In defence of thimerosal

Mercury treaty debate: Should thimerosal be banned as a vaccine preservative? - Slate Magazine

A detailed and interesting explanation here as to why the mercury compound thimersol should be allowed to remain in vaccines.

Other forms of problematic mercury are not so harmless, however:

Estimating its global impact is difficult, but in some populations almost 2 percent of children are born with mental retardation caused by mercury poisoning.

This all reminds me:  the 1980 science fiction novel Timescape by Gregory Benford, which I only partially read since I don't care for Benford's inability to write likeable characters, starts with a near future "mercury hunt" in the sewers under some university town.  If I recall correctly, it was an extrapolation that mercury for scientific use was becoming in shorter supply and much more expensive, and hence these scavenging trips through drains and sewers would be viable in the future.  If I am remembering it right, that was one (amongst many) predictions in the book that failed to pass.   [If you want to guarantee a science fiction book with a short shelf life, set it about the near future and make lots of detailed predictions about what will go wrong.]

Your dose of intense nerdiness for today

TheVine - The Right Way to Watch Star Wars 

It's an amusing read for the intensity of Star Wars nerdiness on display.  

As it happens, I was thinking about the silliness of the midichlorians while in the shower last night:  turning an appealing mystical/spiritual force in the first films into something sounding like a virus infection.

And speaking of virus infections - I'm having an interesting one at the moment.  Worth a separate post...

 

Australia heat wave in detail

What's causing Australia's heat wave?

I haven't commented on all the publicity about the nation wide heatwave of a couple of weeks ago, as I was waiting on a bit more explanation of how they work it out from the Bureau of Meteorology.

Well, the article above does give more detail, and is well worth reading.

No matter how much the reality disconnected Right wing of politics complains, it looks clear that it was a very unusual event.  

Update:  how appropriate that I posted this on the morning that Sydney has (unexpectedly)  had its hottest day on record by .5 degree.  (45.8 - which is by any standard remarkably hot.)

Hobart broke its record by a full 1 degree on 4 January.

A normally temperate place like that breaking its record by a full degree is very remarkable, I reckon.

Inflatable space homes on the way

Space station to get $18 million balloon-like room (Update)

NASA is partnering with a commercial space company in a bid to replace the cumbersome "metal cans" that now serve as astronauts' homes in space with inflatable bounce-house-like habitats that can be deployed on the cheap.

A $17.8 million test project will send to the International Space Station an inflatable room that can be compressed into a 7-foot (2.1-meter) tube for delivery, officials said Wednesday in a news conference at North Las Vegas-based Bigelow Aerospace.

 If the module proves durable during two years at the space station, it could open the door to habitats on the moon and missions to Mars, NASA engineer Glen Miller said.

These will be rather useless as shelters from space radiation, though.

The odourless underarm gene

Deodorants: Do we really need them?

Well, I had always wondered why some people (like my father, actually) do not produce body odour no matter how sweaty a day they may have had.  I always assumed it was a quirk of the bacterial flora on the skin, but it appears that for some it is in the genes:

New research shows that more than 75 per cent of people with a particular version of a gene don't produce under-arm odour but use deodorant anyway. The study was based on a sample of 6,495 women who are part of the wider Children of the 90s study at the University of Bristol. The researchers found that about two per cent (117 out of 6,495) of mothers carry a rare version of a particular gene (ABCC11), which means they don't produce any under-arm odour....

Speaking about the novel finding, published today in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, the lead author Professor Ian Day said: 'An important finding of this study relates to those individuals who, according to their genotype, do not produce under-arm odour. One quarter of these individuals must consciously or subconsciously recognise that they do not produce odour and do not use deodorant, whereas most odour producers do use deodorant. However, three quarters of those who do not produce an odour regularly use deodorants; we believe that these people simply follow socio-cultural norms.  This contrasts with the situation in North East Asia, where most people do not need to use deodorant and they don't.' ...

The authors highlight that people who carry this rare genetic variant are also more likely to have dry (rather than sticky) ear wax and that checking ear wax is a good indicator of whether or not a person produces under-arm odour.

Previous studies have shown that there is a link between a genetic variant located in the ABCC11 gene and under-arm odour. Sweat glands produce sweat which, combined with bacteria, result in under-arm odour. The production of odour depends on the existence of an active ABCC11 gene. However, the ABCC11 gene is known to be inactive in some people.

Miller talks, a lot

Bryan Appleyard :  Jonathan Miller: Talking About Termites

Here's a cheery article by Bryan Appleyard about a recent interview with Jonathan Miller.   

Paranoia and the Republicans

From a column in the LA Times, a very accurate take on the nuttiness infecting large slabs of the Right in the US at the moment:

Although assault weapons have been banned in the past without a loss of liberty, and no regulation Obama is considering comes close to negating the right to keep and bear arms, one congressman from Texas said he would push impeachment of the president for trying to nullify the 2nd Amendment.

Tea party hero Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky equated Obama’s proposed administrative actions with the monarchy of King George III and pledged to fight the president “tooth and nail” as if 2013 were 1776.

Clearly, the debate about guns is not going to be a reasoned discussion about how to better regulate the hundreds of millions of guns in America and keep them out of the hands of criminals and crazy people. At least on the right, it will be an exercise in paranoia and fear-mongering.

Meanwhile, in the sane state of New York, Republican and Democratic legislators have joined together to pass new gun restrictions that will ban high-capacity magazines, strictly limit ownership of assault weapons and ban their sale online. They did it quickly in a bipartisan fashion and Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed the measure into law on Tuesday. So far, the Empire State shows no sign of turning into a Stalinist nightmare. Other than the significant exceptions of Illinois and Michigan, gun deaths are generally lower in states, such as California, that have strict guns laws. New York was on that list even before this newest law was passed.

Of the annual 30,000 gun deaths in the U.S., only 200 are homicides resulting from acts of self-defense, according to the FBI. Still, no one is talking about stripping away the right of anyone to own a gun to scare off a prowler or hold off a rapist (even though most people shot by guns in homes are relatives and friends). The only types of gun anyone is talking about restricting are the assault rifles that former Gens. Colin Powell and Stanley McChrystal say should only be in the hands of soldiers -- the kind of weapon used by a mentally unstable young man to murder first-graders in Newtown.

 But folks on the right disagree with the generals. Apparently, that is the kind of weapon they think they may desperately need in the event of civil war against the would-be monarch in the White House.

