Of gods and men (and women too)

On rock worship and the Shinto gods | The Japan Times Online

I was interested to read this article by Japan Times columnist Amy Chavez, concerning how Shinto works.

It's basically an animistic religion, with particular places said to have their local god. But I wasn't really aware of this aspect of it:

Part yamabushi and part spiritual healer, Man-chan is 84 years old and considered the person most in touch with the Shinto spirits (kami), on our island. He alerted me to a couple of yorishiro or spiritual antennas to the gods. These days the kami probably have handheld GPSs made in China, but in ancient times you still had to send them a spiritual sign. So special rocks or trees were designated as antennas to invite the kami to descend there. No batteries necessary.

The most famous rocks of this sort in Japan are perhaps Meoto Iwa, the "husband and wife rocks" off the coast of Mie Prefecture. These rocks invite the kami to descend on them from above. You often see these two rocks in photos, a special shimenawa rope connecting them across the water. Let's hope they never divorce.

Man-chan told me that Shinmei Shrine was considered sacred because of the small cave there. But the two other places he told me about, Myoken and Hachiman, were given their status by a Shinto priest. In other words, the priest invited the kami to descend there. When a priest calls to the kami to descend, he must feel the kami enter his body. He must feel the spirit of the kami in his heart. He may even prostrate himself before the kami. If he does not feel the kami inside him, they have not descended and the spot is not made sacred.

Various shamanistic and animistic religions appear to have this idea: that the priest or holy man takes the nature god or spirit into his body in a useful form of spirit possession. I remember David Byrne talking about a South American religion that was like this. He made a documentary about it that I haven't seen, but as I recall, there is a lot of trance inducing rhythm and singing, all while waiting for a nature god, like the chicken spirit (I actually do think he mentioned such a poultry spirit - that is what made me remember it) possesses the shaman/priest for a while.

I don't know whether the Shinto priest would say he is "possessed" by the kami, but I didn't know that having it in his body was part of their religion at all.

Of course, the idea of incorporating the spirit of God is a feature of Christianity too. A Christian apologist can argue that the animistic systems which believed in the importance of this were pre-figuring the true religion that was revealed through Christ. But of course, it still leaves the question: what is it that a shaman or priest is sensing when they believe they are possessed by a god or nature spirit?

A fundamentalist Christian, I suppose, might argue that it could be a true supernatural entity being sensed: just not a holy one. (I certainly don't expect that fundamentalists think God sends angels to act as if they were the Great Chicken Spirit, in the hope of guiding shamans towards Christianity.)

But really, what these religions which incorporate possession as a holy ritual must show is the human susceptibility to misinterpreting a generic "high," or a passing emotional feeling, with communion with the gods. And this, in turn, doesn't say much for those who rely on emotional responses in Christian services as proof of their religion, or a source of sound guidance.

I find the whole question of the sense of feeling God's presence or guidance a vexed issue. On the one hand, if God is capable of raising from the dead, amongst other miracles, the possibility of simply bumping the right neurons in the brain so as to make a person understand what God thinks he should do seems a relative breeze. I mean, it just seems wrong to argue that the Christian God is incapable of such subtleties, and can only work on a big dramatic canvas.

On the other hand, it seems that people are continually thinking that God or the spirits are guiding them: from Mormons who like to argue that if a person prays sincerely, they will "know" that this is the true church; to shamans who think they are being possessed by a nature spirit for a night.

They can't all be right.

Anyway, this is generally why I am very cautious on the whole issue of the importance or what a believer feels in any religion.

Of course, an over-intellectualisation of moral or religious belief runs its own dangers too. Certainly, I don't dismiss the importance of the intuitions or emotions in their guidance for the moral life. I continually find myself amazed, for example, when thinking about the Holocaust, that the intellectual justification for treating Jews as so much cattle to be slaughtered managed to triumph over what must have surely been a instinctive reaction against cruelty to fellow humans; particularly children. (The "girl in the red dress" sequence was particularly good in Schindler's List, I thought, for showing a man whose empathy with an innocent child would not let him accept the intellectually justified horror going on around him.)

I similarly find it difficult to fathom that some people have no problem with late term abortion, when the fetus has but the slightest genetic problem. (Although attitudes to killing even new born children have been extremely different in the past to what they are now, and I guess that I shouldn't be surprised that modern people can be comfortable killing viable babies by late term abortion.)

And then, on the fourth hand (I'm starting to lose count), appeals to the primacy of emotionalism and an inner sensation for guidance (which is fundamentally what I think a lot of people mean when they say they are interested in spirituality in their religion) leads to some pretty soft headed ideas in the modern world. Gay marriage is one of these; it being tied up with the triumph of gay identity politics over what I think is a more common sense view as to what marriage is fundamentally about - the possibility of procreation.

I think most people would tend to see spirituality as a more feminine aspect of religion, and intellectual interest in defining rules and logic as a male pursuit. For that reason, people think greater female input into Catholicism would make it more humane in areas such as teaching on sexuality. And to an extent, women can be more practical than men, and are better at not following logic and reason to conclusions that are nonsensical, which is how I view something like the Catholic teaching that a condom used by a loving husband and wife converts the sex into something sinful, whereas timing sex to avoid pregnancy does not. Yet Anglicanism and other Protestant denominations which have become very "feminized," for want of a better word, lose following because a generic sense of feel good spirituality does not particularly need any Christianity to keep it going. (The "feel good" soft rock churches like Hill Song don't seem particularly feminised; I'm not quite sure how to explain how they fit into this outline I'm sketching.) It also seems to me that women can be the worst at reading (or imagining) too much into their fleeting emotional feelings - hence the predominance of women into spiritualism or New Age ideas. (What about shamans, then? I see that some sites claim that a lot of them are homosexual, as indeed in the West they seem to be over-represented amongst spiritualist mediums.*)

So, where does this leave us? A religion which incorporates nothing by way of ceremony or practice with which to uplift the heart is not appealing at all: it seems hard to argue Biblically that these things are not a legitimate concern of God. But the Protestant churches who treat every Sunday service as a soft rock concert that is only designed to hit the heart seems equally wrong. A rule bound over-intellectualised Church can indeed be inhumane; but go too far the other direction and it becomes redundant.

It is perhaps the straddling of the two aspects that is what I find appealing about the Catholic Church, but as I say, we still have the problem of how even a Catholic should understand the sense of God moving in them personally.

It could, of course, be taken all as reason to believe that all religious feeling is delusion, as is all internal sensation that God is influencing a person in any particular way or direction. But what is the fun in that? Thinking about the various mixed messages and ways of interpreting religion and religious sensation seems a rather more interesting past time than many other pursuits; at least to me.

* Isn't it funny how native cultures might elevate a homosexual man by making him the shaman; today Western society has similarly decided to treat them as special and able to do no harm, such as in the way the magazines will gush over Elton or Ricky Martin using the magical powers of egg donation and renting a womb to conceive a child without sex!

An insider view

Former NOTW executive recounts phone hacking - ABC News

I found this a pretty remarkable interview from a News of the World insider about the phone hacking scandal.

It surprises me that he still seems to have no problem with phone hacking by journalists per se, as long as the target is a "deserving" one: like a politician that a journalist thinks might be doing something wrong, or a celebrity (just because they are a celebrity, is the impression he gives). Although it seems he has blown the whistle on the paper generally, how come he still doesn't get the idea of privacy?

Heaven located (maybe)

New mathematical or scientific ideas often provide material wihich believers in life after death can adapt to provide quasi explanations for the supernatural world. Spiritualism for a long time clung to the idea of "higher vibrations" as being the context in which souls lived. This always sounded a rather silly idea to me, but I'm sure you can still find lots of allegedly channelled books in New Age outlets which talk of spirits having to lower their vibrations to talk to mediums.

I was always keener on the idea of higher dimensions. Ever since mathematicians started thinking about them, the religiously inclined have wondered whether this is a good explanation of a physical location for Heaven, or other (formerly supernatural) realms. Science fiction writers liked the idea too: Heinlein's "And He Built a Crooked House" comes to mind as a fun short story. Other dimensional worlds feature often in his novels too, now that I think of it.

I see from Googling that a physicist priest (William Pollard) as late as 1961 was writing a book explaining higher dimensions as an important religious idea. From a review of his book in Time:

"The key to this approach," he writes, "lies in conceiving the whole space-time continuum of our human intuition as being immersed in a space of higher dimensions." The reality of a higher dimension than the three of space and one of time may seem somewhat elusive to ordinary human beings, but modern scientific minds can see it as mathematically just as sound.

