Let's hear it for the state (sort of)

The visible hand | The Economist

This will go over well at Catallaxy. The Economist has a quasi sympathetic look at the success of "state capitalism," as demonstrated by China, Brazil and elsewhere:

This special report will cast a sceptical eye on state capitalism. It will raise doubts about the system’s ability to capitalise on its successes when it wants to innovate rather than just catch up, and to correct itself if it takes a wrong turn. Managing the system’s contradictions when the economy is growing rapidly is one thing; doing so when it hits a rough patch quite another. And state capitalism is plagued by cronyism and corruption.

But the report will also argue that state capitalism is the most formidable foe that liberal capitalism has faced so far. State capitalists are wrong to claim that they combine the best of both worlds, but they have learned how to avoid some of the pitfalls of earlier state-sponsored growth. And they are flourishing in the dynamic markets of the emerging world, which have been growing at an average of 5.5% a year against the rich world’s 1.6% over the past few years and are likely to account for half the world’s GDP by 2020.

State capitalism increasingly looks like the coming trend. The Brazilian government has forced the departure of the boss of Vale, a mining giant, for being too independent-minded. The French government has set up a sovereign-wealth fund. The South African government is talking openly about nationalising companies and creating national champions. And young economists in the World Bank and other multilateral institutions have begun to discuss embracing a new industrial policy.

The Economist comments are often worth reading too, and this one caught my eye:

The problem is that the Western liberal capitalism, that developed our society, has transformed paradoxically into communism. The welfare state is really a form of communism that prune and obstruct the tradicional liberalism that became western contries leaders of the world.

If you create a huge free public health system, a three years unemployment coverage, a free educational system, a grants culture or compel successful workers to pay 56% income tax, you really has establish a communism regime where talented people have to support others without any merit more than to be human beings.

Yes, what a tragedy that is!

A bit of a worry

BBC News - Big Tokyo earthquake likely 'within the next few years'

A big earthquake is much more likely to hit the Japanese capital, Tokyo, in the next few years than the government has predicted, researchers say.

The team, from the University of Tokyo, said there was a 75% probability that a magnitude 7 quake would strike the region in the next four years....

Researchers at the University of Tokyo's earthquake research institute based their figures on data from the growing number of tremors in the capital since the 11 March 2011 quake.

They say that compared with normal years, there has been a five-fold increase in the number of quakes in the Tokyo metropolitan area since the March disaster.

The Dotcom life

'I have a different attitude towards money than those who rather hoard it': inside the lavish life of Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom

This article is most remarkable for the photos it contains of the larger than life (or at least, larger than normal) Mr Dotcom. Quite an effort put in by the journalist to make him look funny, I think. Not that I mind in this case.

For future reference

The Republicans’ new voodoo economics - The Washington Post

I was asked over the weekend why I had started saying that it seemed to me that the Right in America had re-adopted a form of "voodoo economics".

I don't think I knew that an economics editor from The Economist had written an article in August with this very title, and I link it here for future reference.

Update:  Slate looks at how Gingrich's tax reform proposals are marginally different from those of the other Republicans.  But it points out:

 Every single candidate from the wacky Herman Cain to nice guy John Huntsman is running on the premise that taxes should be reduced relative to current policy, especially on high-incomes and on investment income. Gingrich is no exception to that rule as this chart based on Tax Policy Center analysis will show:

One respect in which Newt stands out from the pack somewhat is that essentially everyone's taxes go down at least a little under the Gingrich Plan. Most of the Republican contenders are currently preparing to raise taxes on a large number of lower income families who benefit from what are called refundable tax credits.

But as the first comment following the article notes:

I don't think anyone really believes that Gingrich et al are even pretending to look after "the 99%". How can someone simultaneously shriek about the deficit, openly plot a bloody, senseless, and expensive war, and propose steep tax cuts for everyone? You would think that someone who wanted to shrink the deficit or take a bite out of the debt would keep both massive spending cuts and tax hikes on the table.

Ocean acidification, continued...

Unprecedented, man-made trends in ocean's acidity

You can see why climate change skeptics think they have won...

Actually, no; no you can't.

(It's true, the rate of increase over the last little while has not been at the rate expected by some models.  It's not true that, in the big picture, it looks like warming is all over.)

Why there is no point in my going to literary festivals

Michael Hayworth, a publisher, complains in a column in The Age today that Australian "classic"novels are forgotten all too quickly by both academia and the public, and many are out of print.  But he starts with this observation:

We live in the world of the home-grown literary bestseller, the world of The Slap and The Secret River. We love our new stars, and celebrate the success of Favel Parrett or Toni Jordan or Craig Silvey. Our writers have careers both at home and abroad. We no longer expect our life-changing books to be written in isolation and despair, against the odds, fulfilling what Henry Lawson came to believe was the destiny of the Australian writer.

OK, well, I've heard of The Slap because it became a TV series last year that didn't sound all that interesting, and I therefore didn't watch.  I have heard the title "The Secret River".  I think.  

But, sorry, call me completely out of touch with Australia literature if you want, I have not heard of Favel, Toni or Craig.  And I even watch First Tuesday Book Club about half the time its on.  [Now that I think of it, I can't remember the name of any Australian author who I saw on it last year, except for potboiler thriller writer Matthew O'Reilly (who I also haven't read.)  Maybe I only watch the show because I like it when they strongly disagree on the merits of something I'm never going to read anyway.]

Back to Hayworth:

Our universities have failed for more than a century to create any kind of enduring tradition for the teaching of Australian literature. We are so familiar with this failure we hardly notice. And our publishing has always been dominated by British houses, which have not always felt the need, simply because a book is part of our national heritage, to keep it available.

In 2011, in not a single course in the whole country were students asked to read Henry Handel Richardson's The Fortunes of Richard Mahony. This is the equivalent of not one Russian university teaching Anna Karenina, of Madame Bovary going untaught in France.

There you go:  another Australian author and book, this one a "classic" apparently, which I haven't heard of.

But hang on a minute:  "failed for more than a century to create any ...enduring tradition..." is a bit rich isn't it?   By 1900, the country had only been around in any substantial form for a few decades.  (Have a look at this chart, which indicates the white population in 1843 was barely 250,000.)  Sure, Sydney University was founded in 1850 (presumably with very small class sizes,) but people coming here were hardly motivated by the weather making it a nice place in which to write books, and it's hard to imagine University courses of the early 20th century being designed around the works of Henry Lawson (or some such.)

In any event, I'm not entirely sure why Universities need to "teach" modern literature at all, but that's just me a being a not-very-arty philistine, I suppose; even though readers of this blog may think I am more "arts" inclined that I really am due to my reports on the latest weird installations at Brisbane's GOMA.   I can see the value in studying (as opposed to merely experiencing) literature from the point of view of what it tells us about societies'  and individual's attitudes in the past, and the arc of their development over time; this applies especially to really old literature.   But the study of modern literature when there is plenty of other material around about the society it was written in; well, after the first 5 years of analysis of a particularly complex book, I am not entirely sure what more there is to be said or taught, and you could probably now find most of that analysis for free on the net instead of going to university.