Legal issues

Virgin threatens to pull out of projected spaceport | Science | guardian.co.uk

I've said before that this complicated and expensive form of short joyride may well have a very short life if there is any accident.  It's not like air travel, where people are always going to need and want the product.

This article talks about some of the liability limitation that is involved in the project.  I guess that, given it is only rich people with plenty of money to sue who can afford it,  such limits are absolutely essential.

I still think that high altitude balloon rides into space, (perhaps using cheaper hydrogen?), may well be a better product.

Yet another exotic disease I barely knew

Step closer to parasite vaccine (Science Alert)

 Scientists - including a geneticist at The University of Western Australia - are a step closer to developing a vaccine against a fatally infectious parasite carried in the bite of sandflies.

Visceral leishmaniasis, also known as black fever, is the second-largest parasitic killer in the world after malaria.  The parasite migrates to organs such as liver, spleen and bone marrow and if left untreated will almost always be fatal. Symptoms include fever, weight loss, mucosal ulcers, fatigue, anemia and substantial swelling of the liver and spleen.

Leishmaniasis affects 12 million people and there are an estimated 1.5 million new cases annually mainly in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia and Brazil.

I'll add it to the list of "exotic diseases I feel I should have known about, but didn't."

Stem cell competition

Court lifts cloud over embryonic stem cells : Nature News

Here's an interesting report noting that stem cells sourced by reprogramming adult cells are well on their way to replacing embyronic stem cells in terms of total research volume.

This is a good thing.

To test or not to test

Change in PSA levels over time can help predict aggressive prostate cancer

I think I read years ago that earlier testing - in the mid 40's - was perhaps more useful than a first test in one's 50's, perhaps for the same reason.

I never got around to it then, though, but last night I got the form for some blood tests and PSA is included.  The doctor basically said "well, it's the only way we've got of detecting anything", which is true, I guess.   He agreed though that it may well result in unnecessary further investigation or treatment.
 My impression is Australian doctors are more reluctant to give up testing PSA routinely than are some American doctors.  But I could be wrong.

Bond noted

So, I finally saw Skyfall yesterday.

My impressions:    It is, without doubt, the best directed and most visually impressive Bond film ever made.   In particular, I thought it remarkable how seamlessly visual effects are incorporated into the film.   Unlike the Bonds of old, there is really no point (which I can recall) at which you can think "oh, now its cut to the actor  in front of a blue screen," yet there are incredible scenes of destruction and mayhem which just must be visual effects.   (That's the upmarket term now for "special effects" isn't it?)  It just all looks real and terrific.  There is also a well acted loony villain for a change, and in fact the whole Daniel Craig era of "actors who take it seriously" continues.

A few quibbles though - I thought Quantum of Solace was going to be the end of Bond having mid life "do I really want to be doing this job" style crises, but the first third of this film is back to that thematically.  The competitive drinking scene was too much like the one in Raiders of the Lost Ark, although the addition of the scorpion was a nice touch.  (If Spielberg were directing, one would say it was definitely self referential.)   And really, as for the readiness to leap into bed with the most available woman: it is, I think, pretty much recognised now as being dated sexual politics, but the producers still presumably consider it an essential element.  It seems that the way they deal with it in this film is to make these scenes as short as possible - so much so that one of them happens so quickly it makes him look (at first) more like a break in rapist than a welcome lover.  Would they really lose anything by not showing him bed a woman in the next film?  I doubt it.

But, overall, I would have to say the film remains quite satisfying.   I particularly like Ralph taking over a key role:  I have long admired him as an actor in virtually whatever he does.

Update:  the biggest quibble perhaps should be - where is the extra bullet hole from the opening scene?    That's never explained.  I see that the issue has been given some detailed internet analysis. 

Galaxy mystery

I should have noted this story from last week:

"When we looked at the dwarf galaxies surrounding Andromeda, we expected to find them buzzing around randomly, like angry bees around a hive. "Instead, we've found that half of Andromeda's satellites are orbiting together in an immense plane, which is more than a million light years in diameter but only 30 000 light years thick. These dwarf galaxies have formed a ring around Andromeda."

 "This was completely unexpected – the chance of this happening randomly is next to nothing. It really is just weird," said Professor Lewis.

 Large galaxies, like Andromeda and our own Milky Way, have long been known to be orbited by an entourage of smaller galaxies. These small galaxies, which are individually anywhere from ten to at least hundreds of thousands of times fainter than their bright hosts, were thought to trace a path around the big galaxy that was independent of every other dwarf galaxy.

 For several decades, astronomers have used computer models to predict how dwarf galaxies should orbit large galaxies, and every time they found that dwarfs should be scattered randomly over the sky. Never, in these synthetic universes, did they see dwarfs arranged in a plane like that observed around Andromeda.

It's odd how much mystery is still involved in understanding the motion of galaxies, both individually and collectively.

Hitting the wall

How do you know if you ran through a wall? Testing the nature of dark energy and dark matter

Researchers from Canada, California, and Poland have devised a straightforward way to test an intriguing idea about the nature of dark energy and dark matter. A global array of atomic magnetometers – small laboratory devices that can sense minute changes in magnetic fields – could signal when Earth passes through fractures in space known as domain walls. These structures could be the answer to the universe's darkest mysteries.

Can't say I've ever heard of "domain walls" before.  Interesting.

Three below the belt

A few articles all with a "below the belt" theme - sort of:

*  the first is a bit of a cheat:  Mary Beard has an interesting review of a new book about shopping in ancient Rome, but because part of the material relates to a poet who was making a bit of a joke, she gives it the title "Banter About Dildoes".   It's a very interesting read anyway.

*  Slate had an article a week ago about the history of condoms in the US.  Again all very interesting.  [As an aside, the availability of condoms in Australia is significant for family reasons.  My maternal grandparents were divorced - or maybe permanently separated, I forget which - by the time I was born.  My mother told me that the relationship had gone bad when, on one of his return visits to their country  home  after working down in Brisbane in World War 2, my grandmother was furious to find he had a condom in his pocket.  She took as a sure sign he was up to no good while away.  I wonder if it was a US condom?]

