Talking to Michael

The dark knight rises: Perhaps Michael Palin isn’t the nicest chap in Britain after all… - Profiles - People - The Independent

Don't be put off by the title:  there are no revelations of a "dark side" to Mr Palin.  It's a very long and quite interesting interview with him.

Fasting for life

BBC News - The power of intermittent fasting

This article, about a BBC show that looks at whether fasting is a good way to extend life in humans, talks in particular about Alternative Day fasting.  You can also do it for just two days a week:

I decided I couldn't manage ADF, it was just too impractical. Instead I did an easier version, the so-called 5:2 diet. As the name implies you eat normally 5 days a week, then two days a week you eat 500 calories if you are a woman, or 600 calories, if you are a man.

There are no firm rules because so far there have been few proper human trials. I found that I could get through my fast days best if I had a light breakfast (scrambled eggs, thin slice of ham, lots of black tea, adding up to about 300 calories), lots of water and herbal tea during the day, then a light dinner (grilled fish with lots of vegetables) at night.

On my feed days I ate what I normally do and felt no need to gorge. 

I stuck to this diet for 5 weeks, during which time I lost nearly a stone and my blood markers, like IGF-1, glucose and cholesterol, improved. If I can sustain that, it will greatly reduce my risk of contracting age-related diseases like cancer and diabetes.

Current medical opinion is that the benefits of fasting are unproven and until there are more human studies it's better to eat at least 2000 calories a day. If you really want to fast then you should do it in a proper clinic or under medical supervision, because there are many people, such as pregnant women or diabetics on medication, for whom it could be dangerous.

I was closely monitored throughout and found the 5:2 surprisingly easy. I will almost certainly continue doing it, albeit less often. Fasting, like eating, is best done in moderation.

It does sound relatively do-able,  I guess.

Whether it's good for you still seems up in the air, though.

Recommended TV

There's a new series of Horrible Histories being shown on ABC3, and I just watched this Darwin song, done as a style parody of David Bowie, and "ch-ch-changes" in particular.   Very clever.



And hey, I see it's not just me who finds this show good viewing.  Here's the Guardian TV blog earlier this year:

 CBBC's Horrible Histories is a wonderfully curious thing: wildly praised, yet woefully undersold as really funny … for a kids' show. But Horrible Histories isn't just the best show on children's television – it's one of the smartest comedies on TV.

That's a bold claim, admittedly. But with the fourth series – broadcasting every afternoon this week – it's time to stop patting Horrible Histories on the head for not being rubbish, and accept that it's a genuinely brilliant comedy in its own right. There are few British comedies that can touch it for ideas, writing and performance

Rude bits

Over the last week, three stories caught my attention:

1.  Avoiding pregnancy.   Teenage pregnancy rates have dropped pretty sharply in the US, and this Slate article asks how and why.

The first partial explanation is a bit of a surprise:    teenage virginity is on the rise.

According to federal surveys of teenage girls, 49 percent reported they were virgins in 1995, but 57 percent said they were in 2010. (The trend was even more pronounced among black teens, whose rate of abstinence rose from 40 percent to 54 percent.) However, these modest changes don’t fully explain the dramatic drop in teen pregnancy.

So the main explanation:

...the key to lower pregnancy rates has been a shift from condom use alone to more effective hormonal methods like the pill. It turns out that not all contraception is the same. No matter how well-educated they are, teens who do use birth control can’t reliably use condoms every time. To be sure, condoms prevent sexually transmitted diseases and are an important public health tool. But we now realize they should never, ever be the sole method of birth control for teens. They find condoms too much of hassle to use time after time—so they don’t.

 However, the article then goes on to point out that the pill is far from perfect:

Earlier this year, Washington University researchers led by Jeff Peipert reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that 5 percent of women in a study who were on the pill got pregnant within a year. Among those under 21 years of age, almost twice as many did. Take a moment to reflect on that. Imagine you are a concerned parent who accepts that your high school senior has sex. You take her to the doctor and she starts taking the pill. The data show that this is much better than just telling her to use a condom during intercourse. However, before graduation, 1 in 10 such girls will be headed for the delivery room or abortion clinic. That is a breathtaking failure rate.

Well, this just supports one of Steve's Rules For Life:   hey, if you're not prepared for a possible pregnancy, don't get into a sexual relationship.   

Of course, the Slate article then ruins my rule by pointing out that modern IUDs are a really effective way to avoid pregnancy:  

 ...the risk of contraceptive failure was 22 times higher with the pill than with IUDs in adult women, and double that for teens.