Anyhow, Hayworth's complaint about good Australian books being out of print would, one expects, be answered by the increasing use of e-readers.   Surely it can't be very expensive to put them out in electronic  format, and even develop a specialised field of advertising for formerly acclaimed books which have been out of print for some years.

If the publishing industry can't work out how to do that, Andrew, I'd say it's pretty much their own fault, and I wouldn't blame it on Universities at all. 

Tourism and politics

Egyptian frustration as tourists stay away | World news | The Guardian

The dramatic drop in tourism to Egypt (at least 32%, possibly 50%) raises an interesting question: can the need for Western tourism be a moderating force on State enforced religious conservatism?

Not for the first time, I will again suggest: much of the Middle East should be managed by Disney. They may have to give up their "gay days," though.

A bit embarrassing (OK, very embarrassing)

The anti-fornication, anti-abortion wife of Rick Santorum lived very differently in her 20s.

I know very little about Rick Santorum, so was this already known in the States? In any event, I was surprised to read about the very less than ideal Catholic life his wife led in her 20's.

About that fridge...

George Lucas Is Ready to Roll the Credits - NYTimes.com

This New York Times article is largely about a new George Lucas produced film "Red Tails," which (to his chagrin) he had to finance personally. It sounds potentially good - an old fashioned patriotic film about the (black) Tuskegee Airmen, featuring a lot of aerial footage. And, importantly, it's not actually directed or written by Lucas.

The article also spends a lot of time reviewing Lucas' career, and the enemies he has made with fanboys who hate him fiddling with his Star Wars films gets much coverage.

But the other great controversy of his movie making career - the much derided "nuking the fridge" segment from the much derided Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - is what I want to note.

I cannot believe how much venom is directed at that film. It was mentioned in at least half of the Tintin reviews I read, usually reading something like "this is a much better Spielberg action film than that last embarrassment of an Indiana Jones film." Well, I beg to differ.

I didn't think IJKCS was wonderful: I thought the script could have been much better, and, yes, OK, it was the silliest Indiana Jones film with some of the fake stunts, but there were enough well done sequences and images that I still ranked it as being enjoyable enough.

So, how did "nuking the fridge" manage to not offend me? I mean, sometimes really stupid science puts me off an entire movie. (The villain needing a satellite dish the size of Arecibo radio observatory to get a message to an orbiting satellite weapon in Golden Eye is the example I remember most frequently.) So what about the fridge? My reaction was that it was extremely unlikely and therefore a bit silly, but not fundamentally impossible. I now have information to back up that view.

The NYT notes (and I had heard this before) that Steven Spielberg claimed in one interview that it was his "silly idea". However, Lucas tells the paper that this was just Spielberg trying to be nice:

When I told Lucas that Spielberg had accepted the blame for nuking the fridge, he looked stunned. “It’s not true,” he said. “He’s trying to protect me.”
In fact, it was Spielberg who “didn’t believe” the scene. In response to Spielberg’s fears, Lucas put together a whole nuking-the-fridge dossier. It was about six inches thick, he indicated with his hands. Lucas said that if the refrigerator were lead-lined, and if Indy didn’t break his neck when the fridge crashed to earth, and if he were able to get the door open, he could, in fact, survive. “The odds of surviving that refrigerator — from a lot of scientists — are about 50-50,” Lucas said.

I wonder who those scientists are?

Anyway, that's enough for me. My gut reaction was about right, and Crystal Skull haters will just have to concentrate on the vine swinging scene instead. (Hey, that wasn't fundamentally impossible, either.)

The big computer in the sky

I haven't been spending much time checking new paper on arXiv lately, but here's a new one that talks about the idea of the Universe as a program being run on a giant quantum computer. 

I liked these parts:

And this part near the end:

Whatever happened to Spielbergian aliens?

The two big science fiction-ish hits of Steven Spielberg's early career, Close Encouters and ET, were notable for the niceness of the aliens:  little squishy botanist ET wouldn't harm a fly; and although the CE3K aliens appeared to have no concept of how disorientating it may be for humans to be sucked up into a mother ship and returned to their families 60 years later, they were touchy feely nice guys in the end.  No alien's perfect, I guess:  ET may well have turned rapidly into an alcoholic if he could have tolerated family absence better.

So, while watching Cowboys and Aliens on DVD last night, which Spielberg executive produced, I wondered why he now only seems to be involved with films showing aliens that want to squash humans like so many bugs.

His own War of the Worlds showed physically weak looking aliens who nonetheless thought humans were the most convenient source of blood and bone fertiliser for the lawn; last year's exec produced Super 8  had an alien that was (if I recall correctly) being treated unfairly, but nonetheless was ultra violent in response;  and now Cowboys and Aliens had another set of grotesque designed aliens who, despite having the technology to come to Earth in a pretty cool looking spaceship, thought the best way to dispose of interfering mammals is to bite their neck out or stab and slash them with their built in dagger fingers.

Doesn't anyone write science fiction with nice aliens any more?

As for Cowboys and Aliens as a movie:  the critical response was about right - not great, not horrendous, but had a bit of a feel of a lost opportunity to do a cool genre mash up better.

Now they tell us...

According to this article, people with a shipping industry background have been getting worried for a number of years about the safety of mega cruise ships.

Great mistranslations in history

Actually, the post is about Original Sin again.

Now, it is quite possible that I have read about this particular translation issue before, but have forgotten it.   Nonetheless, this translation issue was noted in a book I picked up at the Lifeline Bookfest yesterday (yes, Brisbane people - you have until next weekend to load up on books you probably won't finish before the next one comes around), but a simpler explanation is to be found via Google books, which turned up this extract from Hans Kung book "Great Christian Thinkers":

One other thing occurred to me about this - and I presume this is not an original thought - until Catholic scientist priest Spallanzani, who I mentioned here several posts back - did his 18th century work, mammalian reproduction as requiring both ovum and sperm was not well understood, and the idea that semen alone contained a tiny human just waiting to be planted and grow up was one way of understanding it.  Logically, then, there was a sense in which one man's seed also contained all the future babies as well as his own.

Would such thinking contribute to the way in which Augustine might have thought all humans were "in" Adam, and (in a sense) were quasi-participants in the original sin?

Update:  Another book (Augustine of Hippo - a life" by Henry Chadwick ) notes the following, which seems relevant to my speculation:
 

Update 2:  It may not have been Augustine's idea, but we do find in the Wikipedia entry for homunculus that some later thinkers thought that "preformationism" was relevant to original sin:

It was later pointed out that if the sperm was a homunculus, identical in all but size to an adult, then the homunculus may have sperm of its own. This led to a reductio ad absurdum with a chain of homunculi "all the way down". This was not necessarily considered by spermists a fatal objection however, as it neatly explained how it was that "in Adam" all had sinned: the whole of humanity was already contained in his loins.