*  Slate also has a fascinating article about the importance to reproductive health of the microbacterial mix in a vagina:

A healthy vaginal microbiome produces lactic acid and hydrogen peroxide, which maintain a level of acidity that keeps troublemaking microbes at bay. When the vaginal community becomes unbalanced, on the other hand, acidity decreases. The wrong microbes may then invade or, if they’re already present, bloom.

This disturbance can cause bacterial vaginosis—not really an infection, but an out-of-whack ecosystem. It sounds like a trifling problem, and half of women with vaginosis may display no obvious symptoms. But this minor-seeming imbalance can have major consequences.

Vaginosis increases the risk of contracting secondary infections, from herpes to HIV. But even on its own, the microbial shift may prompt low-grade inflammation that can derail reproduction. It can prevent fertilization in would-be mothers, prompt spontaneous abortion in pregnant women, and increase the risk of preterm birth later in pregnancy.

If the vaginal microbiome were suddenly to shift across the entire human population, it's not unreasonable to predict that humanity would go extinct.

 Amongst other fascinating details, there is also the question of how far bacteria get into the female reproductive system:

In 2011, a group at Harvard found that 40 percent of placentas from more than 500 preterm children born by C-section contained culturable microbes. In this case, those placentas colonized by vaginosis-associated species were slightly inflamed. But the placentas coated with lactobacilli were not.

Australian fertility specialists have observed that fluid extracted from ovaries wasn’t sterile, either; it also contained bacteria. The study group consisted of women seeking help with conception. Women who harbored lactobacilli, the researchers found, more often had successful outcomes than those who carried other species.  

The microbes may have been introduced during the egg retrieval process, the scientists acknowledged. But they also asked, “Do we really believe that the female upper genital tract is sterile?”

“I think that there's organisms up there all the time, in healthy people,” Reid says. Some of these microbes likely ascend from the vagina.

And, in the last section, the peculiar American obsession with douching comes in for criticism:

When I asked Cottrell about douching, she told me a story. About a decade ago, flummoxed by the high infant mortality rates in some African-American communities in the Florida panhandle—which were more than twice the rate for Caucasian infants—she began looking for explanations.

“I kept seeing bacterial vaginosis present in mothers whose babies died,” she recalls. “That’s when I started reading about vaginosis.”

She happened on statistics suggesting that one in three American women douche and that some African-American cohorts douched nearly twice as often. Showing that douching directly causes infant mortality remains difficult, yet her resulting paper, published in 2010, reads like an anti-douching manifesto.

Douching has been linked to preterm birth, an elevated risk of acquiring HIV, ectopic pregnancies, cervical cancer, and endometriosis, she points out. It may perpetuate the very condition it’s often intended to address: vaginosis. Scientists at Johns Hopkins have found that, after stopping the practice, bacterial imbalances resolved on their own.

“We recommend not doing it, that's the bottom line,” says Cottrell.

 *   is there any other country that has these products advertised on TV?  Do they still advertise them - I haven't been there for some years - but look at this creepy 1980's ad .  I see that they are certainly still used:

An estimated 20% to 40% of American women between ages 15 and 44 say they use a vaginal douche. Higher rates are seen in teens and African-American and Hispanic women. Besides making themselves feel fresher, women say they douche to get rid of unpleasant odors, wash away menstrual blood after their period, avoid getting sexually transmitted diseases, and prevent a pregnancyafter intercourse. 

 I find this very odd.

Let India do your head in

Last week, SBS showed the first episode of a 3 part documentary "Welcome to India" and it made for fascinating, if rather disturbing viewing.

I've heard people who have been there say that the country is confronting and confounding to Western eyes; the mix of beauty, poverty, striving, and resignation to fate is apparently very hard to process, and I think this documentary illustrates this extremely well.

(These themes were also evident in last years' 2 part doco by Kevin McCloud "Slumming It", which I think I recommended at the time.)

Welcome to India basically tries to spin an optimistic take on how people in India seek to improve their lot by hard, but often disgusting and dangerous, work.   On the one hand, you can admire this, as well as the mutual support that some families, even work families, display.  On the other, the show seems to acknowledge but never wants to dwell on the exploitation that is clear in much of what goes on in the country.  Yeah, the guy who supervises the workers who sluice mud from the jewellery district's drains for the tiny amount of gold dust they may recover pays them every week (after, it seems, spending much of his day by napping in the middle of the workplace,) but he's ruthless in what he'll pay the guy who gets into the rat infested drains to dig out the mud overnight, and he just shrugs his shoulders about how dangerous it is for the other workers who smelt down a mercury mixture to get out the gold.  But "everyone loves gold" he beams at one point.   (Well, that makes it all worthwhile, then.)  And those people who live on a beach growing fenugreek have made themselves a nice enough business, and live in a beach slum which is better than many in India, but they resent the late comers to the beach and don't care if the government moves those ones on.

Anyway, I see that the first episode can still be viewed on SBS on Demand, but is also up on Youtube permanently.   Part 2 is on tonight at 9.30 as well.   Well worth your time.

Fickle fate

A lot of people are worried about bushfire danger in New South Wales today, with Sydney expecting 43 degrees and high winds. 

Of the recent bushfire experience in Tasmania, I thought the following photo of Dunalley was remarkable:

I mean, this just doesn't match my mental image of a town likely to burn down due to bushfire:  it looks just like a bit of seaside suburbia with an unremarkable number of trees in backyards or nearby.  And, of course, there is plenty of water nearby.   (Fighting large scale fires with sea water probably doesn't do a lot for any surviving garden, I guess.)

Anyway, good luck New South Wales.

An early opinion for 2013

"Gangster Squad" is an amazingly bland and boring name for a movie, isn't it?  (I've seen billboards around town for it, and have this thought every time I see them.)

Holidays past and past

Happy New Year, Readers.

Christmas was pretty pleasant at the Opinion Dominion household, seeing relatives and friends that we haven't for some time; and on Boxing Day, heading up for a too short stay at Noosaville - that beautiful "just around the corner from Noosa" part of the world that we used to holiday in, but had given a miss for a number of years, especially the last two summers that had the horrendous weather.

It's easier from where we live to visit the Gold Coast, but (apart from that coast's rainforest hinterland areas, which are beautiful but not part of a normal beach holiday) I still say that the Sunshine Coast (the Noosa end of it in particular) runs rings around the area from Southport to the border for physical beauty. Of course, the fact that as a kid my family used to take summer holidays on the beach at Maroochydore, where camping seemed to stretch for miles on either side of the lifesaver clubhouse may influence my feelings as well.  Here's how happy being at the beach used to make me:

(I feel pretty much the same about a good beach holiday 50 years later.)

