Six Grand into the Future

According to my Google stats, this is the 6,000th post at this blog.   Seems hard to believe, but looking at the numbers for the annual totals, it looks right.

Born in 2005 at a time when blogging was all the rage,  I've been thinking lately that it's a bit sad to see that this method of recording thoughts, interests and some aspects of personal history has been usurped in popularity by the needy instantaneousness and somewhat artificial sense of connectedness of Facebook and Twitter.   As with devotion to mobile telephony,  I seem to be about 5 to 10 years beyond the cut-off age at which being permanently available via social networking is vitally important.   I can't even stand texting if I can avoid it.  

It might just be my imagination, but I get the impression that Facebook may have just slid past some sort of peak of popularity as well.  A lot more people now seem to recognize the harmful uses to which it can be put for spreading gossip and bullying, particularly amongst the young.   (Or the old, come to think of it.   A certain ageing cartoonist in Australia has recently put it to appallingly scurrilous use for personal rumour-mongering about the Prime Minister.   I may do a post about that soon.)  But maybe I am just being unduly influenced by headlines about Facebook's poor performing share float.

In any event, it's time to give myself another burst of mild self congratulation for maintaining this eclectic place for so long.  It's funny how after doing it for this length of time, I forget quiet a few of the things I have said in years past, but I am happy to say that most of the time, upon re-reading old posts, I am pleasantly surprised at their quality.  

It's odd to think that the blog may exist in cyberspace into the far future.   Given my interest in speculative matters such as how a technological recreation of a person may be achieved*, and after re-watching the end of Spielberg's AI recently (with its short term quasi-resurrection from information somehow caught up in the cracks of space-time),  I wonder if readers will think this too grandiose a thought:  if a person has a big enough blog written for a long enough time, will future super-advanced  quantum computers with some sort of extraordinary ability to analyse neurological function from a long enough example of the use of language, as well as from life events and thoughts recorded in a diary-like thing such as a blog,  be able to derive enough information from it to be able a make a perfect cyber copy of the author?  Of course, a few photos of me and a detailed breakdown of DNA analysis being embedded in the blog would help too.**

Maybe that idea has already been dealt with in a science fiction novel or story -  there seem to be few new ideas in that genre now.  But there you have it - the most self aggrandising idea for keeping a blog going possible - it might be for my literal immortality.***  Or, it could just be that it's more diverting than other things I could be doing with my time.

And thus begins the next six thousand....

Updates: 

*  long term readers - the number of which remain I have no idea:  if they are like me, they are reading fewer personal blogs less regularly anyway - will recall that I always thought the weakest link in Frank Tipler's Physics of Immortality was his extraordinarily clumsy mechanism for future resurrection, whereby all possible versions of every person have to recreated to come up with the one that is actually me.   If it turns out to be true, I guess that maintaining this blog will at least help the Omega Point not bother recreating those versions of me which are inconsistent with events noted here.  But, now that I think of it, I suppose that if  Tipler is right, and I want to have future versions of me having (say) an eternal memory of a pleasurable life not lived, I should start lying here.   

**  There is actually one photo of me buried in the middle of this blog, which at least shows me in vague outline.   I've googled my name in the past and never found a photo of myself.   I'm not making it easy for the Omega Point...

***  It would be ironic if this future quantum computer has the complete set of the works of Shakespeare fed into it and recreates Chris Marlowe, or (even worse) a hundred monkeys.

Kohler on the problems with banks

Too rich to regulate: the banks got away with it - The Drum - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Moving a big file

I had to try to get a large movie file to someone over the internet today.  It was just under a gigabyte, making it too large for email.

Googling the problem led me to We Transfer, which seems to work in a very simple fashion, letting files of up to 2 Gb be uploaded for free, and an email notification to go to a download page goes to the recipient.   The file remains there for 2 weeks.  

As usual, the upload took forever (about 4 hours!)  and I don't yet know if the file has been received at the other end, but it seemed to be working well enough for such a free service.

