Party shows substantial donations from "Australian Taxation Office" at Chermside. Huh?

Proof of alternative universes

Good Lord. Opinion Dominion knows that it has truly entered Bizarro World when it finds itself agreeing with (most of) Ken Lovell's comments over at LP. (Earlier opinion of Mr Lovell's posting career at Road to Surfdom was expressed here.)

UPDATE: some very sensible commentary here by Harry Clarke on why Ken Henry's views on alternatives to "his" stimulus package should not be taken as sacrosanct.

I would like to know why, amongst journalists who comment on economics, they don't express skepticism of the economists who (by and large) have been caught by surprise by the unfolding events of the last 12 months, yet now sound so certain as to what the "fix" should be.

Many applicants for this priesthood

Found this snippet at the end of an article about a temple in Kyoto:

Fans of religion and alcohol might also enjoy Matsuo-taisha shrine in Arashiyama, Kyoto Prefecture. It's dedicated to the god of sake, and is a place of pilgrimage for sake brewers praying for good fortune. The priests can reportedly outdrink most people, arguing that it's their sacred duty to imbibe.

Something different

There have been too many words around here lately, so here's something different (if not all that new):



There's something a bit disconcerting the first time you see a human shaped robot copying human actions too closely, I find.

It gets worse

Donating a kidney through your vagina or rectum. -By William Saletan - Slate Magazine

If the news earlier this week about a donor kidney being removed through the vagina didn't make you feel queasy enough, William Saletan explains above how the next step (for men) will likely be to try doing it via the rectum. (Germs are no problem: just bag the kidney first.)

Let's all join in a collective sound signifying revulsion now, shall we?

I have a theory: the anal probe claims by some alleged alien abductees are in fact misunderstood prophetic dreams from the future's hospitals. (Short surgeons with masks look like aliens a little, don't they?)

Another Oscar year to ignore

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button review | Film Reviews - Times Online

The big nominee in yet another year of Oscar nominations that the public just doesn't much care about (God we've had a run of Oscar seasons like that the last few years) is Benjamin Button. One reviewer is not impressed:

The film won an astonishing 13 Oscar nominations, just one short of the record set by All About Eve and Titanic. This is mystifying. It is a tedious marathon of smoke and mirrors. In terms of the basic requirements of three-reel drama the film lacks substance, credibility, a decent script and characters you might actually care for. That it should be pitching for the most coveted prizes in cinema is a far stranger fiction than the story itself.

Yet, with typical Hollywood star myopia, Kate Winslet was on Leno the other night saying something like "oh it's been such an extraordinary year for fabulous movies, of course I didn't expect to win.." etc.

(Actually, she did not come across as all that likeable in that appearance. I would link to it if I could, but it appears to be region blocked by NBC. How odd.)

Crazy brave commentary

All this political commentary in the press ("A Leader out of his League" is the ridiculous heading given in The Age to Michelle Grattan's musings) about Malcolm Turnbull's (well, actually, his whole party room's) decision to oppose the governments latest stimulus is just silly guff in my opinion. (It's his "suicide note" according to Mark Bahnisch, who likes to complain about commentary that concentrates on the political game instead of the policy substance, except of course when he thinks the game is running Labor's way.)

I can see no substantial risk to Turnbull if, as appears likely, the government will get the Greens and independents on side in the Senate with some relatively minor variations to the package. The Opposition's opposition is not going to delay it for long. A week or two, maybe? Big deal.

Furthermore, if, as just about everyone from the PM down expects, the economy really tanks and a lot more action is needed, that's further debt on its way. This package alone may not be scaring too many economics commentators with its future debt implications, but the next stimulus might make them more hesitant.

At which point, Turnbull can say "see, I told you not to spend quite so much on the last stimulus, and to target it better."

Besides which, I reckon Rudd just looks like a fake actor when he tries to do "outrage" in Parliament. Just because Howard was able to make hay out of Beazley's delaying tax cuts, the dynamics are quite different now, and people are not going to be readily sucked in to believing all the self-serving ideological dressing on the economic crisis Rudd spent his Christmas holidays apparently dreaming up.

Finally, I see that Kerry O'Brien is continuing the same pandering tone with Kevin Rudd this year. His approach in a Rudd interview is always along the lines "help me to understand why what you say is right." But when it comes to the Liberals it's "clearly you are wrong. Confess!"

UPDATE: Andrew Bolt points out that there are indications that the public is not uniformly rushing to condemn Turnbull's caution, contrary to what most commentators predicted.

Un-informed

Ocean Acidification and Corals - Watts Up With That?

Watts Up With That has become a favourite blog for global warming sceptics, often quoted by Andrew Bolt, Jennifer Marohasy, etc. (I see Jennifer is away for an undefined period; probably to seek a credibility transplant after some of her recent efforts.)

But Watt's Up is spreading its wings to encourage scepticism about ocean acidification, with the above "guest post" by Steven Goddard.

It is, without doubt, the most starkly uninformed sceptical post about ocean acidification I have even seen at a blog that likes to credit itself as having a scientific attitude.

Worthy of Ted Baxter

Hamster labelled a murder suspect | Weird True Freaky | News.com.au

Go to the link to see the amusing news video.

And by the way, it's sad to think that probably half of my readership are too young to know of the Mary Tyler Moore show.

Stimulus issues

One thing seems to be missing so far from commentary on the stimulus package: criticism of the cash handouts.

As I noted only a couple of weeks ago, Peter Martin had belatedly pointed out that the US experience indicated that temporary gifts of cash did not do much to increase consumer spending.

So what do we get now as a big component of stimulus? More immediate cash. I am waiting for Peter Martin's comments on this, as he is yet to express his own opinion.