 I didn't realise IUDs were so effective.  Don't tell the kids.  Just stick to my Rule instead.

2.   The circumcision wars continue, this time with a push from a couple of Australian medical figures saying that the medical profession's solid turn against it in the 2000's was not really evidence based.   I always suspected this was the case.   It seemed to me that, for whatever reason, there was a turn against it going back to about the 1980's that was more cultural than anything else, and now the health benefits side is making a comeback.   We'll see how this develops.

Speaking of circumcision and culture, while Googling the topic, I stumbled across stories about how, in the Philippines, some cities put on "circumcision parties" to provide the operation safely for pre-teen boys.  As a government news agency explains:

Hornido attributed this phenomenon to the preference of the boys to have their circumcision done during the long summer vacation.

Circumcision is being done in the Philippines mainly for cultural reasons and not so much because of its health concerns. Among the Filipinos, the practice symbolizes the rite of passage into manhood.

However, Hornido urged parents to have their boys undergo safe medical circumcision by health professionals instead of the crude method of circumcision practiced in the Philippines known as ‘pukpok,’ performed mostly in rural villages by a local surgeon called "manunuli (one who circumcises)."

Well, I didn't know that.   Actually, like most Australians, there is very little I know about the Philippines culturally, which is odd considering its proximity to us.

3.  What's that doing there?    It turns out that human papilloma  virus is in a lot of prostate cancer.   (Mind you, it's in a lot of healthy ones too.)   But still:

“Recent unpublished experimental evidence by other researchers suggests that HPV and EBV can collaborate to promote the survival and proliferation of cancer cells, so our findings may well have important implications for understanding and preventing prostate cancer,” said Professor Whitaker.

“Significantly, in our prostate samples we found a high-risk strain known as HPV 18, which is known to be associated with other human cancers.

“HPV 18 is a common high-risk strain in Australia and is a specific target of the Gardasil vaccine now offered free to teenage girls to protect against cervical cancer.

“We note recent proposals to offer Gardasil to Australian teenage boys as well, with the aim of preventing the spread of the virus to women through sexual contact. 

“If HPV 18 is also associated with prostate cancers, as our research suggests, vaccinating boys may yet prove to have an unexpected direct benefit for them as well.”

It does sound a decent reason to extend the vaccine to boys.

Spoilt salade

How to make the perfect salade nicoise | Life and style | The Guardian

Hey, here's another one of these Guardian blog articles that go into far more detail than seems strictly necessary as to the possible variations of a common-ish dish.   The last one I noted was about pasta  carbonara; this time it's another favourite of mine - salade nicoise.

But it starts to go off the rails straight away, with the writer (Felicity) saying she really doesn't like canned tuna, and just prefers it with anchovies alone (ugh); also, apparently some people insist that boiled potato in it is an absolute abomination.

Well, this is all rather silly.   Chunks of a good quality canned tuna (in olive oil) are essential, and some modest amount of boiled potato make it a filling meal.   As for the other vegetables, I usually - um , julienne is the word I think I need - carrots and cut up some green beans and steam them just for a minute or two, then poor cold water on them to stop the cooking and leave them crisp but with the rawness taken off a bit.   That and lettuce are the main ingredients; well, if you aren't counting the olives, tuna, potato, salad onion, capers and boiled egg.   Not sure if always add tomatoes or not - my son won't eat them, which I find odd.   I think the vinaigrette I use is usually just lemon and olive oil, with garlic and a little bit of sugar. 

Anyhow, as I say, these articles in the Guardian do get a bit carried away.  As someone in comments says:

This kind of article is testament to the levels of debauchery now prevalent in the food porn industry. What utter, utter toss.

Well, maybe that's going too far.

But the biggest spoilsport of all in the thread is George Monbiot (!) who writes:

 I love what you do Felicity, but "the issue of fish" isn't just a matter of taste and money. It's also a matter of conservation, especially when it comes to species like tuna. Could we not make a decision that some species should be off-limits in recipes? And that if they are to be discussed, we can remind readers that this is a moral choice as well as a gastronomic one?

Oh dear.  I can't even enjoy canned tuna in oil once a week?

Actually, I was under the impression that some headway had been made in protecting tuna, and I also thought that your common canned varieties were not the most endangered.   Now I have to check this again, otherwise I will be thinking of George the next few times I make my salade nicoise.

