Gopnick on Lincoln

The high cost of Abraham Lincoln’s uncompromised morality. : The New Yorker

Always a fine writer, Adam Gopnick here looks at Lincoln.  I haven't read it properly yet, but I'm sure it's worth reading...

Sounds like a solar power "win" to me

Solar power keeps electricity peak down | National - Rural | BigPond News

Record temperatures across Queensland have helped show solar power units on private homes are keeping peak electricity demand down in rural areas of the state, a utility says.

Ergon Energy, which supplies regional areas of the state outside Brisbane and the south east corner, says the most noticeable impact is on the mid-afternoon peak loads.

Temperatures on Tuesday soared to 40 degrees across much of Queensland, with new records for December were set in the southeast, and while they dropped slightly on Wednesday, temperatures were still above the monthly average.

With solar power units in regional areas capable of generating around 173 megawatts (MW), Ergon says as much as 150mw is flowing back into the system from private homes.

Chief executive Ian McLeod says peak demand of 1957 MW during the heatwave was down by 14 per cent on the record peak of 2285 MW in January 2010.

'After a number of mild summers this heatwave has been the first real test of where peak demand is heading on those few hot days of the year,' Mr McLeod said in a statement.

'The record growth of the last decade may be behind us.

'A reduced peak demand reduces the need for more investment in new substations or increasing the capacity of existing substations and powerlines and this takes the pressure off rising power prices.'

Carbon pricing needed everywhere

U.S. energy revolution transforms climate debate - CNN.com

This article by Dieter Helm from Oxford makes the point that the technological advances in the US which have provided it with heaps of  (gas) energy resources has really changed expectations as to how to deal with encouraging a move off fossil fuels.  But at least gas is less harmful than coal, as a stepping stone.

Still comes down to this:

The next steps are harder: A carbon price is a necessary condition for facing up to the pollution our consumption is causing. If we don't want to pay the price of our pollution, then we don't want to tackle climate change. So far, the sad reality is that we are not prepared to act. That is why nothing much has been achieved on the carbon front since 1990.

Why then might the U.S. consider putting a price on its carbon emissions, through taxing pollution? One powerful reason has nothing to do with climate change: It needs the money. Taxing carbon might be politically painful, but not as painful as taxing income. So for the wrong reason there are some grounds for optimism.

What would be even better is if some of the money were spent on new technologies. Current renewables can't bridge the carbon gap. Low-density intermittent energy just doesn't generate enough electricity to carry though decarbonisation. But future renewables just might, and here is not only the best hope on the climate front, but also precisely where the U.S. stars. Its deep technological base and its entrepreneurial culture provide one of the best places to drive through the necessary advances.

For the rest of the world, the lessons are much the same. Everyone needs to switch out of coal, and gas provides a now much more abundant alternative whilst we develop new technologies. Sadly Europe is engaged in a dash from nuclear and gas towards coal.

It needs to waste less money on current expensive renewables -- especially the really expensive options like offshore wind -- and get serious about future renewables. Next generation solar technology is an obvious candidate. And everyone needs to put a carbon price in place.

The climate change problem can be cracked, but not through current policies. And in the meantime the world needs to get used to the idea that the U.S. no longer needs the Middle East to keep its cars and industries moving.

Back to climate change

I've given readers a bit of a  break from climate change posts, but this item from a couple of weeks ago is important.

Real Climate noted some new research indicating the (possibly) very strong regional differences in a warming world.   It's all to do with how atmospheric flow changes.  Here's a couple of key paragraphs:

I think there were some surprising aspects in Deser et al.‘s results. Not that I didn’t expect natural multi-annual variations to be important (on shorter time scales, they are very pronounced), but what strikes me is the strong contrast (on a 50-year time scale) between the global mean temperature (lower graph), which was not very sensitive to the regional atmospheric circulation, and the regional temperatures which were strongly influenced.