Actually, the Wiki entry on preformationism is worth looking at too, for a more detailed look at its development in philosophy and its lasting influence.  It all starts with Pythagoras, apparently.  When microscopes came along, the dutch inventors gave preformationism a boost by claiming to see (in a fashion which reminds me of how, much later, Martian canals would be imagined via telescopes) things in semen that simply aren't there:

Dutch microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek was one of the first to observe spermatozoa. He described the spermatozoa of about 30 species, and thought he saw in semen, "all manner of great and small vessels, so various and so numerous that I do not doubt that they be nerves, arteries and veins...And when I saw them, I felt convinced that, in no full grown body, are there any vessels which may not be found likewise in semen." (Friedman 76-7)^[7]

But, going back to Augustine, it would seem that he does not really count as a preformationist:

St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas both held that hominization, or the coming into being of the human, occurs only gradually. Quickening was thought to occur around 40 days, and to be the point at which the merely animal mix of material fluids was ensouled. Until 1859, when Pope Pius IX decreed that life begins at “conception,” the Church was epigenetic along with the Aristotelians [see Maienschein 2003].

Put down the can

Study finds caffeine poisoning on the rise

I suppose it's no surprise that the highly caffeinated soft drink market should cause a spike in the number of cases of apparent caffeine poisoning. Is this part of the report right, though?:

Caffeine toxicity can mimic amphetamine poisoning, cause seizures, psychosis, cardiac arrhythmias and rarely even death, but the most common symptoms reported include irregular heart rate, tremors, stomach upsets and dizziness.

Well, Google knows everything, and links me to this blog post, containing the following extract from a toxicologist's book:

“Caffeine-induced psychosis, whether it be delirium, manic depression, schizophrenia, or merely an anxiety syndrome, in most cases will be hard to differentiate from organic or non-organic psychoses….

The treatment for caffeine-induced psychosis is to withhold further caffeine.”

In fact, the entire website ("The Caffeine Web") describes itself as having the following purpose:

At CaffeineWeb.com, psychiatrists, allergists and toxicologists address caffeine's potential to induce symptoms of mental illness in healthy people.

But it appears to have been a short lived affair. Maybe the author had a relapse after a particularly hard night on the Starbucks.

The lucky tilt

Here's an interesting story from Physorg about the possible importance of planetary tilt for the emergence of life:

But take away the Earth's axial slant, and the place might become a lot less inviting.

With an obliquity of less than five degrees or so, an Earth-like planet's broader equatorial regions bear the full brunt of a sun's radiance. The polar regions also receive far less sunlight than they do with seasonal ebbs and flows. The result: extreme temperature gradients based on latitude. "Your equator is heated enormously while the poles freeze," said Heller.

In theory, bands of habitability in temperate, mid-latitude zones could persist. In a worst-case scenario, however, the entire atmosphere of a zero-obliquity planet could collapse, Heller said. Gases might evaporate into space around the planet's blazing middle and freeze to the ground in the bleak north and south.

Life, had it ever emerged, would be stopped dead in its tracks.

And the problem is, for life on other planets, that red dwarf stars may well erase planetary tilt relatively quickly.

It sounds like it may be an important reason as to why you can have billions of planets, but not many suitable for life.

Back to Pelagius?

I saw a link to an article in The Tablet about evolution and religion by Jack Mahoney, but it was behind the paywall and couldn't get to it.  (The Tablet offers very little for free.)

Anyway, a bit of Googling shows that Jack Mahoney is a Jesuit and has recently published a book "Christianity in Evolution: An Exploration".

It sounds very interesting.  As the review in The Independent notes:

Mainstream Christianity long ago dropped overt hostility to Darwin, and even manages to speak of him fondly on occasion, but it has held back from the next logical step, bringing theology and evolution into meaningful dialogue. Christianity, Mahoney argues, "has been strangely silent about the doctrine of evolution" because to accept it wholeheartedly would then involve a redrawing of the theological map. Yet that is precisely what he wants it to do.

It's true: there's an unresolved tension in the modern Catholic Church between the scientific understanding of evolution and the traditional understanding of the role of Christ; it is being ignored rather than dealt with adequately.  The fundamental problem is that evolution erodes the concept of Original Sin.   It certainly can't be understood in the previous sense of being the reason why death and suffering came to the Earth.

Thus, it is not surprising that Mahoney follows the path previously trod by another Jesuit interested in evolution, Teilhard de Chardin, in throwing doubt on the traditional understanding of Original Sin.  Of course, once you start questioning one traditional theological understanding, it can have a bit of a domino effect. From another review from a Jesuit website:

 Mahoney suggests that more traditional understandings of Original Sin, the Fall, Atonement, Justification and similar concepts no longer sit comfortably in an evolutionary context. His own position on sin in this context is very helpful: ‘Sin emerges as humanity’s yielding to evolutionary selfishness and declining to accept the invitation to self-transcendence: it is a refusal to transcend oneself in the interests of others.’ (p.43) Put like that, it makes sense of Paul VI’s claim that ‘the world is sick’ (Populorum Progressio, §66) and his diagnosis of its sickness as ‘the lack of brotherhood among individuals and peoples’. I also liked Mahoney’s comment: ‘What people in today’s culture need most is not the recovery of a sense of sin but the acquiring of a sense of purpose in their lives.’ (p.66)

I don't know:  I kind of miss the emphasis on personal sin in the Church these days.  But anyway, the review also notes:

He carries this approach to the Incarnation through to offer an interpretation of Christ’s death and resurrection, too, suggesting that evolutionary theology:

proposes that the motive for the Word becoming flesh was not to save humanity from any inherited congenital sinfulness; it was for Christ to lead and conduct the human species through the common evolutionary fate of individual extinction to a new level of living with God. Nor was this done by the offering of Christ as an expiatory sacrifice to placate an injured God; it was achieved by Christ’s freely confronting death and winning through to a new phase of existence to be imparted to his fellow humans in their evolutionary destiny to share fully in the life of God. (pp.14-15)

Such suggestions will, one would think, not endear Mahoney to Pope Benedict; but then again, some people took the latter's mention of Teilhard de Chardin with brief approval in 2009 as indicating a softening of the previous Vatican warnings against his theological thoughts.

The problem, of course, is that Original Sin in its traditional form has been solidly maintained by the Church virtually since its inception.  Pelagius' views on the topic (that Adam merely set a bad example to humanity), which presumably can be more easily accommodated within modern understanding of evolution, lost out in the ideological battle with St Augustine.  (I see from Wikipedia that there was also Semipelangianism, which was an attempt to find a compromise between Augustinian and Pelagian views, but it was also promptly condemned as heresy.)

I would expect that Pelagianism gets covered in Mahoney's book, as it certainly seems he is effectively arguing that the modern understanding of evolution forces us to return to something resembling it.

Finally, while Googling around on the topic, I found this chapter of an online book * which deals with the theological response in the Catholic Church to evolution.   It is very detailed, but rather good.  Amongst other points if makes, it seems that it may have been well into the 20 th century before a majority of theologians really started believing that evolution was completely true.   This does not surprise me.  My own father, for example, never fully accepted evolution, and as it was a topic that the Church chose not to preach about, I expect many Catholics born in the first (say) third of the last century found evolution a topic easy to ignore, and a little hard to believe, and as such it did not represent much of a challenge their faith.

