Queen witch Bratara Buzea said she will lead a chorus of witches in casting a spell using a concoction of cat excrement and a dead dog.Interestingly, the report goes on to note:
Such spiritualism has long been tolerated by the Orthodox Church in Romania. The late Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, had their own personal witch.Well, at last I understand the best role for this woman in the Australian parliament.
And the report ends:Riyadh: A squad from the Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice has raided the house of a Saudi man following a tip off that he is practising sorcery.
It was reported that the suspect has bewitched a girl and married her without the knowledge of her family.
Following investigation, the suspect was put in jail, awaiting trial. Saudi Arabia applies capital punishment for sorcery.
The incident, which took place in Riyadh, came to light when a security guard, working for a private company, accused a fellow citizen of bewitching his daughter and his other family members and used magic to marry the girl without a marriage contract.
The Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice [gosh, that's an appealing name for a a government department, isn't it?] said it is conducting awareness programmes against the practice of withcraft.Now there's a lecture that would be interesting to see.
Saudi Arabia confirmed on Tuesday it plans to buy more F-15 fighter jets as part of a massive arms deal which the US State Department said in September could be worth up to $60 billion.This is a tad odd, isn't it? If the government believes in sorcery enough to be giving public education programs and killing people for it, why do they need 20th century jet fighter technology to protect themselves? Can't they train up a crack elite squad of good sorcerers who will, I don't know, stand at the border and make the enemy forget that Saudi Arabia is there?
Saudi nationals have seized a vulture wearing a Tel Aviv University tag and a transmitter, prompting speculations that it was used by Mossad, the Israeli spying agency, to gather intelligence on the area....No, clearly this is just a country that has been left out in the hot sun for too long.
The vulture was handed over to the Saudi security.
According to Israeli media, the tags indicated that the six-year-old bird was part of a long-term research project into migration patterns.
Those who are inclined towards itchy self consciousness after reading about the amazing variety of life to be found living on and in our bodies should probably not read The top 10 life-forms living on Lady Gaga (and you).
I thought I had heard of most kinds of bugs that live in and on us before, but the article still contained a few surprises (or things I had forgotten about.) For example:
Inside your lungs is a kind of fungi called Pneumocystis. It cannot live outside of human lungs. No one has been able to grow it anywhere else.
And (emphasis mine):
Update: you can read more about face mites here.I will wager that Lady Gaga’s head is crawling with mites. They live in her pores and come out to have sex under the shade of her wig while she is on stage. Well, not just then. They do it other times too. She could have more than one kind of mite. Forehead mites (Demodex spp.) have not been well studied and they are so small that differences among species might be impossible to detect simply by studying how they and their parts look under the microscope (which is all that has been done). Where these mites have been studied, they have mostly just been counted. They are more common on older people than on younger people. The exception to this pattern is among the Tokelau islanders where the pattern is the reverse (more mites on younger people) for reasons unknown. On average--the Tokelau Islanders in the audience notwithstanding--more than half of us have forehead mites and quite a few of us host two species. Some of us may even host as of yet unnamed species. Every so often these mites are badly behaved (they are linked to rosacea, although innocent until more convincingly proven guilty), but mostly they seem to have no effect on our lives. Maybe they are even good for us? Who knows? What is clear is that they bury themselves in our pores and eat.
It is quite easy to look for one's own Demodex mites, by carefully removing an eyelash or eyebrow hair and placing it under a microscope.Umm, not sure I want to know, when they look like this:
Over the years, considerable evidence has accumulated that Demodex folliculorum may at least play a role in certain skin conditions, particularly papulopustular rosacea. Patients with immunity problems, such as AIDS patients, appear to be particularly susceptible. Symptomatic infestation with demodex mites is called demodicidosis or demodex folliculitis.Excuse me while I go practice how long I can hold my breath while keeping my head in a bucket of rubbing alcohol.
While the role of demodex in disease is still unclear, treatment for skin problems in cases where there are many mites present now often includes a topical antiparasitic cream. Treatment successes where the mites were targeted provide further indirect evidence that face mites cause skin problems, at least in some instances.