It has long been recognized that local and regional climate would warm at different rates than the global mean, but not with such large differences as presented by Deser et al. at the time scales of 50 years and for continental scales. Their results imply that while some regions could experience almost zero warming over 50 years, this will be compensated by substantially stronger in other regions (because they also find that the global mean temperatures to be largely insensitive to the different model initial conditions).

These results also imply a surprisingly long persistence of weather regimes in different parts of the world. Usually, one tends to associate these with inter-annual to decadal scales. However, Deser et al observe:

Such intrinsic climate fluctuations occur not only on interannual-to-decadal timescales but also over periods as long as 50 years… even trends over 50 years are subject to considerable uncertainty owing to natural variability.

These findings were in particular important for the winter season at mid-to-high latitudes. Hence, they could be entirely attributed to chaotic dynamics. On the other hand, the two simulations that they highlighted in their study represented extreme cases, and most of the simulations suggested that the future outcome may be somewhere in between.

My interpretation of Deser et al.‘s results is that the range of possible future temperatures gets broader at the same time as the most likely outcome follows a warming curve. This means that the most likely scenario is warming for the future while there still is a small possibility that the temperature for a particular location hardly changes (or even cools) over a 50-year period.

What strikes me as important about this is it surely means that those economists or advocates who argue for money to be spent more on adaptation to climate change rather than limiting emissions are barking up the wrong tree.

It has long been acknowledged that regional effects of climate change are harder to predict that the bigger picture - this research seems to go further in demonstrating this.   So if you are a politician, how can you reliably predict what adaptation projects are most appropriate to your particular region?

Not a novel story - but a somewhat worrying one

It was only in August that I noted a report that Israeli researchers had found long term decline in human sperm count and quality:

Over the last 10 to 15 years, the concentration of sperm samples collected by the bank dropped 37% from 106 million cells per milliliter to 67 million, according to Dr. Ronit Haimov-Kochman, a leading Israeli infertility researcher at the Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Center.

Now a very similar sounding study in France finds much the same:

New research shows that the concentration of sperm in men's semen has been in steady decline between 1989 and 2005 in France. In addition, there has been a decrease in the number of normally formed sperm.

The study is important because, with over 26,600 men involved, it is probably the largest studied sample in the world and although the results cannot be extrapolated to other countries, it does support other studies from elsewhere that show similar drops in semen concentration and quality in recent years.

They found that over the 17-year period there was a significant and continuous 32.2% decrease in semen concentration (millions of spermatozoa per millilitre of semen), at a rate of about 1.9% per year. The researchers calculated that in men of the average age of 35, semen concentrations declined from an average of 73.6 million/ml in 1989 to 49.9 million/ml in 2005.

In addition, there was a significant 33.4% decrease in the percentage of normally formed sperm over the same period. Changes in the way sperm shape (morphology) was measured during this time may partly explain this decrease and make it difficult to give an estimate for the general population. However, the researchers say that these changes do not account for the total decrease in the quality of sperm morphology observed over the study period.

In their paper, the researchers write: "To our knowledge, it is the first study concluding a severe and general decrease in sperm concentration and morphology at the scale of a whole country over a substantial period. This constitutes a serious public health warning. The link with the environment particularly needs to be determined."

 A few observations:

a.   the Israeli's decline seems to have started from a much higher starting point.  I wonder what the explanation for that might be.

b.  the Israeli report at my first link noted that 20 million per ml and below count as "abnormal" sperm counts, and the French figures indicate that the average is heading that way very rapidly.

c.  As noted at the end of the French report - surely it's most likely that it is something environmental that is causing this, and the figures do sound as if it is something deserving really serious and urgent research.

This deserves greater attention in the media, I reckon.

UPDATE:  the Guardian has a good article looking at this study, and noting the history of controversy over whether declining sperm counts are "real" or just an artefact of changing  laboratory methods.

Certainly, it seems to my amateur scientist eye that the French study goes a long way towards showing that it is real.  The Guardian article notes that there is no detail of socioeconomic factors that might account for why the men in the study had lower sperm counts (such as if they were more likely to be smokers or drinkers), but as the original article I linked to suggested, the men who end up in fertility clinics are probably more likely not to be from the poorer classes, and to have reasonable health if they have been trying to conceive.  The sample, in other words, may be biased for higher than average sperm counts, not lower.