* the website it is from is said to be "Where Christian mysticism, theology and metaphysics meet Eastern religions, Jungian psychology and a new sense of the earth", and appears to be mostly the work of James Arraj, a psychologist who died a year or two ago.  I don't know about the quality of everything he has written, but the chapter I have linked to here seems pretty good.

Respect needed

BBC News - Eve teasing in India: Assault or harassment by another name

I didn't realise India could be such an unpleasant place for female tourists. Not just the article, but many of the comments following, indicate that it can be quite aggravating for them.

Terry Eagleton dissents

Religion for Atheists by Alain de Botton - review | Books | The Guardian

Terry Eagleton is always an interesting commentator, even if his Marxist take on Christianity is not for everyone. Here, he reviews Alain de Botton's book that argues in the tradition of Matthew Arnold, who (explains Eagleton):

....feared the spread of godlessness among the Victorian working class. It could be countered, he thought, with a poeticised form of a Christianity in which he himself had long ceased to believe.

The key criticism of this approach is in these paragraphs:

There is something deeply disingenuous about this whole tradition. "I don't believe myself, but it is politically prudent that you should" is the slogan of thinkers supposedly devoted to the integrity of the intellect. If the Almighty goes out of the window, how are social order and moral self-discipline to be maintained? It took the barefaced audacity of Friedrich Nietzsche to point out that if God was dead, then so was Man – or at least the conception of humanity favoured by the guardians of social order. The problem was not so much that God had inconveniently expired; it was that men and women were cravenly pretending that he was still alive, and thus refusing to revolutionise their idea of themselves.

God may be dead, but Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists is a sign that the tradition from Voltaire to Arnold lives on. The book assumes that religious beliefs are a lot of nonsense, but that they remain indispensible to civilised existence. One wonders how this impeccably liberal author would react to being told that free speech and civil rights were all bunkum, but that they had their social uses and so shouldn't be knocked. Perhaps he might have the faintest sense of being patronised. De Botton claims that one can be an atheist while still finding religion "sporadically useful, interesting and consoling", which makes it sound rather like knocking up a bookcase when you are feeling a bit low. Since Christianity requires one, if need be, to lay down one's life for a stranger, he must have a strange idea of consolation. Like many an atheist, his theology is rather conservative and old-fashioned.

De Botton does not want people literally to believe, but he remains a latter-day Matthew Arnold, as his high Victorian language makes plain. Religion "teaches us to be polite, to honour one another, to be faithful and sober", as well as instructing us in "the charms of community". It all sounds tediously neat and civilised. This is not quite the gospel of a preacher who was tortured and executed for speaking up for justice, and who warned his comrades that if they followed his example they would meet with the same fate. In De Botton's well-manicured hands, this bloody business becomes a soothing form of spiritual therapy, able to "promote morality (and) engender a spirit of community". It is really a version of the Big Society.

A bigfoot-like creature

Did Bigfoot Really Exist? How Gigantopithecus Became Extinct | Hominid Hunting

Interesting blog entry from Smithsonian.com. I don't think they went extinct - they invented a time machine and just wander the Earth at whim.

TB back

Totally drug-resistant TB emerges in India : Nature News & Comment

You don't hear too much about TB as an international disease these days, hence I didn't know this:

Tuberculosis trails behind only HIV as the world’s leading cause of death from infectious disease. But in spite of its impact on human health and economic growth, it has not ranked among the pharmaceutical industry's priorities.

“The pharmaceutical industry had scant interest in TB for decades,” says Richard Chaisson, director of the Center for TB Research at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. “The industry pretty much concluded it wasn’t an attractive market, there was not enough potential profit.”

The article goes on to say that there has been an increase in development of TB drugs in the last 10 years or so, and none too soon, by the sounds:

Physicians in India have identified a form of incurable tuberculosis there, raising further concerns over increasing drug resistance to the disease¹. Although reports call this latest form a “new entity”, researchers suggest that it is instead another development in a long-standing problem.

The discovery makes India the third country in which a completely drug-resistant form of the disease has emerged, following cases documented in Italy in 2007² and Iran in 2009³.

A minor rat tale

Watching War Horse the other night, which I thought generally created a very realistic look to trench warfare in World War I, there was one quick shot in which there were a quite a few rats out in the middle of a trench while the last soldier was waiting there after all of his comrades had gone up over the wall and into battle.  Hmm, I thought, I know there were a lot of rats around the trenches, but did they really make such a sudden large scale appearance in bright daylight as soon as everyone had left? 

Then, this morning, in full sunlight, while idly staring out of the kitchen window, I noticed a rat boldly eating the left over bird seed sitting on the spa cover where we normally put the seed trays.

Time for some rat warfare action again at my house.

Comedy, science and religion

Today's reading:

*  the New York Times magazine has a long article on Stephen Colbert, and focusing more on his recent complicated toying with the Presidential race.  All pretty interesting.   Unfortunately, Comedy Central now blocks his website videos here, and his show is not shown on any free network, leaving him only accessible to those who get the Comedy Channel on cable TV.   This is a terrible outcome, as we recently gave up Foxtel at our house, to no discernible loss of quality of life except for my not being to watch Colbert Report. 

*  the Christian Science Monitor reports on Nicholas Steno, with the headline "The saint who undermined creationism".   Well, he's not quite a saint yet, but I don't recall reading about him before.  (He is apparently credited as the first to work out - in the 17th century - that different geological layers are laid down over time and contain a record of life in the very distant past.)  He went on to become a bishop.   As the article notes, the Catholic church has other clerics who have made big scientific contributions:

Steno was by no means the only Catholic cleric whose observations created models that counter literal Biblical accounts of creation. Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian friar, developed a model of inheritance that made Darwin's theory of evolution intelligible. In the 20th century, it was a Belgian priest, Georges Lemaître, who first proposed the Big Bang theory.

Oddly enough, there is also the case of Lazzaro Spallanzani, who amongst other things:

...discovered and described animal (mammal) reproduction, showing that it requires both semen and an ovum. He was the first to perform in vitro fertilization, with frogs, and an artificial insemination, using a dog. Spallanzani showed that some animals, especially newts, can regenerate some parts of their body if injured or surgically removed.

Given the Church's current teaching, with its overly detailed theologising about the one and only legitimate place for semen to ever be, it's a tad ironic that it was one of their priests who was making discoveries about it.

Reich review

The man who started the sexual revolution | TLS

Here's an interesting review of a new book about all round loon Wilhelm Reich, whose core idea of the e-vil of sexual repression made him quite popular with middle aged Western men for much, much longer than he deserved.

In Australia, the aging Jim Cairns made it clear that he was very enamoured of Reich's theories, and on checking this I see that it was his she's-not-my-mistress mistress Junie Morosi who was largely responsible for introducing him to the books.

Fear of Horse conquered

I am happy to report that my not-so-happy Spielbergian experience with Tintin was not repeated with last night's viewing of War Horse.

It's a very impressive movie, and all the good reviews referring to it being in a grand, "classic" Hollywood style of movie making which petered out sometime in the 1960's are right.  I agree wholeheartedly with Stephanie Zacharek's comment the other day in Slate:

 I love the pure movieness of War Horse—I don’t see it as corny or overcooked.