Do not trust The Australian

Another piece of misleading and rubbish reporting on climate change at The Australian, with Graham Lloyd (and whoever came up with a snide headline "Data on global warming 'adjusted'" spending about 80% of an article about Watts and Muller  on Watts' draft "paper", without mentioning that Watts himself (and "co-author" McIntyre) have acknowledged at least one serious problem with it.

This  is just dishonest reporting with an agenda.  Lloyd refers to the online controversy about the matter, but simply chooses not to tell us that as between Watts and Muller it is definitely, without doubt, Watts who is in the most embarrassing position.

More detailed criticism of Watts' work is up at Skeptical Science.

Modern Judaism

Alive and well | The Economist

This Economist piece has a (sort of) upbeat take on modern Judaism.  Of interest.

Bond fun

Skyfall trailer: what it reveals about the new Bond | Film | guardian.co.uk

The Guardian has a bit of fun analysing the new, longer trailer for the next Bond film.  Some of the comments are pretty witty too, although the main gist seems to be that, well, there really does seem to be a limit to number of Bond plot devices in the universe.

Watts down with that

There's quite an effective takedown of Anthony Watts and his claim to be the one who started the ball rolling with concern about weather station siting issues at Revkin's blog.  I think I have read something similar before, but this explanation is nice and pithy:

Watts has promoted himself as the only person who really cares about siting issues, and that he basically introduced the issue in 2009 ("until I came along ..."). In fact, back at least as far as 1999, a program was created to develop stations specifically for climate research, and to site them very, very carefully. They exceed the Leroy 2010 siting criteria. This is the US CRN http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/crn/. These stations were set up beginning in '04. Even Watts could tell you that 2004 occurred before 2009. The Menne 2010 paper makes an explicit comparison between the USHCN "good" and "poor" sites, and vs the CRN sites. See Menne's figure 7. There is no significant difference. The idea that Watts is the lone ranger who has brought siting issues to the fore is false, although Watts would like you to believe it. This was a very well-known issue in the research community for a couple decades, at least (see Karl et al, 1995 for example). Watts has relentlessly blogged on the issue, but that doesn't mean he was a) original, or b) right. It is emphatically not Watts who brought this up. It's just that Watts has refused to accept answers he doesn't like. His latest draft is a scientific mess, and is far more illuminating about how tightly held preconceived notions can drive a "result" than it is about climate.

The unravelling begins

That didn't take long.

Steve McIntyre has realised there's a serious issue overlooked in Anthony Watts' "paper", and is scolding himself for doing a rushed look at the statistics as a favour for Watts (who was, quite openly, only motivated out of spite for Muller getting PR for his own conclusions.)

Eli Rabett has a post about the work too, with contributions from others, and the future ain't looking so bright for Mr Watts.

I liked Rabett's general take on this:

The take home, of course, beyond confirmation bias, is the same one that Eli discovered a long time ago when Tony, Monckton, Steve and the rest of the crew were all agog at the stamp collection of early CO2 measurements assembled by Ernst Beck

What amateurs lack as a group is perspective, an understanding of how everything fits together and a sense of proportion. Graduate training is designed to pass lore from advisors to students. You learn much about things that didn't work and therefore were never published [hey Prof. I have a great idea!...Well actually son, we did that back in 06 and wasted two years on it], whose papers to trust, and which to be suspicious of [Hey Prof. here's a great new paper!... Son, don't trust that clown.] In short the kind of local knowledge that allows one to cut through the published literature thicket.

But this lack makes amateurs prone to get caught in the traps that entangled the professionals' grandfathers, and it can be difficult to disabuse them of their discoveries. Especially problematical are those who want science to validate preconceived political notions, and those willing to believe they are Einstein and the professionals are fools. Put these two types together and you get a witches brew of ignorance and attitude.

Unfortunately climate science is as sugar to flies for those types. 

We shall see how this unfolds.

Will it affect climate fake skeptics if Watts comes out with egg on his face?  Nope.  All that matters for them is the first press release claiming victory.

Children: do not trust that candy bar you found in the boarding gate waiting area

Man Accused of Smuggling Meth Disguised as Candy Bars - ktla.com

LOS ANGELES -- A Long Beach man is charged with attempting to smuggle more than four pounds of methamphetamine out of the U.S. in packages designed to resemble a well-known brand of candy bar....

Harris was was searched after baggage inspectors became suspicious of what appeared to be a large box of candy bars inside his checked luggage.

Upon closer inspection, CBP officers discovered the 45 individually wrapped, full-sized “candy bars” which contained a white substance that was subsequently determined to be methamphetamine.