Novel topic No 8 - the Evils of Tea

An odd article in phys.org:

Poor women who drank tea were viewed as irresponsible as whisky drinkers in early 19th-century Ireland, new research by Durham University has unearthed.

Critics at the time declared that the practice of tea drinking – viewed as a harmless pastime in most past and present societies – was contributing to the stifling of Ireland's economic growth, and was clearly presented as reckless and uncontrollable. Women who drank tea wasted their time and money, it was said, drawing them away from their duty to care for their husbands and home. It was felt this traditionally female responsibility was vital to progressing the national economy.

Pamphlets published in England at the time suggest that the concerns about tea drinking were also felt widely outside Ireland. Some believed it threatened the wholesome diet of British peasants and symbolised damage to the social order and hierarchies.

 According to the Durham University paper, published in the academic journal Literature and History today (5 Dec) and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, reformers singled out tea drinking amongst peasant women as a practice which needed to be stamped out to improve the Irish economy and society.

Author Dr Helen O'Connell, Lecturer in English Studies at Durham University, who analysed pamphlets and literature from that time, said: "Peasant women were condemned for putting their feet up with a cup of tea when they should be getting a hearty evening meal ready for their hard-working husbands.

  This is the best bit:

Pamphlets the reformers distributed to peasant households lambasted tea drinking as a luxury poor women could not afford and which could even cause addiction, illicit longing and revolutionary sympathies. It was also said that tea drinking could even be akin to being a member of a secret society, a belief which heightened political anxieties at a time of counter revolution within the Union of Britain and Ireland.

Dr Helen O'Connell said: "The prospect of poor peasant women squandering already scarce resources on fashionable commodities such as tea was a worry but it also implied that drinking tea could even express a form of revolutionary feminism for these women.

"If that wasn't enough, there were also supposedly drug-like qualities of tea, an exotic substance from China, which was understood to become addictive over time."

A novel topic No 7: the birds' bath

One of the nice things about our house is that we have a birth bath in the back yard which is easily visible from the dining table and kitchen.  Hence, we often get to watch birds bathing while eating lunch.  (You can also see the bath from the main lounge area too.)   It's fun watching birds bathe:  everyone should have such avian facilities in their yard.

But, it has occurred to me - why do they bathe at all?   Does the water help remove lice?  Google is my friend, and leads me to some information:

When birds bathe in water or saturate themselves with dust they are actively maintaining their plumage. In well-watered areas bathing is most common, in arid ones dusting is more often observed. Experiments with quail show that frequent dusting helps to maintain an optimum amount of oil on the feathers. Excess plumage lipids, including preen oil, are absorbed by the dust and expelled along with dry skin and other debris. If quail are prevented from dusting, their feathers quickly become oily and matted. Dusting may also help to discourage bird lice, but no experimental evidence exists as yet showing that to be the case.

Wrens and House Sparrows frequently follow a water bath with a dust bath (one reason to suspect an anti-parasite function for dusting). Overall, the amount of time and effort birds put into bathing and dusting indicates how critical feather maintenance may be. Feathers are marvelous and intricate devices, but keeping them functional requires constant care.

A bird is considered to be bathing whenever it uses any of several stereotyped movements to wet its feathers. One pattern, wading, is commonly observed in birds with strong feet and broad, short, flexible wings. In a typical sequence a bird stands in the water, fluffs the feathers to expose the bare skin between their bases, and rapidly flicks the wings in and out of the water. The breast is submerged and rolled vigorously back and forth, and then, as the front end emerges, the head is thrown back, forming a cup with the partially elevated wings and tail, and dousing the feathers of the back. Those feathers are elevated so that the water reaches the skin, and then lowered, forcing the water between them. The sequence may be repeated, with the bird submerging farther in each cycle, until it is a mass of soaked disarranged feathers. Variations on this theme can be seen in different species, such as robins, thrushes, mockingbirds, jays, and titmice.

