Get that woman out of there!

Dezeen - Axial Symphony by Design Systems

I think I quite like this apartment refurbishment by a Hong Kong company, although I am curious about how hard it will be to maintain the mini mountain range on the terrace. You can't exactly run of mower over it, although I suppose a whipper snipper may do. (Kids would love it as an area to play with toy cars, soldiers or whatever.)

But what's this? There's a woman in shot in one of the interior photos. And she's slouching on the sofa! This is not allowed in architectural photography. All interiors must look unsullied by any evidence of actual humanity (including magazines, old newspapers, the mail, food, crumbs, the dog, and of course, people.) Big mistake.

Real estate bubble or not?

In China, fear of a real estate bubble - washingtonpost.com

There seems to be a fair amount of different opinion expressed in the article as to whether China has a real estate bubble that is about to burst, or whether it will hold for many years yet.

Of course, they already know about yurts, so it may be a bit redundant for me to mention again my favourite solution to all housing problems.

Lindzen criticism mounts

Lindzen & Choi's "feedback is nothing to worry about" paper from last year is facing more criticism.

Given that even Roy Spencer thinks Lindzen got this wrong, it would seem a fair bet that he did.

More money from dead bodies

Now you can be mummified just like the Egyptians - Science, News - The Independent

We haven't heard much about the plasticised skinned body exhibits lately, so it must be time to come up with some other ghoulish use of dead bodies for public entertainment. Cue England, that new bastion of inappropriate and degrading entertainment on TV:

We've had the first televised real autopsy and the first on-screen assisted suicide. The latest wheeze to challenge the British public’s attitudes to dying comes from Channel 4, which is appealing to the terminally ill to find someone to donate their body to be mummified for a reality television show – then displayed in a museum for two years.

Way to run a country

Chavez's snap devaluation sparks panic in the aisles - Americas, World - The Independent

The Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez promised to send soldiers into shops to seize businesses from owners who raise prices in the wake of the country's steep currency devaluation.

People had crowded into shops over the weekend to snap up imported televisions and electrical appliances, fearing that the devaluation of the bolivar was about to send inflation soaring.

"Right now, there is absolutely no reason for anybody to be raising prices of absolutely anything," Mr Chavez said on his weekly TV show. "I want the National Guard on the streets with the people to fight against speculation. Publicly denounce the speculator and we will intervene in any business of any size." To audience applause, the president added that the government would take over shops and give them to their workers if price rises were discovered.

Options, none of them good

Israel and Iran: The gathering storm | The Economist

Here's a very good article on the current situation and the limited options available in dealing with Iran's nuclear program.

The top hat controversy

Times Archive Blog: Why inventors weren't always hailed as heroes

The Times website has a link today to a Times Archive Blog story about inventions that caused a social stir in their day. Most strange is an account of the first top hat being worn on the street causing quite a disruption.

It is not so clear whether the story is true, but there is a link to the Times 1926 article which discusses it.

In fact, the whole Times Archive Blog looks like a very entertaining resource, and I am sad to have not discovered it before.

Doctors in trouble

Doctors gone bad stories are always interesting (or, I suppose, horrifying if you happened to have been their patient) and there are a couple of pretty spectacular cases of note lately:

* She was just trying to be helpful:

A DOCTOR has been struck off the medical register for giving a woman 22 prescriptions for mood-altering drugs, knowing she was secretly spiking her husband's coffee with the tablets for four years.

Yuk-Fun Christina Port, a GP in Deniliquin for more than 20 years, wrote prescriptions for about 3000 antidepressant and anti-psychotic tablets, including the highly toxic drug lithium carbonate used to treat bipolar disorder, without examining, diagnosing or monitoring the man.

Dr Port also changed the type of medication prescribed and increased his dose at the wife's request even though she had not seen the man for about six years, the NSW Medical Tribunal found.

Dr Port said she felt pressured to prescribe Sinequan, Aropax and Zoloft because the man's wife said he was becoming violent at home and she feared for the safety of her children.

* a former neurosurgeon seems to be finding it particularly hard to kick a habit:

A LEADING neurosurgeon charged with supplying drugs to a woman found dead in his apartment has been arrested for breaching his strict bail conditions.

Suresh Surendranath Nair, 41, was arrested shortly after midnight yesterday when Kings Cross detectives raided his apartment in Bondi.

His arrest came after surveillance police alleged the Malaysian-born surgeon separately hired three female escorts over 2½ hours, taking them back to his first-floor unit in Hall Street.

As part of his bail conditions, Dr Nair is barred from hiring any sex workers or taking illicit drugs.

The raid on the unit came a week after Dr Nair discharged himself from a private hospital where he had been undergoing treatment since being charged in relation to the death of Suellen Domingues Zaupa, 22, at his Elizabeth Bay unit on November 21 last year.

Three escorts over 2 1/2 hours? Seems kind of excessive, doesn't it?

And you thought House getting hooked on prescription painkillers was a scandal.

An innovative use for DNA science

Are the Taliban descended from ancient Israelites?

The Jerusalem Post reports:

Are the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan descendants of an Israelite tribe that migrated across Asia after it was exiled over 2,700 years ago?

This intriguing question has been asked by a variety of scholars, theologians, anthropologists and pundits over the years, but has remained somewhere between the realms of amateur speculation and serious academic research.

But now, for the first time, the government has shown official interest, with the Foreign Ministry providing a scholarship to an Indian scientist to come to the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa and determine whether or not the tribe that provides the hard core of today's Taliban has a blood link to any of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, and specifically to the tribe of Efraim.

Shahnaz Ali, a senior research fellow at the National Institute of Immunohaematology, Mumbai, has joined the Technion to study the blood samples that she collected from Afridi Pathans in Malihabad, in the Lucknow district, Uttar Pradesh state, India, to check their putative Israelite origin.

She's be doing genetic testing on the samples. If the theory pans out, I somehow can't imagine the Taliban being impressed. In fact, I thought the Israeli Government might be funding it just to annoy them.

But, it's possible that a historical link might be capable of good, and indeed at the end of the article, one researcher thinks this is the point:

Navras welcomed Shahnaz's research grant. "It's a great news that now my research would be analyzed scientifically," he said on his blog.

"I don't know what would be the outcome of the DNA analysis, but it would provide us a direction to resolve the complex issue. I also hope that such effort will have positive ramifications and will bring the Muslims and Jews close and enable them to forget historical animosity," Navras wrote

So it may be a case of government funded DNA research for peace. Neat.

Confirming what we knew

Boys will be boys when it comes to toys - life - 08 January 2010 - New Scientist

Seedy Sydney

I don't often find myself in agreement with Miranda Devine lately, but I reckon she's pretty right about the always slightly seedy atmosphere around the southern end of George Street.

Other big cities like New York apparently manage to push out the sex shops and general depressing sleaze from their entertainment areas, but somehow Sydney seems never to have quite managed that. (Mind you, it's been some years since I visited, but later this year I'll be there for a few days.)

Movies that jump the technological shark

I just saw the second half of the 2005 Jodie Foster movie "Flightplan". I knew the set up, and was curious to see the explanation for where the missing kid had disappeared on the plane.

I hadn't realised that the script would solve that problem by pretending that a plane somewhat resembling the new Airbus A 380 would have absolutely cavernous amounts of open space both above and below the passenger decks. It was so ridiculous, this internal design of the aircraft, that the movie just plummeted into a black hole of implausibility so overwhelming that I found it impossible to believe that any viewer could have found it engaging. Do people really think the hidden nooks and crannies on a passenger plane look something like a standing inside a Zeppelin?

Looking at the summaries of reviews at Rottentomatoes, it would seem that critic Mark Ramsey similarly found this the defining feature of the film:

It's an obscenely big plane. "Where is my daughter?!" asks Jodie. "Did you search the plane's tennis courts? The plane's new ballpark? Get me this plane's governor! NOW!

