More important than bikies laws

 Doctors' contracts dispute: Queensland Premier Campbell Newman vows to fight union rabble rousing - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Yes, the Campbell Newman anti bikie laws were in some respects over the top, but gee I have trouble building up much personal concern over what was essentially anti criminal gang laws, especially if (as I suspect) they will be wound back after an initial hammering.

Personally, I am more concerned about a government blundering its way through negotiations with a highly skilled group of workers who have taken substantial pay cuts compared to what they could get in the private sector to work for the public health system.

Does anyone have any idea why the government has taken this group on?   How much lower than private sector remuneration does Campbell Newman think they should work for?

The Newman government has been very unimpressive generally.  I bet Campbell himself loses his seat, and I won't be sad.  

Poor Arthur

Every journalist seems to like Arthur Sinodinos at a personal level, and I always thought he seemed a sensible, straight talking and pragmatic type.   I have my doubts that he is comfortable with the climate change denialism arm of the Coalition, although I guess I could be wrong.  He and Malcolm Turnbull would seem to be a good match.

And this respect for him amongst journalists is what I think is making many of them shake their heads about his involvement with a corrupt company.

It seems to me that the Australian Financial Review is running hardest on the matter, and when even The Australian says an Abbott minister has to step down, you know it must be serious.

Tony Wright gives some surprising detail in the AFR as to how he first heard about the Sinodinos problem:

When The Australian Financial Review alerted readers in a “puff’’ in early 2013 it would publish a magazine item – “Arthur Sinodinos: Going public” – I received a call from a senior figure in the heavily factionalised branch of the NSW Liberal party.

He asked whether the magazine item, of which I was the author, made reference to Sinodinos’s term as chairman of Australian Water Holdings, including tax implications of his 5 per cent stake in the company then believed to be worth about $3.75 million.

This individual also repeated scuttlebutt abroad in the NSW branch that Sinodinos’s personal finances were stretched. Political journalists get these sorts of calls periodically, more often than not from within the same party or faction of the individual being targeted.

Politics is not conducted according to Marquess of Queensberry rules.

 Another AFR report today talks more about what came out of yesterday's hearing.  I note that the traditional politicians defence of "not recalling" has been deployed by Arthur already:

Senator Sinodinos, who stood down as Tony Abbott’s assistant treasurer on Wednesday, told the Senate in February 2013 that political donations by AWH “were handled by the ­management of the organisation at their discretion”.

“I do not recollect donations to political parties being discussed at the board level,” he said. ICAC documents show that between April 2009 and May 2011, AWH paid $183,342 to the Liberal Party-related slush fund known as EightByFive, operated by Tim Koelma, a staffer for former NSW state Energy Minister Chris Hartcher.

The payments by AWH were booked as public relations services from Mr Koelma.

As a rule of thumb, when a politician deals with questions about his knowledge of damaging matters at the time they happened by using the "I have no recollection" formula, it is usually a sign that they are on the way out.

I don't think Arthur will be back.

Update:  now Fairfax provides some of the details of Arthur's financial problem at the time he took the ill fated job.   I didn't realise how good a pun the title of this post would turn out to be.

Today's weigh in

My weekly minimum weight is always the morning following the second "fast" day.

This morning, after a couple of weeks of hanging around the low 85.0's:  84.4kg.  Yay.

My first fast day was 28 January. 

Another loopy murderer who references Dexter

I was half watching a TV show about teenage killers last night, when they went into a lot of detail about a fairly recent example from South Australia.  I hadn't heard of this case at all, but the teenager killed his girlfriend, and an unfortunate woman who just happened to be in the wrong place, with an axe.  His comment to the police was widely reported:  "I wouldn't make a very good Dexter."

OK, so he wasn't claiming inspiration from the show.   Still, I'm going to add this case to the list I produced in October 2012 as to the number of murderers who were keen on the show.  (And repeat my very reasonable argument that people should regret that it was made at all.)

An appalling creep, and freedom of speech

Suicide voyeur William Melchert-Dinkel, who posed as a female nurse and went by the name 'Falcon Girl', has case overturned

He was found guilty of aiding the suicide of Mark Dryborough, 32, who died
in Coventry, UK, in 2005, and of Nadia Kajouji, 18, who took her own
life in 2008.

In the original trial, the court was told that Mr Melchert-Dinkel, who is
married with two children, posed online as a compassionate female nurse
to prey on depressed individuals, but then gave them advice on how to
suicide.

He allegedly told police that he acted for the ‘‘thrill of the chase’’ and
wanted to watch his targets die via a computer webcam.

But in a ruling eagerly awaited across the United States by both sides in
the assisted suicide debate, the state supreme court has ruled that a
state law prohibiting ‘‘advising’’ and ‘‘encouraging’’ suicide broke the
constitution by restricting freedom of speech.

However, it upheld the part of the statute that outlaws ‘‘assisting’’ suicide
and sent Mr Melchert-Dinkel’s case back to a lower court.

County prosecutors must now decide whether to appeal against the ruling in the
US Supreme Court or to bring fresh charges against Mr Melchert-Dinkel
for assisting suicide.

It's another example of why I don't care for the American approach to rights.

Talk about your dubious studies destined for tabloid attention

I don't even want to put the headline here, but it's to do with men, sport and locker rooms.  You can guess the rest.