It is, even by Spielberg standards, an exceptionally lush and beautiful film, and I don't recall a World War I movie which has ever evoked the look of the period in such an authentic feeling way.   The John Williams score is not over-powering, the actors are all fine, and the script works well too. 

But the largest praise must go to Spielberg himself.   The film does not (unlike Tintin) contain motifs repeated from his earlier work in any calculated way;  it references classic directors' works but (for the most part) with the added benefit of the graceful camera movement and careful regard to the composition of every single shot that is the hallmark of an extraordinary natural talent. 

You should see it at a cinema.

A bit of a surprise?

Marijuana use associated with cyclic vomiting syndrome in young males

Researchers have found clear associations between marijuana use in young males and cyclic vomiting syndrome (CVS), where patients experience episodes of vomiting separated by symptom free intervals.

Since marijuana is well known as a help for some people with nausea and vomiting from things like chemotherapy, this would seem like a bit of a surprising finding.

Visiting Lenin

The designer skin he lives in: is it time to bury Lenin's stage-managed show?

The Guardian has an interesting and entertaining account of what it is like to visit the body of Lenin these days.

Big battery news

Two potentially important battery development stories:

* Air battery to let electric cars outlast gas guzzlers

IBM claims to have solved a fundamental problem that may lead to the creation of a battery with an 800-kilometre (500-mile) range - letting EVs potentially compete with most petrol engines for the first time.

Would be very impressive if this pans out - but it is IBM making the claim, apparently.

*  new technology that sounds as if it would allow large scale battery storage of solar power:

Battery developer Eos Energy Storage claims to have solved key problems holding back a battery technology that could revolutionize grid energy storage. If the company is right, its zinc-air batteries will be able to store energy for half the cost of additional generation from natural gas—the method currently used to meet peak power demands.

This is a start up making the claims though, so caution is warranted.

The Anti Tattoo League

I am getting tired of waiting for fashion sense to turn against tattoos, particularly on women. 

Call me sexist, but young men generally are known to be silly risk takers in all  aspects of life.  Ask the insurance companies; and I noted last year the "accident hump" for young men, which apparently "exists in almost all societies and is statistically well documented."

So, it doesn't surprise me that garish and godawful tattoos which will fade into horrible splotchly things in 30 years time appear to be a good idea to some relatively young men.  Of course, this doesn't help explain why any man over 25 gets a tattoo, but who am I to disagree with a few decades of American sitcoms which sociologically prove that women are actually, unknown to their oblivious husbands, the most sensible ones in 9 out of 10 marriages.

So, women:  come on, you mature earlier and are supposed to be the moderating influence on stupid young men.  Hence, I am getting increasingly disturbed at the amount of awful, large tattoos appearing on women's arms.  There is no sense of the tattoo craze petering out for females at all yet - in fact, at this rate, I expect to see our Prime Minister return from summer holidays with a "Timbo 4 eva" tatt, complete with a facsimile of her beau armed with haircutting scissors and dryer emblazoned on the large expanse of skin she often shows between her chin and bustline.  (See here, here, and especially here.)   My previous cautious hope that tattooing has peaked seems to have been misplaced. 

I've said before that the small tattoo on the back of the neck (which seems popular with women) is a bit silly:  they're never going to see it themselves, so it's just self branding for the audience that's behind them in the shopping centre.  But at least it could always be hidden in future if they tire of it by virtue of longer hair. As for smallish tattoos on the breast line or ankle:  again, depends what they wear, but it's not always going to be on display if it turns ugly in future.

But lately I have been noticing absolutely horrendously large tattooing down arms on otherwise conservatively dressed and coiffed women, who don't particularly seem to be wanting to make a "look at me" statement to the world - except, that is (by way of recent example) for the ghoulish zombie like face that is on the forearm handing me change at the newsagent.   Or the shift manager (for goodness sake) at the MacDonalds I was at today, whose entire left arm was devoted to an extensive fairy world themed tattoo.   Granted, it was better than the newsagent's tatt, but you look at this otherwise attractive enough young-ish woman in short sleeves and all you can see is an enormous, arm-devouring fairy tattoo.  

I think it's time society (or at least, the over 50, wanting-to-control-the-rest-of-society-for-their-own-good part of society to which I subscribe) to start taking matters into our own hands.   I mean, would nice women with tatts in a public environment really punch out people for making the quiet observation "my God, that's a hideous tattoo", or "I would notice your nice face if it wasn't for the fact that you seem to want people to stare only at your arm", or the more vindictive take "tattoos are generally kitsch art*; yours particularly so.  I hope you regret it now, or will in the future"?  Maybe all of them could then be followed up with a quick "Nothing personal, mind you.  I hate the tatt, not the person, but nonetheless seek to encourage a severe reduction in tattooing by whatever guerilla tactic I can muster."

I mean, I seriously want to say those things to men too (well, not the bit about the nice face) but I'm not completely insane.  And let's face it:  women can have substantial influence on men, but it ain't going to happen with tattoos while ever they are in a competition for garish arm covering ones too.

So the tactic is identified, and all we need now is to apply it. Join the league.  I won't do it alone...

*  Oddly enough, I Googled "kitsch" to check the spelling, which led me to the Wikipedia entry on the topic which notes the important contributions of both Kant and Hegel to the philosophy of aesthetics; two philosophers who I have recently been discussing at this very blog in other contexts.   I was obviously destined to make this post.

UPDATE:  whaddya know:  Kant did discuss tattoos briefly, and did not approve.

Say anything..

I don't normally find myself reading the (Brisbane) Sunday Mail, but I had time to kill while my daughter and her friend were in the cinema watching the latest Alvin and the Chipmunks travesty (well, after no.2, I think we can safely assume the latest was dire for anyone over the age of 12) and found myself reading this story about the Walter Mitty style Facebook life of a sometime Brisbane school teacher.

Apparently, people enjoy reading Facebook pages of people they don't know and get upset when they realise there is not a shred of truth in them. According to the report, this guy named an imaginary girlfriend (well, at least the life story was imaginary) who was said to be a drugs squad police officer who had been shot during a raid last November, made a recovery, only to die unexpectedly of a heart attack at the end of December. An imaginary funeral was then announced and took place, and our fiction writing "hero" made the following entry on Facebook:

"One thing that Kell said to me the day before she passed away will always stay with me: 'You have made me the happiest woman in the world . . . I love you Clintypoo . . . I'll always be with you'," Mr Acworth wrote on his Facebook page last week.

People kept reading his Facebook after that? Really?

Was this all an in joke, or maybe a deliberate lesson to his students about the dangers of trusting strangers on Facebook? As far as I can tell from the odd comment I hear, Facebook has had nothing but a malign effect on high school student relationships. (I heard someone on talk back radio in the last year or two complaining that half of each Monday at a high school he/she was involved with was taken up with having to deal with the the fall out from the weekend's vindictive slagging off and bullying on Facebook.)

I remain quietly confident that Facebook has been a net detriment to the betterment of society.