Oddly, Ross Gittens has seemingly decided that economics is just a magic art that no one can ever truly know anything about anyway:

It's all very well for Gerry Harvey to say the cash splash failed because he saw no sign of it in his stores. The economy is just a bit bigger than Harvey Norman. The fact is we don't yet have most of the figures for what happened in the economy in December, or even the last three months of last year.

And even when we get the figures it won't be easy to detect what effect various government measures have had on them. For instance, since there are no miracle cures, evidence of the economy's continued decline doesn't prove the measures did no good.

To measure accurately the effect of the measures you have to know something we'll never know: what would have happened in the economy had the authorities not done what they did.

As for my take, which is just as good as anyone else's at the moment, the package deserved better targeting; much better targeting.

Top marks for creativity, at least

Ehud Barak proposes tunnel connecting Gaza to West Bank - Telegraph

Respect your mice

From a report at Physorg.com:

Humans and mice are both good at assessing risk in everyday tasks, according to a study by Rutgers University scientists published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....

The finding leads Gallistel, professor of psychology and co-director of the Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science, to conclude that risk assessment is not basically a high-level conscious activity, but one that is programmed into the brains of animals - mice, humans and many others....

"These animals [the mice] were doing something that, on the face of it, was mathematically complicated," Gallistel said.

Seems to me the lesson to take from this is that the banking and investment industry may as well be run by mice. Send them to Wall Street, I say.

Psst...don't tell Kevin

It does seem odd that when thinking about ways to stimulate the Australian economy, one of the first things our PM should announce is spending on home insulation.

But, it could have been worse:

In their search to find programs upon which to rest the complaint that the stimulus bill is too generous, some conservatives have seized upon one of their favorite whipping boys: the arts. "Even [House Republicans] can't quite believe it... $50 million for that great engine of job creation, the National Endowment for the Arts," declared Rep. Mike Pence (R-Indiana).

Pence was being sarcastic, of course, but the rest of the article is a defence of government spending on the arts as a stimulus measure:

Arts are actually a great form of economic investment, particularly public art, and they should be amply funded in the stimulus package. Every year nonprofit arts organizations generate $166.2 billion in economic activity, support 5.7 million jobs, and send almost $30 billion back to government, according to Americans for the Arts. There is hardly a person more likely to go out and spend her stimulus check than a starving artist.

One suspects a certain rubberiness in those figures. It also continues the line that was behind much of Rudd's first stimulus idea: that that the poorest people are the best to "stimulate". If we follow that logic too far, we'll end up with the most confortable old age pensioners, unemployable Bachelor of Arts graduates and no-audience polemic playwrights in the world, while the government and those actually doing productive work get pooer. Then I guess it'll be their turn for stimulus.

Michael Crichton would have loved them

Technology Review: The Army's Remote-Controlled Beetle

A giant flower beetle with implanted electrodes and a radio receiver on its back can be wirelessly controlled, according to research presented this week. Scientists at the University of California developed a tiny rig that receives control signals from a nearby computer. Electrical signals delivered via the electrodes command the insect to take off, turn left or right, or hover in midflight.

A fuel cell and battery aircraft: cool

How Things Work: Flying Fuel Cells | Flight Today | Air & Space Magazine

Well, it was only a powered glider, but it's still impressive:

....his HK 36 Super Dimona carried a 200-pound hydrogen fuel cell that ran an electric motor to turn its propeller. The fuel cell couldn’t quite put out the energy required for takeoff—45 kilowatts—and got help from a lithium ion battery to lift off the runway in Ocaña, Spain. At 3,300 feet Barberán disconnected the battery, and for the next 20 minutes the Super Dimona flew straight and level at about 60 mph on just the fuel cell. It was the first time a piloted airplane had flown powered by a fuel cell alone.

Urgent geek toy alert

A TARDIS Of Your Very Own | Discover Magazine

More details here.

Luke, use the Force

It sounds like this would be an interesting book: real life accounts of people who believe they have had otherworldly assistance when in a dire situation. (Well, some of them just believe it was their brain playing tricks, but it's still an interesting phenomena, even it you are allergic to the paranormal.) The comments after the article are worth reading too.

Famous battle toilets of Japan

I wish I was in Japan at the moment, to see the touring "toilet museum" exhibition. A highlight:

... history buffs are sure to enjoy seeing a quarter-size model of the field toilet on which the famed feudal lord Takeda Shingen reportedly mulled strategies during the Warring States Period (1467-1568).

Expect fewer appointments today, doctor

Dubbo doctor in hot water for posing as prostitute on YouTube - National

This is pretty funny, at least if you don't live in Dubbo and stories of oddball doctors amuse you, but it remains a mystery to me as to why the police would be involved.

Unusual delusion of the day

Mind Hacks: Shattered delusions

Mind Hacks has a post about an unusual delusion of old Europe, in which the sufferers believed that they (or parts of their body) were made of glass.

That is pretty strange. (If you go to the original article on this, you find some very odd similar exampes - such as "earthernware men, and "urinal man".)

You learn something new every day.

From the formerly great Britain - a continuing series

Apparently, 2 million Britons watched Jamie Oliver masturbate a pig on TV last week. Seriously.

On a primary-coloured set, in front of a whooping audience, Oliver had four volunteers, plus Joanna Lumley, spending 24 hours in sow stalls, as an experiment called “Pig Brother”. There was a sow giving birth, live in the studio, as some kind of “Here come the little sausages!” sideshow. And in a moment more The Word than The Word ever managed, Oliver - face contorted with nausea - masturbated a boar into a jar as the audience cheered him on.