About Tim, revised

Has anyone noticed the website for blowhard hypocrital self-promoting socialite Human Rights Commissioner Tim Wilson lately?  Here's his discription:

Tim Wilson is Australia’s Human Rights Commissioner and a classical liberal public policy analyst. He is one of Australia’s most challenging opinion leaders drawing on strong philosophical principles, backed up with evidence while maintaining a real-world edge. Passionate. Controversial. Fearless. He’s not afraid to be outspoken in offering an optimistic solutions-focused perspective on local and international issues that gets people engaging and talking.

 Timbo, I think there is an important "an" missing from that first line, which should open like this:

Tim Wilson is an Australian Human Rights Commissioner.

Does he write this self congratulatory stuff personally?  Perhaps not.  At the bottom of the website:

 Mr Wilson is represented by Shaun Levin from Profile Talent Management, +61(0)3 8598 7808 or slevin@profiletalent.com.au.

On his $300,000 plus salary, paid by an organisation he wanted disbanded until a political pal offered him a job there, does he still need really need an agent?   I think I might be emailing him with a requested correction to the profile, together with this proposed replacement photo:

I always wanted a dungeon

One of the sites I found via using Zite is medievalists.net, which has always quite a few interesting articles.

I see they have a post about an English castle that's gone on sale for 3 million pounds, complete with moat and dungeon.  

It looks more window filled than I expect a castle to be.  But then again, I am not entirely sure what makes a castle a castle.  I see from Wikipedia:

Scholars debate the scope of the word castle, but usually consider it to be the private fortified residence of a lord or noble. This is distinct from a palace, which is not fortified; from a fortress, which was not always a residence for nobility; and from a fortified settlement, which was a public defence – though there are many similarities among these types of construction. Usage of the term has varied over time and has been applied to structures as diverse as hill forts and country houses.

I guess just having a moat counts as a fortification, then.

I never thought that Castle Howard, as used in the TV version of Brideshead Revisited looked like a castle either, and Wikipedia informs me I was right to be skeptical:

Castle Howard is not a true castle, but this term is often used for English country houses constructed after the castle-building era (c.1500) and not intended for a military function.

Actually, I always thought it looked too grandiose compared to what was mentioned in the book.  Sure the family was supposed to be rich, but that rich?  

Anyway, glad we've sorted that out....

Oceans going down

I see that Oceanography has a special issue out about changes to ocean chemistry, which means in large part it's about ocean acidification.

I think all of the articles are available as .pdfs, so I won't bother linking to individual ones.

But having a look at a couple of them, the take away messages are:

*  the oceans at all parts of the world are showing declining pH dues to increase CO2 in line with predictions

*  coastal oxygen free "dead zones" are increasing and are likely to continue increasing with warming temperatures.  (This has been predicted for some time too.)

I don't do many posts about ocean acidification lately, but looking through the Ocean Acidification blog, there is plenty of research still going on, much of it with worrying results.  It seems to be a frequent theme that both oysters and scallop growing areas in North America are already suffering due to coast water acidification.  Although there is a natural variation to pH in those areas anyway, the slow increase in surface acidification is obviously not helping.

Many studies look at developmental and behavioural changes displayed by various species under decreased pH, but it is obviously very difficult to work out how they will play out in the future oceans.   Some species indicate some adaptive ability, but the big picture is enormously hard to predict.

I still think the pteropods are like the canary in the coal mine on this issue.  A study in 2012, which was looking at pteropods taken in 2008, found that those in aragonite undersaturated waters were showing severe shell erosion already.    A future collapse in this extensive species which feeds many of the sort of fish we like to eat could be dire. 

So, for all of the talk of lower rates of temperature rise and when that will turn around, this is the issue that climate change deniers larger ignore or simply dismiss as another scientific disaster story told to ensure funding. 

They are ignorant and dangerous to the future of humanity.

More Renaissance

Further to my recent post about the Renaissance, this BBC article about the codpiece fashion of the time is quite amusing.  (You have to watch the video to understand properly what they are talking about.) 

Can Andrew take a hint?

I see Andrew Bolt today notes everything about the Marcia Langton "racist" allegation except the story in The Australia where the one aboriginal activist who he doesn't have a problem with (at least since he started to criticize Labor and defected into the Abbott camp) tries to tell him to stop going on about colour and race:

“I know Andrew Bolt personally,” Mr Mundine said. “I don’t believe he is a racist. Having said that, I find it strange that he continues to talk about colour, and talks about race. I find that bizarre.
“To me he does not have an understanding of the complexity and structures of indigenous kinship and I think he needs a little more education in that area.”

I also note that in defending Mundine last year, Bolt didn't just label one Left wing person as "racist", but the entire political category:

  The Left tends to see racists everywhere. That’s the thing with mirrors.

It makes his drama queen act over Langton all the more ludicrous. 

Low flying dreams

The Flight 370 story, with the parts about it flying low during certain sections, either deliberately or accidentally, reminds me about the recurring "low flying" dreams that I have had in recent years.

Although it seems a while since I had one, I have over the past years had dreams in which I am on a passenger jet, looking out the window and realizing we are flying really low for no apparent reason.   Sort of so low we are going up and down to get over hills.  No one else on the plane seems to have noticed.  I find it scary.

I have not been able to identify why this should be a recurring theme in my dreams.  I was interested to see in New Zealand a few years ago a smallish passenger jet flying through a valley on the approach to Queenstown airport.  I thought I wouldn't like the look of that if I were in the plane.  But was that enough to bring on a recurring dream?  I also think I might have had my first "low flying dream" before then.  They have turned up now and again for quite a long time.