Bryan Appleyard seems inclined to feel the same way, and a couple of days ago he was discussing "twittercide", the phenomena by which a politician or celebrity makes ridiculously unguarded, career-endangering comments on Twitter. Bryan seems to fear the worse:

I suspect there’s a neuroscientific aspect to all this. The neurological walls that divide public from private utterance are crumbling. Our brains are being hollowed out. At this rate there will be no unexpressed thoughts and all the sustaining complexity of the human world will drain away to be replaced by a featureless, babbling simplicity. But you’ll now have to buy my book to find out what I mean.

But to get back to Facebook, I am curious as to whether the possibly apocryphal story at the end of this comment to Appleyard's post is true:

Yes I’m shocked at some of what I see on my 17yr old nephew’s Facebook page but the shock is because I’m 40 and not used to seeing that sort of thing set out so publicly, not in the content itself (which, largely, is the same as anyone’s teenage years). This habit of documenting everything is becoming the norm so if he applies for a job in 15 years then all the other candidates – not to mention the hiring manager, HR department etc. – will be in a similar position. They may be apocryphal but I’ve heard stories about shops & supermarkets actively discriminating against applicants without Facebook profiles etc. on the grounds that it’s an indicator of a normal, hopefully gregarious teenager. In other words the absence of social media history may, in time, become more problematic than its presence.

God help us if this right.

Sweaty palms flying

Qantas passengers injured in turbulence

Given last week's news of small cracks developing in the wings of the A380, this is exactly the sort of flight in one which would make me a tad nervous:

Qantas says seven passengers have been injured on a flight from London to Sydney.

The airline says the seat belt sign was turned on and passengers were returning to their seats when an A380 experienced turbulence over India yesterday.

Seven people suffered minor cuts and bruises during the incident.

Extreme cuteness

As appearing inThe Age this morning:

It's a baby Leadbeater's possum. Irresistibly cute, no?

A remarkably warm winter temperature

Climate Central notes that much of the US has had little snow this winter, and some of the Plains states have just had some very high temperatures:

The National Weather Service said on its Sioux Falls, S.D., website that one sign pointing to the unusual nature of the warm weather was the fact that old records were exceeded by huge margins, as much as 17 degrees warmer than previous records, the agency's website states. As noted by the Weather Channel's Twitter account, the high temperature of 61°F in Minot, N.D., — an all-time January record — was the average high temperature in April, according to The Weather Channel.

Life is complicated

Mass prostate cancer screening doesn't reduce deaths: study

This seems pretty strong reason to not worry about PSA testing, but I bet it won't be accepted quickly.

Not dead yet

Tiger set to boost services

Tiger Airways (the airline that's somewhat akin to a flying Soup Nazi, except it's the price that's good, not the quality) is still alive and expanding a bit.

I want them to survive. I should use them again in the next year.

In other art news....

Very kind of them...

Soft drink vending machines offer free Wi-Fi Internet access ‹ Japan Today

Asahi Soft Drinks Co has developed a vending machine that provides free Wi-Fi connection to the Internet.

The company said on its website that 1,000 Wi-Fi vending machines will be rolled out this month in Tokyo, Sendai, the Chubu and Kinki regions, as well as Fukuoka. It said it plans to expand the number to 10,000 within five years.

The free Internet service, to be provided in association with Freemobile, will be available in two types, Asahi said. One will require registration via email, and one will not. Asahi says both services will be free of charge.

Asahi says that sessions will time out after 30 minutes and that wireless hotspots will available within a 50-meter radius of Asahi vending machines. WPA2-PSK security will be provided.

The electrodes must be tiny...

Scientists record electrical currents that control male fertility

Biologists Yuriy Kirichok and Polina Lishko of the University of California, San Francisco, have made a name for themselves recording the electrical currents that course through, yes, sperm cells....

In a pivotal study, the husband-and-wife team has uncovered how progesterone - a hormone involved in menstruation and embryo development - switches on a sperm's internal electricity. The electric current kicks sperm tails into overdrive, powering the final push toward the egg. Sperm that fail to heed progesterone's "get-up-and-go" signal could help explain some couples' struggles to conceive, say Kirichok and Lishko, both Ukrainian immigrants.

Humans and algae

I've found that American Scientist seems to put a fair few of its feature articles on its website.  Here are a couple of some interest:

*  the potential for algae based biofuel is discussed in some detail here.
*  the question of whether homo sapiens' "modern" behaviours evolved over tens of thousands of years is discussed in this article. 

I should add this magazine to the blogroll soon.

Mochi deaths noted - 2012

It's time for me to note the annual New Year's mochi death toll from Japan.

(Look, this blog is high on Google search for only a few things:  Julia Gillard's enormous earlobes, forehead mites, and mochi deaths.   I have to keep going to maintain my pathetic numbers...)

Anyway, as with last year, it seems the English language media from Japan is slow to report this now, and I have to resort to Google searching in Japanese.

So far, I've come up with this, courtesy of Google translate, from Yomiuri Online:

The number of people were transported by ambulance to the New Year mochi choking is 3:00 pm daily, up to 13 people in Tokyo alone, two of whom died.

According to the Tokyo Fire Department, around noon on December 28, men in Nerima (82), died 草餅 clog. Noon to 30 men Hino (101) died of suffocation by clogging clots lunch.

I have had this confirmed:  yes, the story says the two who died were 82 and 101!  (I wonder who fed mochi - famous for causing choking in the aged) to the 101 year old. 

And looking that the searches in Japanese, that is all I can confirm so far.

This job is getting harder by the year....

I'll check for more reports tomorrow.

Update:  collected figures for the nation remain as evasive as ever.  Ah well.  Japan has had enough death within the last year without worrying about this.

Still Kant-ing after all these years

I mentioned before that I had picked up a copy of Philosophy Now for some holiday reading, mainly because Ï felt I just had to reward whoever it was that came up with the cover featuring this:  "Kant & Co.   Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer - Four Dudes that Shook the World".

As it turns out, I didn't find the story on Kant all that good, although it did point out that the famous problem of what his system of morality means for lying (he thought you shouldn't even lie to an axe murderer who arrives at your door looking for your occupant) is about a conflict of values, and Kant didn't talk about this at all.

The relevant section from the article is this:

Staying with the axe murderer, it should be plain that more than one imperative/moral principle is relevant to the situation.  Certainly we should tell the truth; but do we not also have an obligation to fight evil?  We are confronted with a conflict of values here.  Unfortunately, as far as I know, there is no explicit discussion of this issue in Kant.  One could assume, however, that his general approach of distinguishing the lesser from the greater evil should be applied.  I think Kant might say that although lying is never right, it might be the lesser evil in some cases.

What the writer (Prof Peter Rickman, a former head of philosophy at City University in London) is that the murderer example came up during Kant's life and he did try to address in an essay.  If this summary from Wikipedia is any guide, Rickman's optimism about Kant coming up with a "lesser of two evils"resolution seems ill placed:

This challenge occurred while Kant was still alive, and his response was the essay On a Supposed Right to Tell Lies from Benevolent Motives (sometimes translated On a Supposed Right to Lie because of Philanthropic Concerns). In this reply, Kant agreed with Constant's inference, that from Kant's premises one must infer a moral duty not to lie to a murderer.