According to the criminal complaint, each bar “was coated in a chocolate-like substance to make the contents of the package appear to be a real candy bar.”

Good to know

BBC News - Apollo Moon flags still standing, images show

Not that I care .....

....but this just sounds greedy, doesn't it?:

Peter Jackson's The Hobbit to be extended to three films | Film | guardian.co.uk

Maybe it will cause people to cast a cynical eye towards Jackson himself, who seems a nice enough fellow, but I can't see how he rates as a director.

Fake meat news

Beyond Meat: Fake chicken that tastes so real it will freak you out. - Slate Magazine

The only thing is, you can't get this fake chicken yet.

As it happens, on the weekend, I make spaghetti bolognese using Quorn (which gets a mention in the article) in its "minced meat" version.   The result was not bad, and certainly it looks exactly like the "real" dish.  The Quorn itself is, however, soft on the tooth and feels less "weighty"  than meet, as well as not really having much flavour of itself.   But, following a Quorn recipe using quite a bit of vegetables (small diced carrot, celery and mushroom) the result was still pretty pleasing.

In looking at the packet, I think I saw that the Quorn was about 11grams of protein per 100 grams.  That doesn't sound much, but then again I had to go find out how much protein you get in a piece of steak.   Looking at this site, it appears to be 20 gram per 100 grams, which is a bit less than I would have guessed.   I see that chicken breast is actually a bit higher in protein than steak.  I wouldn't have guessed that either.

Quorn sure isn't cheap ($6 for the 300 gram bag at Coles), but as a substitute just when it feels like you've been eating too much meat lately, it's not bad.

For future reference

I haven't read this paper yet, but the topic looks interesting:

Is the individuality interpretation of quantum theory wrong ?

Watts over the top

I have this strong suspicion that this is not going to end well for the chronically immature Anthony Watts.  (I mean, who else would speculate that his critics just aren't patriotic enough, or that a passing reference to his mother - dead as it turned out - was beyond the pale.)

His latest spat in his traumatic falling out with Richard Muller, whose temperature record re-appraisal  project Watts said he would trust, until, of course, it basically reaffirmed the existing temperature records, has been on display over the weekend.

Muller got a piece in the NYT on Sunday, confirming that his latest analysis still says the temperature record is OK; when the rumours about this column were floating around late last week, Watts went all "drama queen" by announcing a controversial something of international significance would be announced on Sunday.

The announcement turned out to be that he and a bunch of AGW skeptic mates had an un-reviewed paper that showed the US temperature record did suffer from siting problems after all.    Yay Anthony!  All those fans who spent their holidays taking photos of weather stations for you instead of doing something actually enjoyable with their family will feel vindicated after all.

But wait - even taking it at its best - doesn't it still show US warming at the pretty much the same rate as the satellite record shows globally?  

Not only that, David Appel writes that the satellite record for the US alone is in fact quite a bit higher than what Watts now thinks the surface temperature record indicates, yet weren't skeptics always putting their faith in the satellite record as being the one which was likely to be more reliable?  And John Christy (who works on the satellite record) is a co-author of this new (unreviewed) Watts work.   Explain yourself, Sir.*  AGW skepticism has always been a hydra-headed opportunistic thing against which science has been playing a 10 year game of Wack-a-Mole,  but it seems it's getting particularly schizophrenic (in the colloquial sense) lately.

Here's the Appel quote:

 First of all, it's exactly the kind of paper that most needs peer review: based on a lot of judgements and classifications and nitty gritty details that only siting wonks can evaluate. (So does a paper like BEST's -- but their conclusion is nothing surprising.)

And it just doesn't compete with the narrative -- record US heat, the US drought, BEST -- that is quickly sweeping by. It smells a little desperate. If it withstands peer review, then it's worth a good look. Until then it looks like PR, which is, of course, exactly how it's being delivered.

(Can I just say that delivering science as PR, or PR as science, is off-putting and worrisome, whether it comes from private groups or professional journals like Nature.)

Then there are the inconvenient facts that

(1) USA48 is 1.6% of the Earth's surface area, and

(2) the trend of the USA48 lower troposphere, as measured by satellites as calculated by UAH, is 0.23 ± 0.08 °C from 1979 to present (95% confidence limit, no correction for autocorrelation). Satellite measurements almost completely avoid the urban heat island problem.

Stoat is similarly unimpressed, and his take on the self aggrandising Muller is worth reading too.