That is all.

Against the Bolt and the Abbott

Hypocrisy adds insult to injuries

It's taken a while for someone to make this observation about the Kenny defamation case, but here it is in Richard Acklands enjoyable article ripping into Andrew Bolt and his demands for apologies:

Maybe Aunty's lawyers wanted to avoid another round of bullying from the government and News Corp.

Already it has the prime minister's dinner guest and Murdoch
pen-man Chris Kenny on its schedule of defamation cases, with Tony
Abbott saying the ABC should not be ''defending the indefensible''.

''Next time the ABC comes to the government looking for more
money, this is the kind of thing we would want to ask them questions
about,'' he said.

If ever there was a blatant contempt of court, this is it -
threatening a litigant with a monetary penalty if it defends itself in
civil litigation. George Brandis must have forgotten the Wran case in
which the former premier was found guilty of contempt for encouraging
the second jury in the Lionel Murphy case to find the High Court judge
not guilty.

Things we're learning from Flight 370

The mystery of this missing flight has certainly led to a lot of interesting explanations about aviation and other topics: even, of all things, anthropology.

1. Take a look at this article from Slate: How the Malaysian Airlines Plane Could Have Landed in the Stone Age. Who knew there was an island in the Indian Ocean with an African looking naked tribe which apparently aggressively fights off anyone who wants to visit them?:

From 1967 through the mid-1990s, Indian anthropologists embarked on periodic "contact expeditions" to North Sentinel Island. Approaching by boat, they attempted to coax out members of the tribe by depositing coconuts, machetes, candy, and, once, a tethered pig onto the beach. The Sentinelese almost always responded to these "gifts" by shooting arrows, throwing stones, and shouting at the unwelcome visitors. India discontinued its attempts at peaceful contact in 1997 and ruled that the islanders be left alone, but visits still occur — in 2006, a fishing boat drifted too close to the shore, and Sentinelese archers killed the two men on board. An Indian helicopter sent to retrieve their bodies was also fired upon and could not land.

That is a very strange story.  It's like discovering that King Kong Island still exists in the 21st century.

2. Slate also explains the limitations of being able to use mobile phones in an emergency in an aircraft. I had wondered about how they had been used in 9/11. Now I know.

3.   The BBC gives a pretty easily followed explanation of how aircraft are tracked.  

Tougher than expected

Frozen moss buried in Antarctica for more than 1,500 years starting to grow again in laboratory - Science - News - The Independent

Nietzsche considered

New Statesman | The ghost at the atheist feast: was Nietzsche right about religion?

Jason, have you already read this review?  It's interesting.

I can never quite work out why Nietzsche is popular.  I see that John Gray in this review says Nietzsche was not, ultimately, taking a tragic view of life.  I don't know enough about him to work out if this makes sense or not, but here's the key argument:

...neither the Christian religion nor Nietzsche’s philosophy can be said to express a tragic sense of life. If Yeshua (the Jewish prophet later known as Jesus) had died on the cross and stayed dead, that would have been a tragedy. In the Christian story, however, he was resurrected and came back into the world. Possibly this is why Dante’s great poem wasn’t called The Divine Tragedy. In the sense in which it was understood by the ancients, tragedy implies necessity and unalterable finality. According to Christianity, on the other hand, there is nothing that cannot be redeemed by divine grace and even death can be annulled.

Nor was Nietzsche, at bottom, a tragic thinker. His early work contained a profound interrogation of liberal rationalism, a modern view of things that contains no tragedies, only unfortunate mistakes and inspirational learning experiences. Against this banal creed, Nietzsche wanted to revive the tragic world-view of the ancient Greeks. But that world-view makes sense only if much that is important in life is fated. As understood in Greek religion and drama, tragedy requires a conflict of values that cannot be revoked by any act of will; in the mythology that Nietzsche concocted in his later writings, however, the godlike Superman, creating and destroying values as he pleases, can dissolve and nullify any tragic conflict.

As Eagleton puts it, “The autonomous, self-determining Superman is yet another piece of counterfeit theology.” Aiming to save the sense of tragedy, Nietzsche ended up producing another anti-tragic faith: a hyperbolic version of humanism.

Oh yes, wouldn't the Right love this

Here's an interesting short article on why Finland seems to have such a successful education system.

It paints a picture of educational philosophy that is, for the most part,  the complete opposite of what our current Right wing commentariate thinks about education:  an intense commitment to equality to access to education up to and including tertiary education; teachers who are very highly paid and very highly educated (masters degrees!) in how to teach, a national curriculum, small class sizes, and my favourite part for making the Judith Sloans of the world shake their heads in disgust:

School should be where we teach the meaning of life; where kids learn they are needed; where they can learn community skills. We like to think that school is also important for developing a good self-image, a strong sensitivity to other people’s feelings … and understanding it matters to take care of others. We definitely want to incorporate all those things in education.

Gee, I wonder what they teach about global warming and environmentalism?   All of the readers of Catallaxy would rather home school than put them through the Finnish system, I expect. (Several of them like the idea of home schooling in Australia because our education systems dares teach accurately on environmental topics, and tolerance of gays.)  I wonder if home schooling is illegal in Finland?

About the only thing the stoopid Right would like is a high emphasis on vocational training. 