Kant denied that such an inference indicates any weakness in his premises: not lying to the murderer is required because moral actions do not derive their worth from the expected consequences. He claimed that because lying to the murderer would treat him as a mere means to another end, the lie denies the rationality of another person, and therefore denies the possibility of there being free rational action at all. This lie results in a contradiction in conceivability and therefore the lie is in conflict with duty.

I also note that in what can be argued is a sign that philosophy is either:

a. a lively, relevant and engaging activity relevant to the modern world; or
b. stuck in endless and unproductive repetition and should be replaced with more drinking

you can Google the topic "Kant and conflict of categorical imperatives" and get 225,000 links, including to this one, from a discussion in 2011 which is pretty good. The modern issue of lying to the axe murderer at the door is usually reformulated to the more historically relevant "what should good Europeans have done if they were hiding Jews in their house and a Nazi came to the door asking awkward questions". The "best" answer to the question in that last link notes that strict Kantian thought would deny there really was a conflict; the lying can never be justified. It also points out that Kant would argue that the truthful house owner would not be morally responsible for the deaths of the Jews, which is technically true but no doubt hardly a source of comfort to most people. But the other interesting point is that Neo Kantians have another way out of the specifically Nazi based example:

It's also worth considering that a neo-Kantian would take issue with your example on technical level, arguing that it's not a good example because the Holocaust is an exceptional situation, a special case, if you will. More specifically, the German state at the time formed an illegitimate government, and the SS officers were acting as agents of this illegitimate government, this state that is on face unjust. Given such case, one could argue, his entire corpus of ethics does not apply, as it was only intended to apply to situations involving a just government. (For more on this, see Kant's "Doctrine of Right" and Metaphysics of Morals 6:264, etc.)

That's not helpful if a real revenge seeking violent person comes to your door looking for your relative, however. The last link also provides a link to a philosophy journal discussion of the issue from Nov 2010, which looks interesting indeed, but is behind a paywall.  Here's what we can see, from the part of the abstract that is available:

 Sorry about the fuzzy quality of the image: I did my best.

The author of the article is Helga Varden, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois, and her list of work indicates she's quite the Kant fan.   I see she has one paper entitled "A Kantian Conception of Rightful Sexual Relations," which sounds like a blast from a man who thought masturbation was more degrading than committing suicide.

Anyhow, it's interesting to note how Kantian philosophy continues to intrigue and be debated after all these years.  The motivation, I suppose, comes down to wanting to ground morality and ethics on something rational other than utilitarianism, which has its own distinct problems (which, incidentally, get discussed in an article in the same issue of Philosophy Now about the "trolley problem".)    

Back to normal programming soon...

A short history of drinking on New Year's

Why we get wasted on New Year's

Salon has a fun look at why drinking and New Year's go hand in hand. Here's a key paragraph:

Across ancient Europe, the yuletide holidays were a free-for-all, made dicey by role reversals: The poor invaded the homes of the rich, men dressed as women, and the lord bowed to the peasant. The 12 days of Christmas, from Dec. 25 to Jan. 7, were set in the mold of the Roman holiday Saturnalia: The holidays were a period of truce, when old grudges should be forgotten (at least temporarily), and anger swallowed. But despite all this brotherly love, the Christmas season had a sinister playfulness, similar to the original concept of trick-or-treating. Echoing Saturnalia’s public ridicule of society’s laws and customs, rowdy bands of peasants invaded the manor, demanding food and drink. In exchange, the lord received his subjects’ blessings and goodwill for the coming year.

It's unfortunate that we can only manage fun for about 8 or 9 days, in this modern world. However, if you had money, you probably would tire of "wassailing"pretty quickly:

By the 17th century wassailing was a holiday tradition. Girls gussied up in holiday finery would carry a dubious alcoholic punch (usually spiced beer with apples) from door to door. The wealthy were expected to drink a toast and offer the wassailers payment in return. Far from the beatific carolers of today, the mobs were known to get unruly: Wassailers would prank or menace householders who refused them booze or money.

After noting that Puritans did not approve of this festive season, we at least can be thankful that we do not have to watch our national leaders emulate the Sumerians:

Mather no doubt was equally horrified by New Year’s Eve, which always marked an apex of drunken revelry. This is true around the world and throughout time: Although the New Year is celebrated from June to January and from Tallahassee to Timbuktu, almost all cultures have used the passing of one year to the next as an excuse to really party. Take for instance the fine old Sumerian tradition wherein the king had public sex with the high priestess of Ishtar, symbolizing the conception of Ninkasi, the goddess of beer.

A deep and meaningful end to 2011

Hegel and Hegel's God - The Philosopher's Zone - ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

I read an article in Philosophy Now by Robert Wallace about Hegel's idea of God, and found it pretty interesting. He was in Australia last year and did an interview with Alan Saunders on the Philosopher's Zone, and it covers the same material.

I found it rather interesting, but you must read it all.

At GOMA today

It was time to make another school holiday visit to the Gallery of Modern Art today.  It's hard to dislike modern art when it's in such a nice building.  Some highlights included a exhibit by a Japanese avant garde artist who's infatuated with dots (I think I had heard of her before), and some Aboriginal dogs from North Queensland.   I'll just post the photos to give you an idea:

If ever you are in Brisbane, you must visit it.

Oiko oiko

Green Philosophy by Roger Scruton – review | Books | The Guardian

Here's a somewhat cynical, but nonetheless interesting, review of Roger Scruton's new book on his version of being Green.

You have to read it to understand the title of the post.

Here comes the AP1000

New Toshiba reactor model gets U.S. nod | The Japan Times Online

I meant to post about this before Christmas, but forgot:

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved Toshiba Corp.'s AP1000 reactor design, paving the way for the first new reactor construction license to be issued in more than 30 years.

The five-member agency voted unanimously Thursday in favor of certifying the reactor's design.Southern Co. and Scana Corp. are seeking permission to use the next-generation reactors to expand nuclear power output at existing sites in Georgia and South Carolina. The certification "marks an important milestone toward constructing the first U.S. nuclear reactors in three decades," Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Thursday in a statement.

Well, they certainly take their time with new reactor approvals. As the report goes on to note:

The biggest difference between the AP1000 and existing reactors is its safety systems, including a massive water tank on top of its cylindrical concrete-and-steel shielding building. In case of an accident, water would flow down and cool the steel container that holds critical parts of the reactor — including its hot, radioactive nuclear fuel.

An NRC taskforce examining the Fukushima nuclear crisis said licensing for the AP1000 should go forward because it would be better equipped to deal with a prolonged loss of power — the problem that doomed the Fukushima No. 1 plant.

Good to see better passive safety being considered so important in new designs, but I would assume you could better than having a water tank on top.

Anyway, you can have a detailed look at the design at the reactor's own Westinghouse/Toshiba website. It's full of reassuring statements like this:

The AP1000^® pressurized water reactor works on the simple concept that, in the event of a design-basis accident (such as a coolant pipe break), the plant is designed to achieve and maintain safe shutdown condition without any operator action and without the need for ac power or pumps. Instead of relying on active components such as diesel generators and pumps, the AP1000 relies on the natural forces of gravity, natural circulation and compressed gases to keep the core and containment from overheating. However, many active components are included in the AP1000, but are designated as non safety-related.