So, it seems the dust might be more important than the water in removing lice?  Oddly, I can't find, even via Google scholar, any papers on water itself removing parasites.   But preening is important:

After bathing, birds dry themselves using ritualized movements. Even swimming birds must force the surplus water from between their feathers to protect their insulating properties. Anhingas and cormorants, which often sit in a characteristic sunbathing posture with drying wings spread, are perhaps also thermoregulating. (Vultures take on similar sunbathing postures in the morning. Sunbathing, which occurs in many birds, may stimulate skin parasites into activity so they can be more readily picked off.) Songbirds shake themselves to throw off water by vibrating wings and tail and ruffling feathers. All birds normally follow bathing with preening.  

More on preening from another website: 

 Preening is the simplest and most common of feather care activities. It involves two different actions, nibbling and stroking. All other feather care activities seem to be a prelude to preening, or at least end in a bout of preening. Preening serves the function of returning feathers to their correct position and form and often involves the addition of oil to the feathers from the Uropygial gland. Wiping is simply wiping the feathers with the bill, pressing them into place and perhaps spreading some oil over them. Nibbling is a more serious attempt to put the feathers back into pristine condition. The bird uses its bill to nibble along the edges of feathers straightening them out and ensuring the barbules are all zipped up.

 One thing I am not sure I have heard about before, however, is "anting":

Many different songbird species have been observed picking up single ants or small groups and rubbing them on their feathers. Less commonly, other songbirds "ant" by spreading their wings and lying on an anthill, and squirming or otherwise stimulating the ants to swarm up among their feathers.

The purpose of anting is not well understood, but the most reasonable assumption seems to be that it is a way of acquiring the defensive secretions of ants primarily for their insecticidal, miticidal, fungicidal, or bactericidal properties and, perhaps secondarily, as a supplement to the bird's own preen oil. The former explanation is reinforced by a growing body of evidence on the biocidal properties of ant secretions and by an observation of a jungle Myna (Acridotheres fuscus) actively "anting" with a millipede, whose potent defensive secretions (evolved to fend off the millipede's enemies) could be smelled from 15 feet away. Likewise, the observed correlation of anting activity with high humidity might be explained by the documented fungicidal properties of ant secretions. Because the seasonal timing of anting and molting (spring and summer) often correspond, some have suggested that anting may soothe the skin during feather replacement. It seems more likely that the seasonal relationship simply reflects the greater activity of ants during those periods.

Interesting.

UPDATE:  here's another way birds deal with parasites - by lining their nests with cigarette butts!

Birds have long been known to line their nests with vegetation rich in compounds that drive away parasites. Chemicals in tobacco leaves are known to repel arthropods such as parasitic mites, so Monserrat Suárez-Rodríguez, an ecologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, and her colleagues wondered whether city birds were using cigarette butts in the same way.

In a study published today in Biology Letters¹, the researchers examined the nests of two bird species common on the North American continent. They measured the amount of cellulose acetate (a component of cigarette butts) in the nests, and found that the more there was, the fewer parasitic mites the nest contained.

A musical interlude

One of these kids is my daughter, playing the weekend before last:



But she told me that piece was really easy.  Last weekend, there was a mini concert at school, and she got to show her skill with very nice piano accompaniment.  I videoed it on our not so expensive camera, but have deleted the video part for privacy reasons.  The ending is very special:

  

Novel topic No 6 - watch out below!

So, some people study landslides.  Hence, we have The Landslide Blog.

With increased intensity of rainfall expected under AGW (whoops, sorry, that's not a novel topic) there will probably be more and more work for landslide specialists.

The blog is full of scary photos of the aftermath of landslides.   For example, this row of terrace houses in England did not do well out of the recent rains:

And some landslides seem to just be giant boulder slides:

A better view of this road hazard:

An even better bit of road blockage was in Malaysia earlier this year:

  

No one was killed.  

Anyway, it's an interesting natural disaster blog.