It's not often that technological ludicrousness ruins a movie for me. I mean, I'm not one of those people who likes to be overly analytical and worry about the fact that in Star Wars we can hear an explosion in space, or some such. Sometimes things are a bit silly and laughable but are sort of dramatically right, and you don't come away thinking that movie was ruined. But other times, that just doesn't work, and I can think of 2 movies in which technological silliness smacked me in the face so hard I could no longer enjoy it:

GoldenEye: no it wasn't the laser in a watch. Yes, ridiculous I know, but impossibly powerful gadgets had been in many of the Bond films for many years and I can overlook them. What I couldn't forgive was the absolutely 100% gold-plated absurd idea that a satellite weapon would have to be controlled by an antenna the size of the Arecibo Observatory, (of course, it was the Arecibo Observatory used in the film,) which also had to be hidden in a fake lake! I mean, even in 1995, satellite telephones were already in use with small laptop sized antennas, and even smaller handsets were in the pipeline. The satellite in question was not orbiting Pluto, for crying out loud; to use EMP it had to be in low earth orbit, not even geosynchronous orbit. What an inexcusably weak excuse for getting an interesting location into a movie. Didn't anyone point out this made no technological sense at all?

For some reason, it seems that every few months my mind goes back to GoldenEye and how annoyed I was at this incredibly stupid plot point. Maybe therapy is called for. Send me money someone, I will put it to good use.

Armageddon: to the best of my knowledge, this is by far the biggest collection of stupid, wrong, or improbable space science stuff ever assembled into one loud movie. Too many things wrong to possibly list. As Phil Plait wrote:

Here's the short version: "Armageddon" got some astronomy right. For example, there is an asteroid in the movie, and asteroids do indeed exist. And then there was... um... well, you know... um. Okay, so that was about all they got right.

Any reader with a different favourite example of a silly bit of technology that ruined a movie, you are welcome to share.

Planetary disaster averted

No, a nearby supernova won’t wipe us out | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine

The Daily Telegraph and The Sun both reported this was a relatively immanent danger to the Earth. As it wasn't picked up by more reliable sources, I suspected there might be less to the story than first appeared. Seems I was right, even if it wasn't the papers' fault

Prat blog

For those of you who just can't get enough of the only TV show host ever to urinate on his shirt and wrap it around his head, (he was feeling a touch hot at the time, and an application of warm urine apparently helps,) I've just discovered that "Bear" Grylls has his own, not frequently updated, blog.

He's significantly more annoying than Steve Irwin, who at least kept his unnecessary wildlife interventions to simply annoying them; not eating them. (That's assuming you can believe anything at all on "Man vs Wild". For all I know, every animal he eats raw may have followed him into the wilderness in an icebox.)

Worse still, it seems from his blog that he was appointed "Chief Scout" in England last year. That would put me off encouraging a child to the organisation.

Every time I see the show and the mention of him being ex-SAS, I just imagine a bunch of groans from the soldiers who used to serve with him. "That prat again...!"

Unnatural selection

Brow Beat : Beauty, American Beauty: Sam Mendes Directs James Bond

Slate has some mildly amusing fun with the announcement that Sam Mendes (!) is in talks to direct the next James Bond.

Presumably, this may at least mean that we don't get a repeat of the hypershakes and hyper-editing of Quantum of Solace. (My son saw some of it on TV recently and said, quite unprompted by his Dad, "it's too fast". Smart boy.)

However, whether it will also mean a Bondian mid-life or sexual identity crisis is another matter.

Things change slowly in the Middle East

Nearly a year ago to the day, I posted about how Egypt's blockade of Gaza attracts almost no attention from media critics of Israel. I see from this article that the blockade continues, and Egypt is working on ways to make the border even more secure.

Meanwhile, what happened to the Christmas hope that Shalit was about to be released? Oh. Still under consideration.

The magic plastic e readers

BBC News - Plastic Logic e-reader aims to challenge Kindle

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is apparently packed full of new e-readers this year, and the flexible plastic screen one shown in the video at the above link does look very cool, except that its odd squarish dimensions (while great for a genuine newspaper reading experience) looks a tad too large to safely carry in your briefcase.

The Skiff reader looks like the nearest rival to Plastic Logic, but no one knows how much it will cost.

And cost is a pretty significant issue.

Very, very nerd news

Japanese Live Action Star Blazers (Space Battleship Yamato) Trailer

I didn't know they were making a live action version of Space Battleship Yamato in Japan. They've released a teaser trailer for it that you can see at the above link.

I wasn't a huge fan of the cartoon, but it was of interest.

In even worse Muslim/Christian news:

Egyptians riot after 7 killed in church attack

Three gunmen in a car sprayed automatic gunfire into a crowd leaving a church in the town of Naga Hamadi. The lead attacker is identified as a Muslim...

Police suspect that the Wednesday night attack was in retaliation to a rape of a Muslim girl by a Christian man in the same town two months ago. Muslim inhabitants of the town had rioted for days last November and attacked Christian properties there after the rape, according to local reports.

Fighting over the name of God

Malaysia Says It will Appeal 'Allah' Ruling - WSJ.com

A fight is going on in Malaysia over a Catholic Malay language newspaper's court win against a government ban on its use of the word "Allah" for God. According to the above article:

The Arab word Allah has been used by Malay-speaking Christians for centuries, much as it is used by Christians in Arabic-speaking countries or in Indonesia, where, like Malaysia, the concept of a single deity was introduced by Arabic-speaking traders. Rev. Lawrence Andrew, editor of the Herald, says there's no other appropriate term for God in Malay.

The paper had a pretty good case:

The church's Herald newspaper filed a lawsuit in 2007 challenging a government ban on it using the word Allah as a translation for God, complaining that the prohibition discriminated against Malay-speaking indigenous tribes who converted to Christianity decades ago.

The newspaper has a circulation of about 14,000 and is available only in Catholic churches, although some Muslims have complained that it is possible to look up Malay-language material using the term Allah on the Herald's Web site.

Muslim activists mobilized almost as soon as the High Court's verdict was delivered. The National Union of Malaysian Muslim Students contended that Christian missionaries using the word Allah could trick Muslims into leaving their faith, and the influential Malaysian Islamic Youth Movement said it plans a demonstration against the verdict in Kuala Lumpur on Jan. 8.

The Malay-language Utusan Malaysia newspaper reported that the influential mufti of northern Perak state, Harussani Zakaria, called the verdict "an insult to Muslims in this country."

Some Muslim groups are planning protests for tomorrow. All pretty amazing, really.

UPDATE: a bit of church burning in KL overnight.

And a bit more on the background of the use of the word "Allah" by Christianity appeared in the Jakarta Post article on the arson attack:

Many Muslims in Malysia have refused to accept the argument that "Allah" is an Arabic word that predates Islam, and that it is used by Christians in countries such as Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Indonesia regularly in their worship.

Can't they parachute in Karen Armstrong to sort this all out?

Very odd

Cellphone radiation is good for Alzheimer's mice

Regular exposure to an electromagnetic field identical to the ones produced by mobile phones seems to improve memory in mice with symptoms of Alzheimer's disease...

To the researchers' surprise, the memory of both normal and transgenic mice exposed to the electromagnetic field (EMF) seemed better by the end of the experiment than that of a control group of mice that were not irradiated.

Arendash speculates that radiation might increase the electrical activity of neurons, which could in turn improve the brain's ability to form memories. An experiment in 2000 found that if people were exposed to an EMF equivalent to mobile-phone radiation before they went to bed, their brain activity during sleep increased....

They found that the brains of transgenic mice that had been exposed to the EMF from two months old did not contain as many plaques as transgenic control mice of the same age that had not been exposed to the EMF.

What's more, in the older transgenic mice, which had already developed brain plaques before the experiment began, the EMF exposure seemed to have broken up and shrunken the plaques. Arendash say he doesn't know how the EMF could do this.

That's a very surprising finding, and as the article says, it would have to be replicated to be sure the effect is real.

Never liked Wimps

BBC News - Dark matter 'beach ball' unveiled

This article talks about the inferred shape of the presumed dark matter around the Milky Way. It seems it's not like a round ball, but a squashed one.