It is surprising (well, maybe not, given the excision of anything resembling boundaries in British TV over the last decade or so) that this not the first time such activity has featured there:

Of course, Jamie isn't the first person to masturbate a boar on television - Rebecca “sex with David Beckham” Loos pioneered it as her signature manoeuvre on Five's The Farm, way back in 2004 - but there seemed to be a more palpable air of unwillingness here, as Jamie wailed, “It's spraying all up my arm”, and then asked “Why's it taking so long?” These were not “happy days” with the Naked Chef.

I find this fairly puzzling, as Oliver's show was apparently a serious attempt to raise public awareness of pig farming animal welfare issues in England and Europe. It would appear that pigs are raised considerably more humanely in England, yet cheap European pork is overwhelming the English product in sales.

At the risk of further lessening my credibility as a conservative blogger (at least in the eyes of those who think that it is impossible to want action on greenhouse gases without being a crypto-socialist,) this is a subject that I reckon actually does deserve attention in Australia as well. It seems odd that chickens and their free range status is a matter of interest to many people when they are looking for eggs or chicken meat, yet the conditions in which a (roughly) dog like animal is raised does not seem to be on the radar of most Australians. (Well, it wasn't on my radar either until thoughts about whaling and cruelty made me look around at sites regarding farm animal welfare.)

But really, why put on a sideshow of semen collection as part of this. It's what the punters want, is it?

Sorry, I just can't get used to animal husbandry practices as a source of humour for television.

Coded messages

Classified: The Secret History of the Personal Column by HG Cocks review | - Times Online

An amusing book review here about the history of the "personal column" in newspapers and magazines.

A magazine devote to it was started in England in 1915, but it was considered a moral scandal:

The police were particularly interested in the number of young men who claimed to be artistic, musical, unconventional, or fans of Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman. Officers also had their doubts about women who claimed to be “jolly” or “sporty”, thinking this might be a euphemism for what might now be called “up for it”.

This part of the review is particularly interesting:

...the anthropologist Gilbert Bartell and his wife posed as swingers to compile a study of wife-swapping in the Chicago area (making excuses and leaving at the vital moment).

The image of swinging, as sold by magazines such as Playboy, was all glamour and decadence. So the Bartells were surprised to find their fellow swingers were, well, rather dull. “The typical male was a slack-waisted, balding man of about 5ft 10in,” reports Cocks. “Women averaged 5ft 4in and, if not exactly fat, had succumbed to the early ravages of middle-aged spread. They were not enormously overweight, but at the very least tended to be over-endowed in the hips, thighs and stomach. For all the advertised charms of big breasts, the women tended to be relatively flat-chested.”

Well, I already knew that from watching Fast Forward a couple of decades ago.

On internet advertising

Roger L. Simon - Pajamas Media matters

Pajama Media's group advertising system has failed.

I know absolutely nothing about internet advertising, except for this fact: it is extremely rare for me to ever click on a advertisement on a blog, or a newspaper site. I would guess at about once a year.

And this is from a person who spends far too much time on blogs and the internet.

The internet is great for finding products and services, but that's what Google is for. I may click on a Google search "sponsored ad", but that's different.

Maybe I am the odd one out, but if a significant number of people are like me, I just can't see how any blogs or newspaper or magazine sites make significant money from advertising.

Dominion over-rated

Attenborough: Genesis? It can go forth and multiply

As nice a man as he appears to be, Sir David Attenborough is just as much off the mark here as those fellow atheists who blame nearly every single war on religious motivation:

Sir David, 82, said the devastation of the environment has its roots in the first words that God supposedly uttered to humankind, as detailed in Genesis 1:28: "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth."

Come on. I thought it was now commonly believed that many pagan societies collapsed as a result of over-flogging the environment. Did all of them have gods directing them to use the earth to maximum advantage too?

Some people might suggest that he's right, in that some societies such as the Australian aborigines and Native Americans lived in harmony with the environment. This always ignores, however, both the relative technological incapacity these groups had to stuff up their environment, and the damage or change that did manage to create anyway. Changing vast swathes of forest to grassland by regular burning is somehow OK for the aborigines when they arrived on the continent; I can't imagine Bob Brown being all that enamoured of the practice if a new island continent was discovered tomorrow. (Mega-fauna would almost certainly have been better off without aborigines too.)

That all humans like to arrange things to make themselves more comfortable, have developed better technology with which to do that over the years, and can find it hard to recognise the point at which to pull back and let an overused resource recover, has much more to do with it than any religious motivation.

UPDATE: overnight it also occurred to me that non-Christian Japan probably has the worst record for overfishing in recent decades.
UPDATE 2: what about China too? Barely a Christian influence to be seen there, yet hardly a beacon of environmental rectitude.

Lesbian separatists of Alabama

Lesbian Communities Struggle to Stay Vital to a New Generation - NYTimes.com

I could also have entitled this post "Nuttiest Lesbians Ever", and some people may have taken offence; but then, after reading the article, I suspect most people would agree with me.

The story is about some "womyn's" communities in the US which date from the 1970's, and comprise women who absolutely want nothing to do with men (and don't even trust transexual men who have had the operation). Some extracts:

Finding one another in the fever of the gay rights and women’s liberation movements, they built a matriarchal community, where no men were allowed, where even a male infant brought by visitors was cause for debate....

Ms. Greene trims branches of oak, hickory and sassafras trees and stops by the grave of a deer she buried in the woods after it was hit by a car. She named it Miracle. “I talk to Miracle every day,” Ms. Greene said. “That is one of my joys of living here.”

[Could Ms Greene care to explain whether she is aware of the irony of calling a deer hit by a car "Miracle"?]