Novel topic No 5

This beer is highly recommended:

Novel topic No 4 - a cheap shave

I don't mind using shaving soap and a brush for shaving, but my preference has been for the tube lather soaps, which don't require a cup.  The Fauldings brand has been in supermarkets forever.

But I have always wondered about shaving sticks.  These have also always been in supermarkets, but I never understood the shape.  A couple of years ago I bought one, broke it in half and used it in a cup, but the pieces moved around and it was kind of annoying.

Of course, if I had checked the Web, I would have learned how to use one in the proper way.   Some guy has an illustrated guide (with some upmarket looking stick) here.

It is acknowledged in comments there that the more ubiquitous Palmolive shaving stick is pretty hard, and needs a bit of a dip in water before application.   However, it is clear that the stick has its fans. 

It's also clear that some men think a great deal about their soap-and-brush shaving experiences.  For example: 

I just used a Palmolive shave stick for the first time - wow! I have a heavy beard and had two-days growth.

After soaking the stick for a few minutes, I face lathered with a semi-broken in semogue 1305 boar, a 3rd use Personna IP and a 61 Fat boy. I had three good passes with the lather on the brush and touched up a bit with the stick after for some buffing.

I had tried to stick on Saturday thinking that it would behave like my Tabac stick (wet face, rub stick). The Palmolive is a much harder soap, so there was little lather. I did some B&B research and learned to soak the soap a bit and today perfection.

It provided a nice cushioned lather, lubricated and protected well. I like the scent, finding it to be be damp-forest smelling. Palmolive will be a permanent part of my rotation.

***OLD MAN SCENT ALERT*** The scent of Palmolive is definitely old school. If you like the scent of Williams, Tabac, Van Der Hagen, you'll like this scent. I happen to like all of these very much, so the scent of Palmolive is a plus for me.

Is there any benefit to grating this stuff into a bowl? Has anyone does this?

Yes, there are men who know a great deal about shaving brushes, with terminology that sounds vaguely associated with weaponry.  I still use a cheap-ish looking one I know for a fact I got in 1984.  I did not use it for many years, but still.

Anyhow, yes I have found using a Palmolive stick the "right" way works well, and the stick seems to be lasting a very long time.

Novel topic No 3 (although Spielberg gets a mention)

‘Cyndi Lauper - A Memoir’ - NYTimes.com
Everyone finds Cyndi Lauper likeable, don't they?    I still do, even though she seems (like most female pop singers from the 80's - don't ask me why) she's become a gay icon and seems to spend a lot of time on gay marriage advocacy.

Anyway, I was always vaguely aware that she had had a fair few troubles in her life.  Her memoir, which the NYT likes, gives some idea:

Unlike recent books by Patti Smith, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards that have come to be regarded as models for the art of rock literature, Lauper’s memoir makes no attempt to be the least bit literary. Lauper essentially lays out the events of her life in something close to straight chronology, with digressions, in the rhetoric of lunchtime chat. Lauper grows up in a two-­family house with “shingles that looked almost like the color of Good & Plenty candy.” She struggles as a young woman, so hard up at one point that she skins and cooks a squirrel for dinner. She works almost anywhere that will have her, including as a hostess for a Manhattan club catering to Japanese businessmen. She develops as a singer and songwriter, loses her voice, regains it and pampers it ever after as the precious gift that it is. She endures a vile sexual episode with her own friends and bandmates. She becomes famous, then gravely ill with endometriosis, and she proves to have a habit of saying “the wrong things to the right people” — like the time she told Steven Spielberg, in a meeting, that he wasn’t being very ­creative.

(Actually, if she is referring to the video for that Goonies song, she was right.   I'm pretty sure he was supposed to have personally directed it, and it was rather dull.)

PS:  she was also charming and likeable in her one and only movie outing - the little seen "Vibes" - with (the also innately likeable) Jeff Goldblum.  

Novel topic No 2

The Old Foodie: An Incomplete History of Hash Browns.

I was interested to learn the origins of this way of eating potatoes (I never cared for hash browns at McDonalds, but have learnt that cooking them at home and eating them while crisp makes all the difference,) and in the process found this very interesting blog about old food recipes.

