More bugs bugging us

Antibiotics could cure 40% of chronic back pain patients | Society | guardian.co.uk

Yet another story of an unexpected bacterial connection to health.  

Krugman talks about the Keynesian long run

Keynes, Keynesians, the Long Run, and Fiscal Policy - NYTimes.com

Further to the post about Ferguson and his silly comment about Keynes, Krugman here talks about the issue of the long run.

Clear and concise, as usual.

More in Søren than in manga

Julian Baggini — I still love Kierkegaard

I quite enjoyed this summary of the somewhat odd philosophy of Kierkegaard from someone who first became a fan as a teenager.

This paragraph amused me:

Yet alongside this melancholy was a mischievous, satirical wit. Kierkegaard was a scathing critic of the Denmark of his time, and he paid the price when in 1846 The Corsair, a satirical paper, launched a series of character attacks on him, ridiculing his gait (he had a badly curved spine) and his rasping voice. Kierkegaard achieved the necessary condition of any great romantic intellectual figure, which is rejection by his own time and society. His biographer, Walter Lowrie, goes so far as to suggest that he was single-handedly responsible for the decline of Søren as a popular first name. Such was the ridicule cast upon him that Danish parents would tell their children ‘don’t be a Søren’. Today, Sorensen — son of Søren — is still the eighth most common surname in Denmark, while as a first name Søren itself doesn’t even make the top 50. It is as though Britain were full of Johnsons but no Johns.

As for the title of this post:  I was trying to make a pun, and took a stab that there would be manga versions of some of Kirkegaard's books.  Looks like I was right!

Bacterial ecology, continued

To Beat Bad Breath, Keep the Bacteria in Your Mouth Happy: Scientific American

There seems to be a lot of interest suddenly in scientific circles about how bacterial ecology (particularly in the gut) affects the general health of  humans.  Here's another instalment of the story, but this time starting at the mouth:

Bacterial geneticists contributing to the Human Microbiome Project, funded by the National Institutes of Health, have so far identified about 1,000 species of bacteria that commonly inhabit human mouths. Yet one person's particular mix of “bacterial colleagues,” as Rosenberg calls them, is probably quite different from another's. “Each person has maybe 100 to 200 of those bacterial species colonizing their mouth at any given time,” says Wenyuan Shi, a microbiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

During birth our previously sterile mouth picks up some of our mother's bacteria, and in childhood we quickly acquire new microbial colonizers. Studies suggest that a preschooler's population of mouth microbes most closely mimics his or her primary caregiver's. As the years go on, diet, stress, illness, antibiotics and other forces can shift the demographics of an individual's microbial community—and change its collective aroma. When bacteria that release smelly compounds dominate, chronic bad breath may be one of the consequences.

Many current treatments do not improve oral ecology—in fact, they might make matters worse. Although some mouthwashes merely mask unpleasant odors, alcohol-based rinses sold in drugstores and prescription rinses containing chlorhexidine or other antiseptics target all oral bacteria, stinky and otherwise. Shi says that approach has several drawbacks. A chlorhexidine rinse, for example, may improve breath for as long as 24 hours but can temporarily change the taste of food. In one study, 25 percent of subjects experienced a tingling or burning sensation on the tongue after a week of use. Heavy use of rinses with alcohol can dry out the mouth, sometimes exacerbating bad breath. Further, wiping out too many of the mouth's native bacteria could disrupt the usual checks and balances, making way for opportunistic species responsible for gum disease and other infections to move in and take over.

 The article goes on to discuss new treatments being tested to give a more permanent "cure" by changing the bacterial mix in the mouth.  For example:

Other teams are investigating whether probiotics rife with a gram-positive bacterial strain known as Streptococcus salivarius K12 can fight halitosis. A common resident of the mouth and respiratory tract, S. salivarius K12 is benign and known to produce substances that deter harmful bacteria. In a recent study by researchers in New Zealand and Australia, volunteers gargled with a chlorhexidine mouthwash to clear their palate of many native bacteria and subsequently sucked on lozenges laced with K12. Seven and 14 days later they had much sweeter breath. Presumably K12 outcompeted its foul-smelling kin, opening up niches for less offensive species.