This is why I've never felt that WIMPS (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) seemed like a good explanation. I mean, if they exist, why do they form squashed ball halos around galaxies in the first place? If they are weakly interacting with normal matter, why don't they exist in just a more or less random clumpiness right through the universe? I don't know that I have ever read much that addresses that issue.

As for large clumps of normal matter forming dark matter, that's always seemed kind of unlikely too, according to my gut reaction.

That's why the idea that there is something wrong with our understanding of gravity has always seemed to me to be just as likely, but MOND theories don't seem to be advancing much.

Poor Japan?

TigerHawk has an interesting post about Japan's debt problems.

The comments are worth reading too.

Not cold everywhere

BBC - Richard Black's Earth Watch: Arctic roots of 'upside-down' weather

That's interesting. According to Richard Black, while much of the Northern Hemisphere is having an unusually cold winter, some parts that are normally very cold aren't.

A very unusual talent

Frogs' secret disposal system revealed : Nature News

Plant thorns, spiny insects and even radio transmitters don't stick around for long inside tree frogs. Researchers have discovered that these amphibians can absorb foreign objects from their body cavities into their bladders and excrete them through urination.

Would be a good party trick if a human could do it.

Law, science and black holes

There's a very detailed and carefully argued article by a US Assistant Professor of Law about the LHC and safety concerns available at arXiv. (It would seem the article is to appear in the Tennessee Law Review, but I can't see if Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame, who is a Tennessee Law Professor, has noted it yet.)

It's very long, and I have only looked through the first half, but it seems very careful and accurate in its summary of the history of the scientific debate over its safety.

It even covers the concerns of Rainer Plaga, and agrees with my view that they never seem to have been adequately addressed.

The arXiv blog summary of the article is here. Both it and the original article are well worth a read.

UPDATE: hey, I've been Instapundit-ed! Thanks, and welcome all. There's a lot of old posts here about the LHC and black holes, but sadly you have to use the somewhat erratic search function to find them. (Why can't Google perfect search within the very blogs it owns?)

Sex in Malaysia, Part 2

Malaysian Polygamy Club Draws Criticism - NYTimes.com

Yesterday I posted about unfortunate young Malaysian couples getting a knock on their hotel room door from the Islamic "morality police" and facing charges.

Proving it's a land of contrasts, I suppose, is the above article about the increase in Islamic polygamy in the same country. One of the wives interviewed says:

“Men are by nature polygamous,” said Dr. Rohaya, Mr. Ikram’s third wife, flanked by the other three women and Mr. Ikram for an interview on a recent morning. The women were dressed in ankle-length skirts, their hair covered by tudungs, the Malaysian term for headscarf. “We hear of many men having the ‘other woman,’ affairs and prostitution because for men, one woman is not enough. Polygamy is a way to overcome social ills such as this.”

Well, only for those rich enough to provide support for the additional wives, one suspects.

However, it is interesting to note that further down in the article, one critic of the system points out that:

...she knew some well-educated, financially independent women in Kuala Lumpur, including business executives and lawyers, who had chosen to become second or third wives.

“Usually they marry late, they do a second or third degree, they put off marriage until later and they find it difficult to find an unmarried man,” she said. “One of them said ‘all the good men are either married or gay.”’

The women of Sydney who have the same complaint could have their predicament cured by some radical changes in the Marriage Act, then.

And if polygamy were allowed here, but only by men taking on wives richer than themselves, maybe even I could be persuaded of its benefits. :)

Nerd grief

The fall-out from Doctor Who

Caitlin Moran's description of her and her daughter's shared devastation at David Tennant's departure from Dr Who is pretty funny:

Dora and I did a good fifteen minutes of mother/daughter nerd-mourning together - crying whilst flicking through Doctor Who Magazine and saying "Oh that's a good Ood still". Then Dora progressed into the "anger" stage of bereavement: at one point shouting, "Tom Baker managed seven years - WHY COULDN'T DAVID?"

I didn't know she even knew who Tom Baker was. At that point I realised that whilst I was walking wounded, she was metaphorically doing a geek haemmorhage. As Dora lay on the floor, moaning, "WHY did he have to GO?", Pete had a moment of genius, and downloaded a Doctor Who audiobook, read out by Tennant. Comforted by the prospect of there being at least one more David Tennant adventure to be had, Dora finally fell asleep listening to it - AT SODDING 11.30PM

Big explosion noted

Runaway anti-matter production makes for a spectacular stellar explosion

University of Notre Dame astronomer Peter Garnavich and a team of collaborators have discovered a distant star that exploded when its center became so hot that matter and anti-matter particle pairs were created. The star, dubbed Y-155, began its life around 200 times the mass of our Sun but probably became "pair-unstable" and triggered a runaway thermonuclear reaction that made it visible nearly halfway across the universe....

Garnavich and his collaborators calculated that, at its peak, Y-155 was generating energy at a rate 100 billion times greater than the sun's output. To do this, Y-155 must have synthesized between 6 and 8 solar masses of radioactive nickel. It is the decay of radioactive elements that drives the light curves of supernovae. A normal "Type Ia" thermonuclear supernova makes about one tenth as much radioactive nickel.

"In our images, Y-155 appeared a million times fainter than the unaided human eye can detect, but that is because of its enormous distance," Garnavich said. "If Y-155 had exploded in the Milky Way it would have knocked our socks off."

Over 40 years ago scientists proposed that massive stars could become unstable through the production of matter/anti-matter particle pairs, but only recently have large-scale searches of the sky, like the ESSENCE project, permitted the discovery of these bright, but rare, events.

Maybe we just live in a lucky corner of the universe.

Playtime for lawyers

BBC News - France mulls 'psychological violence' ban

I didn't realise the French could be quite so silly.

Cool photo

The_view_from_Burj_Dubai_by_shebanx.jpg

Found this via comments to a Guardian piece on the new skyscraper in Dubai.

New Year in Malaysia

52 unmarried Malaysian Muslim couples face jail for hotel liaisons

Scores of officers fanned out across budget hotels in central Selangor state before dawn on Jan 1, knocking on doors and detaining unmarried Muslim couples who were sharing rooms, said Hidayat Abdul Rani, a spokesman for the Selangor Islamic Department.

The detained, mostly students and young factory workers, are expected to be charged with “khalwat,” or “close proximity,” which under Malaysia’s Islamic Shariah law is described as couples not married to each other being alone together in a private place.

“We chose to have this large-scale operation on New Year’s Day because many people are known to commit this offense while celebrating such a major holiday,” Hidayat said.

In Selangor, “khalwat” carries a maximum penalty of two years in prison and a fine.

Movies and kids

Sci-fi epic doesn't kid around: critics - Film - Entertainment - smh.com.au

My 9 year old son is very keen to see Avatar, but I finally checked the rating and found it was M. After speaking to a person who has seen it, I've decided not to take him.

This article quotes someone who believes that:

"...Avatar was not suitable for children under eight ''due to scary and disturbing scenes and violence'', and was ''not recommended'' for children eight to 12.

''Some of the research indicates that parents don't always know when their kids are handling a movie well,'' said Ms Biggins yesterday. ''There are longer-term impacts on kids that don't always show up at the time.

It certainly seems to me that some parents are ridiculously careless about what movies they take their kids to, and I particularly recall my surprise at the number of young boys that were in the cinema when I saw Terminator 2 back in the 1990's. I quite disliked the film anyway, and I suppose you could argue that most of the violence is robot on robot. But killing a guy with a metal spike through the eye, various other breakings of human bones, the general bleak, dark tone of the whole film, and a real lack of any particularly sympathetic characters to my mind made it one of the most obviously unsuitable films for under 10 year olds that I could imagine.

Basically, most parents seem to pay no attention to the classification a film receives.

Yurt on ice

Broadband, Yes. Toilet, No. - NYTimes.com

I haven't mentioned yurts for a while, but I see that the NY Times has an article with a good slideshow about a young family in Alaska who chose to live in one.