...ironically, the leaks show that the US government is not an "authoritarian conspiracy" at all. They show, notably in the case of relations with the Arab states of the Middle East, an American government served by generally candid diplomats, trying to keep its balance and think its ways through a devilishly challenging set of problems, chief among them how to dissuade the theocratic and dangerously anti-Semitic regime in Iran from developing nuclear weapons. They show nuance and scruple, not authoritarian conspiracy. They show honest assessments of world leaders such as the corrupt and domineering former KGB thug Vladimir Putin, or the corrupt and irresponsible Italian leader Silvio Berlusconi. Moreover, as Robert Gates, heir to McNamara, has pointed out, the leaks were possible precisely because the US government had been trying to circulate more information to more of its civil servants in order to facilitate learning. That was Ellsberg's agenda. Assange wants to prevent just such learning.
Michael Tobis (and Gareth Renowden) have really been ripping into some recent bogus claims by climate “skeptics”lately. First, it was the non story of the New Zealand temperature record adjustments, somehow claimed by the skeptic group that forced a reassessment as some sort of triumph over the e-vil lying NIWA scientists. Yet, gullible skeptics lap this sort of stuff up.
Secondly, it was a takedown of a Watts Up With That post by Don Easterbrook, in which a puzzling graph was claimed to show something it patently did not. Again, about 95% of the comments following the story at Anthony Watts place brought this hook, line and sinker.
There really is a new definition for gullible, and it’s Climate Change Skeptic.
As someone commented at Tobis’ blog, it seemed clear that Watts Up With That has in the last couple of weeks been running with a pre-emptive campaign to argue why the possible hottest year on record title for 2010 (it will be a close call with 1998) is not really so important anyway. I reckon this sort of pre-emptive action was obvious in 2010 too, with respect to Arctic ice loss when it wasn’t clear just how wrong Steven Goddard’s prediction would be.
At other blogs:
* Barry Brook has an important post on the meaning of the “no statistically significant warming since 1995” line. In fact, he puts up a persuasive argument as to why it was (in effect) the wrong question that was being asked in the first place.
* Tamino looks at the GISS temperature record to once again emphasise via graph that there is no last decade decline in the warming trend, which is the key thing (not the annual ups and downs.)
* Stoat had a pretty good take before Christmas on the issue of explanations for the current (and previous year’s) cold European winter, which can be summed up as:
He doesn't deny that the ideas being run as to why these winters have been so cold might be correct (see the Real Climate post on this), but he considers it safer to not try to over-explain weather and its relationship to climate change. Given the way skeptics smack their lips over decade old statements that snow was well and truly on the way out in Britain, he has a pretty good point.So before explaining such-and-such an event, the first thing you need to do is to show that there is something in need of an explanation. A cold December in Europe doesn't fall into that category.
* It’s easy to forget, in light of the well publicised extreme heat of Russia in 2010, that Japan also suffered a record hot, long summer last year. As I noted in my first post of 2011 earlier today, it seems that the record number of deaths for the elderly has been blamed on this. The Japan Meteorological Agency seems right on board with AGW, and it is fascinating how so many agencies from so many countries have been “fooled” according to the skeptics. It’s funny how the gullible think they can recognize the gullible, but it doesn’t work that way.
Update: I see that the China Meteorological Agency also put out a 2010 year end summary noting the extreme weather, and putting it down to global warming. For example:
Extreme rainstorms followed the hot weather. Ninety-seven weather stations around China reported record-breaking daily rainfall, and 133 stations broke their annual records. Only seven record-breaking daily rainfall figures were reported from 2000 to 2009.
This intriguing article “The Truth Wears Off”appeared in the New Yorker before Christmas, but I’ve only just read it.
It’s all about the “decline effect”, whereby effects that initially appear strong in experimental studies seem to start declining in effectiveness as more and more scientists try to replicate the original findings.
Some (or all) of this is understandable in terms of better experimental set ups, and publication bias, which means that it’s much easier to get an apparently new effect published than a study that has a negative result.