 I wonder if protracted kissing with someone with good breath can help too!

Keynes and the long term

Yesterday, when the story about Niall Ferguson quipping that Keynes didn't worry about the future because he was gay and childless was doing the rounds, I commented elsewhere that having children certainly seems to have no effect at all on the Tea Party Right and their dismissive attitude to the long term  issue of climate change.   (The point being that they are an obvious example of how having kids is not co-related to "concern with the future of humanity".)

But what I suspected was that Ferguson's take on Keynes not being concerned about the future was the more fundamentally wrongheaded claim.  Not being one who reads much about economics, though, I didn't know where to find a good commentary on this aspect.

Overnight, what I wanted appeared at Slate.  It's a good read.  Here is the opening slab, for which I trust Slate will forgive me for reproducing:

Niall Ferguson, the distinguished historian who for the past several years has increasingly abandoned his trade in favor of inept conservative punditry, stepped in it over the weekend when he told an investors’ conference that John Maynard Keynes’ allegedly misguided ideas stemmed from the fact that he was gay and had no intention of having children, and was thus blinded to the importance of long-run considerations.

When an uproar ensued, Ferguson, to his credit, offered a full and complete apology on his website. But both the controversy and the apology primarily reflect the welcome fact that gay-bashing is increasingly frowned upon in polite society. They don’t confront the larger smear, which is against Keynes’ ideas. The fact of the matter is that both Keynes personally and “Keynesian” thinkers about macroeconomics in general care deeply about long-term issues. In fact, Keynes is one of the deepest thinkers about the long-term economic trajectory of all time.

The assumption that Keynes only cared about the short run stems from Keynes’ too-often quoted line that “in the long-term we are all dead.” This is, obviously, true. But while it’s often taken to be something like a 1930s version of YOLO, that kind of carpe diem economics has nothing to do with what Keynes was actually writing about.

The line appears not in the General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money but in 1923’s Tract on Monetary Reform. Most countries, including Great Britain, had abandoned the gold standard during World War I. After the war, the major powers sought to return to gold and the British authorities wanted to return their currency to its pre-war peg, a step Keynes thought would be disastrous. The question of the long run arose in response to the claim that overvaluing a currency relative to the currencies of its trade partners can’t make a difference since in the long-run domestic prices will adjust to any exchange rate.

Keynes says that this is true. If after the conclusion of the American Civil War “the American dollar had been stabilized and defined by law at 10 percent below its present value” that would have had no implications for the world economy of the 1920s, 60 years later. Nominal prices would have adjusted. “But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs,” he wrote, “In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.”

Read the whole thing.

It certainly helps illustrate the intellectual poverty of what passes for much Right wing commentary on economics in the last few years.

Fan boys and girls who are not to be trusted

Diana Rigg in Doctor Who: The Crimson Horror recap.

I continue to be amazed at the global fan boy detailed analysis, excitement and praise appearing at Slate (above) and The Guardian after every episode of Dr Who, when I am finding the stories increasingly incredibly stupid.

Last night's episode, for example, in my opinion, just made no sense as a story whatsoever.  I personally think that the makers of the show think they can include any steampunk element and fan boys will "ooh" and "ahh".  (Last night, it was a steampunk ballistic missile type thingee.)  

The stories have become absolutely hopeless.   The end times must be near, one would think...

In praise of stretchers

I've always liked stretcher beds.   As a young child, I remember finding the camp beds comfortable during the Christmas Holiday trip to Maroochydore.  I don't remember anything in particular about their design, but I'm pretty sure they were canvas stretchers or bunks of some design.

As a teenager, when in cadets, we used to sometimes sleep on old military canvas stretchers of this type of design:

except the canvas was white and very thick, and and the steel rods and leg brackets were pretty heavy and the whole thing probably weighed three times as much as the modern version shown here.

Still, I always found them comfortable too.