Update:  maybe I spoke too soon. The first attempt failed, but it was my fault for forgetting to change the power settings on the computer so that it didn't go to sleep mode just before the upload finished.  The second time, however, I saw that it got to within 14 minutes of finishing, then when I clicked back on the tab an  hour later, it said that Flash had crashed, and I never got an email telling me that the upload had succeeded.   I presume that under the National Broadband Network, this will be less of a problem....

Just go for a walk

Blood pressure drugs for mild hypertension: Not proven to prevent heart attacks, strokes, or early death - Slate Magazine

Interesting article here about the uncertainty of whether treating mild hypertension really helps.

I really should start getting some exercise myself...

Nuts for nuts

A pack of walnuts a day keeps the fertility specialist away?

OK, the title is a bit Benny Hill, and the research was paid for by the walnut industry, but still, who would have guessed the ways in which walnuts could be good for you:

A paper published 15 August 2012 in Biology of Reproduction's Papers-in-Press reveals that eating 75 grams of walnuts a day improves the vitality, motility, and morphology of sperm in healthy men aged 21 to 35.

"Filled with the Holy Spirit"

This week's episode of Horrible Histories had a segment about a German crusade which involved following a goose  and a goat "filled with the Holy Spirit" that was meant to take them to the Holy Land.  You can watch it here.

I had a vague feeling I had heard this before, but thought it was worth a Google.

Wikipedia is, surprisingly, low on detail about this; but it does note that this is part of Count Emicho's story:

The original idea for the First Crusade that had been preached by Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont in 1095 had already turned into a much different popular movement, led by Peter the Hermit. Peter's preaching of the Crusade spread much more quickly than the official versions of Urban's call. Peter's version, which probably involved the Second Coming of Jesus, influenced Emicho, who spread his own story that Christ had appeared to him. Christ promised to crown him emperor, and would help him convert the Jews of Europe, if Emicho would join the Crusade.

He did so, and in the first half of 1096 he gathered an army, which arrived at Speyer in May. Emicho, or his followers in separate groups, also went to Worms, Mainz, Cologne, Trier, and Metz, where they forcibly converted the Jewish communities, and massacred those who resisted. Eight hundred Jews were murdered at Worms and one thousand at Mainz. Peter the Hermit's mob massacred communities in other cities as well.

Well, that's not amusing at all.  But further down:

Emicho's army attracted many unusual followers, including a group who worshipped a goose they believed to be filled with the Holy Spirit.^[2] 

That's not enough detail.  A history student's blog gives us more information:

 We hear of this goose in Albert of Aachen's (or Albert of Aix's) chronicle which also described the events of the Peoples Crusade, led by Peter the Hermit.

'There was also another abominable wickedness in this gathering of people on foot, who were stupid and insanely irresponsible, which, it cannot be doubted, is hateful to God and unbelievable to all the faithful. They claimed that a certain goose was inspired by the holy ghost, and a she-goat filled with no less than the same, and they had made these their leaders for this holy journey to Jerusalem; they even worshipped them excessively, and as the beasts directed their courses for them in their animal way many of the troops believed they were confirming it to be true according to the entire purpose of the spirit.'

 The blog writer seems to not be 100% certain as to whether the story is to believed or not, but he does note that variations on the story appear in two other sources.  One of them acknowledges from the start that this sounds hard to believe:

'What I am about to say is ridiculous, but has been testified to by authors who are not ridiculous.

As the blog author notes:

Whether these accounts are based on real events or not, that they were even recorded gives us an insight into the mindset of these people who were caught up in the whirlwind of the First Crusade. That people believed a goose had been blessed by the Holy Spirit and would lead them to Jerusalem, shows the mass hysteria conjured up by the preaching of the First Crusade.

Indeed.

A position rarely held

The New New Deal: A Book Argues That President Obama’s Stimulus Has Been an Astonishing Success - Slate Magazine

Well, you don't hear the argument as set out in the title of that article, do you?

The author explains in an interview that the Obama stimulus is not understood or appreciated for its far reaching effects.  It's quite an interesting read.  