It apparently cost about $14,000, looks pretty nice to me, but does have the disadvantage of having an outside toilet and no running water for a shower or the dishes. (They walk to town to do the laundry and wash themselves.) Given that they live in a place that can get 17 feet of snow in a season, even I would draw the line at living with an outside loo in a place like that.

Decline of Great Britain, cont.

Forget Shameless: X-Factor holds up a truer mirror to the working class | Television & radio | The Observer

This article is mainly about the (to me) surprisingly successful British drama/comedy Shameless. I simply don't "get" the show, yet apparently semi-tragic "comedic" stories of the hopeless unemployed/working class characters of modern day Britain are appreciated by many people. To criticise such a show as being largely amoral and/or condescending is to invite the response that you are merely middle class twit, apparently:

The actor has pointed out that Shameless appeals to all sectors of the audience. "I've had people from right across the social spectrum tell me they get it," he said. "Sometimes reporters ask, 'Don't you think you're being a bit patronising about working- class people?' To which I say, 'Bollocks, you middle-class journalist!' If it was condescending, I'd know, because the people on the estates where we film would come and tell me."

But apparently some in Manchester have (finally) started to turn against it:

Bloggers on the Manchester Evening News website are not impressed. "In the beginning, it was edgy and fun. Now it is just tripe, it makes the people of Manchester and Salford look like low-life idiots," complains one..

Only now they are starting to realise that?

Annual mochi death toll post gets harder

Yes, I'm sure someone out there has been waiting for the annual "New Year's Japanese death toll from eating mochi" post. (If you Google "mochi deaths", my 2009 blog post on the topic comes up as No.1. I'm not entirely sure if that's a good thing.)

Well, this year the task is proving much harder than normal, because for some reason it seems that no Japanese news source that publishes on the Web in English has carried the news.

Will this stop your blogger? No. I've had to track down the stories in Japanese, and then use Babel Fish to give the contorted translation. Here we go, from Yoimuri Online via Babel Fish:

The rice cake clogging 2 human death 1 person it is heavy the body

The accident where the senior citizens can plug having in the throat one after another, with investigation of the Yomiuri Shimbun Company, in 4 days December 31st - January 3rd, 10 people was carried by the hospital at least inside the prefecture, the inside 2 people died, 1 people became heavily the body of unconscious.

　According to the National Fire Prevention and Control Administra and the like of every place, 1st around 11 o'clock in the morning, the man of Ichihara city (68) to be carried by the hospital of the same city, prompt the death. 2nd, the man of Funabashi city (61) was carried by the hospital of the same city even around 11 o'clock in the afternoon, died promptly.

　In addition, was carried to the hospital 8 man and woman total of 70 - 87 years old in such as Chiba city and Asahi city.

And I think this might only be the problems mochi has caused in just one prefecture. (There's a report of a 60 year old man dying in Asaka.)

So who knows what the national death toll is? But in any event, the dangers of eating mochi on New Years certainly continue. (And, as with last year, terribly sorry to be sounding as if making light of unfortunate deaths.)

Update: for figures for the New Year 2010/2011, see my latest post here.

An enjoyable review

The legacy of Grace Kelly : The New Yorker

It's by Anthony Lane, so it's good.

The dangers and benefits of pretending

I thought the story in the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday about the psychological dangers of actors playing dark roles was pretty interesting. I hadn't heard the story before that Daniel Day-Lewis quit Hamlet after seeing his own dead father on stage, or that Robert Downey Jnr partly blamed playing a cocaine addict in a movie for his own real life addiction.

As the article says, part of the problem is that Western training for actors has come to be dominated by method acting, by which actors are encouraged to internalise and experience the fictional character.

It is, in many ways, a little curious that this has become the dominant idea for actor training. After all, it only came to be popular in the mid 20th century, and at least two of the worlds most lauded actors, Olivier and Guinness, were not into it. Olivier is famously said to have told Dustin Hoffman to "just try acting", or similar words, although the veracity and meaning of that anecdote seems somewhat uncertain now. I am pretty sure it is fair to say that, although he could be extremely thoughtful about what he was doing, Alec Guinness also took a "craftsman" approach to acting which would disdain the need to internalise the role being performed. (I think he also used to say that his approach to acting over the years increasingly came to be one of whittling down the effects to a bare minimum, but maybe that was particularly encouraged by some of the characters he was later to play.) Harrison Ford, who is not the world's greatest actor but has been quite convincing in some serious roles, has also frequently made the comparison to it being a trade something like the carpentry that he did between jobs in his early days.

So if everyone knows that method acting is not essential, why do so many drama teachers still think it so important? I assume that it's because it gives a certain gravitas to the profession that is, after all, a very curious one that is very similar to child's play conducted in public. (Colin Firth, who I don't particularly find interesting as a actor, at least recognizes the semi-absurdity of the job.)

Talking about this reminds me that (I think) CS Lewis said somewhere that if you pretend something long enough, you start to believe it. I can't track down the quote now, but I remember it struck me as important at the time I first read it.

As a an aspect of the human psyche, it is something that can be used in both a positive or negative way. It is related to the idea that a lie repeated enough will start to be believed, but on the other hand, as Lewis said elsewhere: "Do not waste time bothering whether you "love" your neighbour; act as if you did."

Certainly, atheists can use it to attack religious faith as being no more than a matter of thoughtless indoctrination. (A point Lewis would surely have recognized, but you have to also concede that he did his fair share to get people to really think about their faith.)

But from the other side of the fence, it is a principle that can be used to justify a critical attitude of the (barely recognized by younger people especially) Freudian psychology which dominates Western thinking in many ways. Why, after all, should we be so concerned with understanding our subconscious landscape, and giving fulfillment to it, if it is something that can be "tricked" into believing stuff quite easily anyway?

The important point that CS Lewis, and the (now Catholic) philosopher Alisdair McIntyre might make is that Aristotle was right in his assumption "that man is as-he-happens-to-be and that this is distinct from man-as-he-should-be," and that "pretending" to the extent that it helps a person become the person they should be is a worthy thing. I really must get around to reading McIntyre one day.

If method acting made people think about this, it would serve something useful.

A New Year link miscellany

I've been off to the seaside for much of the last week, and there's a post about that on its way. But to get me back into blogging mode, here's a bunch of stuff that has caught my attention since I got back on the computer:

* The Australian ran an interesting article on one of the oddest UFO cases of the 20th century: the Australian missionary William Gill's detailed report of a sighting in New Guinea in 1959.

The case has received much attention over the years because of it strange combination of improbable details (humanoid figures seen on a platform floating above the mission by a whole group of witnesses) and the apparent believability of the missionary reporting it.

It was a sighting that lasted a long time, which is always immediate reason to believe it is Venus or a similarly bright astronomical object. But how do you mistake a planet as a platform containing a bunch of waving humanoids? Some skeptics have suggested that it was simply Gill's poor eyesight, but if so it's one of the strangest cases of mistaken identity from squinting at a point of light It also would appear that Gill never admitted that it was a hoax. It remains a very odd case.

* Slate magazine remembers Omni magazine with fondness. I'm glad I'm not on my own. At its height, it was a great read that I looked forward to every month, and I think I've still got some editions somewhere in the garage, if the silverfish haven't got to them.

* The Australian continues its bipolar approach to Tony Abbott, whose ascendancy seemed to be greeted with a lot of "Abbott brings the fight up to Rudd" guff, but the paper still has to concede that current polling indicates that regional areas still aren't going Coalition, and by all looks an early election will place Labor in a much better position than it is now. It will be an interesting year in politics.

* From Japan we learn that about university research that indicates that lightning (or just electric shocks) makes for a bigger shiitake mushroom crop. How on earth did the Iwate University come up with that research idea? Must be a distinct lack of things for the electrical engineers to do, is all I can say. (I think I've even walked through their campus too.)

* More depressingly (if you like Japan) it would appear the population dropped again in 2009.

* In the trivia department, I learned from the New Scientist Christmas edition that the Romans used to stew grapes in lead pots "leeching the sweet tasting metal into their food". I knew they used lead for cooking; I didn't know it was sweet tasting. It's rather unfortunate when a toxic metal tastes good.