And so we advance to today, where recent experience both at home and camping has made me turn against inflatable bedding and try the modern version of this (presumably) old design:

In fact, this was the very model bought this weekend, when an air mattress failed us on the first night.  (Air mattresses are not to be trusted.  Sure they can be bought very cheaply  now in nice, thick versions, but there's nothing worse than a slowly deflating mattress to disturb a night's rest.)

Stretchers like this are, in contrast, very sturdy and comfortable, and fold up quickly.  This one is pretty heavy, but it's not as if you're ever going to try to carry one far.

Of course, they don't use canvas for them any more, so you don't get the added pleasure of the smell, but you can't have everything.  (Everyone likes the smell of canvas, don't they?  Or is it just that it was imprinted on me as a child during pleasurable beach side camping?)

Googling around tonight to see if my fondness for stretchers was shared, I tried to look up the history of this design.  Certainly, nothing turns up of great use in the first pages of results. I assume the cross leg design must be pretty old, and maybe its inventor is lost to us.

It's hard to find anything about their use, let alone the designer.  I did find this, though, from the Australian War Memorial:

It's a stretcher as used by a Captain JM Head in New Guinea in the Second World War.  It's pretty basic, and one would assume it may well be the same used in World War 1, or the US Civil War.  But it's hard turning up information on this topic quickly.

The problem is, of course, that whenever you search for "stretcher" something, you get links to medical stretcher information and images.  And, gosh, don't people find that subject fascinating.   Look, here's a 29 page "Short History of [Mountain] Stretchers" alone.

Anyhow, I'm all impressed anew with the comfort and portability of stretchers.  I'm not entirely sure why mattresses ever caught on.

Main Beach, Gold Coast, 4 May 2013

Dark thoughts about superhero

‘Iron Man 3,’ With Robert Downey Jr. - NYTimes.com

The reviewer for the New York Times has some dark thoughts while watching Iron Man 3, but I think it's a valid observation:

  

The only significant difference between “Iron Man 3” and others of its type is that it is opening a few weeks after the Boston Marathon bombings. It’s an unhappy coincidence that might not be worth mentioning if “Iron Man 3” didn’t underscore just how thoroughly Sept. 11 and its aftermath have been colonized by the movies. 

The makers of “Iron Man 3” — including the director, Shane Black, who wrote the script with Drew Pearce — could not, of course, have known that their carefully engineered entertainment would open so soon after the Boston attack. Yet the explosions in the movie, as well as its plot elements — among them the threat of terrorist violence, homegrown terrorism, American soldiers and improvised explosive devices — made it impossible not to think about the marathon. When a Los Angeles landmark is blown up on screen, a twist rendered with the usual state-of-the-art digital technology, all I could think was how clean it looked without the pools of blood and grotesquely severed body parts.

The most discouraging gift ever?

“For the Law School Graduate in Your Life: Gift Certificate to Have Your Eggs Frozen”: Julie Shapiro

From the link:

I’ve been travelling a lot recently and in Anchorage (American Bar Association Family Law Section Meeting) I was on a panel with a doctor who does fertility work in southern California. He mentioned that it was now possible to give a gift certificate that allowed the recipient to have her own eggs frozen. It turns out to be a popular gift from parents to their daughters who are graduating from law school.

The idea here is that the eggs can be harvested when the daughter is young and in her (reproductive) prime and then they can be safely stored away until after she finds Mr. (or maybe Ms?) Right and/or gets her career up and running. It’s a way of stopping–at least for a while–the biological clock. Now, thanks to the wonders of technology and the generosity of her parents, the daughter has a choice.   Freezing her eggs lets her have it all.

 That's a terrible idea...

In 10 years time, I'll have no idea what this was about....

Spooky Stuff

I've never added a blog about UFOs to my blog roll, but I've occasionally looked at the one by long time Australian UFO writer Bill Chalker, The Oz Files.    It seems, as far as I can tell, pretty sensible for a UFO blog, so I'll add it.

I've also found an infrequently updated blog called Parasociology, which seems to cover some interesting topics, and has a handy list of links to bodies involved in parapsychology.