Renaissance nudity

I happened to catch some of  Radio National's The Body Sphere today, and the section in which an Italian Renaissance art historian [Jill Burke] discussed attitudes to nudity at that time was particularly interesting, and amusing.   Here are some things of which I was not fully aware:

There's a kind of golden age of acceptance of the nude in art in Florence in the 1480s when Botticelli's painting his Venuses and these get very popular. Then there's a big swing, a big kind of religious turn in the 1490s, when some of these nude drawings, nude paintings are burned. The Bonfire of the Vanities in 1497, 1498 in the Piazza della Signoria just where the David was later to be displayed. And the David itself when it was first put up in Florence, he had a little kind of garland of leaves to cover his private parts. So even though you might think that it was all very acceptable, it was always a little bit problematic because of the potential of art to arouse erotic feelings in the viewer.

Burke then comments that as for public nudity, some males doing certain types of work might be seen nearly naked; but as for women, it was all very taboo, unless they needed to be punished:

They'd also have these kind of shaming rituals in some Italian cities where women who'd been caught for adultery would have to run round the city with no clothes on being pelted by vegetables, that kind of thing. But actually for what you might call respectable women, it would be shocking to see women naked.

Even bedroom activities were the subject of anti-nudity instruction:

They were told to have sex with their clothes on. There's a lot of religious texts and sermons that talk about women never allowing their husbands to see them naked. So, there's a Franciscan preacher called Bernardino Siena who in the early 15th century said to women in a sermon, 'It's better to die than let yourself be seen naked.' And that was by husbands, not in public. And there are other handbooks for married life. There's one by a man called Cherubino da Siena, again early 15th century, that tells both men and women that they shouldn't see each other naked, that's it's okay to touch areas but it's not okay to see them. So it's that kind of thing; on an official level no, they weren't meant to have sex naked, but what they actually did…I suspect that they really did have sex naked.

And as for the use to which what we might now consider "high brow" nude art was put; well, the erotic potential was not lost on its owners:

Jill Burke: From what we know, the evidence that we have from inventories is that these paintings would have been kept in the bed chamber. Often they were covered in some way, either with curtains…or there's another kind of nude that's very early, actually, that was on the underside of the lids of wedding chests…

Amanda Smith: The cassone…

Jill Burke: Cassoni, yes, that you'd keep clothes and things in. And you'd lift the lid and there's a reclining nude. Often they'd come in pairs and there'd be a naked man on one side and a naked woman on the other side. Again, whether this kind of almost taboo nature…you can imagine opening a chest or pulling aside a curtain might raise the erotic charge of these paintings.

Amanda Smith: But having that sort of naked image on the inside lid of a cassoni, for example, I mean was that to get the bride fired up as she, you know, pulled out her nightie?

Jill Burke: I think it probably was, yes, to get the couple kind of 'in the mood'. There's also a belief in the Renaissance that if you look at pictures of beautiful men that you're more likely to conceive a beautiful boy baby. So there's almost this kind of magic thing attached to it.

Burke's segment was too short.  But there is more at the transcript on the website.

A couple of Krugmans

Paul Krugman has two posts of interest up:

*  one about worries about private debt in China.

* the other is about increases in life expectancy in the US being not all that it seems.  I assume he won't object to my reproducing it in full:

I was pleased to see this article by Annie Lowrey documenting the growing disparity in life expectancy between the haves and the have-nots. It’s kind of frustrating, however, that this is apparently coming as news not just to many readers but to many policymakers and pundits. Many of us have been trying for years to get this point across — to point out that when people call for raising the Social Security and Medicare ages, they’re basically saying that janitors must keep working because corporate lawyers are living longer. Yet it never seems to sink in.

Maybe this article will change that. But my guess is that in a week or two we will once again hear a supposed wise man saying that we need to raise the retirement age to 67 because of higher life expectancy, unaware that (a) life expectancy hasn’t risen much for half of workers (b) we’ve already raised the retirement age to 67.

I wonder whether the Australian increase in life expectancy is more evenly spread across income levels.   Given our system of health care, you would certainly expect so.   (But of course there is a big disparity between aboriginal and non aboriginal life expectancies, even though I don't think that is something that is relevant to the Krugman argument.) 

Two odd thoughts on Flight 370

1.   Someone somewhere on the internet has probably already said it, but the situation as it has developed keeps striking me as something very like the opening of a James Bond film.   Sure, it's usually military or similar items being snatched or destroyed by an evil genius who does not make his plans public, but close enough. [Update:  Ah yes, I see today that James Fallows in The Atlantic perhaps made the James Bond connection a couple of days ago.]

2.   The discussion about the relative paucity of radar cover across the globe indicates that there may be more room for UFOs of the nuts and bolts variety to be cruising around the Earth than I would have thought.  Radar sightings of UFOs are pretty sparse; visual/radar sightings even more so.  There is the occasional muttering around that NORAD has had radar tracks of pretty inexplicable things (very fast objects doing very fast turns, for example) but I don't know at what height and perimeter it can be expected to see things.  It certainly appears that there is plenty of space over plenty of parts of the globe that something could sneak in if it did not want to be detected.

Needs better drawings

Death Is Wrong, the transhumanist kids’ book by Gennady Stolyarov.

Slate has a look at a book for kids promoting transhumanism. 

If the cover is anything to go by, the author could not afford a good illustrator. 