....the women live in simple houses or double-wide trailers on roads they have named after goddesses, like Diana Drive. They meet for potluck dinners, movie and game nights and “community full moon circles” during which they sing, read poems and share thoughts on topics like “Mercury in retrograde — how is it affecting our communication?”...

There is strident debate within and across the womyn’s lands about who should be allowed to join. Many residents subscribe to strict lesbian separatism, meaning that men are permitted only as temporary visitors and that straight, bisexual and transsexual women are also excluded.

As the article notes, most of these communities are dying, as young lesbians don't see the need to set themselves up as isolationists from the rest of humanity.

UPDATE: spelling of Alabama corrected. I must stop posting late at night.

Doesn't sound like a failed state

No Injuries Reported in Iraqi Elections - NYTimes.com

Victoria not coping well

Victoria without power for days

POWER outages caused by an explosion at an electrical substation wreaked havoc across heatwave-stricken Victoria last night.

All Melbourne train services were cancelled and about 500,000 homes and businesses were left without electricity in the city's west, some parts of the CBD and western Victoria....

Connex staff told thousands of commuters at Flinders Street Railway Station trying to get home at the end of the working week that they would have to find other means of travel because there was no power for trains.

A number of city buildings were evacuated, with the firemen called in to rescue office workers trapped in stalled lifts.

Traffic lights in the city stopped working and signals on the rail network also failed.

How about this potentially expensive offer:

Power retailer Jemena offered to pay $150 towards the costs of hotels for residential customers who have been without power for 24 hours.

I'll be waiting to hear the story of some poor family that leaves their powerless home for a night in an airconditioned hotel, only to get stuck in an unairconditioned lift for 3 hours.

Your odd quantum thought for today

0901.2073.pdf

This short paper up at arXiv seems to propose a simple quantum experiment that could have a puzzling outcome. In fact, the way it is described, it is hard to believe the experiment has not already been done, but I assume from the way this is written that it hasn't been tried.

All very odd.

An important read

The school Israel didn’t shell | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog

As much as I disagree with Andrew Bolt's take on greenhouse gases, posts such as this one provide a valuable service to those who fail to exercise skepticism when it comes to media reporting of Israel's actions and Palestinian's claims.

They don't like it hot

There's sort of a vicious cycle of silliness going on about global warming and the day to day weather. It certainly started with proponents of warming (from Al Gore down) exaggerating the significance of particular weather events as being signs of global warming. The skeptics rubbished this, but then when the weather starts to turns cold, they start doing the same trick. Now that Melbourne and Adelaide are melting in (possibly) 1 in a 100 year heat, it's back to some on the AGW side (notably, Penny Wong) to claim it is "consistent" with warming. Which sets Andrew Bolt and the like back to the "no, it's only weather" argument again. (Until next winter, probably, when he may swing back to a run of cold weather being evidence of no warming.)

It's also particularly ironic that Andrew Bolt names his post on this "Wong wrong to pick that cherry", when his repeated claim that the warming has stopped since 1998 has long been criticised as the biggest cherry pick of all.

Everyone should just repeat the mantra: "Day to day weather is not climate. Day to day whether is not climate."

That said, would it be wrong for those on the AGW to at least say "well look, this is not proof itself of AGW, but this is what it will be like for longer according to the predictions of the vast majority of climate scientists." ? (Wong semi-qualifies her statements by saying it is "consistent with", but in my books that is still being a bit tricky. If she rephrased her comments in the way I suggest, then it would be completely unobjectionable, while still making the connection with AGW as a policy issue.)

Where not to invest

Raising the Roof - Beijing suspends restrictions on foreign buyers

By all means, if you want your own holiday apartment in an unusual location, consider Beijing. But don't expect capital growth:

Last week the Beijing Statistics Bureau reported price growth declined for the ninth straight month. Prices could fall by 20 percent in the next few months, a recent report by the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences predicted.

"Change" going well so far

Ahmadinejad demands Obama apology - World - smh.com.au

In case you missed it: micro black holes are news again

I've been slack lately and not following closely the arXiv papers on black holes at the LHC.

As those who read Instapundit would already have seen, there is a new paper by some credible European physicists (original is here) in which they re-visited the question of how long a micro black hole created at the LHC may last. The previous perceived wisdom was that it would be a tiny, tiny fraction of second before they disappeared into a spray of decay particles, which (presumably) the LHC could detect.

As I understand it, the new paper suggests that for a certain model, the decay rate may in fact be many seconds, even minutes; time enough for a micro black to shoot off through the earth. But they still think there is no likely risk of accretion starting and overwhelming the much-slower-that-previously-thought-possible decay rate.

As some are commenting (see the second link above), this still seems a pretty big revision of what was considered possible from the LHC, even if the authors are still arguing that there is no danger.

I note that the authors of the paper acknowledge discussions with physicists Giddings and Plaga, who themselves still (as far as I know) are stuck in disagreement as to whether Plaga's warning last year that a micro black hole could be an explosive danger was fundamentally flawed or not. At the very least, it indicates that other physicists consider that Plaga is not to be dismissed as a nutter.

Also on the topic of danger from the LHC, New Scientist has an article about a paper looking at (if I can paraphrase it correctly) how to judge the probabilities of something going wrong when you are not entirely sure of what may you might create in the first place. The general gist seems to be that it is potentially riskier than you think.

The guy who runs the Physics arXiv blog is probably really getting up the nose of CERN now, as the effect of both of these recent papers is to make him start worrying about safety issues. Fox News's version of the story probably annoys them even more.

"Chris, want to know who I just spoke to?"

Obama and Rudd discuss financial crisis - Yahoo!7 News

So, Obama finally got around to ringing our PM. I like to imagine Kevin doing a little dance in his office in celebration and relief. Then a phone call to Chris Mitchell to tell him all about it.