This bit certainly sounds right:

 I don’t think my book portrays the Republicans as “vicious,” but I do show—thanks to a lot of in-depth interviews with GOP sources—how they plotted to obstruct Obama before he even took office. I show how the stimulus was chock full of stuff they claimed to support until Jan. 20, 2009—not just things like health IT and the smart grid and energy efficiency and scientific research, but the very idea of Keynesian stimulus. Every presidential candidate in 2008 proposed a stimulus package, and Mitt Romney’s was the largest. So I do spend a fair amount of time chronicling Republican stimulus hypocrisies. (Readers might enjoy the backstory of Sen. Judd Gregg’s short-lived nomination to be Obama’s commerce secretary.) In general, I’d have to say my reporting backs up the Norm Ornstein-Thomas Mann thesis that the Republicans have gone off the policy deep end—denying global warming, denying Keynesian economics (except when it comes to business tax cuts and defense spending!), trashing Obama’s government takeover of health care and also his Medicare cuts, drumming stimulus supporters like Crist and Specter out of the party.

Spielberg's favourite?

'Raiders of the Lost Ark' to Receive Imax Rerelease - NYTimes.com

This might be good to see in IMAX; I'm not sure.  But as there is no IMAX theatre in Brisbane I'm not likely to be seeing it this way.  But anyway, the item is of most interest because of what Spielberg says about the movie (even if it does have a ring of advertorial puffery about it):

 “‘Raiders’ is a movie of my own, that I can actually stand to watch from beginning to end,” Mr. Spielberg said. “In that sense, it has a special place in my heart. I don’t rewrite it in my mind; I’m not kicking myself for what I didn’t do. I’m just going along for the ride like everybody else. It’s one of the few films that I’ve directed that I can sit back objectively and observe and enjoy with my family or whoever I’m with, or even alone. Most of my other films, I’m hypercritical of them.”

Call me extremely dubious

Vets call to end 'dangerous' dog breed bans - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Hugh Wirth, a vet who I think has often been extreme on animal welfare matters, used to want American bull terriers banned and said they were " "lethal" and "time bombs waiting for the right circumstances".  Now he's decided breeding bans don't work, but what's more incredible is this:

Mr Wirth says his change of heart was brought about by the latest veterinary and dog behaviour research.

"What I believed years ago, when I made those statements... was the common approach that even the veterinary profession was using," he said.

"Now that this research has been done and it's quite widespread we've discovered that our understanding of dogs and their behaviour was completely wrong."

I find this very hard to believe.

Here's what my common sense tells me:  some breeds are recognised by the public for good reason to be particularly dangerous, either in temperament generally, or as to the particular severity with which they will attack when they do attack.    Give people a choice as to enter a yard with a King Charles Spaniel or an American Pit Bull, and tell me which yard they think would be safer to enter.  Would you trust the person who says "well, contrary to popular belief, I consider the risk of harm equal."? 

There are ways to spin statistics, and I would bet money that a credible case can readily be made out from statistics in various countries that certain breeds deserve banning due to their higher representation in severe bit incidents.  Even if this results in the dogs being bred  underground, the illegality of the activity is likely to make the owner much more careful about the exposure of the dog to the public in any event, and in that sense it is still partially effective.

Professional bodies can go off the rails and against good sense, and I reckon this is what has happened here.  As someone else says in the article:

Graeme Smith of Victoria's Lost Dogs Home says the AVA's recommendations are a backward step.

"The old system of 'deed not breed' is a system that allows dogs one free bite," Mr Smith said.

"In the case of American Pit Bull terriers one free bite can often be a fatal bite.

"Ten years ago I wouldn't have been a breed specific person myself but I've seen what American Pit Bull terriers do and people are fearful of them and we need to protect the community from these dogs."

The people who want to breed such dogs always remind me of American gun nuts:  full of excuses that aren't in the interests of the general public.  In fact, they are even worse:  it's not as if there aren't hundreds of other breeds they can get into.