But seriously, have a look at how nice the water is in these couple of photos, the first of the river at Noosaville just 30 m or so from where we stayed.   (If you don't care for my efforts at producing a moving panorama effect, just click on it and see the whole stitched thing*):

(I'll slip back into nostalgia for a moment and share a photo of me at - I think - Cotton Tree near the mouth of the Maroochy River some years ago:

and as an aside,  note how annoying it is that, even without eating more than before, my almost-post-middle-age torso is wanting to revert to that shape.)

Back to Noosa Heads 2012, where we still managed to find a car park in the bushy part at the end of Hastings Street provided we got there by about 8 am or after about 3.30pm:

Yes sure, driving into Noosa's Hastings Street is a nightmare in the middle of the day at peak holiday season, but you normally want to avoid the sun at that time of day anyway.  

I was extremely happy that the weather was good for the whole week this year:  just one threatened afternoon storm that curtailed things a bit but that was it.   South Easterly winds picked up on the last couple of days, but Noosa Heads is well sheltered from them and the surf was always gentle but intermittently large enough to be fun for people on body boards.  The water seemed particularly glassy and clear and warm this year.  (I have long maintained that you only have to go 20 km south of the Queensland border to find that the ocean water feels noticeably colder, even at the height of summer.  On the other hand, even if you brave the potential killer jelly fish of tropical north Queensland waters in summer, they are like having a tepid bath and not very refreshing at all.  Water at the Sunshine Coast is just right.)

Noosaville still has a great bunch of cafes and bars on the riverfront, although (sad to say) I don't recommend having a meal in the "French bistro" there.  The owners do seem French and bake a nice croissant and assorted pastries for breakfast, but their evening meals are distinctly ordinary.  [On the other hand, if you are visiting Southbank in Brisbane, I do strongly recommend French Martini on Grey Street, which we ate at before Christmas.  Servings sizes are not huge, but the food was very pleasing.]   Back at Noosaville, for simple takeaway, the Red Emperor fish and chip shop opposite Pelican Beach on the river continues to do excellent work feeding hundreds of people a night; Elvis's takeaway next door does decent standard burgers; many of the local pizzas are good and most of the more upmarket places also do takeaway if you don't care to eat in.  It is a good place to eat.

We also hired a boat for a morning of fishing, and my son was happy to catch his first edible sized fish, a whiting.   I didn't realise before that there is a stretch of the river behind a canal developed part which has a a large stretch of foreshore left bushy:  if you nose your boat towards that side and don't look behind you, you can imagine for a minute that you are in a very undeveloped river:

As for the whiting itself, it was kept in a large bucket of water while we tried to see if we could catch another fish to make a shareable meal; we didn't and it was decided that I would take a photo of son holding it before releasing it into the water.  While holding it, it make a clear squeak sort of sound - perhaps regular anglers know that whiting can squeak, but it surprised us and confirmed that it should be released, in case it had just promised us 3 wishes, or something.

I must have forgotten to ask for a million dollars in the end of year Gold Lotto, or maybe it was released under false pretenses.

Anyway, all in all, a very good time was had, both in 1962/3 and 2012.

*  Readers who are interested in stitching photos together for a panorama, and who (like me) have misplaced software for that which came with an older camera, might be interested to note that I found Microsoft's free ICE program did the job very well.   I also actually have deleted my kids from 2 of these photos using the clone tool in PhotoImpact, which has always seemed to me to be a good cheap alternative to Photoshop.

Christmas elsewhere

NRA Fail

NRA press conference: The lesson of Newtown—when gun nuts write gun laws, nuts have guns. - Slate Magazine
This is just one of the many savage media attacks on the NRA approach that "more guns, more guns" is the only response it will consider to mass shootings. 

Funny how it won't acknowledge that it was legally acquired guns that caused the latest horror.   Or that it is not even clear that any increased regime of reportable mental illnesses would have helped.  (For an organisation so keen on civil liberties, I would like to see how many mental or personality issues it thinks should be notifiable to a government register, and how close to access to guns such a person has to be to be included.)

The fact that the Columbine shooting happened in a school that regularly had an armed, uniformed deputy from the local sherriff's office eating lunch in the caferteria was probably something they weren't keen to take questions on either.

It may be early days yet, but there seems to be a sense that the latest killing has turned the tide of opinion against the likes of the NRA.  I  have to say, though, that I agree that the issue of violent games (and movies) is not getting enough attention.  It's just that the NRA is the last organisation that can credibly bring that up...

Scruton appears

High culture is being corrupted by a culture of fakes | Roger Scruton |

Nice to see Roger Scruton turning up somewhere again.

Abbott considered

What does it profit a man? Between Tony's faith and Abbott's ambition – Opinion – ABC Religion & Ethics (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

This essay by fellow Catholic Chris Uhlmann about Tony Abbott is very good, I think.

It certainly raises the question of how much conflict Abbott may privately feel about what he does in his current role in politics.

I just still think he is a man who has been appointed above his level of competency and comfort, and I do not imagine him being a good PM.

PS:  Uhlmann does made a crack about Greens being modern pantheists - which has an element of truth to it, I suppose - but it also indicates to me that he can't get over his previously stated belief that climate change is not really science but a religious belief.   He may be OK on the humanities and religion; I don't think he's smart when it comes to science.

Gun control discussed

Well, I certainly hope it is annoying gun lovers of Australia that Slate is running an article noting how John Howard's gun buyback actually did put a sudden end to mass shootings of the kind all so frequent in the US.

While no one realistically suggests such a buy back is politically possible in the US, and the general tone is of pessimism as to what can really be achieved in a country already brimming with private weaponry, Slate does have an interesting article arguing that history tells us the certain forms of violence have been successfully tackled in the US.  I wasn't aware of the incidents mentioned in this aspect of US history:

 One example is class violence, once seen a shameful but ineradicable feature of American life. Beginning in the 1870s, the United States became infamous around the world for the brutality of its labor clashes, in which gun battles, dynamitings, and hand-to-hand combat produced what seemed to be an unending stream of senseless death. Sometimes the violence came at the hands of police: 100 strikers killed during the rail uprising of 1877, 11 children burned to death in the 1914 Ludlow Massacre. On other occasions, it came as retaliation from below. In 1910, men employed by the Bridge and Structural Iron Workers blew up the headquarters of the anti-union Los Angeles Times, killing 21 printers and laborers working inside.