The trouble in Egypt

Gaza crisis threatens outlook for Mubarak - International Herald Tribune

Egyptians and Arab countries complained that Mubarak kept the official border crossing between Egypt and Gaza closed before and during much of the war. The most populous Arab country - and the first to sign a peace treaty with Israel, in 1979 - Egypt has been subject to scorn in Yemen and Lebanon, where mobs have marched on its embassies in the past few weeks. It has also been the target of criticism from the tiny Gulf oil state of Qatar, as well as Syria and Iran. All support Hamas.

At the same time, Israel complained that the Egyptian police turned a blind eye to arms smuggled though hundreds of tunnels beneath the Gaza border.

Surely this issue with the Egyptian control of the border is not an insurmountable problem.

This is modern art (Part 1)

Kulik confounds critics with multisensory Monteverdi in Paris | guardian.co.uk

This is a somewhat amusing report on a very avant garde reworking of classical concert material in Paris:

Behold, the classical concert is reborn! Its saviour? A man whose career high until now has been crawling naked on all fours barking like a dog. The Russian artist Oleg Kulik is notorious for biting critics when his canine alter ego occasionally breaks the leash in galleries — now he has taken a nip at the heels of an artform that has been getting a bit doddery on its feet....

The resulting two-and-a-half hour "trip" – think William Blake meets Jean-Michel Jarre, crossed with Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books – is either a flabbergasting reworking of one of the most sublime works in the classical repertoire, or what the dependably crusty French daily Le Figaro today called an "indigestible visual minestrone".

As for that dog act of Kulik, it sounds like he, um, role plays it to the extreme:

The critic accused Kulik of doing to Monteverdi what French police suspected the artist did to a dog in some of his "man-dog, couple of the future" photographs recently seized from a Paris art fair.

Ugh.

Synergy

Last night I read this story:

Seven diners fell ill, one critically, after eating "fugu" globefish at a restaurant whose owner was unlicensed to safely prepare the notorious winter delicacy, police said Tuesday.

The seven consumed sashimi and fish testes at Kibun-ya restaurant in Tsuruoka, Yamagata Prefecture, at around 6:30 p.m. Monday and one of them, identified as Asakichi Sato, 68, fell ill on the spot and was taken to a hospital, where he was listed in critical condition, the police said.

Then this morning I learn that:

Taiwan has a smorgasboard of theme diners, including one modeled after a hospital ward, one that holds puppet shows and two that seat customers on toilet bowls.

Am I the only person in the world to see the potential for a fugu restaurant done up as a hospital ward? (Or cut out the middle man: just locate it in a real ward.)

Moral panic delayed

The Myth of Rampant Teenage Promiscuity - NYTimes.com

The general gist of the article is that the number of teenagers having sex in American (including oral sex) is not as high as some recent reports have indicated. In fact, some participation rates have dropped over the last 20 years or so. For example:

A 2002 report from the Department of Health and Human Services found that 30 percent of 15- to 17-year-old girls had experienced sex, down from 38 percent in 1995. During the same period, the percentage of sexually experienced boys in that age group dropped to 31 percent from 43 percent.

This part of the report seemed particularly surprising:

The reality is that the rate of teenage childbearing has fallen steeply since the late 1950s. The declines aren’t explained by the increasing availability of abortions: teenage abortion rates have also dropped.

Damn. I hate it if a perfectly good moral panic is shown to be illusory.

The ever helpful drug

BBC NEWS - Aspirin 'could cut liver damage'

Yet another way in which aspirin may prove to have unexpected benefits:

A dose of aspirin may be able to prevent liver damage caused by paracetamol or heavy drinking, suggest researchers.

It only has been shown in mice so far, but still it sounds hopeful.

Here's a surprising figure from the report:

Rates of liver cirrhosis have risen in the UK in recent years as people drink more alcohol, and paracetamol overdose, both deliberate and accidental, accounts for well over 100 deaths per year.

That's more than I would have expected.

Have I mentioned here before that a nurse told me years ago that suicide by paracetamol overdose could be one of the most tragic ways to die, as the person (if not treated quickly enough) could wake up feeling relatively OK, realise what they have done and regret it, but may have irretrievably damaged their liver anyway. What may have been a "plea for help" type suicide attempt may therefore turn into the real thing, and the help they are offered won't make any difference. It's an awful scenario.

(Geoff can correct me if this is medically wrong.)

Bob Ellis to be with us for a while yet

Masturbation can be good for the over-50s - The Independent

He's a poet, but didn't know it

Praise song for the first day for the school year (Brisbane version)

Hooray, hooray, is the cry of a million parents, as we catch the joy in each other’s eyes.

The noise all about us at home for the last six weeks is finished, and a tidied house again may stay that way for more than one hour.

No more cinema queues to be endured for the latest movie about dogs.

No more cartoons every morning.

No more outings just to find time in airconditioning.

Say it plain: we love you kids, but jeez it’s good to get you out of the house again.

Learn well, and don’t expect us to do your homework for you. (Tell the teacher that too.)

Praise the day, that domestic peace rules again for 8 hours a day.

Nudge nudge, wink wink...

Grand Arabian nights Geert Jan van Gelder TLS

This is a long review on a new translation of 1,001 [Arabian] Nights, which I found of limited interest. However, being kind, I will extract for you the best bit:

Some readers will be delighted to learn some naughty Arabic, but surely English has a profusion of equally vulgar words for the sexual organs. It should be stressed, however, that obscenities, Arabic equivalents of English four-letter words, are few and far between in the original, where sexual intercourse is often simply expressed as “lying with” or more elaborately by means of metaphors martial (“storming the fortress”) or religious (“circumambulating the Kaaba”, “putting the imam into the prayer niche”), with the mildly shocking profanity that was common in pre-modern Arabic.