But the article is of most interest when discussing cases where the scientists who first made a positive finding discover that they can’t replicate it themselves. A good example is given from parapsychology, where pioneer JB Rhine initially seemed to have a star subject, but he subsequently seemed to lose all of his ESP powers. Sure, the simple explanation may be that, even though Rhine may have thought the replication set up was identical with the previous one, it really wasn’t, and a trick the subject was previously using subsequently failed him. But it does seem a little odd to me that Rhine wouldn’t find the trick in a case like this: one feels sure that this would be more satisfying in its own way than admitting that he can’t explain why a subject lost his power.
There are other examples of this given in the article, and from less contentious fields than parapsychology. It’s well worth a read.
Talk of all this couldn’t help but remind me of Rupert Sheldrake and his odd morphic resonance idea. In short, he believes that you can scientifically show that it becomes easier to acquire knowledge as more and more subjects learn it, be they birds, dogs or humans. (And, of course, in his theory, it’s not via simple imitation of the first creature who learnt the talent.) A genuine decline effect would seem to be the opposite of that.
A possible example of the decline effect that came to my mind was the original cold fusion experiments, and perhaps some of the subsequent ones too. These are not mentioned in the article, however.
If it were true (the decline effect) I guess it could be explicable (warning: wild speculation about to embarked upon) by either:
a. the universe really being a computer simulation game run by a mega intelligence that changes the rules for some obscure purpose while the program runs; or
b. God, his opposite number, or aliens (take your pick) finding it important that certain things not be discovered by humans until the time is right. I personally like the idea of undercover teams of angels, demons, aliens or Men in Black interfering with important experiments in very subtle ways to confound humans at particular points in time. Of course, this may make “sense” for something fundamentally groundbreaking like the discovery of ESP, or perhaps cold fusion, but why it should apply to the effects of antipsychotic drugs would be rather harder to explain.
I guess there is probably some science fiction (or supernatural fiction) that has been written along the lines of b, but I can’t bring any to mind. The nearest may be the idea in the Day the Earth Stood Still that aliens would give us a warning to mend our ways by one spectacular demonstration of their power. But that was far from an discrete way of interfering. And I do recall David Brin wrote “The Practice Effect”, in which inanimate objects get better with “practice”, but again that is more akin to Sheldrake’s idea than a decline effect.
A decline effect has better fiction possibilities than morphic resonance, and maybe that is its most endearing feature.
Happy New Year, everyone, and once again, condolences are due to those in Japan who just lost someone due to the annual New Year’s mochi eating habit.
Yes, as my Google search ranking for “mochi deaths” remains very high (number one in fact, something I acknowledge as a dubious distinction), I know that I have visitors waiting for this annual post.
But as with last year, it seems that the English Japanese news media have lost interest in providing the numbers of (usually elderly) Japanese residents who choke on their New Years mochi.
So again I have had to resort to searching in Japanese, this time with the ever helpful Google translate. It seems the numbers in the Tokyo area (see 3rd story at the linked page to Yomiuri Shimbun), at least, are pretty much as high as ever:
Between one or two days in Tokyo, Kanagawa, Saitama, Chiba, and Wakayama prefectures of five, died choke on rice cakes from a total of 10 elderly people.
Tokyo Fire Department is "good hair cut is a small cake, for the elderly and children, accompanied by family members want," and has called for.
So, the take home message from that seems to be: 10 dead, at least 24 taken to hospital. You can watch video of this deadly New Year's treat here at the link to Fuji TV. Fortunately, none of the participants keel over and die for the crew filming it.According to the agency, in Tokyo, the 24 people taken to the hospital by 8:00 pm two days, killing six of them. The 70 year-old woman died and five 95-year-old man 82. Five of them were at home eating rice cake.
In the other 4 provinces, 61 hours a day to choke on rice cakes 89-year-old male and female four people died.
There is another TV news story (see link to Japan TV NNN) about it, sadly showing an elderly person in a nursing home, by the looks, not being fed mochi. It is, I suppose, a hard story to illustrate well, but still I wish they had come up with something better than this.
Anyhow, my searching around hasn’t found any obvious links to the national mochi death toll this year, but if there were 10 dead around Tokyo, the total for the entire country must be considerably higher.