And for my third new source of spooky stuff, I see that Dean Radin has put together a list of links to studies that have been published since 2000 that he thinks are collectively a good introduction to the evidence for psi.  It looks like there is plenty of interesting abstract reading to be had from that springboard.

Made me laugh

Spotted in a discussion in The Guardian about whether Ben Elton is now too old for comedy:

I'm guessing that maybe someone like Louis CK (aged 45) holds a place in your heart once occupied by Ben Elton many years ago? Louis CK is no spring chicken and his stuff is just getting better and better. No one is older than Joan Rivers (actual age: 197) but I didn't see anyone walking out of the sold-out 6,000-seater Royal Albert Hall when she played there a couple of months ago.

Testosterone can send men mad

Scientists unpack testosterone's role in schizophrenia

Hormones are a worry...

Waiting for stagflation

Krugman wrote about the "stagflation myth" as favoured by conservative economists in June 2009:

Ever since Reagan, conservatives have been using the evils of stagflation to denounce liberal economic policies. Yet mainstream economics — even at Chicago — has never made that connection.

Stagflation was a term coined by Paul Samuelson to describe the combination of high inflation and high unemployment. The era of stagflation in America began in 1974 and ended in the early 80s. Why did it happen?

Well, the textbooks basically invoke two factors. One was a series of “adverse supply shocks”, mainly the huge runup in the price of oil. The other was excessively expansionary monetary policy, especially in 1972-3, which allowed expectations of inflation to become entrenched. (Ken Rogoff — a Republican, by the way — attributes that expansion to the desire of Arthur Burns to see Richard Nixon reelected.)

The appearance of stagflation was a win for conservative economics, but it was conservative monetary economics that was partly vindicated: Milton Friedman’s assertion that there is no long-run tradeoff between inflation and unemployment turned out to be correct, and is now part of the standard canon.

But where is the Great Society in all this? Nowhere. The claim that stagflation proved the badness of liberal ideas is pure propaganda, which not even conservative economists believe.

Two years later, anti-Keynesian and all round hater of taxes and government spending Sinclair Davidson gave "stagflation" for Australia a run on The Bolt Report and The Drum:

It is the consequence of pursuing Keynesian economic policy. It should come as no surprise that the return of Keynesianism during and after the Global Financial Crisis could see the return of stagflation.

In 2007 Kevin Rudd argued, 'this reckless spending must stop'. He was quite right then, he would be even more correct today. The Australian economy is in trouble – according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the first quarter of 2011 experienced negative growth. Second quarter figures will be published in early September. This week the ABS reported that inflation is well above the Reserve Bank's two to three per cent inflation target.

Normally an inflation result like that would see an increase in official interest rates. After all the previous inflation figures were also on the high side. But the economy is very sluggish at the moment. A second consecutive quarter of negative growth would mean that the economy is officially in a recession.

 So what has happened to inflation since then?:

 Hmm.  Looks like inflation is under tight control.  

When asked today, about 20 months after his stagflation warning, we get this, in Catallaxy:

How is your stagflation call going anyway, Sinc?

Going well. The economy is stagnant, unemployment rising, cost of living amongst the highest in the world. Interest rates almost back at the depths of the GFC. The Americans are yet to unravel their QE. I don’t why you’re so happy – it brings me no joy.

So in the absence of actual inflation, you can just substitute "high cost of living"?  

 

What's also interesting is the anti-Keynesian spin put on it.    Yet when I Google on the topic of stagflation, I find that there has been a sudden recent burst of stagflation warnings from the UK:

Indeed, Britain has suffered persistently from higher inflation than any other advanced economy since the financial crisis struck. Unlike in the US and the eurozone, where inflation has remained broadly on track, inflation has been above the BoE’s 2 per cent target since the end of 2009, rising as high as 5.2 per cent in the autumn of 2011.     

So the country which gone much further down the anti-Keynesian "austerity" path than the US is the one facing potential "stagflation".

Looks like a theoretical "fail" too, then; not just a practical one.