How people used to eat has become a very popular topic in recent years, I think.

I also recently heard on Radio National an English author who has a historical novel all based around a large kitchen in, (I think) the middle ages?   It sounded rather interesting.   I'll find the title later and update.

A novel topic

A meta-post

I'm becoming very aware lately of the lack of new topics dealt with in this blog.  Sure, it's good to keep building on knowledge about climate change, the 5 year madness of the Right in the US (with crossover effects in Australia), nudity in Japan, the cuteness of rats, the evil of horses, ocean acidification, World War 2 stories that I haven't heard about before, the magnificent talents of Steven Spielberg, how gay men aren't what they used to be, the troubles of Christianity, strange mythology, micro black holes, other strange physics, the stupidity of Catallaxy, ghosts, cryptozoology, Adolf Hitler's digestive system and (possible) venereal disease, pebble bed reactors, possums, yurts for aborigines, good reviews of bad movies, the Omega Point and my plan for resurrection via blogging; but eventually one feels the need for a string of novel topics.  (And not just about novels - I'm reading few enough of them lately anyway.) 

It also seems clear that everyone is reading fewer blogs lately.  Maybe all blogs feel a bit repetitious after 7 years.  A seven year blog itch, perhaps? 

So, I must put my mind to novel purposes.   Perhaps a special week of ALL NEW material - but I'm not going to go Seinfeld and throw out all of the past. 

I'll think about it....

Rats placebo-ed

Some time ago, I noted that horses getting acupuncture was meant to show that the treatment does not work via a placebo effect.   (I also accused horses of only pretending acupuncture works as a way of punishing humans.  I should start my anti-horse themed posts again - they amuse me.)

But now I see a recent study of the placebo effect in rats.  It works with them.  Who knew rats could be fooled like humans?

Well, now that I look via the wonders of Google - this has been known for a long time.  There are studies back to at least 1963 on a placebo effect in rats.   It turns out that dealing with animals has been an important bit of working out what the placebo effect is all about.  There's a long paper from 2004 about the effect to be read here.  (I've just skimmed it, but seems interested.)

I wonder how far down you have to get in the tree of life before the placebo effect doesn't work?

Good essay on the bad ending

On Great Novels with Bad Endings : The New Yorker

I quite like this short piece on bad endings in great novels.

I have to say, though, that one very good novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, has a great ending. 

Rude bits in history

Public nudity has been in the news in the States lately, leading to Slate running a short article "Why is Public Nudity Illegal?"  The main answer given is as follows:

Because it’s so difficult to ignore. The late political philosopher Joel Feinberg’s “offense principle” offers one persuasive theory for why nudity is illegal. Feinberg argued that an act need not be objectively harmful to merit prohibition—it need only produce an unpleasant mental state such as shame, disgust, or anxiety in observers. Plenty of obnoxious but legal behaviors, like chewing with an open mouth or failure to bathe, can create the same reaction, but Feinberg claimed that nudity has a unique ability to demand our attention. He wrote, “The unresolved conflict between instinctual desires and cultural taboos leaves many people in a state of unstable equilibrium and a readiness to be wholly fascinated, in an ambivalent sort of way, by any suggestion of sexuality in their perceptual fields.” We are drawn ineluctably toward the sexual suggestiveness of the naked body, Feinberg argued, then ashamed of our own reaction. 

All fair enough from a Western point of view, I suppose, but I don't know that it takes into account countries with a rather more relaxed attitude to social nudity.   Which led me to Google up stuff about changing attitudes to nudity in Japan.  This site spends a fair bit of time on the topic, making several interesting observations along the way.  For example:

Members of the samurai class, men and women, did not (or at least were never supposed to) appear in public without being fully clothed. Many norms and values of the samurai class resembled those of Chinese elites, for whom incomplete dress indicated incomplete civilization. In Japan’s terribly hot and humid summers, men and women performing manual labor outdoors *often worked semi-naked*. Scant clothing, therefore, was mainly an indication of manual labor, and one way that samurai distinguished themselves from laborers was by their more formal and complete attire. In the summer, male laborers in rural and urban areas commonly wore only a loincloth both during work hours and while relaxing. Women often went topless and in any case did not wear underwear (more on this below).