Update:   speaking of Americans, I see that in Florida there is a vote happening to un-ban pit bulls, and with the support of the American Veterinary body too:

Other experts concur. In a recent report on dog-bite prevention, published in April, the American Veterinary Medical Association, the nation’s leading veterinary organization, concluded: “Owners of pit bull-type dogs deal with a strong breed stigma. However, controlled studies have not identified this breed group as disproportionately dangerous.”

The report points out that pit bulls are not more prone to biting than breeds such as German shepherds, Rottweilers, Jack Russell terriers and even collies and St. Bernards, but some are made dangerous by owners who abuse them or use them for fighting. A pit bull's size and strength can make its attacks more lethal, but that also applies to other large dogs, the report said.

The AVMA concluded that because of the lack of solid data, "it is difficult to support the targeting of this breed as a basis for dog bite prevention."

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention agrees, offering this statement: “There is currently no accurate way to determine which breeds are more likely to bite or kill.”

 Seems to me we are in "does marijuana cause schizophrenia" land here - where common sense in the public was ahead of the scientists who took a couple of decades to confirm that use of cannabis is indeed an issue for mental health, especially for teenagers.

Dollar problems

Tim Colebatch writes that the Reserve Bank should definitely do something to bring down the Australian dollar.

As usual, I find him convincing and reasonable:

On the broadest measure, the Australian dollar is now 72 per cent higher than it was a decade ago. Against the US dollar, it has almost doubled. At $US1.05 or more, it is 50 per cent higher than its long-term average of US70¢, between 1985 and 2005, before the mining boom drove it up......

What could we do? Two options stand out:

■The Swiss solution: impose a cap on the Australian/US exchange rate, maybe at parity, and print dollars to sell whenever the cap is threatened. There is no limit on the Reserve's ability to create Australian dollars - only the risk that they will end up back here adding to inflation, and the risk that it will become a huge holder of US dollars and other currencies.
■The McKibbin solution: since the main surge in demand for Australian dollars is from other central banks buying them as safe investments, the Reserve should sell them directly to its cousins, printing dollars to meet their needs, and so taking pressure off the dollar in the markets.
I'll say it again: we need to talk about this. We should not let fear of trying something new cost us good enterprises and good jobs.

Update:   David Uren in The Australian strongly disagrees, claiming that the Swiss experience exposes the country to big dangers.

Hmm.  I can't tell how valid his arguments really are, but I generally do not trust the Australian with its current set of writers and editors to do an adequate and unbiased job on reporting anything political, economic or scientific.     

I am therefore skeptical that he's got the better case.

And incidentally:  doesn't this just show was a hopeless bunch economists are?   They can barely agree on the source of problems, let alone solutions.  

Corny reproduction

I see that Elizabeth Kolbert's comment piece in the New Yorker about the US drought and heatwave begins with a reminder about how odd corn sex is:

Corn sex is complicated. As Michael Pollan observes in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” the whole affair is so freakishly difficult it’s hard to imagine how it ever evolved in the first place. Corn’s female organs are sheathed in a sort of vegetable chastity belt—surrounded by a tough, virtually impenetrable husk. The only way in is by means of a silk thread that each flower extends, Rapunzel-like, through a small opening. For fertilization to take place, a grain of pollen must land on the tip of the silk, then shimmy its way six to eight inches through a microscopic tube, a journey that requires several hours. The result of a successfully completed passage is a single kernel. When everything is going well, the process is repeated something like eight hundred times per ear, or roughly eighty thousand times per bushel.

It is now corn-sex season across the Midwest, and everything is not going well.

It is a bit weird, isn't it.  