* Scientific American had a short article on one of the big stirling engine solar power companies. (My early favourite, Infinia, seems to be much slower at getting into big production.)

Christmas greetings

Interesting

How December 25 Became Christmas - Biblical Archaeology Review

Found this via First Things. It's quite an interesting article on the origins of the celebration of Christmas, and points that there is another explanation for the date other than it simply being a Christian take over of the Roman mid-winter Saturnalia festival.

There is another way to account for the origins of Christmas on December 25: Strange as it may seem, the key to dating Jesus’ birth may lie in the dating of Jesus’ death at Passover. This view was first suggested to the modern world by French scholar Louis Duchesne in the early 20th century and fully developed by American Thomas Talley in more recent years. But they were certainly not the first to note a connection between the traditional date of Jesus’ death and his birth.

Around 200 C.E. Tertullian of Carthage reported the calculation that the 14th of Nisan (the day of the crucifixion according to the Gospel of John) in the year Jesus died was equivalent to March 25 in the Roman (solar) calendar. March 25 is, of course, nine months before December 25; it was later recognized as the Feast of the Annunciation—the commemoration of Jesus’ conception. Thus, Jesus was believed to have been conceived and crucified on the same day of the year. Exactly nine months later, Jesus was born, on December 25.

Annabel Crabb's charitable column

ABC The Drum - Why I like politicians

It's true what she says about politicians and the hours they work, if you take into account all of the party and electorate stuff they have to attend.

I said this to a family member once, who is in the public service, and he pointed out that while it may be tedious to someone like us, for politicians there is an ego stroking aspect of being asked to attend every local shindig.

He could be right.

Charity and the homeless

Local gov'ts to lease 500 rooms for homeless people during year-end

The Japanese government is getting a bit more involved in providing support for the homeless, but as the articles notes, they are still falling well short of the need:

Tokyo and nine other prefectural governments have decided to lease about 500 rooms from places like inns and company dormitories to accommodate homeless persons during the year-end and new year holidays, Kyodo News learned Wednesday.

But the number falls significantly below the welfare ministry’s initial target of securing 2,700 rooms nationwide, apparently because local governments feared too many rooms might lure jobless or homeless persons from surrounding areas, ministry sources said.

The impression you get of the homeless when you visit Japan is that they are economic victims who still have some pride. Hence their cardboard box shelters set up in corners of a big train station will be neat, with shoes still taken off and left outside. I can't say that I have ever seen a drunk, rambling or obviously mentally disturbed looking homeless person around such a shelter, as you readily find in certain parts of the inner cities of Australia. (Mind you, I could just not be going to the equivalent areas of urban Japan.)

I also get the distinct impression that there is little in the way of charities assisting the homeless in Japan, as there are here. I could be wrong; any reader from there can correct me. But the impression I have is that those countries with a history of monotheistic faith have a larger enthusiasm for providing charity, rather than those countries based on Eastern religions.

Your Christmas present from Opinion Dominion

Oceanography: Current Issue

Wow. Oceanography has an entire special issue devoted to ocean acidification with all articles available for free at the link above.

I haven't had time to read it yet, but they are clearly very detailed articles from some of the biggest names in the field.

Wishing you a well informed, if somewhat depressing, Christmas!

Distressing holiday news

Alvin and the Chipmunks 2 is about to be released at the cinema. (And my kids know about it.)

Christmas in Space

NASA - NASA-International Space Station

It's nice to think of those far away from family at Christmas, and you can't get much further away than off the planet. The link above shows the current international crew of 5 on the ISS in silly Santa hates, and has lots of stuff to click on. I should send them a greeting I suppose.

Some cure

BBC NEWS | Health | Tinnitus cure 'is a step closer'

From the above report:

Studies show hearing loss can go hand-in-hand with over-excitable nerves within brain areas that process sound.

This uncontrolled nerve activity causes the noises that plague people with tinnitus and appears to be down to gene changes, Neuroscience reports.

And it raises the hope of treatment by silencing nerve activity, experts say....

Indeed, Belgian neurosurgeon Dirk De Ridder has tried implanting electrodes directly into the brain of sufferers to permanently normalise the overactive neurons.

He has had some successful results, although one of his patients repeatedly reported an out-of-body experience as a side effect.

Post mortem on Copenhagen

BBC News - Why did Copenhagen fail to deliver a climate deal?

There's lot of interesting detail in the BBC's analysis of what went wrong at Copenhagen. For example, this had escaped my attention:

China's chief negotiator was barred by security for the first three days of the meeting - a serious issue that should have been sorted out after day one. This was said to have left the Chinese delegation in high dudgeon.

Mind you, I'm probably in the group that is inclined to think that a bad binding international agreement might have ultimately been worse than the current outcome.

More bathing history

Filth: The joy of dirt | The Economist

I know I have posted on the history of cleanliness and bathing before (perhaps I have mentioned reviews of this book some time ago?) but The Economist review seems to note things I didn't know before. Such as the importance of linen if you didn't bathe:

Regular all-over bathing, elaborated in ancient Greece and Rome and celebrated in luxurious contemporary ensuite bathrooms, was distrusted for about 400 years in the second millennium. Water was thought to carry disease into the skin; pores nicely clogged with dirt were a means to block it out. In the 17th century the European aristocracy, who washed little, wore linen shirts in order to draw out dirt from the skin instead, and heavy perfumes and oils to mask bad smells.

And:

Throughout the 17th century, writes Georges Vigarello, in “Le Propre et le Sale”, it was thought that linen had special properties that enabled it to absorb sweat from the body. For gentlemen, a wardrobe full of fine linen smocks or undershirts to enable a daily change was the height of hygienic sophistication. Racine and Molière owned 30 each.

As for the gradual end of the "water is dangerous" idea:

The myth of the danger of water was long-lived, and its demolition during the 18th and 19th centuries protracted. Louis XIV had sumptuous bathrooms built at Versailles but not, explains Mathieu da Vinha in “Le Versailles de Louis XIV”, in order to clean the body. Valets rather rubbed his hands and face with alcohol, and he took therapeutic baths only irregularly. Yet a century later Napoleon and Josephine both relished a hot bath, and owned several ornate bidets. In “Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing”, Katherine Ashenburg notes that bathing was tied to diplomacy: the more tense the moment, the longer the soak. As the Peace of Amiens fell apart in 1803, Napoleon lay in the tub for six hours.

And let's hear it for the Japanese, who never went through the fear of water fad that the West did:

As Orwell goes on to ponder the question, “do the ‘lower classes’ smell?”, he points out that: “the habit of washing yourself all over every day is a very recent one in Europe, and the working classes are generally more conservative than the bourgeoisie. But the English are growing visibly cleaner, and we may hope that in a hundred years they will be almost as clean as the Japanese.”

Christmas reading suggestion

The Japan Times has a short article on a new book entitled: "Suisen Toire wa Kodai ni mo Atta — Toire Kokogaku Nyumon" ("Flush Toilets Existed in Ancient Times — An Introduction to Toilet Archaeology").

The author "was first captivated by toilet archaeology when he excavated the late seventh century toilet remains at the Fujiwara Palace in Kashihara, Nara Prefecture, in 1992.."

Not quite Indiana Jones, but it's a living.

Inspirational, strange or both?

Two-legged dog gives hope to disabled Army vets -- latimes.com

You really ought to look at the video of the two legged walking dog.

Sounds reasonable

Faster, NASA, Faster - NYTimes.com

The concluding paragraphs:

There is no reason American companies could not build a similar, but modernized, medium-sized, economical workhorse of a rocket that is simple enough to sustain frequent launching. If NASA were to promise to buy one such rocket a week, the manufacturers could also profitably sell copies for launching commercial spacecraft and satellites — at much lower than current prices — and this would spur the development of space-based industries in fields like telecommunications, earth imaging and even space tourism.