A long article on why austerity doesn't work

The Austerity Delusion | Foreign Affairs

Haven't had time to read it all yet, but this section is at the core, I think:

Austerity is a seductive idea because of the simplicity of its core claim -- that you can’t cure debt with more debt. This is true as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. Three less obvious factors undermine the simple argument that countries in the red need to stop spending. The first factor is distributional, since the effects of austerity are felt differently across different levels of society. Those at the bottom of the income distribution lose proportionately more than those at the top, because they rely far more on government services and have little wealth with which to cushion the blows. The 400 richest Americans own more assets than the poorest 150 million; the bottom 15 percent, some 46 million people, live in households earning less than $22,050 per year. Trying to get the lower end of the income distribution to pay the price of austerity through cuts in public spending is both cruel and mathematically difficult. Those who can pay won’t, while those who can’t pay are being asked to do so.

The second factor is compositional; everybody cannot cut their way to growth at the same time. To put this in the European context, although it makes sense for any one state to reduce its debt, if all states in the currency union, which are one another’s major trading partners, cut their spending simultaneously, the result can only be a contraction of the regional economy as a whole. Proponents of austerity are blind to this danger because they get the relationship between saving and spending backward. They think that public frugality will eventually promote private spending. But someone has to spend for someone else to save, or else the saver will have no income to hold on to. Similarly, for a country to benefit from a reduction in its domestic wages, thus becoming more competitive on costs, there must be another country willing to spend its money on what the first country produces. If all states try to cut or save at once, as is the case in the eurozone today, then no one is left to do the necessary spending to drive growth.

The third factor is logical; the notion that slashing government spending boosts investor confidence does not stand up to scrutiny. As the economist Paul Krugman and others have argued, this claim assumes that consumers anticipate and incorporate all government policy changes into their lifetime budget calculations. When the government signals that it plans to cut its expenditures dramatically, the argument goes, consumers realize that their future tax burdens will decrease. This leads them to spend more today than they would have done without the cuts, thereby ending the recession despite the collapse of the economy going on all around them. The assumption that this behavior will actually be exhibited by financially illiterate, real-world consumers who are terrified of losing their jobs in the midst of a policy-induced recession is heroic at best and foolish at worst.

Austerity, then, is a dangerous idea, because it ignores the externalities it generates, the impact of one person’s choices on another’s, and the low probability that people will actually behave in the way that the theory requires. To understand why such a threadbare set of ideas became the Western world’s default stance on how to get out of a recession, we need to consult a few Englishmen, two Scots, and three Austrians.

Gatsby considered

Gatsby may be great, but F Scott Fitzgerald is greater | Books | guardian.co.uk

Someone writing in The Guardian is a big fan of The Great Gatsby (re-reads it every year) and notes that the Luhrmann film coming out about it may well be disappointing.  (Let's hope so - Luhrmann's lurid style never seems to get quite the uniform rubbishing it deserves.)

As for the book, which I read some years ago:  it struck me as adequate but pretty light weight.  I caught a bit of the Robert Redford Gatsby movie on TV recently, and it seemed that it did the opposite of usual cinema compression of a novel:  it was very long for a book that was very short.  

But anyway, The Guardian writer gives a potted history of the trouble life of Fitzgerald, and I don't think I knew  this:

When he died in Hollywood in 1940, Fitzgerald was almost completely forgotten. His funeral was attended by just 30 people, including his editor Maxwell Perkins. Sales of his books had virtually dried up. His publishers, Scribners, still had unsold stock from the first printing of Gatsby. He had lived the American dream, and it had turned into a waking nightmare.

Given that (as I recall) Gatsby ends with the funeral of the title character attended by virtually no one, that's a bit of an unfortunate "life imitating art" episode.

Colebatch puts revenue and spending in perspective

Before we tackle the budget, let's clarify a few points

In the last eight years of the Howard government, cash revenues averaged 25.4 per cent of GDP while spending was 24.2 per cent. Result? Budget surpluses averaging 1.2 per cent of GDP.

In 2012-13, revenue will be roughly 23.2 per cent of GDP. Underlying spending, after adjusting for last year's budget fiddles (which shifted $9 billion of spending into 2011-12), will be roughly 24.5 per cent of GDP.