Elsewhere in Slate, a comment in National Review Online that the Bushmaster semi-automatic is not worth worrying about banning because it is (apparently) not powerful enough to reliably kill a deer is given a thorough ridiculing, including showing this ad that illustrates the mentality behind some gun ownership in the States:

 

If I had enough time, I'd adjust the slogan to "Consider your penis inadequate".

But one thing about Slate bothers me:  amongst all this talk of gun control and violence, they are still running prominently an episode by episode commentary on the series Dexter - a show about a psychopath made for entertainment value that has nonetheless (as I detailed a couple of months back) been clearly implicated as having inspired several murders by nutters internationally.

I haven't noticed anyone in the comments section following the Dexter article comment on this weird juxtaposition, where the same liberal leaning publication is both deeply concerned about violence in culture, and celebrating it as entertainment on the same page.

Meanwhile, over in the Atlantic, James Fallows puts succinctly the case against the "more guns is the answer" argument:

To spell it out:

• Being in a shopping mall, on a train, in a theater, or at a school where someone starts shooting is statistically more frequent in America than anywhere else, but is vanishingly unlikely for any individual. Yet if we were to rely on the "more guns make us safer" principle, logically we'd have to carry guns all the time, everywhere, because ... you never know. Jeff Goldberg and I have both railed against TSA policies based on the premise that every single passenger is a potential terrorist. A more-guns policy would involve a similar distortion in everyone's behavior based on outlier threats.
• There is very little real-world evidence of "good guys," or ordinary citizens who happen to be armed, taking out shooters in the way the more-guns hypothesis suggests. After all, and gruesomely, the mother of the murderer in Newtown was heavily armed and well experienced with weapons, and that did not help her or anyone else.
• It is all too easy to imagine the real-world mistakes, chaos, fog-of-war, prejudices, panic, and confusion that would lead a more widely armed citizenry to compound rather than the limit the damage of a shooting episode.

It is, to Australian ears, extremely odd that such an argument even has to be explained.  But we're not talking a normal country here. From another Salon article (worth reading in full):

Although the NRA has temporarily gone to ground, it’s no secret that its solution to this sort of gun violence is more guns. Indeed, chief spokesman LaPierre has made clear that he believes every American should be armed with a concealed weapon.  “Every American wife and mother and daughter, every law-abiding adult woman should be trained, armed and encouraged to carry a firearm for personal protection,” LaPierre told the NRA’s national convention, and he wasn’t trying to establish his feminist credentials.  LaPierre thinks every man in America should be packing heat as well.  The NRA believes that armed citizens in places like Newtown, Aurora, Tucson, Virginia Tech and Columbine can stop determined killers.  ”The presence of a firearm makes us all safer,” LaPierre said.  ”It’s just that simple.”

Whether or not a “responsible,” law-abiding adult trained in the use of firearms could make a difference in any particular situation is worthy of discussion.  Likewise the question of how to ensure that adult gun owners are responsible.  The problem is that the NRA and its congressional allies don’t want a rational debate about guns.  Two months after the 2011 Tucson rampage, which left six dead and 14 wounded, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, LaPierre rejected an invitation from President Obama to discuss ways of keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally unstable.  LaPierre said there was no point talking to “people that have spent a lifetime trying to destroy the Second Amendment.”  Following the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, which left 13 dead, the NRA urged a similar boycott of a meeting called by President Clinton to discuss ways of addressing teen violence.

The challenge today is not coming up with “the answer” to the nation’s gun violence; rather it is to move beyond the absurd but prevailing myth perpetrated by the extremists who currently run the NRA that nothing should be done because any effort to limit access to guns will lead to gun confiscation and tyranny.

When it comes to random mass shootings, Americans don't need protection from crims:  they need protection from the insane paranoia of the NRA and its supporters.

Update:  a good article here in Salon, citing lots of academics and their studies, on why more guns is not the answer.

The violent Hobbit

Peter Jackson's Violent Betrayal of Tolkien - Noah Berlatsky - The Atlantic

I don't intend seeing The Hobbit, but I am happy to note criticism of it.  

Given that my impression was that even Lord of the Rings movies graphically hyped  up the battle and slashing quite a bit compared to the books (which I haven't read fully - yes please just ignore me it attacking things I haven't seen really gets up your nose), this commentary in The Atlantic on The Hobbit sounds convincing:

Bilbo then (in both film and book) leaps over Gollum's head, leaving the creature despairing but unharmed. Later, in The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf suggests that Bilbo's pity for Gollum "may rule the fate of many." At the end of Rings, it is ultimately Gollum who, inadvertently, destroys the ring and saves Middle Earth. Mercy is ultimately salvation, and Bilbo's decision not to use violence is at the heart of the quasi-Christian moral order of Tolkien's world. 

If Jackson meant for Gandalf's comment to highlight Tolkien's nonviolent ethic, though, the rest of his film undercuts it—and, indeed, almost parodies it. The scene where Bilbo spares Gollum in the movie comes immediately after an extended, jovially bloody battle between dwarves and goblins, larded with visual jokes involving decapitation, disembowelment, and baddies crushed by rolling rocks. The sequence is more like a body-count video game than like anything in the sedate novel, where battles are confused and brief and frightening, rather than exuberant eye-candy ballet.

The goblin battle is hardly an aberration in the film. I had wondered how Peter Jackson was going to spread the book over three movies. Now I know: He's simply added extra bonus carnage at every opportunity. The dwarves, who in the novel are mostly hapless, are in the film transformed into super-warriors, battling thousands of goblins or orcs and fearlessly slaughtering giant wolves three-times their size.

Extraordinary Christmas house

On the weekend I took the family on the annual run around suburbs not too far from us to view Christmas lights.

There is one house, which I had never seen before, that is set up with an extraordinarily professional  light and sound show, with hundreds of people coming on a warm night to sit across the road (in supplied chairs, I think) to watch.  I can imagine this might be kind of annoying to the other people in the street!