Naked science revisited

Do Naked Singularities Break the Rules of Physics?: Scientific American

Interesting article here arguing that a growing body of physicists are now not so sure that black holes always have an event horizon hiding their core from view. Some may be genuine naked singularities, the exact behaviour of which remains very unclear.

In September 2007, I mentioned a paper on arXiv which said that the Large Hadron Collider may also produce tiny naked singularities. Although the author was not worried that they would be dangerous, the issue of how a stationary one on the earth could behave has not, as far as I know, ever been addressed in the LHC safety reviews. (The general argument that cosmic ray collisions of higher energies have been safe for the earth is the only argument I suppose you could use, given the lack of knowledge about their behaviour. It's not a bad argument, except that the issue of whether there is a difference between moving and stationary ones would have to be addressed, as it was for micro black holes.)

Call me overly cautious if you want, but I am not entirely comfortable with the idea of a European lab possibly creating something the behaviour of which can only be guessed.

Bad ocean forecast of the week

Dramatic expansion of dead zones in the oceans

From the above report at PhysOrg:

A team of Danish researchers have now shown that unchecked global warming would lead to a dramatic expansion of low-oxygen areas zones in the global ocean by a factor of 10 or more.

The New Scientist version of the story adds this detail:

Under the worst-case scenario, average ocean oxygen levels will fall by up to 40%, and there will be a 20-fold expansion in the area of "dead zones", like those already discovered in the eastern Pacific and northern Indian Ocean, where there is too little oxygen for fish to survive. Even in the mid-range scenario, dead zones would expand by a factor of 3 or 4. Cold, deep waters will also be affected if warming stifles the currents that deliver oxygen to greater depths.

Shaffer's projections suggest that the oxygen content in surface layers will dip to its lowest levels during the 22nd century, and in deep water a thousand years later. Recovery to pre-industrial levels will be very slow: "Even after 100,000 years, oxygen levels will only have recovered by around 90%," he says.

Go to the links for more details. Not exactly encouraging, as it shows what is potentially at stake if the warming skeptics are wrong. (And it is an additional risk to that of ocean acidification, which of itself is a major concern for future ocean health.)

The problems on Broadway

BBC NEWS | Mary Poppins - a tale for our times

The article is all about the current woes of Broadway. Strangely, though, it doesn't mention the lack of likeable or memorable musicals written in the last 30 odd years.

Remarkable

How low can you go? : Nature News

This is pretty mind boggling, even if it is of no practical application (yet!):

The ones and zeroes that propel the digital world — the fording of electrons across a transistor, or hard drives reliant on electrons' intrinsic spin — are getting packed into smaller and smaller spaces. The limit was thought to be set: no more than one bit of information could be encoded on an atom or electron.

But now, researchers at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, have used another feature of the electron — its tendency to bounce probabilistically between different quantum states — to create holograms that pack information into subatomic spaces. By encoding information into the electron's quantum shape, or wave function, the researchers were able to create a holographic drawing that contained 35 bits per electron.

Warnings to my mother (a ramble about some movies)

Readers may recall that I have an active 85 year mother. One of her main forms of entertainment, when not spending a few hours every week on the internet following all of the Colin Firth fansites, (as well as admiring the large Colin Firth calendar on her wall just near the autographed photo of him: you getting the idea?) is to watch movies, either in the cinema or on DVD.

I see few adult movies these days, but I still like to read reviews and watch how successful some are. My mother doesn't follow the reviews much; she tends to go by what passes for star power these days. Hence, for example, she may well be the only 85 year old person in the country who ventured out to see the poorly received Colin Firth movie "St Trinians" last year. ("No girl or boy over the age of 12 would be attracted by anything so puerile" wrote the Financial Times. My mother agreed.)

This puts me in a position of having to warn her of the nature of certain movies which I can guess she may be planning on seeing.

Recently, for example, she brought a DVD of "The Departed". The reason: she quite likes Leonardo Di Caprio. But gritty, profanity-filled Scorsese gangsterfests are hardly my mother's favourite genre, and I could recall Margaret Pomeranz really disliking it. (She said "It's so violent, it's so vile in the language, you know, particularly the sexual language." That was enough to put me off seeing it too.)

I warned my mother; I think she was going to return it unopened.

Which brings me to another Di Caprio warning I have just issued to her. Revolutionary Road has received pretty good reviews, but I had to warn my Mum that, despite romantic looking scenes in the TV ads, it is a story entirely about a marriage break up.

Now I'll do my easily ridiculed trick of rubbishing a movie simply on the basis of reviews I feel are probably right. In the case of Revolutionary Road, about an apparently ideal 1950's middle class American marriage, and how stultifying the couple find it, it would seem that many reviewer's reactions are related to how "progressive" they are in their social views, particularly on the question of the importance of self fulfilment.

For example, Roger Ebert adores the movie, but writes:

Remember, this is the 1950s. A little after the time of this movie, Life magazine would run its famous story about the Beatniks, "The Only Rebellion Around." There was a photo of a Beatnik and his chick sitting on the floor and listening to an LP record of modern jazz that was cool and hip and I felt my own yearnings. I remember on the way back from Steak 'n Shake one night, my dad drove slow past the Turk's Head coffeehouse on campus. "That's where the Beatniks stand on tables and recite their poetry," he told my mom, and she said, "My, my," and I wanted to get out of that car and put on a black turtleneck and walk in there and stay.

Further down he says of the acting:

They are so good, they stop being actors and become the people I grew up around.

And he finishes with:

A lot of people believe their parents didn't understand them. What if they didn't understand themselves?