To Canberra and Back, Part 7

We're on the last legs now.  From Jenolan Caves we headed up north to Taree, via Katoomba:

I don't know when I was last in Katoomba - perhaps I had been there briefly once as an adult, but I think I may have just driven through on the way to my adult visit to Jenolan Caves.  I wanted to show the family the famous view, but even at midday, this was all that you could see:

  

 

I was reduced to going into the souvenir shops and pointing to postcards and saying to slightly skeptical family that it really looked spectacular if it weren't for the cloud:

(Apologies to Australian readers who didn't really need the illustration.)

I felt sorry for the busloads of Chinese tourists who being delivered to stare into the fog for a few minutes, before being shuffled into what looked like a lacklustre cultural show featuring suburban people of aboriginal descent.  (I'll slip into slight condescension mode and mention again that an interest in Australian aboriginal culture, no matter how it is presented, is something which still eludes me, and I really have my doubts it interests the average Chinese tourist either.)

Anyway, on we drove, descending out of the Blue Mountains and skirting Sydney as we hit the road north.  Lunch was at a McDonalds. 

I've always liked the motorway north out of Sydney to Newcastle; the way it carves through some hills and the high bridges over which (unfortunately) the driver only gets a brief scenic glance.

And in fact the road right through to Taree was pretty good most of the way.  

Taree was chosen to overnight just because of its distance.  It seemed a pretty nondescript town; I prefer some of the more northern big river towns of New South Wales.  More about them later.

A serious problem

Given that the last month in Australian media has been full of appalling stories of pedophilia (apart from the Morecombe case itself, there are the terrible allegations from several women about - alleged - comic actor Robert Hughes, and the extraordinary case of the Cairns based gay couple who acquired a baby with the explicit purpose in mind,)  I thought I would look around for recent commentary on the whole issue of pedophilia and recidivism.

This one from Harvard Medical School in 2010 is pretty good.  The problem is, as the title says, there is pretty widespread pessimism about how it can be treated with any sufficient degree of certainty that you can prevent recidivism.   This is a real nightmare for those in the justice system, and the community more generally. 

Look at Cowan himself.  After serving 4 years for a second rape of a boy, and being sent by his parole office in Darwin to Queensland so that could do a sexual offenders program, he apparently got into an evangelical Church and met his wife there, with whom he had two children (one before he killed Daniel, one after.)  He certainly looks clean cut and reformed in this street interview in Brisbane in which he proclaimed he was a new man.  For any psychologist dealing with him, this must have sounded like the best possible type of support group to help ensure he did not re-offend.  Yet the urge to sexually assault boy strangers was strong enough that he acted on it.

The thing is, what confidence should the public have in sexual offender programs delivered through the justice system?   The Harvard article above notes this about recidivism:

Estimates of recidivism vary because studies define this term in different ways. One review found recidivism rates of 10% to 50% among pedophiles previously convicted of sexual abuse, although this could include anything from an arrest for any offense to reconviction on a crime against a child. One long-term study of previously convicted pedophiles (with an average follow-up of 25 years) found that one-fourth of heterosexual pedophiles and one-half of homosexual or bisexual pedophiles went on to commit another sexual offense against children.

This would indicate the recidivism rate for someone like Cowan is extraordinarily high, and his case is far from atypical.

Are judges kept fully aware of the research on the topic?

And what about the style of treatment and its efficacy that is attempted in the sexual offender programs in Australia?   I see there is a 2010 Queensland study on the sexual offender program, but it is only for about 409 released from 2005 to 2008 - a pretty small sample size over a very short period.  (The report acknowledges these shortcomings;  it also notes that for offences against children, there is often a substantial delay before the offence is reported.)

The report finds that the program seems to have a positive effect (in that those who did the program have a somewhat lower recidivism rate for sexual offences), but obviously the study is looking at a very short period.    The parts that discuss sexual offence recidivism rates generally are of interest. On the "down" side:

Despite a great deal of research effort devoted to the question, knowledge concerning the dynamic risk factors associated with sexual offender recidivism (otherwise referred to as criminogenic needs) remains limited. Some of the psychological characteristics commonly targeted for improvement in sexual offender programs (e.g. sexual preoccupations; impulsivity; intimacy problems) tend to be only weakly (even if significantly in a statistical sense) associated with sexual offender recidivism. Other common treatment targets (e.g. denial; victim empathy) have recently been shown, on average, to be unrelated to sexual offender recidivism (Hanson & Morton-Bourgon, 2005).

 On the (slightly) more positive side:

A meta-analytic review of sexual offender recidivism studies, involving more than 80 separate studies and almost 30,000 sexual offenders, found an average sexual recidivism rate of 13.7% over an average time at risk of five to six years (Hanson & Morton-Bourgon, 2005). In that meta-analysis, rates for nonsexual violent recidivism were 14.3%, and for ‘any’ recidivism 36.2%. For the present evaluation, the average time at risk of two years and five months was a little less than half the average observation period for the studies included in Hanson and Morton-Bourgon’s meta-analysis. Notwithstanding jurisdictional variations in crime reporting.  and recording, it would be reasonable to expect that over the next two or three years observed recidivism base-rates for the Queensland offenders would be more similar to international averages.

But what about for longer periods?   This passage seems to me to be written with unwarranted optimism, given the number quoted:

Notwithstanding the limitations of official recidivism data, it seems clear that a significant proportion (perhaps the majority) of convicted sexual offenders do not go on to commit further sexual offences, even without treatment. Studies that have followed sexual offenders for 20 years or more still tend to find sexual recidivism rates well below 50% (Hanson, 2000; Janus & Meehl, 1997). This raises further questions about the universal need for specialised sexual offender treatment.    