But here is a little bit to illustrate, when the lights are co-ordinated with that classic Christmas song(?), the Chicken Dance: 

Gun violence, revisited

On Friday, I was going to do a post noting disappointment that the latest Quentin Tarentino movie had received very strong reviews.   I didn't read many of them, but noted that they seemed to have a common thread, with phrases like "the director's trademark violence" turning up often.  Here is an example from Rolling Stone:

 In his last class, cataloged as Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino burned down the damn Third Reich, Hitler included. This time, with Django Unchained, he lines up slave traders so a black man can blow their fool heads off.

As noted in detail in my post after the Batman cinema shooting in the US earlier this year, there are few people in the world who note anymore the extent to which violence as entertainment in the cinema has reached levels that would simply have been inconceivable 45 years ago.   Back then, Bonnie and Clyde was very controversial, and although it has been years since I have seen it, this critical reaction remains to my mind entirely appropriate.   (Interestingly, Tony Martin, a real cinema fan and sometime director and screenwriter, made the point in his autobiographical book that it was this film, shown perhaps by mistake to his class at high school, that showed him the power of movies, due to the highly excited reaction the ending got from one of his schoolmates.)  That movie should make people think hard about whether it is violence being depicted as quasi porn.  To my mind, all realistic ultra violence in cinema that is being presented for entertainment should make people think. 

But now it rarely does.   It doesn't matter that movie reviewers are nearly all politically liberal; they nearly all accept it in all forms and in all contexts - praise it even if it is "done well".  I am not one of those people.  Tarentino is at the forefront of moviemakers who use violence for entertainment, and he concentrates in particular on realistically depicted, violent revenge scenarios. He does not deserve his success.

I also have a son who is of an age where computer games are of intense interest, and we usually watch together the ABC's Good Game, which reviews computer games of all varities, including quite violent ones.

Even from the clips I see there, I frequently object to the level of violence, regardless of whether the splattered figures are meant to be zombies or not.   Call me naive, if you want; but games featuring increasing realistic buckets of blood sprayed all over the room, often from a first person shooter perspective, are not a healthy thing for society.  Parents frequently ignore age ratings for games, and simply let their kids play them because their mate has it already.   Again, this would have met with some moral outrage only (say) 20 or 30 years ago.  Not now.

Yes, I know:  bright people play them; they are not made into rampaging killers by doing so, and sure, they tell the difference between reality and games.  (As can nearly all movie goers - see my comment regarding ironic detachment in my earlier post linked above.)

And yet, when mass rampage killings show up in countries such as the US, with the appalling and upsetting Connecticut school shooting, people are always asking "but why"?

As with some previous shootings, it appears this guy did the shooting in military like dress.  It is said he was very much into computers and (I would guess) gaming.    It is being reported this morning that he had some altercation with staff at the school last week - hence revenge for a real or imagined slight is once again an issue, as it frequently seems to be for the socially isolated who take it out on school or university grounds.    (Mind you, it is also early days since the incident, and there already are signs that there has been much initial misreporting.)

Where do mentally disturbed people get the mental image of the (to them) justified vengeful excitement of a mass shooting?   Is it that hard to tell?  Really?  

Of course, Americans are (in very large proportion) sickeningly mad when it comes to the issue of  gun ownership, and of course one of the responses to this year's shootings should be a legislative response which any other country would be able to manage. 

But to my mind, it is a pity that it takes a shooting to happen inside a cinema to make the country, and indeed the world generally, to think culturally about the depiction of fictional violence and the "frog sitting in the slowing heated pot" situation that has developed with scant objection over the span of my life.

And finally - Charlie Brooker had a point about the counterproductive nature of over publicising mass shootings in 2009.   It is a lesson impossible for the media to follow, it seems.  Mind you, without such an approach in the US, it would seem that the political movement to increase gun control would never have a chance of making any inroad at all.  It is, therefore, a dilemma in that nation as to whether the blanket coverage is for good or bad.

Update:   William Salatan has an article up at Slate in which he, quite rightly, notes that the problem with guns in the school yard attack scenario is the speed with which they allow large numbers of people to be killed.   Laughably, gun advocates in the US thought they were on a winner when, by co-incidence, there was a school yard attack in China on the same day.  They were so overjoyed to run the "this can happen anywhere regardless of guns" argument that they forgot to note the number of kids killed via the knife attack - none.

Salatan also notes a Wikipedia list of school yard attacks.   Now, Salatan takes the view that these have happened in so many countries that:

 They’ve falsified every pet political theory about what kind of culture or medical system or firearms legislation prevents mass murder.

Maybe, but here's what I've noticed from the list:  look at the decades in which they have occurred.

Even though there was the largest shooting of all in 1927, there is a mere handful of incidents before the 1970's.   The concentration of incidents in the 1990's and 2000's  is clear.

It can be dangerous to draw conclusions from Wikipedia lists, but I would have thought that my general concern with the cultural influence of fictional violence in games and the media is given a bit more credence with this information.

And the award for most hypocritical performance by an Australian newspaper goes to...

The Australian, with Dennis Shanahan in his column this morning, opining that the public is tired of politicians trying to smear each other.   Yes, that would be the same paper that was running for months Hedley Thomas' protracted game of "but what about this bit of paper?", attempting to smear the PM over a minor bit of legal work and her poor choice of boyfriend 20 years ago.

Now, of course, when a Coalition candidate gets a shellacking from a judge for legal games that went on a mere 10 months ago, it's time to move on, isn't it Dennis?   The obviously shifty game of denying knowledge that went on amongst Canberra Liberals 9 months ago is of no interest whatsoever, hey.

Oh, and of course the political hypocrisy continues as far as the prospect of investigations are concerned.

Tony Abbott (additional words by me]:

"There are all sorts of rumours that have been running around about Mr Slipper for years," Mr Abbott said.  [And I have supported him wholeheartedly throughout this.] ... "I think any such inquiry would plainly be a bit of a witch-hunt" [whereas my promise to hold an inquiry as to the PM's choice of boyfriend 18 years ago and legal matters for which no criminal prosecution has ever been instituted despite investigation at the time would be a matter of crucial public interest and not motivated by political self interest at all.]