A higher dimension is the result of a lower one moved perpendicular to itself. Writes Pollard: "Heaven, instead of being above us in ordinary space, is perpendicular to ordinary space, and the eternal is perpendicular to the temporal dimension. The transcendent and the supernatural, instead of being pushed farther and farther away from us with each new advance in astronomy, are again everywhere in immediate contact with us, just as the dimension perpendicular to a plane surface is everywhere in contact with it, though transcendent to it."

It's a appealing idea, and it always seems a pity to me that modern science seems to have no use for it. Of course, we hear about extra dimensions in string theory all the time, but mostly in terms of the extra dimensions being bound up so small that they are virtually undetectable. The related idea of branes suggest that there might be another dimensional world just a fraction of a millimetre around us all the time, but while branes can affect each other, as far as I know they don't suggest any way for life from one brane to correspond, or transfer, to another "nearby" brane.

But today I happened to buy last month's Discover magazine, and in the article on black holes, they had an extract from Brian Greene's recent book "The Hidden Reality." This was talking about whether our universe is like a holograph of information processing happening elsewhere.

The phrase "holographic universe" has been around for quite a while; I think I have on my shelf the popular book of the same title by Michael Talbot. (I see now that he died in 1992.) But this was mainly about the ideas of David Bohm and Karl Pribram, and the physical detail of how this type of universe arises was left vague, as I recall. An article by Talbot which explains his books themes can be found here.

I have heard before of black holes and holography, but I think the Brian Greene extract explains it in a relatively clear fashion. Here are some of the relevant parts (typed by me, as I can find no link):

Plato likened our view of the world to that of an ancient forebear watching shadows meander across a simly lit cave wall. He imagined our perceptions to be but a faint inkling of a far richer reality that flickers beyond reach. Two millenia later, Plato's cave may be more than a metaphor. To turn his suggestion on its head, reality - not its mere shadow - may take place on a distant boundary surface, while everything we witness in the three common spatial dimensions is a projection of that faraway unfolding. Reality, that is, may be akin to a hologram. Or really, a holographic movie.....

For black holes, we've found that the link between information and surface area goes beyond mere numerical accounting; there's a concrete sense in which information is stored on their surfaces. Physicists Leonard Susskind and Gerard't Hooft stressed that the lesson should be general: Since the information required to describe physical phenomena within any given region of space can be fully encoded by data on a surface that surrounds the region, then there's reason to think that the surface is where the fundamental physical processes actually happen. Our familiar three dimensional reality, these bold thinkers suggest, would then be likened to a holographic projection of those distant two-dimensional physical processes.

If this line of reasoning is correct, then there are physical processes taking place on some distant surface that, much as a puppeteer pulls strings, are fully linked to the processes taking place in my fingers, arms, and brain as I type these words at my desk. Our experiences here and that distant reality there would form the most interlocked of parallel worlds.

Well, the thing that struck me when reading this was that the idea might, with a bit of pushing around, provide possible ways for arguing:

a. we all are embedded in a "higher" realm which we cannot see (even if the "bigger" reality might be a two dimensional surface rather than a 4 spatial dimension universe);

b. the information processing taking place on the distant surface (presumably of the big black hole the universe is enclosed in) could provide a way for individual minds to survive death. I mean, does the information processing happening on the distant surface have to produce a holographic "image" of a body and its incorporated mind in our world? If a body dies, can the information that effectively produced the mind continue working on the two dimensional surface?

In other words, this seems to provide a location for Heaven, of a kind.

Mind you, if we're talking the surface of a black hole, this is not a permanent place, if Hawking radiation would see it slowly evaporate. (But then, it still remains to be seen if Hawking Radiation really exists. There are still some legitimate doubts.)

OK, so it's not a perfect explanation, but I like any idea that gets us away from mere materialism and lets the information that is our minds have an "out of body" aspect to them.

Remarkable medical news

Surgeons carry out first synthetic windpipe transplant

Surgeons in Sweden have carried out the world's first synthetic organ transplant.

Scientists in London created an artificial windpipe which was then coated in stem cells from the patient.

Crucially, the technique does not need a donor, and there is no risk of the organ being rejected. The surgeons stress a windpipe can also be made within days.

The 36-year-old cancer patient is doing well a month after the operation.

Nessie resurfaces

Inverness Courier | News | Loch Ness Monster sighting reported by locals

Fundamental Fysiks revealed

Book Review: How the Hippies Saved Physics - WSJ.com

Well, this looks like a rather fun book:

Among the many people in San Francisco taking drugs in the early 1970s were members of a maverick group of Berkeley physicists who called themselves the Fundamental Fysiks Group. The young scientists dabbled in mind-altering drugs as they searched for a quantum-physics-based explanation for such phenomena as telepathy and extrasensory perception. The scientific basis for this quest was the experimental confirmation that once two quantum entities (such as electrons) have interacted with one another, they remain connected by what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance." The connection is technically known as entanglement; if one of the entities is prodded, the other one jumps.

As David Kaiser deftly spells out in "How the Hippies Saved Physics," these physicists based their work on good science, however drug-fogged were their aims.

You must follow the link to see their photo too.

Solar issues part 2

Lacklustre results from the Colorado Integrated Solar Project � BraveNewClimate

A few posts back, I noted how PV power investment seems less risky than solar thermal, but I also noted that even with cool looking stirling engine style solar power, the output going up and down rapidly on an intermittently cloudy day was something I was unsure about.

It would seem from the above post that this is indeed a serious issue for large scale PV power (and, presumably, stirling engine solar power.)

Of course, you could always orbit them in space and get constant light that way. Now if only NASA still had rockets...

Nothing is dead simply in alternative energy.

(By the way, is this a convincing argument for highly distributed PV on houses and commercial sites as the simplest way to go? You overcome the problem if the solar panels are spread far and wide, then the supplementary power you need from the grid just getting switched between the areas under cloud for 5 minutes. But if everyone has some solar power, presumably your grid has to supply not all that much supplementary power.

Has anyone in the world ever proposed that it be a law that all new houses have to have a certain amount of PV installed?)

LED bulbs coming

Switch Lighting: Dump your fluorescents and incandescents for this amazing new LED bulb. - By Farhad Manjoo

Farhad Manjoo shares the same obsessive hatred of compact fluro lights that you tend to see a lot of in right wing blogs (how dare a government force them into much more efficient lighting!), but he is deeply impressed by a new LED bulb by an American company.

Seems no doubt they'll get cheaper and start to replace CFL.

Hobbies: reading science fiction

Is living forever in the future?

Is it possible that your child could live to see 150 years of age? What about your grandchild living to see their 1000th birthday? According to a British biomedical gerontologist and chief scientist of the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) Foundation Aubrey De Grey, that is a definite possibility.

De Grey believes that we are within 25 years of finding the medical technology to essentially bring a ‘cure’ to aging. He says the first person to live to see 150 is already alive and that the individual who will first live to see 1,000 years could be born within the next two decades.

He believes that with the advancement of medical treatments in areas such as gene therapy, stem cells, therapy, immune stimulation and a variety of other medical techniques, people will soon be able to just visit their physician for regular maintenance checkups and cures for diseases that are a part of aging will no longer be an issue.

While De Grey’s predictions may seem a bit extreme, life expectancy is growing by three months every year and many experts are predicting over a million centenarians by 2030. In 2010, Japan alone had over 44,000 residents who had passed the 100 year mark.

Secrets in the desert

The (very) secret history of Area 51 - Americas, World - The Independent

Here's a somewhat interesting article on Area 51, which includes the claim that Presidents aren't always in the loop as to what is being done there.

I also like this claim of a simple but effective security measure:

According to Bill Sweetman, editor-in-chief of defence technology for Aviation Week, simply "pulling out the plug" and "supergluing USB ports" has also helped to keep these black programmes disconnected from our interconnected world.

"Along with the traditional black techniques of the need to know and using a small number of slightly frightened people, these programmes have either now been disconnected from the internet or have never been connected to it in the first place, and the resulting 'air gap system' has prevented them from being compromised by Chinese hackers, like so many other programmes have been."

Getting in first

BBC News - UK faces more harsh winters in solar activity dip

Has this appeared on Watts Up With That and its virtual sister blog Andrew Bolt yet? Because it is bound to, so I may as well get in first.