It is common in today’s world to link nudity with sex. Clothing serves as a personal boundary marker, and its removal or lack in the sight of others is often an invitation to intimacy. The lack of clothing was especially an invitation to intimacy in Western society of the nineteenth century because the skin itself, along with the secondary sexual characteristics of the body (e.g., curve of hips, breasts, etc.—but not the genitalia) had long been eroticized in visual representations. But clothing or its lack need not function this way in all times, places, or circumstances. While sexuality does have a biological basis, the ways in which it manifests itself are largely products of complex social codes. In Tokugawa and early Meiji Japan, *clothing—not nakedness*—played a greater role in eroticism than it did in most of the Western world. As Timon Screech explains:

Other than the rich (who would not be much encountered in the ordinary townsperson's life), then, fine clothes meant the garb of theatricality or of paying sex. The Edo male would have touched finer fabrics in the arms of these two categories of provider than on any other occasion. The *sexual power* of texture and look in first-rate cloth was commensurately great; it may very well have excelled in excitement the feel of skin, since good cloth was harder to come by than good skin and was more expensive when one did.²

Fine clothing, worn in certain ways and accompanied by certain gestures, typically conveyed sexual messages. Nudity per se, however, usually did not convey sexual messages in Japan at this time, especially cases of habitual nudity such as a woman doing laundry outside topless. A scholar of the relationship be­tween clothing and eroticism explains: “In general, when any­thing is constantly exposed to view, it leaves nothing to the ima­gination, tends to be perceived as ordinary, and, eventually, is hardly noticed at all. The eye be­comes jaded; habitual nudity is notably unerotic.”³

The page points out that it was part of the Meiji period that the government sought to regulate away public nudity (or semi nudity) as part of their modernisation process.  I was amused to read about this early form of protest:

Police enforcement of the law brought forth a brief period of public protest—in the form of #streaking#—but the reaction of the state was to crack down even harder. People began to cover up. In 1890, the Tokyo police issued an order prohibiting mixed ba­thing (police had broad powers to issue orders for the “public good”). Most bath owners could not afford elaborate renovations, so they typi­cally ran a rope across the center of the tub to separate it into sections for men and women. In this way, they complied with the letter of the law but not its spirit.

There's lots more on the page that is interesting, including the rise of underwear (so to speak) in modern Japan.

The site also has another chapter about evolving views on sex in Japan, which contains a lot of interesting information too.  On the older issue of homosexuality, the picture painted is one similar, I suppose, to that of ancient Greece and (to a lesser extent) Rome:

In today's terminology, therefore, the typical Tokugawa Japanese was more or less bisexual, although Tokugawa Japanese generally recognized that people tended to have a preference for one flavor of sexuality or the other. But either way, joshoku and nanshoku were not radically different things. They were simply two broad varieties of sexuality and sexual activity. Was there any major condemnation of those who preferred nanshoku? The answer depends on what is meant by "major." Mark Ravina makes the following observation in the context of discussing an institution called gojū, neighborhood schools consisting of boys and teenagers in nineteenth-century Satsuma (a domain):

Was gojū culture gay? The question is both intriguing and anachronistic. "Homosexual," as a label for people, did not exist in Saigō [Takamori]'s day: sex with men was a practice rather than an identity. Like drinking or fishing, one could enjoy homosexuality regularly, occasionally, or never, according to personal preference. Lacking a biblical story of Sodom, Tokugawa-era Japanese had no concept of sodomy, and Tokugawa-era laws did not criminalize homosexual conduct itself. Legal injunctions against male-male sexuality focused largely on the result of "outrageous" or "provocative" sexual conduct. Like consorting with a geisha or drinking, male-male intercourse became a vice rather than a diversion only when taken to extremes. When Yonezawa domain issued regulations on homosexual activity in 1775, for example, it mentioned violence rather than perversion. Any conflict among a handsome young samurai, his father, and his lover could easily lead to drawn swords and mayhem. Homosexuality was a problem only because male lovers' quarrels tended to grow violent and threaten the public order. (Mark Ravina, The Last Samurai: The Life and Battles of Saigō Takamori [Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2004], p. 33.)