A hard life

Abraham Lincoln, bare-knuckle brawler? - Salon.com

Well, this interview with an author of (yet another) book about Lincoln contains a lot of stuff that I didn't know.  He had a hard life:

The thing I hope readers take away from my book is this: Lincoln truly suffered in life.  He had horrible bouts of depression. He was on suicide watch several times. He was sometimes completely bed-ridden. He said he was haunted by the thought of rain falling on graves all of his life. His mother died when he was nine; his sister died when he was sixteen. The first woman he ever loved died within a few months of him meeting her. He had one son die before the boy was four years old. He lost another son named Willie not too long after they got to the White House.  And given Lincoln’s depressive nature, all of that almost pushed him over the edge. He suffered with the massive themes of his administration: slavery, spies, and ordering troops into battle. But I think, like Churchill, it was his private suffering that prepared him to help a nation that was suffering. William Herndon, Lincoln’s first biographer, said that he, “dripped melancholy as he walked.” I think his suffering drove him to faith and deepened his faith once he got to it. But he also had an atheist phase earlier in life.

 OK, some of that I knew, but a fair bit is new to me.  As is this:

  His family were what used to be called “hard-shelled” Baptists, and they were caught up in the second great awakening, which swept the frontier and was really, quite frankly, violent. It was barking and being “slain the in Spirit.” People would run around and climb trees and it was all too emotional, all too sweaty for Lincoln. His father was the kind of man that would get all weepy at dinner over something that was happening in the revival, and then beat his son the next day to make him work. Lincoln had a hard childhood but he’s the archetype of a person who rises largely through self-education. He probably didn’t have a year of school in his entire life. He read voraciously. All the stories about walking miles to borrow books are absolutely true. He began to read religious skeptics: Thomas Paine, Edward Gibbons —those men challenged Christianity. A lot of the American heroes of the Revolution were that way, Ethan Allen and others. Lincoln bought into it and went through quite a long “village atheist” phase. He schooled himself on how to attack the myths of Scripture and would carry around a Bible just to undercut it. He called Christ a bastard; it was very heated. This is one of the keys to understanding Lincoln’s life: Lincoln’s mother was illegitimate. Her grandmother had been raped by a Virginia aristocrat and Lincoln concluded that God had rejected him, given him the mark of Cain because his mom was “a bastard.” He would even call her that. So, strange as it is to us, Lincoln thought he was cursed. And he began to conclude that all of the sufferings he’d endured were because God had cursed him. So his atheism, his friends said, really was not that he didn’t believe in God, it was that he was angry at God.

Feeling for others

Understanding How Children Develop Empathy - NYTimes.com

A somewhat interesting column here on the human sense of empathy.  

It seems that this is something that must be worked out so we can program it into AI - have a look at Bryan Appleyard's recent piece on whether AI will be the death (or enslavement) of us. 

(It did occur to me, though, in reading the Appleyard piece, that given the amount of trouble viruses and bacteria can cause us, I don't know that we should have too much concern about AI's being able to wipe humanity out of contention.)

Currency woes

Dollar dazzler: why they want our money

Michael Janda seems to be saying that the high Australian dollar is a problem, but there's nought to be done about it now.

Alan Kohler blames our economic blues on another thing as well:

....Australians have had it up to here for three long years - nothing but mad, hysterical politics, day in, day out. And a strong currency.

So what we are seeing in Australia is the effect of a very unusual double whammy: political instability coupled with a strong currency.

Usually the first leads to the opposite of the second, but unfortunately the credit ratings agencies don't watch Question Time in Federal Parliament: if they did they would have cut Australia's credit rating several notches below AAA long ago.

But one of the worst things about the current popular mis-perception of the Australian economy was in the media again recently - the idea that Australia's budget deficit would not have happened under a Coalition government.

This is absolutely outrageously wrong - and Christopher Pyne's dishonest (but probably successful) attempt to further lodge this meme in the brain of the public just illustrates further why I cannot see myself voting for the Coalition next election.

Update:   it occurs to me that, if the sudden deterioration in polling for Federal Labor in Newspoll is correct, and is maintained next year, the electorate is going to be acting in pretty much the same way as it did in the run up to the 2007 election win of Kevin Rudd.   That is, it will not be under the influence of much in the way of credible policy alternatives, or acting against a government that the great majority of economists have a problem with:  it will simply be voting because of the "vibe".

Update 2:  as I understand it, this news this morning only makes worse for our over valued currency problem:

Fed makes new rate pledge, pumps cash into US economy

Life in London

iPad mini, Kindle Fire HD, or Google Nexus 7? What's in your stocking? | Money | The Observer

So, I'm not too interested in the article itself, comparing a few (but only a few) different options for people buying a tablet device for Christmas.

But what did catch my eye was that in the comments section, a few people noted that the photo in the article (showing a woman reading an iPad on a bus) was definitely something you should not do in London if you don't want to be an ex-iPad user.

That surprised me a bit.

I still want to write about how I've found using an Android vs an old iPad, as I know the world is just waiting for my erudite comments...

Reason to go to Sydney?

Wallace and Gromit get a hand at home

A Wallace and Gromit exhibition is at the Powerhouse museum.    Sadly, though, the article says no W & G film is currently in production.  

Wouldn't have guessed that

Caffeinated coffee may reduce the risk of oral cancers

High or Low?

Studies differ on climate change and warming severity, researchers trade jabs - Capital Weather Gang - The Washington Post

There's a really good post here summing up the contradictory conclusions of two recent papers - one saying climate sensitivity is likely to be at the higher end of the range (Trenberth), and one saying it should be on the lower side (Schlesinger).

Each criticises the other's approach quite strongly.  

But even Schlesinger is pragmatic and thinks the world still needs to be cautious:

Despite Schlesinger’s more optimistic outlook, he stresses sharp emissions reductions must begin, in case his estimates are wrong.

“...for argument’s sake, let’s suppose the [climate sensitivity] is larger than the values we determined....humanity must act sooner and more rapidly...” Schlesinger said.

Indeed.

A useful figure to know

BBC - Future - Health - Sex: What are the chances?

I missed this article from earlier in the year, but I reckon it has a good figure that is handy to know for anyone who needs to talk to teenagers about consequences:

 The bottom line is that a single act of intercourse between a young couple has on average a one in 20 chance of pregnancy – this assumes the opportunity presented itself on a random day, as these things tend do when you are young.

 However, the article then goes on to talk about the effectiveness of various forms of contraception, but only seems to quote figures if they are used correctly.   This seems a bit of an oversight.