It's about a new paper saying that decreased solar activity may well mean the UK and Europe have some very cold winters on the way. But it's by Mike Lockwood, who I have already quoted on the topic from an article in Physics World.

But he is no global warming skeptic, and makes the following key point:

The Maunder Minimum, a period of extremely low solar activity that lasted for about half a century from the late 17th Century, has been dubbed by some as the Little Ice Age because Europe experienced an increase in harsh winters, resulting in rivers - such as the Thames - freezing over completely.

Professor Lockwood said it was a "pejorative name" because what happened during the Maunder Minimum "was actually nothing like an ice age at all".

"There were colder winters in Europe. That almost certainly means, from what we understand about the blocking mechanisms that cause them, that there were warmer winters in Greenland," he observed.

"So it was a regional redistribution and not a global phenomenon like an ice age. It was nothing like as cold as a real ice age - either in its global extent or in the temperatures reached.

"The summers were probably warmer if anything, rather than colder as they would be in an ice age."

He added that the Maunder Minimum period was not an uninterrupted series of cold, harsh winters.

Data from the CET showed that the coldest winter since records began was 1683/84 "yet just two year later, right in the middle of the Maunder Minimum, is the fifth warmest winter in the whole record, so this idea that Maunder Minimum winters were unrelentingly cold is wrong".

He explained that a similar pattern could be observed in recent events: "Looking at satellite data, we found that when solar activity was low, there was an increase in the number of blocking events of the jetstream over the Atlantic.

"That led to us getting colder weather in Europe. The same events brought warm air from the tropics to Greenland, so it was getting warmer.

I do wonder, however, whether this issue is important for European decisions about its energy mix. Wind farms perform poorly on colder, relatively still, snowy days, don't they?

UPDATE: WUWT did beat me to this, anyway. C'est la vie.

Up where they belong

iPads Replacing Pilots’ Paper Manuals - NYTimes.com

I was wondering the other day whether an iPad had ever been on a space shuttle trip. I expect that tablets with flash memory could handle the vibration of launch quite well.

A bit of Googling has not answered my question, but I see from the above New York Times article that they are starting to make an impact on commercial aviation:

The Federal Aviation Administration has authorized a handful of commercial and charter carriers to use the tablet computer as a so-called electronic flight bag. Private pilots, too, are now carrying iPads, which support hundreds of general aviation apps that simplify preflight planning and assist with in-flight operations.

“The iPad allows pilots to quickly and nimbly access information,” said Jim Freeman, a pilot and director of flight standards at Alaska Airlines, which has given iPads to all its pilots. “When you need to a make a decision in the cockpit, three to four minutes fumbling with paper is an eternity.”

Neat.

Solar issues

Solar Thermal Plants Losing out to Photovoltaics - Technology Review

The article notes that big solar thermal plants are still (mostly) semi-experimental and therefore hard to finance, and also the "power tower" types that use large arrays of carefully aligned mirrors to concentrate the sun onto one point tend to involve bulldozing a lot of animal habitat. With PV, you can build above the critters.

Someone in comments notes, though, that the article doesn't consider another solar option: arrays of tracking dishes which power their individual stirling engines. Here's one such array with 60 dishes in Arizona. (Yeah, that's still not so big at 1.5 MW, and I'm not sure how they deal with cloudy days when the sun keeps coming and going.)

I used to follow Inifinia Corporation in the US, because I thought it had the coolest looking design for a stirling engine solar power dish. I see they are still around, and have added a website for their "Powerdish" which claims 24% peak conversion efficiency. They still aren't into the domestic market (and the dish is kinda large for your average house yard anyway,) but with a 25 year life, and claiming to be cheaper than other solar alternatives, they look like a good option for rural properties (and even in arrays.)

In the firing line

Australian volcano eruptions overdue, new study confirms

Using the latest dating techniques, scientists from the University of Melbourne’s School of Earth Sciences and the Melbourne School of Engineering have calculated the ages of the small volcanoes in the regions and established the recurrence rate for eruptions as 2,000 years.

With the last volcano eruption at Mt Gambier occurring over 5,000 years ago, scientists say the areas are overdue...

“Although the volcanos in the region don’t erupt on a regular sequence, the likelihood of an eruption is high given the average gap in the past has been 2,000 years,” Professor Joyce said.

“These are small eruptions and very localised but depending on the type of eruption, they could cause devastation to thousands of people,” he said.

The regions of Western Victoria and adjacent south-eastern South Australia demonstrate a history of activity by young monogenetic (single short-lived activity) volcanoes. Similar young monogenetic provinces are found in northeast Queensland.

Professor Joyce suggests it might be a good idea to local governments to think about what to do if an eruption takes place, as they do in Auckland.

Which reminds me, I recently heard on the Science Show a brief mention of Auckland's Rangitoto Island, which only formed in an eruption 600 years ago. (I've been there once, many years ago, but I remember it as very pretty.) As this New Zealand site explains, it's an area absolutely ripe for a new volcano that could come through anywhere:

All of Auckland’s volcanoes come from one magma source. Underlying Auckland is a diffuse pool of magma that occasionally finds its way to the surface. Unlike a ‘classic’ volcano – such as Mt Taranaki or Mt Ngāuruhoe with a single vent through the crust – in Auckland, the magma finds different routes through the crust and erupts in a different place each time.

Each volcanic cone in Auckland stems from a separate eruption from the pool of magma that lies under the city. It’s unlikely that the magma will push through in the same place twice, so each volcano that can be seen on today’s landscape can be thought of as dormant. However, the underlying magma is still active – it may come through at a new place and form a new cone next week, next year or next century.

Obviously, the town planners who let the city be built there have a lot to answer for! :)

The goose that keeps on giving

Sceptic's Nazi jibe ends his lectures

I thought there was something fake about Monckton's rapid, completely unreserved, often repeated apology for using the swastika in a lecture when he referenced Garnaut and others.

Initially, I thought he had used the Nazi symbol so that if anyone did call him out on it, he could complain about use of climate change "denialism" and how no one apologises for that.

Turns out he had a much more direct incentive: his Australian tour organisers had booked him into 3 German Clubs.

What a maroon.

Monckton's lecture presumably contains no new content from what he delivered last time he was here, and his talking points have been comprehensively dealt with already. (In fact, at many places.)

His influence is on the wane; it was a waste of money bringing him out.

As will be, I am sure, the IPA's forthcoming hosting of Vaclav Klaus.

They only look nice and clean

Atmospheric cloud water contains a diverse bacterial community

Atmospheric cloud water contains an active microbial community which can impact climate, human health and ecosystem processes in terrestrial and aquatic systems. Most studies on the composition of microbial communities in clouds have been performed with orographic clouds that are typically in direct contact with the ground. We collected water samples from cumulus clouds above the upper U.S. Midwest. The cloud water was analyzed for the diversity of bacterial phylotypes by denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE) and sequencing of 16S rRNA gene amplicons. DGGE analyses of bacterial communities detected 17–21 bands per sample. Sequencing confirmed the presence of a diverse bacterial community; sequences from seven bacterial phyla were retrieved. Cloud water bacterial communities appeared to be dominated by members of the cyanobacteria, proteobacteria, actinobacteria and firmicutes.

Interesting.

An unintended consequence

Pot drivers: Stoned drivers are uncharted territory - latimes.com

The LA Times reports that there is a concern that the medical marijuana movement in America is leading to an upswing in traffic accidents involving stoned drivers:

In California alone, nearly 1,000 deaths and injuries each year are blamed directly on drugged drivers, according to CHP data, and law enforcement puts much of the blame on the rapid growth of medical marijuana use in the last decade. Fatalities in crashes where drugs were the primary cause and alcohol was not involved jumped 55% over the 10 years ending in 2009.

"Marijuana is a significant and important contributing factor in a growing number of fatal accidents," said Gil Kerlikowske, director of National Drug Control Policy in the White House and former Seattle police chief. "There is no question, not only from the data but from what I have heard in my career as a law enforcement officer."

Given that the THC can take a long time to be fully excreted, simple testing for its presence doesn't correlate to clear impairment. (Hence, employers in industries where safety is a priority simply take the "safe" option and just want to find no trace at all in their employees.)

There was one odd comment in the report that I hadn't heard before:

Flores' tongue had a green coat typical of heavy marijuana users and a later test showed he had pot, as well as other drugs, in his blood.

Having a can of lime green soda in the car might be a good diversionary tactic for medical marijuana users, then...