The other fascinating thing about this is that it appears that Steve McIntyre, another co-author of the new paper, appears to have had no idea that Watts was putting out a press release about the unreviewed paper.  I wonder if he has a problem with that.

Update:     I like Ben's take on this:

 Anthony’s been hiding behind a fence, nursing his snowball-with-a-stone-in-it waiting for Muller to walk past. Hell hath no fury like a betrayed denialist.

Update 2:  I see that in the paper itself, it's claimed that the satellite temperatures can be expected to be higher than the surface temperature, and that's why the Watts claimed trend is right.  Yet, I have read at least one comment around the place that this only applied to the tropics.  So let's wait and see what comes of this.

Making it "relevant"

Gary Younge had a column in The Guardian last week noting the rise of specifically "gay-friendly" high schools in the US.  Such schooling is not exactly welcomed by conservatives, but some gay advocates think it's a bad idea too, for basically letting normal schools off the hook for not dealing with bullying more effectively. 

I hadn't heard things had gone quite this far before:

  "Kids are definitely coming out earlier, and middle school is definitely the worst time for bullying, whether you're straight or gay," says Savin-Williams. There are several summer camps around the country, that cater to transgender children as young as eight.

But the paragraph I found most ready for parody was this:

....Chad Weiden, who led efforts to set up a gay-friendly school in Chicago, says that part of the skill in teaching is making sometimes abstract issues accessible to students. "It's all about making it relevant to kids. If you're doing probability in math, you could illustrate it by looking at GLBT suicides or stop-and-frisk or unemployment. A good curriculum would also deal with issues of sexual orientation when covering things like evolution, biodiversity, anthropology, history and literature. That should be true of any school, not just one that considers itself gay-friendly."

Gosh.  What a cheery class Chad must run.

South for Cameron

The New York Times notes that James Cameron has bought a large farm in New Zealand and plans on living there for half of every year.  

I hope he likes sauvignon blanc.

The locals are not all convinced this is a good thing:

Some of Mr. Cameron’s new neighbors seem to have an open mind. But most worry about his ability to inhabit this paradise without becoming the kind of disrupter he pilloried in “Avatar.” Will the millions he plunked down for the property increase everyone’s taxes? What about continued access to Lake Pounui for the eel researchers at Victoria University of Wellington? Mr. Cameron has already closed a little hall on his land that had been used for wedding receptions, thus severing the public from what locals now refer to as “his lake.” 

There is also the question of what Mr. Cameron farms. To obtain governmental approval to buy the land, he had to agree to keep at least part of it as a working farm. But the current operation — built mostly around cows — poses a problem for Mr. Cameron, who said his wife, Suzy Amis, had pushed him and their children toward a plant-based diet. “So we’re looking for something more crop based,” Mr. Cameron explained. “I don’t want to be a hypocrite.”

Yes, the famously shouty and aggressive on set Mr Cameron appears to be a vegetarian.  Huh.

Samsung un-sung

I guess I've been vaguely aware of how well Samsung has been doing, but I didn't really it was to this extent:

Samsung, the world's largest technology company by revenue, reported another record-high quarterly profit as customers flocked to Galaxy smartphones, helping it outdo rivals at a challenging time for the global tech industry.

Samsung Electronics Co. said Friday its net profit swelled to 5.2 trillion won ($4.5 billion) in the April-June quarter, a 48 percent jump from a year earlier.

The earnings were lower than a median forecast of 5.6 trillion won in a poll of seven analysts by Yonhap Infomax. But Samsung shares jumped 5.2 percent to close at one-month high in Seoul as investors expect its earnings to continue growing strongly.

Samsung, the world's largest maker of mobile phones, televisions and memory chips, benefited from runaway demand for its Android-powered smartphones as rivals including Apple Inc. were yet to release new models.

Clearly, this is a company doing something right, yet we don't seem to hear much about how it built its success.  Not like Apple, with its hero worship of Jobs.

Not just me

I watched Source Code on DVD tonight.  This one, in the ongoing series "movies-from-the-last-decade-which-I-am-catching-up-with-now-that-the-kids-are-older", is only from last year in fact, but it was surprisingly terrific.  Well, OK,maybe not terrific; but good, solid, entertaining science fiction with vague plausibility and some emotional depth and pleasing direction.

It's the second film by Duncan Jones, and I haven't even seen Moon yet, even though it received very high praise.

I only had a vague recollection of Source Code coming out last year, yet I see now it did get very good reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.  So, it's not just me who found it to be high quality.

I do wish there was an attempt to explain what happened to guy whose body Jake kept turning up in, though.