What's missing, of course, is more specific figures for the rate of pedophiliac recidivism.

From reading the Harvard commentary, and this Queensland report with its hesitation about how effective these programs really are, it would seem reasonable to conclude  that the rate of recidivism for pedophiles is significantly higher than for sexual offenders against adults, and is very likely to stay that way even if they undergo a sexual offender course.

More pessimism can be taken from the psychologist who actually treated Cowan.   While he considers sexual offender programs do help (and while ever they have some effectiveness, I wouldn't argue against them - except to the extent that they may give unwarranted confidence to judges when sentencing,) he freely admits you can never really know if someone will re-offend:

He says evidence suggests such programs are effective when they are "well designed and well implemented".

"But there are never any guarantees for individuals, and when you're dealing with high-risk offenders in the first place there's bound to be some recidivism among that group," he said.

"The difficulty is predicting who among that group is and isn't likely to go on to commit further offences."

He says sex offenders often display no observable behavioural features apart from the offences they commit.

"In fact for many sex offenders, the most unusual thing about them is that they have committed sex offences," he said.

"We know that in retrospect, but it's obviously very difficult to know in prospect."

It seems to me that if the long term recidivism rate for guys like Cowan is around 50%, and if sexual offender programs have only ever been shown to have modest effects (say, reducing re-offense by pedophiles to 40%?) this is a really significant matter which must be taken into account in terms of how both sentencing and the terms on which they should ever be released back into the community.

(If any psychologist thinks my guesstimate figures in that paragraph are  wrong - let them come out and be specific about what figures they know about.)

So how is the justice system supposed to deal with these offenders?    The judge in the Cowan case has been criticised for making the observation that an unintended consequence of tougher sentencing for sex offenders is that it can give them a greater incentive to kill their victim.   This makes some intuitive sense, but really, it has got to be balanced with the actual evidence about the rate of recidivism.   What I find particularly hard to credit is that second offence sentences for sexual assaults on children should take this effect into account. 

The Courier Mail is running hard on the previous judges being too lenient in sentencing.   I generally am wary of such media campaigns for various reasons, but it is interesting to note that there was an appeal by the Prosecution which failed against the 7 year (with non parole of 3 1/2 years) sentence for Cowan's second offence in Darwin.  The point is that, reading around on the topic, there do appear to be grounds to be concerned that judges may have an inadequate appreciation of the recidivism rates for this particular type of offender.  If the media can play a role in highlighting this, I don't have a problem with that.

But even then, longer sentences for early offences is not the only issue.   The community hates the idea of released repeat offenders of any age being anywhere near them, and who can blame them, really?  Chemical or physical castration if issued as a punishment by the State feels either too medieval, or "Clockwork Orange," to most liberals, I assume, but it is interesting to see it is still a live issue as a voluntary measure in the United States, and chemical castration is a recently introduced punishment in Korea.  

(One argument noted against physical castration is that men can seek to counteract its affects by testosterone patches - which are presumably not so hard to get your hands on these days.)

The article about the Korean situation notes the 50% recidivism rate for pedophiles:

Surgical castration reportedly produces definitive results, even in repeat pedophilic offenders, by reducing recidivism rates to 2% to 5% compared with expected rates of 50%. Chemical castration using LHRH agonists reduces circulating testosterone to very low levels, and also results in very low levels of recidivism despite the strong psychological factors that contribute to sexual offending (10). Chemical castration has some advantages over surgical castration. First, although chemical castration is potentially life-long for some offenders, it might allow sexual offenders to have normal sexual activity in context with psychotherapy. Second, some sexual offenders may voluntarily receive chemical castration. Third, chemical castration may be a more realistic restriction than electronic ankle bracelets or surgical castration. Fourth, unlike surgical castration, the effects of anti-libido medication are reversible after discontinuation. Finally, the general public may feel relieved knowing that sexual offenders are undergoing chemical castration.

 I'm not at all sure that the public thinks the reversibility of chemical castration is an advantage, but at least chemical castration (I assume) avoids the issue of physical castration being countered by testosterone.

I do not have a conclusive view on this, but I would not reject a serious discussion about the voluntary use of chemical castration as a precondition for release of offenders such as Cowan, regardless of their age.

Update:   I see that a New South Wales Parliamentary committee is said to be already considering chemical castration as a sentencing option.   This report notes that civil libertarians were unhappy with the suggestion, but interestingly, the opinion of one important group of professionals sounds quite sanguine and practical about it:

But the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists president-elect, Louise Newman, believes chemical castration, which works as long as the patient stays on the medication, should be considered for the more "hard core" sexual offenders.

"It's certainly not a cure or a way of reducing all risk, but it might be seen as a useful component of treatment or management for some of these very difficult cases, where we're unlikely to see response to other methods," Professor Newman told ABC News Online.

"They're not commonly used at all and they are not needed other than in the fairly difficult group of very severe offenders."

The drugs impact on liver function, so those undergoing the treatment usually have their health checked regularly.

Professor Newman says that although some sex offenders have a good chance of recovery, there will always be a small group of people who will continue to pose a risk to the community.

"There's always some risk of reoffending and obviously someone can offend in various ways," she said.