Paul Ryan summarised

Paul Ryan's Budget Games : The New Yorker

This short article is consistent with what Krugman and others have said about Paul Ryan, and I suspect it is right:

That may sound a bit strange, since so many stories about Ryan emphasize how serious and wonky he is, and insist that, unlike most politicians, he’s actually willing to talk in detail about the policies he’s advocating. Yet the reality of Ryan’s approach is actually very different. His tax plan, for instance, calls for trillions of dollars in tax cuts (heavily weighted, of course, toward high-income earners), but also claims to be revenue-neutral, since Ryan says that the tax cuts will be offset by eliminating loopholes and tax subsidies. But when it comes to detailing exactly what loopholes and subsidies he wants to get rid of, Ryan clams up—just as Romney has done with his tax plan. This is politically astute, since eliminating the tax benefits that have a substantive budget impact would mean eliminating things voters love, like the mortgage-tax deduction. But it’s a far cry from being honest and tough-minded.

Similarly, while Ryan has been reasonably upfront about his plans for Social Security (which he wants to privatize) and Medicare (which he wants to turn into a defined-contribution, rather than a defined-benefit, plan), he has been both substantively and rhetorically obfuscatory when it comes to the way his budget cuts would, over time, radically shrink the federal government, and effectively make it impossible for the government to do most of what it does today. As the Congressional Budget Office analysis of Ryan’s budget makes clear, Ryan’s plan would mean that by 2050, all of the government’s discretionary spending (including the defense budget) would account for less than four per cent of G.D.P. Since defense spending in the postwar era has never been less than three per cent of G.D.P., and since Romney has said during the campaign that he doesn’t want defense spending to be below four per cent of G.D.P., this means that the only way for Ryan’s numbers to work would be to effectively eliminate nearly all non-defense discretionary spending, including not just much of the social safety net but infrastructure spending, R. & D. investment, federal support for education, air-traffic control, regulatory and public safety spending, and so on. This would be, needless to say, a radical remaking of the federal government. Indeed, as I wrote in a column earlier this year, with the exception of support for health care and retirement, it would basically return the federal government to something like its nineteenth-century role—and early nineteenth-century at that.

Good luck getting Ryan (let alone Romney) to admit this to you.

I was quite surprised to read Will Saletan's enthusiasm for Ryan at Slate over the weekend, and the New Yorker article finds it difficult to believe too:

Ryan has been able to pull off this bait-and-switch game, and win the hearts of many Washington pundits, because his earnest, wonky manner makes it seem as if he’s a hard-nosed pragmatist who’s just listening to what the numbers tell him. (In Slate yesterday, Will Saletan, in a column extolling Romney’s choice, wrote that while he would be voting for Obama this time around, he could easily imagine voting for Ryan in 2016, which is an utterly incoherent position, something like voting for John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Barry Goldwater in 1964.) But Ryan is not a pragmatist; he is an ideologue.

Hypno time

The most interesting thing about this year's visit to the Brisbane RNA Show (I am feeling more formal for the annual report this time around) was the hypnotism show by Shane St James.   He's a son of Martin St James, the famous Australian stage hypnotist, who I recall as a child (or teenager) having quite a run on TV for a time.  (I thought he had died,  but his website seems to indicate he's still with us.  In fact, it notes he's had 20 children, the latest son at the age of 77 only last year!)

I've never been to this type of entertainment before, and I didn't really know that there was anyone out there still making a living this way.  The public fascination with it had moved on, I thought, although there were a large number of people there yesterday for a show which I didn't think had much publicity.   

I remember from some of the old TV series that St James the elder featured one guy as a regular subject who was supposed to be particularly hypnotise-able and particularly funny in the some of the things he would do.  However, after seeing him a few times over several weeks, I recall my father saying "this guy's faking it - he's just acting for fun" and I remember suspecting the same thing.   With these type of shows, familiarity does breed contempt.

So, how did this one go?  It was very much in line with my (somewhat fading) memories of the old TV shows.   A bunch of people are self selected from the audience and (allegedly) hypnotised en mass, but there was no secrecy about the hypnotic induction method.  (I seem to recall M St J - or perhaps another TV hypnotist - doing it in secret, so as to not accidentally hypnotise anyone at home.)   When it's done, there are clearly some on the stage who are not feeling under the spell (so to speak) at all.   They leave the stage when the hypnotist notices, leaving the "live" ones up there.