Comments such as this indicate that Ebert has residual disdain for conformism from his teenage years, and like many others, has fully absorbed the idea that happiness is reached via self-understanding and self-fulfilment. As such he is primed to admire movies on these sort of themes. Indeed, like most critics, he loved American Beauty, also directed by Sam Mendes. I found it terribly over-rated, theatrically directly, and far too contrived to be affecting.

The review of Road which sounds to me to likely be more correct is by Peter Rainer, the reviewer for the Christian Science Monitor, which opens with this:

What is it about the 1950s that brings out the worst in cultural historians? The received wisdom is that this era that gave us Mailer and Ginsberg and Kerouac and Brando and Dean was, in fact, a bastion of strait-laced – i.e., straitjacketed – conformity. People, suburbanites especially, lived lives of quiet desperation in their look-alike, ticky-tacky dwellings. Wives were obsessed with spotless kitchens. Commuter trains served up faceless men in gray flannel suits to the gaping maw of Manhattan and then back again, to the two-car garage and the 2.5 children.

The latest movie to plug into this cautionary myth is "Revolutionary Road," set in the mid-'50s and based, extremely faithfully, on the celebrated 1961 novel by Richard Yates. The director is Sam Mendes, who plumbed these shallows once before in "American Beauty," which, though contemporary, felt '50-ish. The new film stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, who previously appeared together in "Titanic." This is another kind of disaster movie, on dry land.

Rainer makes the point, as do other some other reviewers, that the well received TV show "Mad Men", dealing with men behaving badly in the same era, at least shows the characters as having some vitality. In my view, its even more instructive to watch some of the quality films or television made and set in the 1950s (rather than modern ones about the 1950's) to be reminded that people really did live then.

Although I am too young to know of the 1950's directly, this point about it being too easy to overlook the "vitality" of day to day life in earlier times is an important one to remember. Westerners today do feel greater freedom in all kinds of areas, such as sexual mores, career path, and preparedness to end a marriage. Yet such freedoms don't necessarily mean that there were huge numbers of people living in the 1950's sitting around in a blue funk all day because they didn't feel fulfilled. Sure, there were some people who felt unduly constrained then, but that will always be the case for some, no matter how many freedoms are allowed.

Apart from doubting that they accurately reflect the general zeitgeist of the pre-60's world, the other grounds upon which a more conservative soul dislikes such movies is that they show no skepticism of the modern mantra of the importance of self fulfilment and "self realisation". As I think I have written here before, most people today have forgotten that this 20th century Western attitude is a huge turnaround from historic views that developing good character was something to be worked at, not a matter of self-discovery, and to lead a good life involved large components of duty and respect for others which often necessarily involved self-sacrifice.

I do know something of the 1960's, and of course there are some ways in which society now is significantly better, but other good features of the period have sadly been lost and show little sign of returning. I won't go into detailing the particular rights and wrongs of the recent past right now, but suffice to say that I have an inherent cynicism of movies which paint too bleak a picture of the pre-1960's world, when as an era it featured growing populations, strong economies, the birth of modern technology, a greater sense of obligation and duty, and movies as enjoyable as those of Hitchcock at his peak.

Registering a complaint

Yesterday, January 24 2009, was remarkable even by Brisbane standards for its extremely unpleasant combination of high humidity, high temperature and near complete lack of breeze or air movement for most of the day (especially in the western suburbs). The air in the house felt as if it lacked oxygen. Unwisely, (but I was being social,) I had two mid-strength beers at lunch and that was enough to leave me with the slightly thick head that I usually suffer if I drink any alcohol in the middle of the day, especially in hot weather. I clearly don't have the constitution to be an all-day alcoholic.

The internet tells me that at least one other person felt yesterday was horrible too. Oddly, the weather bureau's record of observations for the day doesn't make it sound as bad as it was.

Still, it was not as bad as an week in (I think) either early 1997 or 1998. I believe it was in February of one of those years that there was a run of hot humid nights, with minimums of 27 or 28 degrees, and one evening I had to go and see a movie just to get into airconditioning. On leaving the cinema, after 11pm, my glasses immediately fogged up completely. That is not a common occurrence here, even with our routine high humidity.

Financial woes

Alan Wood gave a pretty good explanation of the international financial system problems in The Australian today.

I am told by a friend who returned from Taiwan recently that in China there is a new expression (which I can't recall, sorry) for the hundreds of thousands of suddenly unemployed people in the southern cities who are out of work but not yet returning to their rural homes (partly out of embarrassment, and partly out of hope they'll find a job somewhere in another factory.) They are just milling around the cities during the day, apparently. Transport for return home for Chinese New Year would usually be fully booked, but this year it is said to be not so crowded.

And worse times are coming, of course.

Conspiracy of the day

I think I spotted it in comments in Huffington Post yesterday, and the writer may have been joking. But it was to the effect that the fluffed Presidential oath was deliberate, so that the "real" oath taken in the White House could be secretly done with a Koran!

This has probably spread wildly through certain corners of the internet already, but I can't be bothered checking. It is pretty good as far as nutty conspiracy theories go, though. (I am waiting for 9/11 Troofers to start being disillusioned with Obama. It won't take long.)

(And Lefties have nothing to feel superior about. It was conspiracy all the way after the second Bush election.)

Tiltshifting toy

Found via Red Ferret, I've been fiddling at TiltShiftMaker.com with attempts at tiltshifting some photos. (Boing Boing had a fair few posts about it: the 'art' of manipulating normal photos to make them look as if they are really of models.) Here's my best result, which I think does have a bit of a model town appearance (it'll look better if you enlarge it):



The original photo appeared at an old post here.

Small things amuse small minds, hey. (Boom boom).