It’s no wonder that articles like this, warning of the danger, appear just before New Years. Incidentally, maybe this gives an indication of how many people die nationally from mochi, if I can trust Google Translate:
According to the Tokyo Fire Department, four years until 2009, the number of cases in food spending by 4719 the risk of suffocation. Of these, 444 of rice accounts for about 10 percent, are concentrated in the month of January to about 40% of the 171. The ratio becomes more severe 53%, and 70 years or older in most cases by a lot of food.
The Cabinet Office Food Safety Commission in June this year, the probability of risk of suffocation on food, and summarizes the results of the cake at highest risk. And is calculated by assuming 100 million people took a bite, the cake is to be up to 7.6 at the frequency of accidents….
According to the Ministry of Health, Vital Statistics, the number of deaths due to suffocation incidents of food in 2009 4679 people. Account for nearly 90 percent of those over 65.
So, if Tokyo Fire Department has about 4,719 deaths over four years from all choking, and the total national figure is about the same per year, maybe we can assume the national New Year's mochi death toll is about 3 to 4 times the Tokyo average? Well, someone with actual Japanese ability can correct me, but it seems a fair guess.
Onto more death in Japan news, the Japan Times notes the following:
A total of 4,863 people died from traffic accidents in 2010, down 51 from the previous year, according to preliminary data from the NPA.
So, roughly the same amount of Japanese die annually in car accidents as from choking? How does that compare to other countries? Well, it appears well above the American choking rate:
According to the National Safety Council, choking remained the fourth leading cause of unintentional injury death in the United States as of 2004. In 2006, a total of 4,100 deaths (1.4 deaths per 100,000 population) from unintentional ingestion or inhalation of food or other objects resulting in airway obstruction was reported.
But the real point I was linking to the Japan Times article was due to the coverage on the shrinking Japanese population generally:
Death record reset KYODO An estimated 1,194,000 Japanese died last year, the most since record-keeping began in 1947, according to the latest health ministry data.
The data also said an estimated 1,071,000 babies were born 2010, up slightly from 2009.
The difference between births and deaths — 123,000 — also set a record high, blowing by the previous record of 71,830 set in 2009.
"The number of deaths is on the rise due to aging and the number of births will not grow because of a decline in the population of women who give birth," a Health, Labor and Welfare ministry official said.
The difference "will continue to be greater in the future," the official said.
In 2009, total deaths fell by 542 from 2008 to stand at 1,141,865. In 2010, however, total deaths surged by around 52,000 as elderly people succumbed to the hottest summer on record, the official said.
Japan's population decline has certainly taken a surge for the worse, by the sounds. (It's also interesting to note how many deaths they blame on the hot summer, even in a country where small houses and apartments make air conditioning easier and more economical than in countries like Australia.)
The Japan Times also recently ran an interesting opinion piece noting that Japan's fertility decline was by no means unique, being shared by other East Asian countries (Korea and Taiwan both, oddly enough) as well as strong welfare state countries such as in Scandinavia. This is true enough, but it still doesn't address the major issue of Japan being reluctant to take substantial immigration. It's not like they're going to be short of houses anytime soon.
Long term readers may recall that, apart from They Might be Giants, my other main pop music interest has been David Byrne and Talking Heads.
Tonight, I was looking at a Youtube of Once in a Lifetime, as I was going to show it my son. But he was too busy hunting dinosaurs on the iPad, so he didn’t pay much attention. I’ll get him to watch it yet.
But the thing of interest is that this upload of the clip (done in Jan 2010) is still attracting recent comments. (I presume it must the version that everyone watches when they search for it.)
And generally speaking, nearly everyone commenting seems young, but very appreciative. I like this one:
my parents will do the arm thing and say "same as it ever was" all the time!! LOLOL
And this comment:
Such a cool video even till today
and
Best. Video. Ever
That’s nice. I feel the 1980's doesn't have much to be ashamed of after all.
My favourite band, They Might be Giants, spend a lot of time doing kids albums lately, which I don’t usually buy, even though they write some pretty catchy stuff that usually gets them a Grammy nomination.
But I think I will get the current one: Here Comes Science. Most of the songs seem to be up on Youtube, and I like many, including this one:
And I’ve also found a video for another song of there’s from a couple of years ago. Since we all like drinking and smoking puppets, it’s worth a look:
I’ve been looking around The Guardian’s Comment is Free Belief section, and it’s pretty good. (Generally speaking, I preferred The Guardian’s website when they gave more prominence to CIF articles on their main page. Now you have to make the extra click, and I miss a lot of stuff there.)