The things they do are the old fare - pretending to be anything from a typewriter, a musician, or famous singer or actor.  At the end, it's the "when this music plays, you will do this...." routine.

As entertainment, it's not bad in small doses, I guess.   Even if one is completely cynical about whether there is any "real" altered state in the minds of subjects, the enthusiasm with which some of them will do ridiculous acts can be fairly amusing, even if they are just "playing along" in some sense or other.

Being the enquiring, and perhaps not very suggestible, mind that I am, this naturally led to me Googling around today about the scientific status of stage hypnotism.  Given that even therapeutic hypnotism has a very uncertain standing amongst researchers, I expected that no scientist took stage hypnotism seriously.

And it would seem from the Wikipedia article on the topic that this is true:

Due to stage hypnotists' showmanship, many people believe that hypnosis is a form of mind control. However, the effects of stage hypnosis are probably due to a combination of relatively ordinary social psychological factors such as peer pressure, social compliance, participant selection, ordinary suggestibility, and some amount of physical manipulation, stagecraft, and trickery.^[10] The desire to be the center of attention, having an excuse to violate their own inner fear suppressors and the pressure to please are thought to convince subjects to 'play along'.^{[11][page needed]} Books written by stage hypnotists sometimes explicitly describe the use of deception in their acts, for example, Ormond McGill's New Encyclopedia of Stage Hypnosis describes an entire "fake hypnosis" act which depends upon the use of private whispers throughout:

[The hypnotist whispers off-microphone:] “We are going to have some good laughs on the audience and fool them… so when I tell you to do some funny things, do exactly as I secretly tell you. Okay? Swell.” (Then deliberately wink at the spectator in a friendly fashion.)^[12]

It was indeed clear (he doesn't really attempt to hide it) that Shane St James talks off microphone to some of the people he gets to do certain things.   Is it all a matter of extroverts being able to be made relaxed enough to put on what they would otherwise consider an embarrassing performance?

The Wikipedia article notes that some stage shows use plants in the audience.   I would not think there were any obvious ones in the show I saw yesterday.  

The odd thing about stage hypnotism, however, is that it has caused enough concern that it can affect some people that it is banned or regulated in some countries.   A woman sued a stage hypnotist successfully in 2001 in the UK, and I can't recall where, but I have read or seen something some years ago by (I think)  a researcher saying that stage hypnotism was somewhat risky for its unintended effects.   There is a bit of an explanation of a 1990's UK enquiry into stage hypnotism after a couple of controversial cases to be found at this website.  Googling around, it seems that some suggest that Scientology uses what amounts to hypnotic methods, which I guess would not be a surprise.

Anyhow, the whole topic of hypnosis is a bit of a puzzling one.  While it is more-or-less understandable that deep relaxation akin to sleep might help a person ignore pain, for example, the reason as to how it helps some conditions is much more of a mystery.  For example:

  The early report by Sulzberger^[2] on the efficacy of suggestion in treating warts has since been confirmed numerous times. Numerous reports attest to the efficacy of hypnosis in treating warts.^{[31, 32]} In a well-conducted randomized controlled study by Spanos et al^[33] that serves as a typical example, 53% of the experimental group had improvement of their warts 3 months after the first of 5 hypnotherapy sessions, while none of the control group had improvement. Hypnosis can be successful as a therapy for warts.

I believe there is even a well attested case of hypnotherapy working to remove warts on just one side of a patient's body, although I can't find a good internet reference for that yet.  I find that a particularly hard to fathom result, if (as I think it is) true.

By co-incidence, I see that the New York Times yesterday had a fascinating article about the "nocebo effect" - where warning patients of possible side effects of medicine or treatment helps ensure that they will develop the problem:

In a curious study, a team of Italian gastroenterologists asked people with and without diagnosed lactose intolerance to take lactose for an experiment on its effects on bowel symptoms. But in reality the participants received glucose, which does not harm the gut. Nonetheless, 44 percent of people with known lactose intolerance and 26 percent of those without lactose intolerance complained of gastrointestinal symptoms. 