Witness for the prosecution

Pigeons never forget a face

New research has shown that feral, untrained pigeons can recognise individual people and are not fooled by a change of clothes.

I'm waiting for a movie based on a pigeon witnessing a murder in the park, and needing to go on a witness protection program.

Above the eyes

Catalyst: Pet Subjects - Dog eyebrows - ABC TV Science

I found this segment on Catalyst this week pretty fascinating. The key to feeling that we can understand dogs, it suggests, is because they are one of the few animals with expressive eyebrows. This is in contrast to cats (and, I would think, horses.)

Now if you look at the equivalent muscle in the cat, it's not strong, and attaches all the way across the eye ridge. Which means the cat can't do much interesting with that muscle. Whereas the dog's levator anguli oculi medialis is perfectly placed to raise just one edge of its eyebrow. But the deeper why question is, why do dogs have this special eyebrow muscle, and most animals don't? Well the best theory concerns the evolution of social living. In general, the most social animals have the most expressive faces.

One study showed foxes who hunt alone had about half the facial expressions of wolves who work in packs. In fact, in wolves and dingoes, the eyebrows are often even a different colour, exaggerating the movement.

Sounds a plausible theory.

That'll help market share

Tiger planes grounded, pose 'serious risk' | News.com.au

Wow. I've travelled on Tiger with the family maybe 3 times, I think, and always noted that, provided you went with the expectation that you were merely catching a cheap bus line that happens to drive at 40,000 feet, the experience was fine.

But they've had services banned for a week for air safety issues!

With there be any customers left at all after this?

Complicated

Fatima conspiracy theories are damaging the Church

This blog entry at Catholic Herald doesn't fully explain the background, but it would appear that in certain Catholic circles, there is much controversy about whether Russia has, or has not, been consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, in accordance with the apparent wishes of Mary as expressed via Fatima.

This seems a tad arcane for a 21st century Catholic, who, if raised after the 1960's, probably knows very little about Fatima anyway. In fact, if Australian Catholic practice is anything to go by, attention paid to Mary in any respect by Catholics has taken a dramatic downturn since (I would say) the 1950's. (I grew up in the 1960's, but I think even then Marian devotion was starting to dwindle.) I don't think modern nun-ish feminism has been able to convincingly incorporate her story into anything compelling (maybe the "virginity" is the issue there), and priests simply spend as little time as possible talking about her.

It's a curious thing, to have seen emphasis in the Church change so much in a relatively short time of about 50 years.

Stupid men

Lightning strikes far more men than women, statistics show

Mind you, I have known women who have been completely careless of lightning too.

I have a good "standing outside in the middle of a storm" story, and might post it one day.

Some mildly encouraging news...

Nuclear power debate a 'live debate within the Labor Party', says Martin Ferguson | The Australian

Resources and Energy Minister Martin Ferguson said yesterday the topic remained a "live debate in Australia, despite the best efforts of the Greens and the non-government organisations to demonise the discussion".

Speaking in Sydney at a forum on nuclear power, he said Australia would "eventually have to decide on the issue of energy reliability, at the cheapest possible cost".

Modern media questions

David Duchovny and Tea Leoni separate | News.com.au

SEX-addicted actor David Duchovny has separated from his wife, fellow actor Tea Leoni, for at least the second time.

In 2008 the couple split briefly after Duchovny reportedly discovered explicit text messages on his wife's mobile phone sent by actor Billy Bob Thornton.

The pair spent several months apart while The X-Files and Californication star, now 50, entered rehab for sex addiction.

Don't the examples of Duchovny and Sheen indicate that, if you're a person with an addiction issue in your personal life, it's not exactly helpful to play a person who has the same habits on TV? Mind you, Sheen is mad enough to say he doesn't have a problem.

Extremes

Experts warn epic weather ravaging US could worsen

Towards the end of this report about the extremes of recent US weather, we get this comment:

However, the intensity of future droughts, heat waves, storms and floods is expected to rise drastically if greenhouse gas emissions don't stabilize soon, said Michael Mann, a scientist at Penn State University.

"Even a couple degree warming can make a 100-year event a three-year event," Mann, the head of the university's earth systems science center, told AFP.

"It has to do with the tail of the bell curve. When you move the bell curve, that area changes dramatically."

Is that right? Because if it is, it's a handy retort to climate skeptics who, failing all else, will come up with "but is a 2 degree increase really going to be all that bad?"

And it also suggests that, if indeed formerly 1 in a 100 events do start piling on top of each other at much more rapid intervals over the next decade, this may well be the proof that the public seems to need that serious reduction of CO2 is needed.

More work needed?

Acer's Iconia tablet rivals iPad in price, but not much else

I've been noticing the Android tablets that have been turning up at JB Hi Fi, including this one by Acer. I was wondering if they a good alternative to an iPad, being slightly cheaper and all. (One obvious and fairly big difference is an ability to run Flash.)

But according to the review above, the Acer model has its problems.

I did see a Toshiba one yesterday too, but I had a really bad Toshiba notebook once, so I'm cautious about the brand.

Anyway, we'll see.

Mouse trouble

BBC News - Mickey Mouse tweet by Egypt's Sawiris angers conservatives

One of Egypt's richest men has been accused of mocking Islam after tweeting cartoons of Mickey and Minnie Mouse wearing conservative Muslim attire.

Telecoms mogul and Coptic Christian Naguib Sawiris apologised for re-posting the images on Twitter a few days ago, saying he meant no offence.

But several Islamic lawyers have filed a formal complaint and there are calls for a boycott of his businesses.

Sensitive bunch.

No big surprise

Climate sceptic Willie Soon received $1m from oil companies, papers show

Electric Air

VoltAir shows off electricity powered plane concept at Paris Air Show that is slated for 2035

Hard to believe it could work, and I assume it is only a small aircraft, but I like the idea.

Whatd'ya know...

More on marathoning and heart disease : Science-Based Running

Interesting report on a recent study with some pretty convincing sounding evidence that too much marathon exercise is bad for the heart.

I am not at all surprised. I would have thought it hard to argue that from an evolutionary point of view, human bodies are made for such protracted and repeated bouts of exertion.

Man trouble

The idea is not new, I guess:

...a team of psychologists based in China and Hong Kong believe the ultimate cause of human war rests with the male libido. Historically, they argue that the lure of an attractive female primed the male brain for conflict with other males, an effect that persists in modern man even though its usefulness is largely outdated.

But the way this was tested does strike me as kind of funny:

Across four experiments Lei Chang and his team showed that pictures of attractive women or women's legs had a raft of war-relevant effects on heterosexual male participants, including: biasing their judgments to be more bellicose towards hostile countries; speeding their ability to locate an armed soldier on a computer screen; and speeding their ability to recognise and locate war-related words on a computer screen. Equivalent effects after looking at pictures of attractive men were not found for female participants.

The effects on the male participants of looking at attractive women were specific to war. For example, their ability to locate pictures of farmers, as opposed to soldiers, was not enhanced. Moreover, the war-priming effects of attractive women were greater than with other potentially provocative stimuli, such as the national flag. Finally, the men's faster performance after looking at women's legs versus flags was specific to war-related words, as opposed to merely aggressive words.

Given the huge disproportionate number of men in China, this is not encouraging research for them (or us, I guess), that's assuming you give any credence to this sort of research at all.

UPDATE: here's the link I forgot to insert.

Antarctic thoughts

I mentioned some weeks ago that I was reading Heather Rossiter’s biography of Herbert Dyce Murphy, who, after he stopped being a cross-dressing European spy for England, went on to join Mawson’s Australian Antarctic Expedition of 1911.

I’ve nearly finished the book, and have found it quite enjoyable, even though it clearly has its flaws as biography. (There’s too much of what I am sure must be imagined re-creation of conversations and thoughts that are not clearly acknowledged as such.) But, as I have never read any detailed account of the Mawson led expedition, I found this aspect of it - which is the largest part of the book - pretty fascinating.

Rossiter at one point makes the sardonic observation (after noting a disastrous early 19th century trip to Antarctica by Biscoe):

Thus the stage was set for glory in Antarctica. Glory could be obtained by death. The supreme glory would be attained by a leader’s death described in intimate detail.

Mawson came close to achieving that, but not quite. In fact, one of the most interesting things in the book is that it paints a pretty uncomplimentary picture of Mawson as an aloof, overly serious, and difficult to like leader, especially for an expedition in which he was to be confined for many months on end with his suffering crew in one small-ish hut.