This article about modernising Hinduism is pretty interesting. Apparently, the Hindu America Foundation has a report that tackles the caste system head on. I was interested to read this part:
It's always good to see how outsider intellectuals justified crap systems.Noting that there are defenders of the caste system, not just the curmudgeon and cruel among Hindus, but the likes of Voltaire and Diderot who fought against the monotheistic intolerance of Christians and Muslims, to sociologists like Louis Dumont who argued that the "distribution of functions leads to exchanges", to the great Indophile, Alain Daniélou who argued that caste does not equate to "racist inequality but… a natural ordering of diversity," the HAF report argues that a birth-based hierarchy is unacceptable, that inequities against and the abuse of the Dalits/SCs is a human rights issue, and that the solution to this social ill is available within Hindu sacred texts themselves, and that Hindus should be at the forefront of putting an end to the system of birth-based hierarchy as well as taking the lead in energising the Dalit community to fight discrimination.
Scientists already know that a drop in ocean pH affects the carbon cycle, reducing the carbonate ions that organisms like corals, mollusks and crustaceans use to build shells and external skeletons. Now, a new study shows that a CO2-induced increase in acidity also appears to disrupt the marine nitrogen cycle. The finding, to be published December 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could have ramifications for the entire ocean food web.But what practical effect this may have is completely unclear:
Nitrification decreased, compared to controls, in all experimental cases, with the effect ranging from an 8 percent reduction to a 38 percent reduction. "What we saw is almost uniform across the ocean, or at least in all the experiments we conducted, which seems to suggest this is fairly consistent effect," says Beman. Importantly, in some cases the change was quite large. "So it could have a pretty substantial effect on how nitrogen is cycled in the ocean," he says.
One potentially positive effect could be a reduction of nitrous oxide—marine nitrification is a relatively big source of this greenhouse gas. "But the larger, much more difficult things to predict are the connections to other organisms and processes," says Beman. Less nitrification would make fewer nitrates available to the plants and other organisms that use them to make vital proteins, making it more difficult for them to thrive. This in turn means less food would be available to the animals that eat those nitrate-using organisms, and so on up the food web.
Time for some ocean acidification news.
Oysters grown on the West coast of American have been having a hard time. As this story noted in 2009:
In 2005, when most of the millions of Pacific oysters in this tree-lined estuary failed to reproduce, Washington’s shellfish growers largely shrugged it off.
In a region that provides one-sixth of the nation’s oysters – the epicenter of the West Coast’s $111 million oyster industry – everyone knows nature can be fickle.
But then the failure was repeated in 2006, 2007 and 2008. It spread to an Oregon hatchery that supplies baby oysters to shellfish nurseries from Puget Sound to Los Angeles. Eighty percent of that hatchery’s oyster larvae died, too.
Now, as the oyster industry heads into the fifth summer of its most unnerving crisis in decades, scientists are pondering a disturbing theory. They suspect water that rises from deep in the Pacific Ocean – icy seawater that surges into Willapa Bay and gets pumped into seaside hatcheries – may be corrosive enough to kill baby oysters.
Well, now it seems the suspicions of high CO2 having something to do with this may have been confirmed. Someone had the good idea to actually takes measurements of the water used:
Increased pCO2 and decreased pH have been shown to negatively impact larval development in C. gigas (Kurihara, 2007). Periods of elevated pCO2 in May and June 2010 correlated with commercial losses at WCH.
In another study, decreased pH was shown to decrease shell strength of pearl oysters (although it doesn’t appear that they looked at the pearls themselves.)
And for corals, another recent study indicated that a combination of even modest water temperature increase and lower pH has a big effect on coral growth and survival:
Holger babysat 40 of the baby corals for 42 days under four different conditions: In the first tank, the researchers simulated 1C of ocean warming; in the next, they simulated ocean acidification by bubbling carbon dioxide through the tank to lower the pH by 0.25; the third combined this warming and acidification; and a fourth tank maintained current ocean conditions as a control.