In one remarkable case, a participant in an antidepressant drug trial was given placebo tablets — and then swallowed 26 of them in a suicide attempt. Even though the tablets were harmless, the participant’s blood pressure dropped perilously low.

That second case certainly is reminiscent of  aboriginal deaths caused by "pointing the bone," isn't it?

The article goes on to note a less surprising example of the effect:  

The nocebo effect can be observed even when people take real, non-placebo drugs. When medical professionals inform patients of possible side effects, the risk of experiencing those side effects can increase. In one trial, the drug finasteride was administered to men to relieve symptoms of prostate enlargement. Half of the patients were told that the drug could cause erectile dysfunction, while the other half were not informed of this possible side effect. In the informed group, 44 percent of the participants reported that they experienced erectile dysfunction; in the uninformed group, that figure was only 15 percent.

All of this certainly ties in with the idea that quite a large proportion of people are very "suggestible", and as such should stage hypnotism really be seen as tantamount to mere acting?  A bit hard to say, I think.

Finally, I hope that the hypno-duck at the top of this post (whose photo I took yesterday - the poultry and bird area is always a favourite place to visit) is not making any reader drowsy.    

Three parts politics

1.   I used to find Tim Dunlop a tedious bore when he had a gig as a News Ltd blogger, but in small doses he's occasionally OK.   Here, he complains about the easy ride which the media (including Fairfax) seems to be giving Tony Abbott now.   It's all "oh well, he doesn't want to discuss his actual policies yet; we'll just have to leave his inconsistencies and shallowness alone then."

I would add - Chris Uhlmann on the ABC gives him the easiest ride of all.   This is always puzzling, given his wife is a Labor MP.   Uhlmann used to express skepticism about climate change, although I have not heard him comment about it for a long time.   If one thing has become clear in the last couple of years, it's this:   amongst political commentators, and economists, climate change skepticism is a reliable sign of unreliability.

2.  Bernard Keane on Crikey writes that the winter break has actually not gone too bad for Julia Gillard:

But the winter break certainly didn’t play out according to opposition plans. July 1 came and went without any drama associated with the carbon price. August 1 then came and went without drama. Yesterday’s jobs data for July saw a lift in employment after June had seen a sizeable fall. Non-official inflation data suggested our main concern might be deflation, rather than the rampant price rises predicted by the Coalition. Even many Liberal voters, far more likely to see the economic cloud than any silver lining, professed to have not seen any price rises.

Then there was the curious framing exercise, delivered via a one-two punch from first Wayne Swan and then, this week, Julia Gillard. Swan risked ridicule by embracing his inner Boss, but the Springsteen stuff enabled Swan, and Labor, to get a cut-through message out about its values in a way that just another speech, just another interview, would never have done. Moreover, it complemented one of the government’s few reputational strengths, the impression that it is more inclined to manage the economy for working Australians rather than business, as voters tend to think the Coalition does. It also comes at a time when the government has near-utopian unemployment, inflation and interest rate figures to boast of.

I think he's write, and the surprise bounce in Newspoll would have been welcome with open arms by the PM.  I like the way Bernar refers several times to Abbott's flakiness.  He has him down pat, explaining Abbott's inconsistency with his others in the Coalition as follows:

Manifestly, Abbott was let down by his staff, who failed to brief him, or gave him dud advice in encouraging him to wish away a key factor behind rising power prices. It also confirmed the impression that, once you get him off attacking the carbon price and asylum seekers, Abbott is a flake. Malcolm Turnbull, for all his many and varied faults of political style, was across most issues as leader because of his genuine interest in public policy. That’s why he was able to offer intelligent en passant comments on the electricity issue this week.

Part of the impression of Abbott’s flakiness, of course, is that he prefers a political approach to policy, which is why he’s now adopted a media policy of wanting freedom of speech for News Ltd but greater censorship of the internet, a stance that grates with those of us who like consistency and rigour, but that maximises his political interests.