There seem to be many biographies around about Mawson, but Googling terms like “Douglas Mawson’s personality” hasn’t really led me to anything to confirm whether or not he was unpopular with his expeditionary crew.

Rossiter does appear to have read many diaries and a lot of source material about the expedition; but again it’s hard to tell whether she is really just taking Murphy’s view on things, or if there was a more widespread disdain for Mawson’s leadership skills.

And Mawson certainly does have his fans. There’s an active “Friends of Mawson” in Adelaide. There is also going to be a museum sponsored Mawson Centenary 2012 Expedition (leaving Hobart on January 3) for which you can buy tickets. (That would be pretty interesting, actually.)

Murphy (obviously) did not accompany Mawson on the 3 man trip across the ice from which only Mawson returned. Mawson’s account is the only one we have of how the other two died. (You can download his book about the expedition – The Home of the Blizzard – for free from Project Gutenberg.) At the risk of upsetting Mawson fans and relatives, it did cross my mind that one would hope it did really happen as a series of tragic accidents, rather than an outbreak of shoving between men standing too close to the edge of a crevasse.

Murphy himself headed off with 2 men to see if they (with another team they met up with) could reach the South Magnetic Pole. The account in the book of how difficult and appalling the conditions were, even in Antarctic summer, makes for fascinating reading. They weren’t using dogs, but dragged sleds in that strange, stiff-upper-lip way the British seemed to think was the manly way to do Antarctica; although the expedition did have huskies which Mawson’s team took (and ended up eating.)

As for Murphy’s shorter and unsuccessful trip: snowblindness was a constant risk that was not (for reasons I don’t quite understand) solved by wearing tinted goggles; the wind was fierce most days; the ice surface was wavy and often tipped over the sleds they were pulling (maybe dogs would not have helped anyway?); and the scenery on a ice plateau can apparently be very dull. It’s a wonder it didn’t send the expeditioners mad, really.

One minor point of slight amusement to the modern reader: to save weight and share body warm, the 3 man teams took with them a single, 3 man sized reindeer fur sleeping bag. I wonder if Murphy would tell stories of his cross dressing spy days before they would fall asleep?

It’s also a bit wryly amusing to realise how, well, environmentally insensitive these early expeditions were to the modern eye. Seals, penguins and penguin eggs were all apparently key sources of food for the expedition, at least when they were holed up in the hut near the colonies. No one liked killing penguins, apparently, yet the number of meals which seemed to feature them was quite high. I wonder if their flesh tastes a bit fishy?* Penguin eggs rated quite highly, apparently. (Reading this also made me realise I don’t know anything about the rate of egg laying for different bird species. We all know chickens produce constantly; but is that special to them? Presumably, birds which are on the fly for protracted periods don’t need to lay all the time.)

Anyway, there might well be better accounts of the rigours of this expedition, but I think you could do worse than read this one. Anyone who wants to correct my possibly false impressions of Mawson as a crook leader is welcome to pay for me to listen to the lectures on the Mawson Centenary Expedition in January!

* Update: A description of the taste of penguin can be found here. Doesn't sound all that great:

'It is rather difficult to describe its taste and appearance; we have absolutely no meat with which to compare it. The penguin, as an animal, seems to be made up o fan equal proportion of a mammal, fish, and fowl. If it is possible to imagine a piece of beef, an odriferous codfish, and a canvas-back duck, roasted in a pot, with blood and cod-liver oil for sauce, the illustration will be complete.'

Small is better?

Small Nuclear Reactors Get a Customer - Technology Review

A short article here on another nuclear company in the States proposing to build a nuclear power station using small reactors.

The reactors themselves are not any particularly new design, though, and are not the "nuclear battery"type that Toshiba and Hyperion are developing. It remains unclear how much cheaper and quicker it could be to establish this modular nuke station.

The comments thread after the article is well worth a read too.

Universal

End of financial year

I'm a tad busy, but a short video on the start of a universe is in preparation...

Contact

It only came to my attention tonight, when I was trying (unsuccessfully) to find another Blogger's email address, that I couldn't find my own email address here.

I'm sure it used to be in my profile, but it's been turned off. I have a vague recollection that I may have done that deliberately, but I forget when.

Now I understand why the emails of offers of free holidays to Tromso, Norway, or other assorted gifts in cash or kind, have not been arriving. Ever.

Anyway, I've opened a new handily named Gmail account which I'll use just for here, and have a link to it at top right hand side.

Also, as I've noted before, the search function at the top of a Blogger page is very hit and miss. The search function that appears as a Gadget on the right below my email address is (I think) generally more reliable. I've moved that up so it's easier to find.

The skeptic glass 4/5 full

Readers might recall my annoyance that the surfacestation.org project paper co-authored by Anthony Watts received so little attention. It had, after all, contradicted claims of a serious bias in the US mean temperature record when Watts had been spending years saying that it surely must account for some of warming trend.

Last year, Watts had appeared on ABC's Counterpoint making these claims (although he did not go as far as claiming the bias might be as much as .5 degree as he did to Andrew Bolt - a claim I am sure Watts would be more than happy to see disappear into the mists of time.) So I wrote to Counterpoint and noted that they said they would follow up on the project, and now they could. I suggested that some hard questions be put to Watts about how wrong some of his claims, particularly to Bolt, had been.

Counterpoint responded and said they would follow up.

Maybe I am therefore at least partly responsible for the interview they ran yesterday with John Neilsen-Gammon, the Texas State climatologist who is one of the co-authors of the paper. He's in Australia at the moment for a conference in Melbourne.

The interview is available to listen to here; perhaps a transcript will follow soon.

Don't, however, expect either the interviewer or interviewee to express any interest at all in co-relating what Watts used to say about his project, and what it actually found.

As one might expect from the soft-sceptic Counterpoint, they are interested in emphasising the finding relating to diurnal temperature range, the importance of which still seems fairly unclear, even according to Neilsen-Gammon.

The finding about mean temperature trends not being artificially inflated by siting issues gets the briefest of mentions. Surrounding it is a sea of words from Paul Comrie-Thomson emphasising that the paper did find something interesting, that it was a worthy project, that it would be good if more science of this type could be done, etc.

And you know what? The completely un-skeptical Neilsen-Gammon goes along with this.

It is a strange performance by him. As with a couple of comments he made when the paper came out, he appears completely uninterested in the political use which Watts made of premature claims about his project, and is keen to defend Watts in setting up it up. He seems to think it is most unfair that anyone should point out the major way in which Watts' disproved his own central claim.

In this interview, Neilsen-Gammon also speaks in a way which provides much for climate skeptics to cherry pick; such as when he talks about the complexity of working out the effect of all of the forcings other than greenhouse gases.

Sure, he does manage to slip in that he thinks the clearest thing about climate is greenhouse forcing, and the sensitivity range for CO2 is 2 - 4 degrees, but this is almost glossed over. In another part of the interview he talks about how climate research is not only about warming, and he seems to think too much time is devoted to talking about AGW.

He certainly therefore makes for a puzzling figure in the climate science community. He seems to not care about how his message will be interpreted (skeptics will probably interpret it as 4/5 full in their favour, whereas his attitude to climate change seems to actually be the other way round.) He gives the impression of not caring at all about the political issues around climate science. If he did you would think he would try to throw in the occasional comment to the effect "now don't think that I am in any way a climate change skeptic or 'lukewarmener'. I think it crucially important to limit the range of possible temperature increases that we start to seriously reduce CO2."

I'll update this post when the transcript is available.

The Coalition and science

I didn't realise this:

While the scientists won't meet Opposition Leader Tony Abbott - who is on record as having questioned the science of climate change - they will meet with opposition science spokeswoman Sophie Mirabella.

Sophie was amongst the first to bail out on Turnbull because she just couldn't vote for Labor's ETS. Now she's attending the No Carbon Tax rallies along with Barnaby Joyce.

I'm trying to find some direct quotes she has made about the science, but they are hard to turn up. They must be there somewhere.

Somehow, I can't envisage the science community being happy working with a future Minister Mirabella.

Why do they do it?

London to New York in 90 minutes: is this the Concorde of the future? - Science, News - The Independent

Why is it that, about every 12 - 24 months, there is always some airline manufacturer, aerospace company, or university research group, that comes out with some vision for a super-super sonic (OK, hypersonic) jet rocket thingee of the future that will get people across the world in the space of a few hours?