To maintain a vibrant, innovative program, NASA needs to step up the rate of rocket launchings. It should set a requirement that any new launching system fly once a week, then put out contracts for private companies to design and build rockets that can operate this frequently. By launching early and launching often, NASA could get back in the business of exploring space.

Dawkins' limits

Elders with Andrew Denton - episode 6: Richard Dawkins (21/12/2009)

Last night's Andrew Denton interview of Richard Dawkins was pretty fascinating. It seemed to me that Dawkins was quite defensive and almost ludicrously cautious; seemingly worrying all the time that Denton was setting him up for some sort of trap. For example, this exchange:

ANDREW DENTON: What's your definition of success?

RICHARD DAWKINS: ...Oh dear, I don't really answer that kind of question...

ANDREW DENTON: Why not?

RICHARD DAWKINS: ...I'm just trying, well, because I just think of it as a dictionary word, which has a dictionary definition and you can go and look it up. I don't have a personal...

ANDREW DENTON: Well, you don't have a marker in your life for what would be achievement?

RICHARD DAWKINS: No, it's cause it's either you just give a dictionary definition or it becomes very complicated and personal. No, I don't really think I've got a got a good answer to that.

And then this part where he seems unwilling to talk about emotions:

ANDREW DENTON: Is it possible to explain love?

RICHARD DAWKINS: I think it in principle can be explained but I don't actually have the internal wherewithal to explain it. I just experience it.

And this:

ANDREW DENTON: When do you laugh at yourself?

RICHARD DAWKINS: ...Are all the questions going to be like this?

ANDREW DENTON: Not all... do you find these very difficult?

RICHARD DAWKINS: Yes.

ANDREW DENTON: Well, why is that?

RICHARD DAWKINS: Um ... because they're about me, I suppose.

ANDREW DENTON: Some of the questions are about you and some are about your observation of other people.

RICHARD DAWKINS: Yes...

I found this avoidance of the personal and emotional a strange contrast with his aggressiveness and apparent confidence in attacking belief in God.

More entertainment than expected

Taking the kids to a Christmas season bit of theatre seems to be a riskier exercise than it used to be. First, you have to hope that Amy Winehouse is not in the audience:

During a production of Cinderella at Milton Keynes theater in Bucks, Winehouse, who was in the audience with parents and children, heckled the cast and kept shouting, “He’s f…ing behind you”, The Sun reported.

Winehouse allegedly refused to be seated as she blocked the view of families by standing up in the stalls and walking along rows.

She called out for more than half an hour in the first act, yelling: "F… Cinders, Prince Charming, marry me" and branding the ugly stepsisters characters "bitches", sources said.

She refused to be ushered to a box after the interval and allegedly launched herself at front-of-house manager Richard Pound - allegedly pulling his hair, punching him and kicking him between the legs.

And even in New Zealand the kids might get more of an education that you expected:

About 130 foster children went along to see a performance of An Adagio Christmas put on specially for the young group.

Most of the children in the group were under 10, and some were as young as six.

But the government service that arranged the free Christmas play had not seen the script, which contained swearing and sexual references.

One character in the show swore: "He called me fat. You can talk you fat f**k."

Then another character talked about losing her virginity and pretended to have an orgasm.

"She loses her virginity! She shuddered and he lifted her higher, higher!"

The deputy chief executive of the Child, Youth and Family service, Ray Smith, has released a statement saying the play was a generous gift from a Wellington theatre.

He says he is disappointed the event has been tarnished by what he calls less-than-fair media coverage.

He said while small sections took everyone a little by surprise, they did not detract from what was an amazing show.

One way correspondence

Dear God, you've got mail

Well, I didn't know that this went on. I'm starting my 30 page opus now.

Lowering expectations

I forgot to link last week to this post at the First Things blog, about how low an author's expectations should be. It quotes a publisher, and then adds its own comment at the end:

"Here’s the reality of the book industry: in 2004, 950,000 titles out of the 1.2 million tracked by Nielsen Bookscan sold fewer than 99 copies. Another 200,000 sold fewer than 1,000 copies. Only 25,000 sold more than 5,000 copies. The average book in America sells about 500 copies. (Publishers Weekly, July 17, 2006). And average sales have since fallen much more. According to BookScan, which tracks most bookstore, online, and other retail sales of books, only 299 million books were sold in 2008 in the U.S. in all adult nonfiction categories combined. The average U.S. book is now selling less than 250 copies per year and less than 3,000 copies over its lifetime."

Alternative: Start a blog. You’re likely to reach more readers in a year you will with your book

Well, that makes me feel better about being a low-ranking blogger.

A fair summary

Phillip Coorey in theSydney Morning Herald gives a fair enough summary of the political mess that Australia (and indeed the world) is in regarding a response to AGW.

Christmas consciousness in the Many Worlds

Here's an interesting paper I found on arXiv: "Quantum features of consciousness, computers and brain".

I haven't heard of author Michael Mensky and his ideas before, and it remains unclear what his science qualifications are. Here's his home page.

He calls his idea the Extended Everett's Concept (EEC). (That's referring to Hugh Everett's "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics.)

This paper is rather frustrating. His explanation of the background debate of the role of consciousness in quantum physics, and Hugh Everett's many worlds theory, seems all quite reasonable and (as far as I can tell) accurate. But his own EEC idea seems poorly explained. For example, we get this:

Although consciousness in EEC is directly connected with quantum features of our world, no structure in brain of the type of quantum computer is suggested. Rather the whole quantum world is a sort of quantum computer supporting the phenomenon of consciousness and superconsciousness.

I need more meat on those bones. Here is another interesting line, apparently the crucial feature of EEC:

It is accepted in EEC that not only consciousness separate the alternatives but consciousness is nothing else than the separation of alternatives.

I should note that this paper is not the first he has written on his EEC idea; he came up with it in 2000, apparently. So I am not suggesting that this paper is inadequate for not explaining it well enough.

But when he gets to the consequences of the idea, it starts to sound a bit New Age flaky:

....the separation of alternatives disappears in the unconscious regime so that one obtains access to all alternatives. Therefore, in unconscious regime one obtains super-consciousness having access to all classical alternatives. This not only predicts ‘supernatural’ capabilities of consciousness but also explains why these capabilities reveal themself when (explicit) consciousness is turned off or weakened, for example in dream or meditation (the fact well known in all strong psychological practices).

This explains not only parapsychology but such well known phenomena as intuitive guesses including great scientific insights. In fact superconsciousness is a mechanism of direct vision of truth.

Hmm. Mensky has been published in the grandiosely titled journal "NeuroQuantology." (I wish I had come up with that name.) I see now that he has had an earlier paper up on arXiv, but I don't have time to read tonight. The abstract notes that:

The brain serves as an interface between the body and consciousness, but the most profound level of consciousness is not a function of brain.

So our individual consciousness is all just a subset of the the universal super-consciousness that is accessed via the brain? I'm not sure if that's what he means, but I am interested enough to read some more. (It also sounds consistent with some Eastern religious beliefs, too.)

Anyhow, this is just the sort of stuff that I find pretty intriguing. I may be enjoying the coming Christmas not just in this world, but in many others too, and while I sleep I may catch a glimpse of them. It's a good thing I don't have many nightmares.

On a final note: given that "many worlds" is pretty popular amongst scientists now, has any theologian considered its implications for Christianity? (I know Frank Tipler believes in it, and is a Christian, but I am not sure he has much dwelt on the theological implications.)

I mean, Christianity can live with the idea that God may have had incarnations in alien species in the universe we can see, but can you expand that to include his necessary incarnation in all of a spectacular number of branching universes? Just wondering...

Update: here's a recent internet forum in which the question about Christian theology and Many Worlds was asked, and some useful contributions follow. I also see that there was a 1998 seminar on the whole topic, with the likes of Paul Davies, Lee Smolin, a Vatican scientist and even Richard Dawkins attending! I'm betting nothing was resolved.

Mad or not?

James Cameron appeared on Conan O'Brien's show last week and did not appear particularly mad at all. Here's part one of the interview, which has its amusing bits:



Part 2 can be seen here.