But Bernard is a realist:

This government’s history is to follow up a good fortnight like the one it has just had with some sort of self-inflicted debacle that reverses all the momentum and ensures that Abbott’s flakiness is never subjected to sustained pressure.

True.  But maybe it will change, one day...

3.    Alan Kohler is well worth reading on the electricity prices issue.   Everyone is right, apparently.

The Iran issue

I thought this cautionary piece about Israel and Iran was not bad. It is unclear whether a strike against Iran might be gearing up for before the US election.

I think one thing everyone is curious about is how technically a military attack would be run, given the targets are dispersed and underground. Still, it is hard to imagine that any politician in the US (well, apart from the nuttier Tea Party types) are enthusiastic to see what an attack would do to the world economy.

Dengue noted

A travel writer in the SMH notes how he and he wife caught the worrying dengue fever in Thailand. As he says at the end, the worry is always that a second round with it could kill.

Ninja in history

From a review (with the great title "Silent but Deadly") of a new book about ninja:

But what did anyone actually know of ninja? They were mostly men, sometimes masked, hiding in shadows, able to move undetected and to use a host of martial skills to achieve their impossible missions. Unlike the death-obsessed samurai, they were pragmatic. They were often sent to spy out an enemy stronghold and to do this effectively they needed to return successfully to base. Assassins of infinite patience, they were light (the ideal ninja was a flyweight 132 lb), flexible and able to hide by hooking on to ceilings. They could silence dogs, and disguised their body odour with a bland tofu diet. One famous ninja was a dwarf who, according to some accounts, assassinated a heavily guarded warlord, Uesugi Kenshin (who may actually have been a woman in drag), by hiding in his castle toilet and drilling him per anum with a telescopic spear. Man reasonably speculates on this story and wonders how a shit-coated dwarf ninja managed to sneak out of a castle on high alert.

Mars plans

While you're at Wired (see last post), you should look at its nicely illustrated list of former plans for manned exploration of Mars.  

I still say:  just go to the Moon first, and learn how to live there.

Corn won't grow without water

Wired has an article about the limitations on what can be done to make corn drought resistant:

Yet even if drought tolerance hasn’t been a central commercial priority, it hasn’t been ignored. As Keaschall noted, Pioneer has worked on it since 1977, and so have hundreds of academic scientists. A more fundamental problem is sheer biological intractability.

Unlike pest or herbicide resistance, drought tolerance doesn’t come from a few easily added genes. It’s the result of complex traits involving hundreds of genes, their activity difficult to orchestrate. “Drought is not going to be a single-gene solution,” said Keaschall.

Even when the genetics can be grasped, they’re often antithetical to farmers’ aims. A slow-growing plant with tiny leaves that shutters its metabolism in the absence of rain would do fine during a drought, but for farmers it’d be slightly more useful than a cactus.

Indeed, inasmuch as high productivity is required of drought-resistant corn, the limitations of genetics may be inescapable. “If you add it all up, what it says to me is that there are limitations to what you can do in a plant like corn,” said Gurian-Sherman.

That makes non-genetic approaches, such as using cover crops to manage soil characteristics and fine-tuning planting times, all the more important. But those methods are knowledge-based, and it’s much harder to monetize knowledge than genes.

The "we don't have to do anything about AGW, it will be good for agriculture" crowd should take note.  (They won't.  They are selectively stupid.)

Inferational

Grey parrots are pretty clever, as this report of a recent experiment shows:

... the team showed the birds two opaque boxes, one of which contained food. The researchers then shook the boxes allowing the birds to hear that something was inside just one of them. The birds then guessed correctly which box had the food in it, walked over and tipped it over and ate their treat. Next, however, the researchers tried shaking just the empty box, producing no sound. This time, the birds were able to infer that the food must be in the other box and ran to it when given the chance, accomplishing a feat the team says, humans can’t handle until the age of three. They also say that dogs and monkeys failed when given the same test and that it seems that other than the birds, only great apes and human are known to be capable of such inferential thinking.