“The different conditions had absolutely no effect on the ability of the larva to settle – to stick to the rock surface – which may be good news for people who are trying to grow coral gardens,” Aaron says.
But post-settlement, some of the young coral polyps were showing the effects ‘global warming’.
“The biggest surprise was that neither temperature alone, nor acidification alone had a big effect on the growth or survival rate [95%] of the coral, even though the warming prompted zooxanthallae expulsion as expected,” Aaron says. “Once we combined this moderate warming and acidification, though, we saw significant impacts: growth rate of the polyps – for both the skeletal and soft pulpy mass – plummeted to almost half of the rate seen under the other three conditions, and they were twice as likely to die [90% survival rate].”
The link to the actual study abstact is here.
And finally, if these Europeans have it right, the decrease in aragonite saturation (important for some corals and shellfish) is going to be on a rapid downward spiral this century right around the world:
If you want to read the tiny words, and look in more detail at the original, go here.
I recently mentioned Geoffrey Rush as an Australian actor who actually doesn’t bother me. (He has managed to get through the insidious effects Australian films have on me.) I see today that he has an interview in LA Times which is pretty interesting. I liked this part about his first (short) trip to LA:
Tell me about the first time you ever set foot in L.A.
It was in 1996. James L. Brooks had seen a copy of Shine before it was released, and he asked to meet with me. So I flew over and spent six hours with him. He had a little camera, and I read and did improv, and then I just got back on the plane and came home. It was weird—there was a limo waiting to take me to my $500-a-week theater job.What was your impression of the city from those six hours?
Well, I’m suddenly driving down Pico Boulevard. You see the palm trees, and you think, Oh my God, it’s just like Brisbane but bigger! It didn’t seem unfamiliar, because it’s known to us through so many movies. It just had a complete air of unreality, and I thought, This is kind of an adventure. [Brooks] gave me some Simpsons booty to bring back. I got [an animation] cel and some shirts and stuff. It was a fun, amazing weekend.
Slide 14Clear? No, it wasn't to me either.In conclusion: The drive to reduce scientific uncertainty in support of precautionary and optimal decision making strategies regarding CO2 mitigation has arguably resulted in:
- unwarranted high confidence in assessments of climate change attribution, sensitivity and projections
- relative neglect of defining and understanding the plausible and possible worst case scenarios
- relative neglect of decadal and longer scale modes of natural climate variability
- and conflicting “certainties” that result in policy inaction
Slide 15
A way forward is the decision analytic framework of robust decision making under deep uncertainty, which emphasizes scenario discovery and uncertainty analysis and identifying a broad range of robust decision strategies.
Implications of such a strategy for climate research are an increased emphasis on:
- exploring and understanding the full range of uncertainty
- scenario discovery using a broader range of approaches
- natural climate variability, abrupt climate change, and regional climate variability
He also emphasised the importance of only speaking in areas where you had earnt credibility based on your published record, which formed an interesting backdrop to Judith Curry's talk later that day. She devoted her time to accusing the IPCC of ignoring the tails of the pdfs of climate sensitivity that were clearly presented in the very figure that she repeatedly referred to and explicitly emphasised in the summary ("values substantially higher than 4.5C cannot be excluded"), then read out a few cartoons and finally, literally out of nowhere, concluded that therefore they had underestimated the magnitude of decadal variability and that their detection and attribution results were unsound! Really, I'm not making this up, it was actually how it happened. These latter topics were first introduced on her concluding slide and there was no hint of supporting argument. She also talked about the "modal falsification" of Betz 2009, (which I haven't read but just googled now, is there a free version somewhere?) so I asked if and how this "falsification" (and she used the scare quotes herself) was distinct from assigning a low posterior probability in a Bayesian sense. She replied that it could be considered the same, at which point some of the audience were shaking their heads and others were nodding in agreement. From which I conclude that nobody, including Judith, knows what Judith means. Unfortunately, she didn't seem to be anywhere to be found at the end of the session and I didn't see her at any of the other relevant sessions where people actually dealing with these sorts of issues were actually presenting concrete results.So, I am not alone in not being able to make head nor tail of Curry, and my lack of science qualifications are not the reason why. Romm's description of her as a "confusionist" seems as apt as ever.