The Daily Mail recently ran a story about him and Avatar, suggesting that there was enormous fear in the studio that it would be a box office failure. (That prediction seems way off the mark. The movie has been so well received, even I will probably see it.) The article describes Cameron's reputation as a horrible person to work with (or marry, apparently), which I noted here before, but also adds a little bit more biographical detail, such as his boyhood obsessive with Kubrick's 2001 inspiring his career.

Maybe Cameron should meet Kevin Rudd; they both seem to have a well deserved reputation for being two-faced. And it would be kind of amusing to see one of those Hollywood plagiarism cases against Cameron; I imagine James would turn up on the plaintiff's doorstep at midnight in mega gun-toting space marine mode, suggesting it be dropped.

Much to do about very little

RealClimate: Are the CRU data “suspect”? An objective assessment.

Climate change skeptics are still happily misrepresenting "hide the decline" and so busy trying to track down site adjustments that they think look suspicious (all the better to smear climate scientists with "smell likes fraud" comments) that they forget to see the wood for the trees. (Briffa pun unintended.)

This useful post at Real Climate shows a random check of raw data against the much maligned (by skeptics) adjusted data indicates no great disparity with the warming trends worked out from either.

I particularly liked one of the comments following the post, responding to a commenter suggesting that he was still concerned about researcher bias in what is chosen to be published. Here's the response:

JSC, frankly, the likelihood that this analysis could have come out differently is basically nil, because their are multiple research groups analyzing such climate data, so there is no way that one group could be “cooking the books” in some way without a discrepancy showing up. For that reason, an analysis like this is almost certainly unpublishable–it is hard to a publication for belaboring the obvious. I don’t think the point of this post was to convince the deniers, anyway. Anybody who believes that CRU, GISS, etc. are all engaged in a grand conspiracy has doubtless already dismissed RealClimate as co-conspirators, so why would they believe that the raw data randomly sampled just because RealClimate says so?

The key point here is that the data is readily available for anybody who is genuinely interested in temperature trends or who is concerned about the possibility of temperature adjustments introducing bias, and it provides an example of how to go about it. This is not sophisticated science, just random sampling that anybody who has taken a basic statistics course would understand. The remarkable thing, really, is the apparent total lack of interest of climate science critics/auditors in doing this kind of basic analysis. One cannot help but suspect the motives of those who focus on criticisms of cherry-picked individual stations, or who insist that the validity of the enterprise cannot be evaluated without analysis to every scrap of data and code used by climate scientists for their own analyses, but who cannot be bothered to do this kind of analysis using unbiased sampling techniques. Or perhaps they have done it, but have chosen not to report it?

Toddler Hamlet

Here's a very charming video found via Scienceblogs:

Now I can write that novel

johncwright: Writing in One Lesson

Science fiction writer talks about the "one trick" in writing, which I assume I am allowed to pass on here:

There is, when you right down to it, only one trick in writing, which she here calls "the trick." It consists of raising the readers expectations, but satisfying those expectations in a logical yet unexpected way. The trick is that anything has more effect if the reader things the opposite is about to happen.

If you only learn one thing about writing, learning the trick the one thing you should learn.

The trick when applied to plots is called plot twist; when applied to character, is called three-dimensionality; when applied to theme, is called wisdom; when applied to word-choice is called contrast.

I'm not sure how useful this is for my tiny brain. When I was single and had more idle time to think, I would sometimes try to think of ideas for stories or movies (or even plays, since they seem the simplest form of writing for publication possible!) But my mind would invariably float to books/movies/plays/characters I already knew or liked. I guess that other people sharing this problem explains fan fiction. It's so much easier to work in a world already created by someone else than to start in your own.

And on the rare occasion I have tried to write something, I realised that simply reading fiction gives you absolutely no idea how to write it. Just to write the simplest exchange of dialogue seemed suddenly awkward and daunting.

Actually, on this dialogue point, I have just tried to read Tim Winton's "Breath", and found it dull. His approach to setting out dialogue was to simply indent it, avoid inverted commas and strip it of surrounding "I said" "she said" stuff. I found this quite unsatisfactory. After about 25 pages, I decided the book was uninteresting thematically, and skimmed the rest. It turns out that erotic asphyxiation - sometimes auto-erotic, sometimes not - was a key plot element, although I couldn't really see the point of the whole novel really. I had thought I might like Winton, given that he is reviewed so favourably (he won the Miles Franklin Award for this book, for crying out loud) but it turns out he is a JAOAA (Just Another Overrated Australian Arthur.)

(Yay, I just listened to the BBC Saturday Review in which one person on the panel reckons the book's a bore too.)

Anyway, I'll just sit around and wait for a breakthrough idea, write it as a play set to the music of ELO, and make millions.

A Christmas suggestion for your local GP

GIANTmicrobes

I find the line "Swine Flu (H1N1) now available" particularly amusing.

CO2 news from the AGU

AGU Day 2: The role of CO2 in the earth’s history | Serendipity

This is a good, lengthy summary of a talk given at the current American Geophysical Union conference on the important role of CO2 in prehistory.

There is also a very noteworthy report of a talk given by the people who run AIRS, an infrared instrument, on NASA's Aqua satellite.

Here are some key parts:

researchers told reporters that AIRS, containing no moving parts, has proved remarkably robust, measuring carbon dioxide, ozone, water vapor, and carbon monoxide in the mid-troposphere, five to 12 km above Earth’s surface, with far greater precision than anticipated prior to launch in 2002.

In particular, said Moustafa Chahine of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, “AIRS provides the highest accuracy and yield of any global carbon dioxide data set available to the scientific community.” Seven years of these data were made available to researchers worldwide in conjunction with the AGU meeting. NASA said it was the first ever release of daily CO2 data based solely on observations.

AIRS researchers have learned over the past seven years that CO2 does not mix well in the troposphere, but is what Chahine called “lumpy,” concentrated more in some places than in others, driven by the jet stream. AIRS has tracked the dispersion of CO2 from Indonesian forest fires, which accounts for a staggering 20% of global anthropogenic CO2. Where does it go? Along with the northern hemisphere’s other CO2 emissions, much of it winds up over the southern hemisphere, according to AIRS measurements, as reported here....

Bloody hell! How hard can it be to devise a way to stop Indonesians from burning so much forest?

This part is important:

Another member of the AIRS team, Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M University, reported on the unique view the instrument is providing of water vapor distribution in the atmosphere, and in particular the feedback of water vapor that he says amplifies warming due to CO2. He warned that warming of a few degrees Celsius is “essentially guaranteed” over the next century, unless there exists a “presently unknown offsetting feedback (e.g., clouds).”

Dessler took issue with a statement, attributed to Lowell Wood, in the recently published book, Superfreakonomics, that current climate models “do not know how to handle water vapor and various types of clouds….I hope we’ll have good numbers on water vapor by 2020 or thereabouts.” Dessler told reporters that AIRS, using the infrared spectrum, sees right through clouds and is providing accurate water vapor data today. Current models do a good job of simulating the water vapor feedback effect, he said.

A worthy post

An ambitious social experiment: the Harlem Children's zone - Life Matters - 11 December 2009

I happened to hear part of this radio documentary on the Harlem Children's Zone, a project designed to make a difference to the socially disadvantaged kids of that area.

It was really quite interesting, explaining how adult work training programs don't generally work, yet some relatively simple interventions in very early childhood show clear and lasting benefits for the kids.

I've always felt a bit suspicious of some of the claims of the early childhood intervention academics. It just sounded like a field of study which wanted to carve out a new niche industry of toddler teachers.

But this documentary sounded very convincing, at least if you talking of the advantages early intervention shows in really poor/disadvantaged neighbourhoods.

It's well worth a listen, which is your only choice as there is no transcript.

The Economist on Copenhagen

The Copenhagen climate talks: Filthy lucre fouls the air | The Economist

This article is a pretty good explanation of the arguments over money at Copenhagen.