Multiple levels of defense for accident mitigation are provided, resulting in extremely low core-damage probabilities while minimizing occurrences of containment flooding, pressurization and heat-up.

The AP1000 meets the U.S. NRC deterministic-safety and probabilistic-risk criteria with large margins. Results of the Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) show a very low core damage frequency (CDF) that is 1/100 of the CDF of currently operating plants and 1/20 of the maximum CDF deemed acceptable for new, advanced reactor designs.

I hope they are right.

From The Guardian

The Guardian may have helped caused the closure of the News of the World by reporting some policeman's wrong theory about how voicemails came to be deleted from a murder victim's phone, and been in bed with Julian Assange until it decided he really was only in it for himself and filed for a divorce,  but I still find it one of the best newspaper websites around.   Take these items from its Comment is Free section, for example:

*  Stephen Kelly, a freelance journalist who still seems to like really big glasses, writes about the deification of Dr Who, which did become a key feature of the show under Russell T Davies, and continues under Steven Moffat.  He writes:

The Doctor, of course, isn't marketed outright as a messianic figure but it's all there: "the lonely god", more of an idea than a man, who resurrects himself in a crucifix position; who has, literally, defeated the devil, resisted temptation and forgiven his greatest enemy; "he's like fire and ice and rage", it was once said. "He's like the night and the storm in the heart of the sun. He's ancient and forever. He burns at the centre of time and can see the turn of the universe. And … he's wonderful."

Even the main premise of the show is built upon the concept of existential salvation: the idea that one day this wonderful being will drop out of the sky to rescue us from the crippling tedium of adult life, to make us believe that there is more to existence than work, bills and over-thinking popular tea-time television shows.

All quite true, but it has really started to weigh the show down.

*  Denis Alexander (a British biologist and Christian) has a short but pretty good attempt at reconciling Genesis with evolution and atonement through Christ.  Here's the key passage:

The tradition of interpreting the early chapters of Genesis figuratively – as a theological essay, not as science – goes back to two great thinkers from Alexandria: the first-century Jewish philosopher Philo, and the third-century church father Origen. In 248 Origen wrote that Genesis references to Adam are "not so much of one particular individual as of the whole human race". Figurative understandings of the Genesis text have been part of mainstream theology ever since.

The first mention of Adam in the Bible is clearly referring to humankind (Genesis 1:26-27) and the definite article in front of Adam in chapters 2 and 3 – "the man" – suggests a representative man, because in Hebrew the definite article is not used for personal names, with Eve being the representative woman.

The Genesis narrative tells the story of humankind going their way rather than God's way. On the day that Adam and Eve sin, they do not drop dead but proceed to have a big family, albeit now alienated from friendship with God, causing spiritual death. Nowhere does the Bible teach that physical death originates with the sin of Adam, nor that sin is inherited from Adam, as Augustine maintained. But the New Testament does teach that humankind stays true to type – all people sin by their own free will – and Christ dies for the sins of all. Christ is the second Adam who opens up the way back to friendship with God through his sacrifice for sin on the cross. The result is the "at-one-ment" that the first Adam – Everyman – is unable to accomplish by his own efforts.

I'm not sure I'm entirely convinced, but it seems this is a summary of an argument he puts in an entire book on the subject, and it may be worth the effort.

*  On a lighter note, kind of, a writer looks at the latest report of Japanese retreat from relationships, and brought to my attention this story from earlier in the year:

Virtual girlfriends became a sensation last summer, when Japanese game-maker Konami released its second-generation of its popular Love Plus, called, aptly, Love Plus +, for the Nintendo DS gaming system. Konami skillfully arranged for an otherwise deadbeat beach resort town called Atami to host a Love Plus + holiday weekend. Players were invited to tote their virtual girlfriends, via the gaming console, to the actual resort town to cavort for a weekend in romantic bliss. The promotion was absurdly successful, with local resort operators reporting that it was their best weekend in decades.

He ends on this point:

"Maybe we're just advanced human beings," says a Japanese friend of mine over dinner this week in Tokyo, who won't let me use her real name. She is an attractive, 40-something editor at one of Japan's premier fashion magazines, and she is still single. "Maybe," she adds, "we've learned how to service ourselves."

Seriously, if research leads to more advanced ways for men to derive more, ahem, pleasure from virtual interactions with their electronic girlfriends, Japan is over with faster than even currently anticipated.

The comments following the article, from (I assume) mainly English people complaining about the difficulties in relationships indicate that the Japanese may just be a bit ahead of the curve.

*  Finally, the marvellously named Morven Crumlish talks about the Scottish celebration of Hogmanay (the New Year party which is, apparently, pretty full on in the drinking and fighting.

Interestingly, I see that they share the Japanese idea of cleaning up the house for the New Year.

But in comments, there are many people of Scottish heritage who say they are over the whole thing.  I liked this one:

Once you get out into the rural areas hogmanay is more community based with first-footing and the meeting up with friends. But in the big cities it has lost its main meaning. The Edinburgh hogmanay parties are just ugly vulgar spectacles packed out with interlopers and freaks, whereas in the west of Scotland the neds and radge use it has an excuse to act out the Battle of Helms Deep from the Lord of the Rings using tonic wine bottles has props. If memory serves the A&E departments in the West of Scotland at hogmanay and new years days are swamped with an insane amount of stab victims in the 18-24 demographic.

For once i think Glasgow council done the right thing this year by stopping the paid celebrations in George Square. theres a lot of people who are on the poverty line and cant afford a big swanky doo at Hogmanay. If anything the first-footing tradition of the lump of coal and mini bottle of grouse carries more symbolism than any amount of drunk hussies on Princes street.

Call me ignorant, but I can't say I've heard of "first-footing" before, so here we go:

"First footing" (that is, the "first foot" in the house after midnight) is still common in Scotland. To ensure good luck for the house, the first foot should be male, dark (believed to be a throwback to the Viking days when blond strangers arriving on your doorstep meant trouble) and should bring symbolic coal, shortbread, salt, black bun and whisky. These days, however, whisky and perhaps shortbread are the only items still prevalent (and available).

 The website I got that from goes on to explain some ever odder old Scottish New Year's traditions:

The traditional New Year ceremony of yesteryear would involve people dressing up in the hides of cattle and running around the village being hit by sticks. The festivities would also include the lighting of bonfires, rolling blazing tar barrels down the hill and tossing torches. Animal hide was also wrapped around sticks and ignited which produced a smoke that was believed to be very effective to ward off evil spirits. The smoking stick was also known as a Hogmanay.

Some of these customs do continue, especially in the small, older communities in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland where tradition, along with language and dialect are kept alive and well. On the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides, the young boys form themselves into opposing bands, the leader of each wears a sheep skin, while a member carries a sack. The bands move through the village from house to house reciting a Gaelic rhyme. On being invited inside, the leader walks clockwise around the fire, while everyone hits the skin with sticks. The boys would be given some bannocks - fruit buns - for their sack before moving on to the next house.

OK.  I think we've all learnt something today.  Unless, of course, you are smarter and better read than me.