In addition to violence, another possible "extreme" of homosexual behavior would have been failure to reproduce. Elite and commoner society expected men and women to marry and produce some offspring, and exclusive indulgence in homosexuality would have a hindered fulfilling this expectation. The *third Tokugawa shōgun Iemitsu* is a good example of nanshoku, its potential for violence, its possible conflict with expectations to reproduce, and connections between sexuality and politics. Looking at the wide range of social commentary in Tokugawa Japan, we can find a few Confucian scholars and other moralists who denounced nanshoku as morally improper, though often in the context of a broader critique of a society allegedly obsessed with sex. Overall, however, these moralists did not enjoy a large or influential audience. Generally speaking we can say say that there was little or no social censure of non-violent nanshoku in Tokugawa times for those who met their basic social obligations.

I find it somewhat amusing that the main concern about intense homosexual relationships was the threat of samurai running around the streets battling over their lovers!  How different can you get from the modern Western idea of the "problem" (for want of a better word) with homosexuality?   There are many things a visitor fear accidentally seeing in San Francisco (well, the new anti nudity law might help with that), but bloody battles between armed men over their lovers is not one of them.

Message re another blog

I am presently not getting comments through, for reasons unknown, at another blog.

Someone from there might care to point that out, over there...

Back to that ocean problem

Animals are already dissolving in Southern Ocean - environment - 25 November 2012 - New Scientist

It's been ages since I have posted anything about ocean acidification.   I still read about it, but a lot of the studies that have come out in the last year or so have been kind of dull and very technical.   I think there is a realisation that ocean biology, chemistry and ecology are more complicated than previously thought, making forecasts of the effects of ocean acidification a field with a lot of uncertainty.  

I have also been waiting for something more specific about some species that everyone thought would be first affected, and pteropods are high on that list.  So at last there is a study out about them, noting field research from a 2008 field trip.  (They take their time, don't they?).

From the link above:

In a small patch of the Southern Ocean, the shells of sea snails are dissolving. The finding is the first evidence that marine life is already suffering as a result of man-made ocean acidification.

"This is actually happening now," says Geraint Tarling of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, UK. He and colleagues captured free-swimming sea snails called pteropods from the Southern Ocean in early 2008 and found under an electron microscope that the outer layers of their hard shells bore signs of unusual corrosion.

As well as warming the planet, the carbon dioxide we emit is changing the chemistry of the ocean. CO₂ dissolves in water to form carbonic acid, making the water less alkaline. The pH is currently dropping at about 0.1 per century, faster than any time in the last 300 million years....

It gets worse:

Aragonite is still relatively plentiful in most of the ocean, but Tarling suspected that some regions might already be affected by shortages.

He visited the Southern Ocean near South Georgia where deep water wells up to the surface. This water is naturally low in aragonite, meaning the surface waters it supplies are naturally somewhat low in the mineral – although not so much so that it would normally be a problem. Add in the effect of ocean acidification, however, and Tarling found that the mineral was dangerously sparse at the surface.

"It's of concern that they can see it today," says Toby Tyrrell of the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, UK.

Aragonite-depleted regions are still rare, but they will become widespread by 2050, says Tarling. The polar oceans will change fastest, with the tropics following a few decades after. "These pockets will start to get larger and larger until they meet," he says.

Tyrrell says the Arctic will become undersaturated with respect to aragonite before the Antarctic. Patches of undersaturation have already been seen, for instance off the north coast of Canada in 2008.

The only way to stop ocean acidification is to reduce our CO₂ emissions, Tyrrell says. It has been suggested that we could add megatonnes of lime to the ocean to balance the extra acidity. However, Tyrrell says this is "probably not practical" because the amounts involved – and thus the costs – are enormous.