"Clearly there is a group of people for whom risk is significant and they might have ongoing and really severe difficulties in managing their impulses.

"Containment and monitoring of those sorts of people might actually be necessary to ensure community safety."

 I could not think of a more ideal candidate for having his release on parole subject to a lengthy mandated period of chemical castration than Cowan on his second sentence.  Of course, this would presumably have stopped a relatively young man from marrying and having kids as he did, but look at what it could have stopped.

I also see from Wikipedia that, surprisingly, in the United States, California was the first state to introduce it as a punishment for child molestation.  It is a mandatory if going on parole after a second offence.  The article notes about 7 other states have "experimented" with it; I am a little surprised that it has not been used more widely in some of the more conservative states. 

The Wikipedia story also lists quite a few European nations that have implemented it since about 2010.  There would seem to be a bit of an international movement towards accepting it as useful particularly for repeat offenders against children.

It seems to me that it is time for it to be discussed in more detail in this country, too.

Don't forget "expensive"

BBC News - Viewpoint: Does Singapore deserve its 'miserable' tag?

I've always quite liked my short stays in Singapore, although the last one was maybe 8 or so years ago now (I think.)

I am told by someone who was holidaying there recently, though, that it really has become expensive.

The interesting thing is that, as far as I can gather (since I don't bother reading that much about American libertarians) Singapore has developed a bit of a fan club amongst at least a subset of those of that political persuasion.  Certainly, I think the country has a reputation for a self sufficiency of its people.

According to the article though, that self sufficiency seems to have progressed into lack of empathy with strangers.   If it is a society that does reflect libertarianism, I am not exactly surprised.

The old "I'm just being reasonable" line

I see Sinclair Davidson is again running with the old "I'm just being reasonable" line in which he seeks to downplay his active promotion since at least 2007 of public disbelief in the seriousness of climate change.

Here are some of his cute lines today:

To the extent that we all agree that CO2 emissions are a problem, and we want to do something about those emissions, then theory tells us that the least-cost solution would be to impose a tax on CO2 emissions...

So, a person who is an high ranking member of the IPA, and who runs a blog with contributors who are all openly dismissive and hostile towards climate change as a serious issue is suggesting that he agrees that "CO2 emissions are a problem"?   Or is there some subtle interpretation I am missing out on here?

Well, the next paragraph notes that some people don't agree that there is a CO2 problem at all - (yeah, like every single contributor to his blog.)

Would Sinclair like to explain whether he is within the some people, or would he prefer to keep it somewhat  vague so he can try to distance himself from his fetid IPA colleagues when, as is widely expected by the scientists he routinely seeks to discredit, the next change in the Pacific sees the temperature increase its rate of climb? 


I think I have known the answer to that one for quite a while now.

Reason for optimism?

The Economist has a short article on the potential for "distributed generators" and large scale batteries to beat down things like big coal.  It starts:

WHO needs the power grid when you can generate and store your own electricity cheaply and reliably? Such a world is drawing nearer: good news for consumers, but a potential shock for utility companies. That is the conclusion of a report this week by Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, which predicts that ever-cheaper solar and other renewable-energy sources, combined with better and more plentiful batteries, will allow many businesses and other electricity users to cut the cord on their electricity providers.

Tesla Motors, an American maker of electric cars, recently said it will build a “gigafactory”, which by 2020 will turn out as many lithium-ion batteries as the whole world produced last year. These batteries can do more than power cars; they can also store electricity which is produced when it is not needed, and discharge it when it is.

Is everyone fed up with Andrew being fed up, yet?

You know, I think Andrew Bolt might be playing the martyr line to such a tiresome degree that even his supporters may be wavering in their loyalty.

I was going to write something about how, if you don't want to be labelled a racist (even if in error), it probably helps to not spend so much time rubbishing aboriginal activists, arguing that every single "stolen generation" claim is bollocks,  and pointing at and deriding pale skinned people who claim aboriginality. 

But the opening paragraph in a wry Guardian opinion piece (semi sarcastically imploring Bolt not to quit) sort of summed up the situation well:

There is a classic scene in The Simpsons parodying the borderline un-parody-able Fox News, wherein the network’s news helicopter is emblazoned with the slogan “Not racist, but #1 with racists”.

It was the first thing that sprang to mind upon reading about poor, maligned Andrew Bolt and his claim that, so hurt by an accusation of racism by Marcia Langton on Q&A, he didn’t turn up to work on Tuesday (freeing him up to write a cheeky 14 posts on his blog, happily).

What? You mean no productivity crisis either?

One graph that completely contradicts Australia's 'productivity crisis' | Business Spectator

Last week, I noted there was no wages growth crisis in Australia.

As Kohler points out, the Australian government is also happy to tell foreign investors that there is also great crisis in productivity either.

I just heard that unemployment was steady at 6%.  Not great, but not a crisis either.

And all of this happening while we still have a carbon tax, and no certainty it will be gone in July.

Odd, that.  [/sarc, of course.]

History: A medieval multiverse

History: A medieval multiverse

This somewhat interesting look at the theories of a medieval scholar and bishop includes this bit:

The possible existence of more than one universe was indeed a live issue
of the period, and a highly contentious one — appearing, for example,
in the Papal edict of 1277 that banned a list of scientific teachings.
But it was a debate that Grosseteste apparently chose to avoid. None of
his surviving treatises discusses the possibility of other forms of
universe, however close he came to implying it in his cosmogony.