Stupid right wing moochers

If there's a right wing thing I can't stand, it's when they use the Randian term "moochers", even if half in jest.   Anyone who has been a fan of Rand is automatically suspect, in my books; but to use her terminology just shows the continuing influence of a crank and a sympathy to her appalling lack of a social conscience.

But the funniest thing is when right wing starts "mooching" themselves.   Climate change fake skeptics are pretty expert at this.  Who can forget the request for money from the American family who ran into environmental problems with their feed lot in WA.    They blamed their alleged prominence in the climate change skeptic movement for their problems (never with any real evidence, as far as I could see.)   Promoted via Jonova and Watts Up With That, there appeared to be a lot of money pledged for their "save the farm" action, which may or may not be continuing, as they decamped back to the US anyway.

Now look at the latest example - Mark Steyn, who has stupidly decided to go out of his way to insult and defame Michael Mann on the pages of National Review Online, got full NRO support, which now publishes this ad:

Oh diddums?  More from their webpage:

As many of you know, National Review is not a non-profit — we are just not profitable. A lawsuit is not something we can fund with money we don’t have. Of course, we’ll do whatever we have to do to find ourselves victorious in court and Professor Mann thoroughly defeated, as he so richly deserves to be. Meanwhile, we have to hire attorneys, which ain’t cheap.

Righto.  So a publication that is making no profit decided to escalate a fight by challenging him to sue after they called him "the man behind the fraudulent climate-change “hockey-stick” graph, the very ringmaster of the tree-ring circus" and approved this quote:

Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet.

What idiots.

Steyn and (much of) the Right in the US have become an intellectual embarrassment. 

And yes, it's affecting the Right as constituted in Australia:

South Australian senator Cory Bernardi, formerly Mr Abbott's parliamentary secretary, said: ''I do not think human activity causes climate change and I haven't seen anything that changes my view. I remain very sceptical about the alarmists' claims.''

Queensland senator Barnaby Joyce said the whole debate about whether humans were causing the climate to change was ''indulgent and irrelevant''.

The Coalition has a large fracture line within its ranks on this issue, and it has serious consequences on leadership and policy more broadly, since dismantling the Labor carbon "tax" and replacing it with the half baked Abbott scheme (which no economist supports as a better scheme for its intended purpose) will have  serious knock on budgetary consequences.   

It's the issue that poisons everything on the Right.  

Eurine-eka

Brain cells made from urine 

It's about using kidney cells excreted in urine and reprogramming them to be (something like) embryonic stem cells.

Hobbit hobbled

Time for celebration for those of us in the very, very small club of  "Go Away, Tolkien" (an incorporated association):  The Hobbit has only* got 74% on Rottentomatoes, and quite a few of the more prominent critics have been giving it a pretty good thrashing for being way, way too long and mostly dull.

But the most interesting thing is the poor reaction to the high frame rate version.  This, from Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian, is pretty typical:

The second unexpected point is the look of the thing. Jackson has pioneeringly shot The Hobbit in HFR, or High Frame Rate: 48 frames a second, as opposed to the traditional 24, giving a much higher definition and smoother "movement" effect. But it looks uncomfortably like telly, albeit telly shot with impossibly high production values and in immersive 3D. Before you grow accustomed to this, it feels as if there has been a terrible mistake in the projection room and they are showing us the video location report from the DVD "making of" featurette, rather than the actual film.

Some other critics have noted that it makes it way easier to spot the changes from special effects shots to reality, and that it makes fast motion look wrong (speeded up, I think they say.)

Isn't this fascinating?  I'm pretty sure I read about high frame rate film back in about the 1980's, maybe in something like Omni magazine, or perhaps Discover.   It was thought to be the way of the future.

But, it turns out, too much clarity look bad. 

I wonder why that is.  I could go for the philosophical explanation:  maybe we prefer soft edges over reality, just as people don't like to think too much of the materialist/existentialist view of the world that says it is ultimately meaningless after the suffering and temporary bursts of happiness of life. (I am full of Christmas cheer, hey?)   Of course, the religious and (in particular) Christian come back is that ultimate reality is better than what we get living in this muck.  I take it that Heaven looks better than high quality video, though.

Or it could be that part of our normal vision that we concentrate on means the perimeter is not sensed as if it is in focus, and hence our normal vision does not have a widescreen clarity that sharp digital has?

Anyway, all that matters is that some people don't like it.  Yay. 

*  all of the Lord of the Rings movies scored in the 90 percent range.  It was a lonely job, being bored with those films.  

Death of the monocle too?

Astronomer Sir Patrick Moore dead, aged 89

I noticed Moore's name on the cover of some magazine the other day, which surprised me because I assumed he had probably died already.

Anyway, now he has.  We never saw much of him in Australia, as far as I can recall, but his grumpy face was memorable.  (Like Julius Sumner Miller, looking rather stern and easily annoyed seemed to be part of the pop scientist mystique in the 1960's.  These days they have to be all smiley so as to not scare the kids.)

But as the title of this post suggests, Moore's photo at the link shows him wearing a monocle.   Surely he must have been one of the last surviving monocle wearers?  Or is there an Eastern European country where this is still the fashion?

Fun with tablet

 

Update:  these were done using Paper Camera, an Android app which to my mind does this conversion to sketch or painterly image far better than any other app I have seen.  It also does it "in camera" so you can immediately tell what shots look good with it.  I must write about the differences I've found using Android and an iPad soon. 

The problem with practical jokes

What a sad story, how the nurse who was taken in by a prank call from Australian FM radio appears to have committed suicide. 

The Age is still running a column from a day or two ago about whether the radio station should have apologised, and basically suggesting that the answer is "no", as it was only the silly English who were upset.  An online poll suggested most people agreed:

The column did make the observation, which has now been rendered a major, major understatement:

The jokesters, however, know it can go badly wrong. A Kyle Sandilands radio stunt involving a lie detector test and a 14-year-old, who revealed she was a rape victim, was deplored across the nation.

I don't listen to FM Breakfast Radio, and never have really, and the only prank calls I remember from AM radio were ones where a friend or family member was involved in the set up.   These type of calls, I think, have little chance of going wrong.  

But calls that may put the job or reputation of the receiver on the line - isn't it time there were recognized as always immature and inherently cruel?  

Time to grow up, FM Radio.

And as for the radio hosts who made the call:  they shouldn't appear on air, anywhere, again.  They're not going to starve to death, I'm sure.  It's the least they or the radio industry can do to show remorse.

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.