You do the sums. Which is the bigger problem: revenue or spending?

The gap was meant to close in 2012-13. Revenue was forecast to swell 11.8 per cent, mostly from company tax and the mining tax, while spending, thanks to the fiddles and ''efficiency dividends'', was meant to shrink 2 per cent. It hasn't worked out like that.

Spending in the eight months to February was up 1.8 per cent year on year, but Finance Minister Penny Wong insists it will end up on target. But revenue has risen only 4.5 per cent year on year. For the three months to February, tax revenue was 0.5 per cent less than it was a year earlier.

Why? We've been told again and again, but some don't want to hear. Mining companies, which have been doing well, have been quite legitimately reducing tax by writing off the record $285 billion they invested here over the past decade. And the mining tax was so poorly designed that it has raised virtually nothing, and might not for years.

Apart from the banks, the rest of the economy has not done well, mainly due to the overvalued dollar, so it's not paying that much tax. Company tax was meant to reap an extra $6 billion this year, but in the first eight months, its take rose just $381 million, less than 1 per cent.

But the government spends too much, you say. Well, all of us can think of areas where we think it should cut spending. Equally, we can all think of areas where it should spend more. The International Monetary Fund estimates that, excluding east Asian countries where welfare is left to the family, Australia already has the second lowest spending of any Western country, behind only Switzerland.

Noting changes in spending and revenue as a percentage of GDP puts the figures in a perspective that propagandist economists for the Coalition who infest The Australian and News Ltd (and spend their days at Catallaxy) would rather not talk about.  For them, it's all "but revenue has increased!" 

[Catallaxy has, incidentally, been just about completely taken over by conservative Catholics or wannabe Catholics who want to condemn abortion all day; complain about Labor politicians who are pro-choice (let's not fret about Liberal ones who are too - or Tony Abbott adopting the "legal, safe and rare" formula); and worry about how the Catholic Church is being persecuted on the sex abuse issue.    Oh, and Islamists - they are very, very worried about Islam.     Strangely, Sinclair Davidson seems to very sympathetic to anti-abortion calls himself - he has never objected to one particularly neurotic visitor linking continually to his own anti-abortion posters featuring graphic photos of aborted foetuses.  Davidson also complained about the sex abuse enquiry that has just started, and one poster made (and never retracted, despite his being shown how bizarrely wrong he was) the  ludicrous claim that more Labor politicians had been to jail for child sex abuse than Catholic clergy.   It's like the Tea Party (Traditionalist Catholic sub-branch) of Australia.   A weird place.]  

Show way past its peak gets Slate column

Doctor Who "Journey to the Centre of the Tardis" recap. - Slate Magazine

Isn't it odd.  Now that Dr Who is way, way past its prime (I have been seriously underwhelmed with it in the latest series,)  Slate has started giving it the Dexter treatment.  That is, started giving a show which doesn't deserve it a discussion column after every single episode.

Last night's episode, which should have been full of fun with the interior of the Tardis being exposed for the first time, was the typical shambles of late.   The problems are:

a.  Everything can be solved with time travel, so there is no tension.

b. There is an endlessly malleable explanation of time travel used in the series.

The show needs to be put out to pasture again for 5 years, until better stories can be conceived.

Talking about Antarctica

A white and inexpressibly horrid land | TLS

I learnt some things from the above review of a handful of new books about Antarctica.  The number of people who visit during summer, for example:

...every (southern) summer sees more than 30,000 visitors arrive, swelling the resident population of some 5,000 scientists and support staff, though in winter that number drops to just over 1,000, many of whom apparently regard themselves as the luckiest people on earth. 