No one seems to consider that these are at all very likely with current or near term technology, do they? This latest one, linked above, says that one stage of the process will involve liquid oxygen/hydrogen rockets, just like that remarkably (un) reliable space shuttle did.

As much as I like high technology, I find these announcements vaguely ludicrous.

For the moment, I would be much more impressed if they were devoting much more time to planes that have as high a fuel efficiency as you can achieve, even if they are a bit slower than current ones.

Bougainvillea, and choosing sides

I spent much of yesterday battling bougainvillea.

What an evil plant it is.

Not much blogworthy material came to my attention over the weekend, except I did briefly note two NYT Magazine articles that show some unusual takes on gay identity. The first, about a young man who was so far into the gay lifestyle that he worked for a gay youth magazine and lived in a 3 way relationship, decided suddenly that he was straight. Stories of married men deciding they really are gay or transexual late in life are rife, but people tend to forget that it can happen the other way too. (Maybe not often, but still.) As in this case of this American guy, though, if the conversion has a religious aspect to it, people tend not to believe it's genuine. Still, the article was interesting for some of the observations his gay friends make about him. Here the writer and "Ben" talk about ex-gay Michael:

As Ben and I reminisced, I couldn’t help wondering if Michael’s new philosophy might, in a strange way, be a logical extension of what he believed back then — that “gay” is a limiting category and that sexual identities can change. Ben nodded. “A radical queer activist and a fundamentalist Christian aren’t always as different as they might seem,” he said, adding that they’re ideologues who can railroad over nuance and claim a monopoly on the truth.

Ben went on. “To me, Michael is a victim of this insane society we live in, where we grow up with all these conflicting messages and pressures around sexuality and religion, and where we divide into these camps where we’re always right and the other side is always wrong. Some people are susceptible to buying into that, and I think Michael is one of them.”

Is that what "radical queer activists" believe? I also suspect that magazines for gay youth don't do much other than re-enforce the binary thinking of "gay or not gay" for nearly all readers (although I have not made a study of the source material!) so it's a little odd to hear "Ben" talk about how this is something to be regretted.

The other story, which I haven't even read past the first page, is about therapists who help gay people stay in the closet as being the most appropriate thing for them.

How helpful of them. As I'm sure I've alluded to before, the whole thing about modern treatment of sexuality which is to be regretted is that it has devalued all sense of privacy. Frankly, it just seems that people treat sexual identity and practices as worthy of attention in a way that they don't really deserve. Can't we go back to the likes of Noel Coward, who famously would claim he did not want to come out "Because there are still three old ladies in Brighton who don't know?" In the Australian context, I feel similarly well disposed towards John Michael Howson, who, apart from being pretty right wing politically, has always seemed to be homosexual while at the same time not wanting to be defined by his sexuality. (He is still a practising Roman Catholic, and refuses to believe he is sinning by having a stable gay relationship.) Of course, Gore Vidal is strongly against sexual identity politics; although I suppose people might say that it's easier for a genuine bisexual like him to take that line.

Look, I know this is a not a simple issue, and it's not as if the way homosexuality was treated in the West 50 years ago is something worth re-implementing. I'm just making the point that I certainly find it easier to like those who display the somewhat more stoic and privacy valuing attitude of men like them, compared to the bare cheeked exhibitionism of Gay MardiGras.

Nazi night was very good last night

Will SBS ever run out of World War Two documentaries to run on Friday nights, I wonder?

It's not like it's watchable every week, but last night I happened to catch episode 3 of The Last Nazis - Children of the Master Race, and found it very moving.

It was about Himmler's Lebensborn program, designed to help breed and propagate the so-called Aryan race, but concentrated on 3 adults who were children of the program and their sense of guilt and/or displacement because of what their parents did.

Although I had vaguely heard of Lebensborn before, I was not aware of the kidnapping of "right" type of blond/blue kid from the rest of Europe was carried out with casual and callous ruthlessness.

The whole show is still available for viewing on SBS, but it also appears to be permanently available here.

Do not discuss at the dinner table

A new study should finally convince parents to get their boys vaccinated against HPV

Slate talks about evidence regarding the connection between HPV and increasing oral cancers in men.

Although the idea sounds convincing, when they find HPV in the tumours, the second page of the article makes a good point about another puzzle:

It's easy to see why the notion that oral sex can give you cancer is so attractive. It makes for an irresistibly lurid headline, of course, and it appeals to the secret Victorian hidden less or more deeply in all of us. (Everything fun has a price—everything!) And to be fair, the circumstantial evidence is compelling. It's well understood that HPV is transmitted through other kinds of intimate contact, such as vaginal sex. HPV seems to grow quite well on mucous membranes, those nonskin tissues that line the mouth, nose, vagina, anus, and a few other anatomic areas, and which may touch quite a bit during oral sex.

As an explanation for the uptick in oropharyngeal cancers, though, oral sex has one glaring problem: HPV-positive head and neck cancer is, inexplicably, a guy's disease. If oral sex were driving the issue, wouldn't we see a commensurate rise in HPV-positive tumors among women?

Even if the explanation was an upswing in bisexual behaviour in men in the last few decades, you would think the rate should be higher in women than men if only one form of oral was the cause.

All a bit of a mystery.

Libertarian utopians

Free State Project: What happens if 20,000 libertarians move to New Hampshire? - Slate Magazine

Here's a slightly amusing article about some Ron Paul libertarian/voluntaryist (?) twits who have a grand idea of living free in strange kind of do-whatever-they-like utopia in New Hampshire.

They sound rather like right wing hippies, and is a very strange, peculiarly American, movement.

Masters of distraction

Only In It For The Gold: Two Empty Kerfuffles

Michael Tobis is right. Climate change "sceptics" are all about distraction.

Watts Up With That is positively gleeful that the sun is not exacting behaving in a very predictable way, and more evidence suggesting the equivalent of a Maunder Minimum is coming out.

What WUWT and it's followers don't know, or remember, or ignore, is that this possibility has been considered by climate scientist years ago and has been dismissed as reason to ignore CO2.

Skeptical Science provides an update on this issue, noting the conclusion:

For both the A1B and A2 emission scenario, the effect of a Maunder Minimum on global temperature is minimal. The most likely impact of a Maunder Minimum by 2100 would be a decrease in global temperature of 0.1°C with a maximum reduction of warming by 0.3°C. Compare this to global warming between 3.7°C (A1B scenario) to 4.5°C (A2 scenario).

However, Barry Brooks blog had dealt with it in a post in 2008, as I am sure did other places.

It would seem that magnetic effects of a solar minimum could also make European winters colder, but again this would not mask global warming.

So sorry skeptics, it's been dealt with as an issue.

UPDATE: Richard Black at the BBC makes the same points, although he does quote someone as saying that the biggest effect of a really major minimum could be 1 degree of global cooling. This still doesn't offset 2 -4 degrees by the end of the century (by which time any minimum may well be over anyway.)

Black notes the political use to which this is being put:

All the studies I'm referring to above are out there in the public domain - which immediately raises a question over why some accounts claim big things for the new research but fail to take into account the context afforded by the larger body of published work.

The battle for public opinion on climate change is largely fought with memes; and solar changes leading to a cooling planet is one of them.

On this battleground, where the bigger picture can be conveniently forgotten, it has proven remarkably persistent.

Part of its appeal is that it has some scientific grounding; but it melts away in the light of the bigger research picture, and that's why it has little credence in mainstream scientific circles as a major factor in modern-day temperature fluctuations.

Could it be that the professional disseminators of climate scepticism are actually dishonest in the way they promote their case? Surely not....

Keeping up with the designers

Libertarian types, being interested in preserving people's right to do themselves harm in any innovative way possible, seem to have a problem with governments making new designer drugs illegal, such as the recent fate of the "legal high" cannabis substitute Kronic. (Well, correct me if I wrong, libertarian inclined readers.) Never mind that no one knows quite what they are getting when they buy this product, and that we get statements from people who know such as this:

Professor Jon Currie, who directs the Department of Addiction Medicine at Melbourne's St Vincent's Hospital, says he is now seeing one or two cases each week in emergency from people seeking help because of Kronic.

Presumably, libertarian types think it reasonable that food manufacturers have to list ingredients and thereby warn of possible side effects, particularly for those unfortunate enough to have peanut allergies. If so, I wonder what grounds they use to justify a legal recreational drug manufacturer being able to sell its mystery ingredient product that seemingly has a good chance of sending a fair few of its users to the emergency department of the hospital.