Oddest story of the day

Monks pledge lush new life for 'the Paris Hilton of cows' - The Independent

It's kind of hard to summarise, just read it. And don't miss this line:

The decision to kill Gangotri, a 13-year-old Friesian blue injured by an overly vigorous mating session, enraged Britain's Hindu community who claim that animal welfare officers and police distracted the monks to make a lethal injection "in secret".

An advance, of sorts

Instant syphilis tests to be offered

The Age reports:

Health authorities thought they had consigned syphilis to the history books but the disease is back, and in epidemic proportions.

In 2001, there was just one case of syphilis recorded in Victoria compared with the 1,000 cases seen in the past two years.

Nationally, the rise has been more than seven-fold since 2003, with the number of infections rising from 164 to 1,166 in 2008.

That surely must be taken as confirmation that safe sex campaigns are failing badly. The outbreak, incidentally, is almost entirely amongst men who have sex with other men.

The "advance" I mention in the title to this post: there is now a 15 minute pin prick blood test for it. And what's more, if you go to Melbourne's midsummer gay and lesbian festival, you can be tested for free. Huzzah.

As the Pope would say, kinda says something about a "festival" when one of its features is free STD testing, doesn't it?

Mmmm, polar bear - full of Vitamin C

Q and A - How Did People Avoid Malnutrition in Societies Where Historically There Was Little or No Produce?

Well, who knew this?:

The researchers, from the University of Calgary, also found that the fresh animal foods these Inuit ate, including fish, birds and animals like seal, whale, polar bears, musk ox and caribou, provided them with surprisingly high levels of vitamin C, in some cases more than a Canadian national study found in the diets of Inuit living in places with more access to processed foods.

Catholics with a fantastic advertising agency

I trust Currency Lad and Saint have seen this.

More sensitive souls you would rather not meet

Edmund White on the French 19th-century poet, Arthur Rimbaud

Pretty funny in parts, this description of the early relationship between Rimbaud and Verlaine. A highlight:

Rimbaud could certainly be as pitiless as a real assassin. He once had Verlaine play a "game" in which Verlaine would stretch out his hand on the table and Rimbaud would stab at his spread fingers. Verlaine thought the point of the game was to show that he wouldn't flinch, that he trusted Rimbaud. But Rimbaud quite simply stabbed him in the wrist.

Not just me, then

In my earlier post on the inauguration, I was too polite to mention that the parts of Obama's speech that I heard did not particularly impress. But I have always been cynical of his oratory skills (would he impress so much if he didn't have that voice?), so I did not feel I was in a position to judge.

But clearly, it was not just me.

(Incidentally, John F Kennedy did not that good a voice to listen to, but the eloquence of the words came through nonetheless. His inauguration speech is worth re-watching, but certainly the sense of it coming from a different era is very strong.)

Cheap

It would appear that electric cars will be extremely cheap to power:

... the i-MiEV — which goes on sale in the UK later this year — is based on the i, Mitsubishi's existing city car. With room for four adults, it has a top speed of 87mph and produces the equivalent of 57 horsepower. Its lithium-ion battery has a range of 100 miles and can be charged from flat to 80% in 20 minutes using Mitsubishi's bespoke high-powered charger; otherwise, a normal mains electricity socket will charge the battery from flat to full in six hours. Mitsubishi estimates that the car can travel 10,000 miles on £45 of electricity at current UK domestic prices.

About AUD$90 for 16,000 km? It seems a Honda scooter will get you about 50km per litre, so 16,000 km at $1 per litre would cost around $320. And you get wet with it. On the other hand, scooters are cheap to buy, although some do look a little toy-like. (Actually, now that I look at the latest models, there now seems to be quite an effort to make 50cc scooters look "sporty". Have a look at the European models in particular. It must be a pretty funny job, coming up with designs that try to make a 60kph machine look fast.)

Anyhow, electric still looks promising.

Noticed in today's real estate listings...

A medieval castle once ruled by Charlemagne, the “King of the Franks,” is for sale in Italy, dungeon included.

Located (exactly) on the border of Tuscany and Umbria, the castle dates to 802...

Features include restored stone battlements with gun ports, four turrets, a moat and the dungeon, an add-on amenity reportedly built in 1500. Five buildings are clustered around the circular courtyard and the property includes about 32 acres of olive groves and woodlands.

There are photos too.

Well at last. I've been looking for a house with those features for the longest time.

How "Hollywood"

The Los Angeles Times has an inauguration day editorial that calls on President Obama to actively support gay marriage. Talk about a Hollywood set of priorities.

The first comment from a gay reader is also noteworthy for its less than black-friendly attitude on a day when one might have expected a more congratulatory tone:

As a gay man, I have been active in the fight for gay rights for the last 30 years. One thing I have learned is that African-Americans have never been interested in any other civil rights struggle but their own. They certainly have not been friends of the gay or Jewish communities, and their relations with the Hispanic communities have been strained at best. They do not even show much interest in the struggles of other Africans in countries such as Sudan. These battles are mostly fought by wealthy whites such as George Clooney. Barack Obama's rejection of gay marriage is in keeping with his culture and no surprise.

Congratulations America

So, Barack Obama has not (yet) been revealed as America's new alien lizard overlord in disguise, or even the Antichrist. (Will the Antichrist be capable of placing his/her hand on a Bible, I wonder? Maybe he can, but with wisps of smoke emerging from under his palm.)

But enough silliness, and no further snide remarks (apart from saying that the largely unseen invocation prayer by Gene Robinson a couple of days ago really was outstandingly awful,) and instead let's all be happy that the most powerful nation on earth remains a robust democracy which manages transitions of power peacefully and with considerable grace.