The charms of penguins:

Gabrielle Walker recalls that she began her time on the ice determined to resist these “clichés of Antarctica”, distrusting the way their cuteness is used to reduce the continent’s alien vastness to a manageable human scale. She would write about them only “because there was interesting science to tell. That was all”. Her vow did not last long, however, and the day an Adélie penguin played statues with her – “each time I turned it was motionless. Each time I walked, it walked with me” – was the day she finally lost her battle with the anthropomorphic impulse.

 and the "Antarctic stare":

One of those lucky ones was Gavin Francis, who spent a year working as the base-camp doctor at a remote British research station on Antarctica’s Caird Coast. Empire Antarctica is his record of that year, an intense and lyrical portrait of the slowly changing polar seasons, at the heart of which lies the cold monotony of the lightless southern winter. At first, as the sun gradually dipped below the horizon, Francis felt he was adjusting well to the coming of the polar night. But by the end of the second month, he writes, the frozen darkness had lost any beauty it once held: “it became a pause, a limbo, a drawn breath between history and the future”. His colleagues on the isolated station grew listless and forgetful, while tempers frayed, owing as much to the lack of privacy as the lack of natural light. Some even developed the notorious “Antarctic stare”, brought on by months of isolation, as though zombified by the pitiless dark. 

On a related note, my handful of long time readers (hello?) may recall that I very much enjoyed the account of the Mawson expedition that is a large part of Heather Rossiter’s biography of Herbert Dyce Murphy.   (Heather actually commented here too about my post about the book.  It's good to be noticed by authors.)   The expedition came to mind again when listening to a Radio National show on Anzac Day last Thursday.

I think Heather may have mentioned it in her book, but one of the unfortunate crew who had to winter over for the second time when Mawson turned up hours too late to catch the boat was killed soon thereafter at Gallipoli.

Edward Frederick Robert Bage was an engineer.  Here's a photo of him with a particularly large pipe which presumably helped him get through two Antarctic winters.  Poor old (actually, he was much younger than he looked) Bage was killed following orders of dubious merit.  Googling around, this article in The Australian seems to be the script of the radio show:

BAGE returned to full-time soldiering, and five months later the Great War began. He joined the Australian Imperial Force, and was appointed deputy commander of an engineers company. Soon afterwards he announced his engagement to Dorothy Scantlebury, a university student.

He left Australia with the first contingent, trained his company's sappers in Egypt, and landed with them under fire at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915. They rated him highly. "Besides being a good officer, Captain Bage was a fine fellow in every way," declared Tom Prince in a memoir of his war service. Another sapper, Jim Campbell, a 27-year-old carpenter, described Bage as "an excellent officer".

The engineers were given a series of urgent tasks during the chaotic first few days at Anzac. They widened roads, made bombs, strengthened trenches, carted ammunition, constructed loopholes and excavated emplacements for the artillery.

Bage spent the morning of May 7 surveying the terrain near Lone Pine. As it happened, the commander of the First Australian Infantry Division, Major-General W.T. Bridges, was appraising his tactical options in a nearby trench. He had just decided on his preferred course of action when Bage materialised along the trench. War historian C.E.W. Bean wrote that Bridges cried: "Here's the man!" When Bage found out why he was the man, he became concerned.

Bridges wanted the infantry to occupy a forward post, and wanted a reliable officer from the engineers to mark out the position beforehand as soon as possible. He wanted Bage to venture out in front of the AIF front line for 150m, and then bang in some marker pegs - this in broad daylight and in view of the Turks. Bage respectfully pointed out that the best chance of tackling such a risky undertaking successfully would be to do it at night. But Bridges was adamant that it had to be done that afternoon.

As a loyal and capable officer, Bage accepted that an order was an order. He resigned himself to his probable fate, and arranged for the dispersal of his belongings.

Bage did his utmost to carry out the task, which "could hardly have been more perilous", as Bean confirmed. Bage was hammering in a marker peg when he was killed by a fusillade of fire from Turkish riflemen and at least five machine-guns.

After his years at Antarctica, Bage was well known and widely admired. The way his life was imperilled so cavalierly by Bridges filled those on the spot with repugnance. It was "madness - he is a great loss to us", Campbell wrote. Indeed, what happened to Bage on May 7, 1915, confirms that Australian soldiers died not only as a result of incompetent decisions by British commanders; Australian commanders were also flagrantly culpable at times.

 Sad, hey?