The other argument I am guessing they would run against banning is to argue for legalisation for all recreational drugs that it is a substitute for, and then the market for Kronic would fall apart anyway. However, given that I have read somewhere that Kronic and its ilk are popular with outback miners, one has to bear in mind that there is a significant group of employers who have legitimate reason not to have their employees doing things like turn up for work to drive their (I'm guessing) 30 tonne trucks while still having last night's THC at high levels in their bloodstream. In other words, there is reason to suspect that there would still be a market for a legal alternative to cannabis, at least for one which would not test positive for cannabinoids.

Anyway, this is all a bit of a preamble to an interesting short article at Nature by a UK forensic scientist arguing that other designer drugs - ones related to amphetamines - also deserve legal banning, simply because they are too dangerous.

He acknowledges that this is not without complications. As he notes, making a drug illegal often makes it more dangerous, because illegal drug manufacturers tend not to worry too much about quality control (to put it mildly.)

Of course, you could argue that the market for new dangerous drugs eventually sorts itself out. If enough users end up in hospital, eventually it will become unpopular within the drug taking community anyway. But do we really want such Darwinian free market methods be the guide for such matters? Certainly, the parents or other close relatives of victims of a new drug would find it hard to accept, unless they are libertarian purists.

What bothers me most about libertarian arguments along these lines (including their attitude to tobacco) is not so much their defence of people to self harm, but that they blithely also condone the effective exploitation of such people by manufacturers of dangerous products for profit. This is particularly objectionable when the product carries a high degree of addictivity, such as tobacco, and is one that is known to be particularly attractive to teenagers, who tend not to have the best developed set of skills for anything, let along starting addictions.

I mean, if the argument was only ever about, say, the wisdom of making illegal the consumption of a magic mushroom that everyone could pick out of their garden, then this aspect of the libertarian argument would not be such an issue. You could say the same about the right of people to grown their own marijuana, I suppose. Yet I bet that in those places that do have very relaxed attitudes to small amount of cultivation for personal use, the illegal trade of larger quantities does not magically fall away.

So the argument about relaxing drug laws is never simply about what people want to do for themselves; it's about the broader questions of how it affects society overall, including safety at work, on the roads and economic productivity generally, and how do you treat the manufacturers of dangerous compounds who are happy to take money with no regard for the health consequences of consuming their product.*


* What about alcohol, I hear you say. Well, it certainly has no parallel with Kronic manufacturers: you know exactly what you are getting and at what strength when you buy any legally sold alcohol. Alcohol is tightly regulated, and governments do discourage its overuse. But you always have the argument that is a product capable of safe consumption. Yes, so is cannabis for most people, I know; yet the evidence of the danger it does represent even for moderate use at some strengths, particularly for young users, continues to accumulate.

Clear and convincing

Speaking science to climate policy

There's been a lot of talk around about The Conversation's effort to bring calm science to the climate change debate. The article above is from there, and is very good.

I see the rest of The Conversation website looks very good too.

The never ending crisis

News Ltd papers, and Andrew Bolt in particular, have been in quite a frenzy over bad opinion polls for the Gillard government for some months. It's like it's a veritable crisis every day in terrible mismanagement by this the Federal government.

Except that, well, I haven't noticed many immediate crises to be mismanaged. As I've suggested before, the problem is one of stasis, not crisis. That is, there are various important policy initiatives waiting to be finalised and knocked into final shape with a Parliament that is more like a herd of cats than any other Parliament in living memory. But these are mainly longer term initiatives - climate change and mineral taxes most particularly - and even the social ones of plain packaging for tobacco and poker machine regulation have longer term effects. My point being that it is more than a tad hyperbolic to be talking up a daily sense of immediate crisis due to the slow negotiation and implementation of these policies.

It's no surprise that polling is bad for the government until they actually get something implemented.

I am particularly amused at Janet Albrechtsen's column this morning, also extracted by Andrew Bolt, with this key section:

Her public positions lack private convictions. From opposing a big Australia, gay marriage and a republic to supporting the flag and the importance of religion, Gillard so obviously echoes voters for no other reason than political gain. Her statements on everything from immigration to population are knee-jerk populism, aimed at dominating the media cycle and putting out potential policy bushfires, rather than presenting a genuine narrative about her political beliefs. Gillard darts all over the place depending on what she wants...

Funnily enough, Janet and Bolt don't seem to realise that this description works even better for Tony Abbott. OK, I'll concede, we all knew he would never be for gay marriage. But consistency with his own party's (theoretical) principles and his past views, as opposed to populism:

* "direct action" on climate change as better than a tax or an ETS? He has to pretend this works as a market, but we all know it is simply a case of him needing product differentiation after holding half a dozen or so different positions on an ETS before his rise to leadership. About half of Coalition supporters don't believe he is being honest about believing there is a need to take action on CO2 at all.

* a nasty big tax scare campaign on a carbon tax. No populism in that, no sir-ee.

* a parental leave plan more generous and expensive than the Labor one. Let's unnecessarily out-Labor at their own game, hey Tony?

* a promise of not touching IR laws, even though this used to be an item of clear product differentiation between Coalition and Labor.

* Back to Nauru; the place where you house boat people for 2 - 3 years and let them build a full case of depression before letting them into Australia anyway. No, that doesn't have a touch of populism about it at all!

Let's face it, Janet and Andrew, if you want inconsistency and leaps to populism, there is no better example in the Australian polity at the moment that Mr T Abbott.

Bee on extra dimensions

Backreaction: Extra Dimensions at the LHC: Status Update

It's rather technical in detail, but Bee Hossenfelder has a look at the early results from the LHC and what they mean for black hole production and theories involving large extra dimensions. The conclusion:

While it is in many cases not possible to falsify a model, but just to implausify it, large extra dimensions are becoming less plausible by the day. Nevertheless, one should exert scientific caution and not jump to conclusions. The relevance of CMS constraints on multi-jets depends partly on assumptions about the black holes' final decay that are not theoretically justified.

The last bit seems to be about her earlier comment that any LHC black hole would be "a quantum gravitational object and it is not correctly described by Hawking's semi-classical calculation. How to correctly describe it, nobody really knows."

Good to know they don't know what to look for, then!

This'll really make your cake rise...

Baking powder for environmentally friendly hydrogen storage

Boom tish.

Handy figures to keep in mind

Beyond Condoms: The Long Quest for a Better Male Contraceptive: Scientific American

This article gives a pretty comprehensive coverage of the never ending quest to find a decent male contraceptive. I was most impressed with this line, though:

Compared with the one-egg-per-month output of the female reproductive system, the roughly 1,000-sperm-per-heartbeat output of the male reproductive system is "a quantitatively challenging problem" for contraceptive research, Amory says.

Young single men: feel free to incorporate this factoid during your next venture in a singles bar. Married men: impress your wife by offering this new found knowledge during a dinner party with that nice new couple you recently met.

There's one other quote that I thought interesting from the article:

In animal models the compound bisdichloroacetyldiamine safely and reversibly induces infertility by inhibiting an enzyme, aldehyde dehydrogenase 1a2, required for retinoic acid synthesis in the testes. Unfortunately, bisdichloroacetyldiamine also inhibits a similar enzyme, aldehyde dehydrogenase 2, required for alcohol metabolism in the liver—meaning that animals on bisdichloroacetyldiamine were unable to process alcohol. "And some would say that if it weren't for alcohol no one would need a contraceptive anyway," jokes Amory

What happens if you "can't process alcohol"? Would five drinks keep you drunk for a week? (I guess it takes a while to for it to get out of you via the lungs.) Would 12 drinks in a day pickle your insides?

Things achieved on a long weekend

* Unblocked the Vacumaid via the application of the old (normal) vacuum cleaner to the inlet that was not sucking. My handyman (handyperson?) credentials have soared, but from a very low base.

* Went to Lifeline Bookfest, and about the first thing I spotted, sitting in a face up position, was volume 1 of the famous multi-volume biography of Graham Greene by Norman Sherry. Purchased for $3, I doubt I will venture past this volume, but having read Greene's short autobiography of the first part of his life last year, I'm curious to see what he left out. See, I told you that the Bookfest was great.

* Saw Super 8. I'm surely not the first to say it, but it's "ET with teeth and a bad temper." I thought it was not bad, but not likely to linger long in memory; still, it's probably the best JJ Abrams movie I have seen. You see, long time readers know I have a problem with him, and dammit, he's still doing it.