As I have said elsewhere, it does seem that African and other developing nations seem to have gone to Copenhagen with a "shake down the rich guys" attitude. Here's a crucial paragraph:

Everyone agrees that poorer countries, including India and China, need cash for climate “mitigation”—adopting green technology and new approaches to land use and forest conservation—and for “adaptation”: coping with the anticipated effects of climate change, some of which (like a degree of sea level rise) look unavoidable. America has joined the list of countries accepting such transfers, saying it will pay its “fair share”. Rich countries have talked of a “quick start” fund. The leaked Danish text has it starting in 2010-12 at a value to be determined; the UN has suggested $10 billion. To poor countries, this sounds paltry: responses range from “bribery” to “it will not even pay for the coffins”. Instead, the G77 has asked for 0.5% to 1% of the rich countries’ GDPs. That implies hundreds of billions of dollars on top of existing development aid. The idea that rich countries will hand over 1.2% to 1.7% of their wealth in perpetuity is not going to fly.

May be worse

Sea level rise may exceed worst expectations : Nature News

Sounds pretty convincing explanation that there may be worse sea level rises than previously expected.

Cardboard houses

Shigeru Ban, the architecture of paper - latimes.com

An interesting series of photos here of an architect who really likes cardboard.

Things that make me happy, No 2

Time for an another instalment of this absolutely fascinating series.*

It's....Tasmanian smoked salmon. Tassal or Huon brands, available at all good supermarkets. (It shames the imported stuff.)

But, it is a pleasure that has a small amount of guilt associated with it. See the recent story about how environmentally questionable Tasmanian salmon farming is. Still, they'll have to take my 100 g two serve packet out of my cold, dead, somewhat fishy smelling, hands.

* Perhaps a slight exaggeration.

One of the more interesting planets found

Waterworld planet is more Earth-like than any discovered before | Science | guardian.co.uk

This makes me think: has there ever been a science fiction novel based on the exploration of a entire water planet? I can't think of one off the top of my head.

Agreed

ABC The Drum Unleashed - Evidence-based policy? Not on this filter!

I still don't quite understand all the details of the Labor government's internet filter, but I understand enough to be able to tell, as noted in this article, that it is going to be completely ineffective for the "normal" types of pornography sites that probably represent 99.999999% of the concern about children accessing the internet.

Surprise: someone with more faces than Kevin Rudd

It is very hard to see how he does it. (I haven't listened to the video, so maybe he gives an explanation.)

Most excellent news

How a glass or two of champagne really does lift the heart | Life and style | The Observer

The team found that champagne had a far greater impact on nitric oxide levels in the blood than did a polyphenol-free alternative of alcohol and carbonated water. In short, its polyphenols have the ability to improve blood pressure and reduce heart disease risks. "Our data suggests that a daily moderate consumption of champagne wine may improve vascular performance via the delivery of phenolic constituents," state the researchers in their paper. They have yet to test other types of fizz, such as cava and prosecco, but Spencer said there was "no reason" in principle that they should not perform in the same way.

Bet Australia follows

Cheques to be bounced into history | Money | guardian.co.uk

Snark heaven

There's lots of UK-centric but still enjoyable snark in The Guardian's series of "The people who ruined the decade". My favourite entries so far:

BEN ELTON Turned rock history into a 'jukebox musical' cash cow

"The Matrix meets the Arthurian legend meets Terminator 2," was how Ben Elton hilariously described his Queen musical when it debuted in 2002. A more honest commentator might have pegged We Will Rock You as being a bit like Suzi Quatro directing a particularly stupid episode of Deep Space Nine using a cast entirely drawn from the Camden branch of Fresh & Wild. By blowing off any regard for plot, cliche or character arc, Elton took the genteel traditions of musical theatre and rock's outsider chic, and served them up as a mindless MOR smoothie. Marketing men realised there were plenty more theatregoers too old to rock'n'roll, yet too dumb for Sondheim. And so, as Tonight's The Night et al followed the idiot-proof recipe drawn up by WWRY and its close predecessor, Mamma Mia!, Elton – rather wisely – relocated to Australia. Now, if you stand in the West End on a Saturday night and tune out the muffled chorus of Hoover salesmen singing Bohemian Rhapsody, you can hear Theatreland creaking towards a new cultural low.

Well, actually I don't care for Sondheim either, but apart from that I agree.

And then there is this, about a TV producer I've never heard of who has a hell of lot to answer for:

PETER BAZALGETTE TV's posh popularist

What do Rebecca Loos's porcine pull-off in The Farm, Jade Goody's entire TV career, and those late-night call-in shows where glamour models pretend that no one in the country is able to rearrange the letters "s-p-a-n-n-r-e" to spell out something you find in a tool box, all have in common? The uncommonly common touch of Peter "Baz" Bazalgette, ex-chairman of Endemol UK. Though Bazalgette says he's a "fishwife at heart", he remains one of those odd, Notting Hill fishwives who attended Dulwich College, Cambridge University and now sits on the board at The English National Opera. Under Bazalgette's watch, TV schedules resembled a televisual tranquiliser, administered from the top table of British society, down to the TV diners at the bottom. He would of course, dismiss this as miserable, puritanical carping, before popping off to a box at the ENO to catch a simply delightful Italian sing their heart out (while you watched Ground Force).

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(Regular readers may recall that, strangely, fiddling with pigs seems to be a particularly popular feature of British TV.)

Cute abstract

From arXiv, a physics paper with an appealing abstract:

The current observational data imply that the universe would end with a cosmic doomsday in the holographic dark energy model. However, unfortunately, the big-rip singularity will ruin the theoretical foundation of the holographic dark energy scenario. To rescue the holographic scenario of dark energy, we employ the braneworld cosmology and incorporate the extra-dimension effects into the holographic theory of dark energy. We find that such a mend could erase the big-rip singularity and leads to a de Sitter finale for the holographic cosmos. Therefore, in the holographic dark energy model, the extra-dimension recipe could heal the world.

Now someone just has to explain to me what a "de Sitter finale" to the universe means.

Esoteric research

In the previous post, I mentioned Ron Stenman, who has runs the Paranormal Review blog, but I've never read it much. (Everything seems to get a run there, which makes it seem just a touch too "broad church" even for someone like me with an interest in the topic.)

Still, this recent post of his shows that there is still some quite esoteric research being undertaken in some parts of the world:

Automatic writing mediumship (known in Brazil as psychography) has almost disappeared in Europe but is still much in evidence in Brazil. Clinical psychologist Dr Julio Peres decided to use the latest medical technology to explore what changes occur in the mediums’ brains whilst apparently receiving communications from spirit entities. To find out, he took 10 of them to the United States so that they could undergo neuroimaging at the University of Pennsylvania’s hospital, which has a new Centre for Spirituality and the Mind.

Before participating in the sessions, each medium was injected with a tracer substance so that areas of brain activity would show up on SPECT scans, which use gamma rays to monitor changes. Brain activity was recorded when the subjects were writing normally and also when they were producing spirit-inspired scripts.

The results, which Dr Peres says “challenges the hypothesis that the mind is created by the brain”, revealed that whilst the content of the automatic scripts was more complex than the structure of the mediums’ normal writing, their scans showed the activity of the reasoning parts of their brains decreased during automatic writing. Which poses the question: who was creating them?

Dr Peres hopes that a scientific paper on this research will be published in the next few months. The data will also be published as a book next year.

Automatic writing would be more impressive if it created whole works worthy of a deceased author, but as far as I know it only produces screeds of New Age-ish waffle. Still, it's of interest.

Death to modern witches

Saudi Arabia to execute TV psychic

An unbelievable story from Saudi Arabi. The Guardian's "Comment is Free" section has also covered it here. Ron Stenman makes the point:

I can’t help but reflect on the absurdity of a situation that arises from a religion – Islam – which is said to be based on revelations from angels dictated to Muhammad over a 20-year-period. In some countries, that would also be thought of as witchcraft.

I would be very surprised if an execution goes ahead, but as the link at the top of this post notes, there is at least one female "witch" still on death row in Saudi Arabia for the last few years.

What a country...