He's the Director of the Giant Faces, who seems to think you need to be able to see skin pores to understand the emotion of a scene.

I get tired of pointing this out. Someone - Spielberg, his wife, his dog - I don't care who it is - tell him to frame a shot and then pull back half way and re-compose it. It is just the Abrams rule of thumb that will never let you down - "you are too close."

Anyway, as many reviewers noted, the young teenage(?) actors are really good, and the script as a homage to early Spielberg is quite good too. I liked the ideas better than the execution; but that always seems to be my fate with JJ Abrams.

* Taught the children how to play poker, as well as Pig. (I only found Pig as an adult in a Hoyles book, but it is a remarkably good party game for kids and adults.)

By nuclear power to the Pole

Last night, quite by accident, I saw the second half of Charlie Bird Explores the Arctic, in which the Irish journalist joins a Soviet nuclear powered icebreaker that takes passengers to the North Pole every summer.

The fact that this is now a quite routine tourist event that has been running for years had escaped my attention.

It costs about $20,000 per person, and the ship is quite well appointed, as far as nuclear powered icebreakers go. Once at the pole, everyone gets off and stands around a temporary North Pole pole stuck in the ice, a bar-b-q takes place on the ice, and several made people go for a dip in the water that is exposed around the ship.

Unfortunately, I can find no Youtube clip of this, but you can currently watch the show on the SBS TV website. The first half is spent with some Inuit, and there is a fair bit of discussion about how they definitely know the climate is changing.

I see that there is an old Youtube of an English woman making this trip in 2001, which gives you the general idea.

I must try and keep up more with fantasy ways to spend spare money I don't have.

Barr explains

Roseanne Barr: 'Fame's a bitch. It's hard to handle and drives you nuts' | Culture | The Guardian

I really did like Roseanne for the first 3 or 4 seasons. Like most sitcoms, it grew tired and was pretty much unwatchable (and unwatched) in its last season, but the first few years were pretty innovative in the way Barr describes in the article above.

In fact, in the first few paragraphs, Ms Barr sounds quite sensible, but then we get a long recount of how and why she felt abused soon after her famous sitcom started. I have read much of this before; it certainly sounds like it must have been a nightmare on the set for the rest of the cast while Roseanne and the producers/writers fought bitterly and openly. And who really know who's right here? Barr can swing wildly from sounding credible, to sounding half nutty.

But towards the end, she criticises Hollywood for tolerating the likes of Charlie Sheen, and here she is on the money again:

Based on Two And A Half Men's success, it seems viewers now prefer their comedy dumb and sexist. Charlie Sheen was the world's most famous john, and a sitcom was written around him. That just says it all. Doing tons of drugs, smacking prostitutes around, holding a knife up to the head of your wife – sure, that sounds like a dream come true for so many guys out there, but that doesn't make it right. People do what they can get away with (or figure they can), and Sheen is, in fact, a product of what we call politely the "culture".

But when it comes to his abusing his producers, she does relate:

Where I can relate to the Charlie stuff is his undisguised contempt for certain people in his work environment and his unwillingness to play a role that's expected of him on his own time.

Well, it seems to me Sheen has a lot less to complain about, given that (unlike Barr) he didn't get a comedy show by developing a character in years of tough stand up comedy. It seems he only had to lead a dissolute life, and a comedy based on that fell into his lap. (I'm assuming that's how it happened anyway.)

Finally, I note that The Middle - a very solid, enjoyable sitcom that is underappreciated - is a pretty clear successor to Roseanne. Maybe it's my own working class family background that makes me like these comedies.

A free plug

Brisbane Bookfest | Lifeline Community Care Queensland

Any South East Queensland reader is reminded that the Lifeline Bookfest is on at the Southbank Convention Centre this long weekend.

As their January one had to be cancelled because of the floods, I assume they will have a lot of books to sell.

You really should go; it's great.

And turning now to international hamster news...

France caught in a legal trap over rare rodent

The story feature as very good portrait of a hamster too.

Today's bit of curious medical research

Magnetic fields reduce blood viscosity - physicsworld.com

In their experiment, Tao and Huang showed that applying a 1.3 T magnetic pulse to a small sample of blood can significantly reduce it's viscosity. About 8 ml of blood with a viscosity of 7 centipoises (cp) – above healthy limits – was contained at body temperature (37 °C) in a test tube. The tube formed part of a device called a capillary viscometer used to measure viscosities. The sample was then exposed to a magnetic field applied parallel to the direction of flow of blood via a coil around the edge of the test tube. After one minute of exposure to the field, the blood's viscosity had been reduced by 33% to 4.75 cp. With no further exposure to the field, the viscosity had only risen slightly to 5.4 cp after 200 min, which is still within healthy limits.

I guess it would be good to know how long the effect does usefully last for. Still, it's all very interesting.

Not exactly a night at the opera

Spat at by a naked dancer: St-Pierre's Un Peu de Tendresse

A Guardian reviewer gets more than he bargained for during a night at the dance theatre.

Really, it's just a case of the avant garde dance movement, such that it is, running out of ways to shock its audience. Pretty pathetic, really.

Finding dark matter in the dark

The Dark Matter Data Bonanza - Technology Review

An interesting account here of some (apparently) successful attempts to detect dark matter via experiments at the bottom of mines.

If confirmed, this would be a major step towards understanding the universe. I think.

Julia has a cow

Julia Gillard can't take a trick at the moment, that's for sure. The latest one being on the Indonesian cattle issue. Of course no one was happy seeing the conditions in some Indonesian slaughterhouses, but stopping the whole export industry for six months when thousands of cattle are about to get on ships?

This was also a rare occasion when Bob Katter also came close to making sense. On Lateline last night, he made the point that I have not seen much of in the media reporting: how the hell did the Australians involved in setting up that box system that is designed to get cattle on their side in about the clumsiest way possible ever think that was going to look good to Australian animal rights people?

As Katter said:

I mean, when I saw that box I just couldn't believe that anyone could have been so stupid as to design that thing. ...

This person tonight admitted that they knew what was going on, that they'd sent people in to have look at this, they knew what was going on and they've known for years and years and years about it and they've done absolutely nothing about it except to provide a stupid box.

If you're going to but the animal in a box anyway, why not make it one which properly holds the beast while you have access to slit its throat while thus constrained? Surely this is possible.

There was also a decent bit of commentary about the issue in an article in the Australian this morning too.

Speaking of Hitler...

Hitler's first draft of the Holocaust: unique letter goes on show | World news | The Guardian

Hitler apparently was writing of his anti-Semitic plans in a letter in 1919:

... Hitler spouted an antisemitic diatribe, in which he said Jews were "pure materialists in thought and aspirations" and that their effect was "racial tuberculosis on the nation".

Crucially, he went on to set out his vision for a calculated antisemitism that would operate through strong governments rather than the emotion of the people. Emotional antisemitism, he wrote, merely ended in pogroms.

"The antisemitism of reason must lead to a struggle for the legal battle to abrogate laws giving [Jews] favoured positions, differentiating the Jew from other foreigners. The final goal must be the uncompromising removal of Jews altogether. To accomplish these goals, only a government of national power is capable, and never a government of national weakness."

Sort of encouraging

Older age does not cause testosterone levels to decline in healthy men

A bit of a surprise finding from this study:

"Some researchers believe that an age-related testosterone deficiency contributes to the deteriorating health of older men and causes nonspecific symptoms, such as tiredness and loss of libido," he said.

Handelsman and his team, however, found that serum (blood) testosterone levels did not decline with increasing age in older men who reported being in excellent health with no symptoms to complain of.

"We had originally expected age to have an effect on serum testosterone, so the findings were a bit of a surprise," Handelsman said....

"The modest decline in blood testosterone among older men, usually coupled with nonspecific symptoms, such as easy fatigue and low sexual desire, may be due to symptomatic disorders that accumulate during aging, including obesity and heart disease," he said. "It does not appear to be a hormone deficiency state."

The message for patients and their doctors, Handelsman said, is "older men with low testosterone levels do not need testosterone therapy unless they have diseases of their pituitary or testes."

Quick, send this information to Strauss-Kahn's defence team: maybe they can make some use of it. (Actually, it may be worth their while getting his testosterone levels checked; if they are ridiculously high, it might be useful in the plea in mitigation.)