I wonder what else was covered in that Papal edict of 1277.

Catholic conundrums

Pope Francis at one year: Why intense focus on the papacy is bad for the Catholic Church

I quite like this article, particularly when it talks about the problems the Catholic Church faces in trying to resolve the contradictions which came out of Vatican 2.  (The fundamental one, which was brought into sharp focus in the minds of tens of millions of Catholics because of the Church's contemporaneous  rejection of the Pill, was the renewed emphasis on individual conscience, while insisting that a good Catholic conscience cannot disagree with the Church's pronouncements on matters such as contraception.)

This passage rings true:

These divisions, and the disputes they provoke, are mind-numbingly
familiar. What is a “faithful” Catholic to think about artificial birth
control; homosexuality and same-sex marriage; divorce; the exclusively
male, celibate priesthood; the possibility of electing bishops; the role
of the laity, especially women, in church decision-making; the
relationship between popes and bishops; religious pluralism; and clergy
sexual abuse and the unaccountability of the hierarchy? These and other
questions go to the heart of Catholic self-understanding, yet a church
notorious for valuing discipline and unanimity remains deeply divided on
all of them. Catholics on both sides of every issue claim to be the
true heirs of the Second Vatican Council. All agree that Vatican II
promulgated the most authoritative understanding of the church’s
teachings. Yet they read the council’s documents in diametrically
opposed ways.

How is that possible? The answer lies with the documents themselves.
On the one hand, the proclamations of Vatican II opened startling new
possibilities for how Catholics might engage both one another and those
outside the church: “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the
anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in
any way afflicted, these too are the joys and hopes, the griefs and
anxieties, of the followers of Christ,” the bishops insisted at Vatican
II, in an unprecedented spirit of ecumenism. At the same time, however,
the council effectively reaffirmed the Catholic absolutism of the past.
The distinguished Lutheran theologian George Lindbeck, an official
Protestant observer at Vatican II, described the resulting dilemma as
one in which “radical and fundamental ambiguities in the most
authoritative” statements promulgated by the council—including those on
papal infallibility, relations with other Christians, and the challenge
of reconciling Catholic tradition with the Bible—enabled those on
different sides of every neuralgic issue to find ample textual support
for their interpretations. “When the supreme law of the land directly
authorizes rival, perhaps contradictory, positions and provides no way
of settling the disputes,” Lindbeck concluded with genuine regret,
“conflict becomes inevitable and, unless changes are made in the supreme
law, irresolvable.”

Little has changed in the nearly 40 years since Lindbeck offered his assessment.

That Groucho Marx club quip comes to mind

The Society of Mutual Autopsy  -  Mind Hacks

The brief explanation:

In October 1876, twenty Parisian men joined together as the Society of
Mutual Autopsy and pledged to dissect one another’s brains in the hopes
of advancing science. The society acquired over a hundred members in its
first few years, including many notable political figures of the left
and far left. While its heyday was unquestionably the last two decades
of the century, the society continued to attract members until the First
World War. It continued its operations until just before World War II,
effectuating many detailed encephalic autopsies, the results of which
were periodically published in scientific journals.

Andrew Bolt, professional martyr

I see that Andrew Bolt's self assigned job (although encouraged with much hand holding by the IPA and, I suspect, News Ltd itself) as professional martyr continues unabated.  Today, complaining that Marcia Langton was mean to him, he writes:

I could prove that my banned articles argued against racism and racial division by republishing them - but the Federal Court has ruled that I may not. Mein Kampf can be published, but my articles fighting racism cannot.

The articles remain (and as far as I know, have always been) available on his own blog, although they are headed by a notice required by the Court that it had made findings that they were inaccurate.  

As for Langton, she may (for all I know) have been exaggerating as to the effect Bolt's comments on Misty Jenkins, but Bolt is also being disingenuous if he is claiming he was not having a go at her for identifying as aboriginal.  The quote in Q&A:

Page four has a feature on Dr Misty Jenkins, a blonde and pale science PhD who calls herself Aboriginal and enthuses: “I was able to watch the coverage of Kevin Rudd’s (sorry) speech with tears rolling down my cheeks ...

Given that we know the question of self identification of aboriginality has been a strongly contested matter even with aboriginal circles, and has been commented on by other right wing figures even in the Australian without there being any legal consequences, the matter has always been not that Bolt deals with the issue, but how he goes about doing it.

Andrew is not big or sensible enough to recognise this, and right wing activists (with who knows what corporate backing) are happy to see him play the role.  All a bit sad for Bolt, really.   As with his gullible acceptance of climate change denialism, he just really continues to prove he's not so smart.

(Oh sure, getting rich on his Fox Lite media performances, no doubt.   But showing himself to be dumber by the day.)

In related news:   it's amusing to read today that the IPA is stamping its feet over the prospect that the Abbott government is not going to repeal s18C in its entirety.  Fairfax writes:

 The dispute is likely to get worse, especially if Senator Brandis introduces, as some expect, a new criminal offence of racial vilification. IPA executive director John Roskam said he would rather there were no changes to the law than a new criminal ban on hate speech. He also said it had ''got back to me'' that Senator Brandis had been criticising the IPA in private conversations.

Oh noes!  A politician who might be rather sick of the bullying blowhards and culture warriors of the IPA (see Sinclair Davidson publicly suggesting that Brandis shouldn't be re-elected if he doesn't toe the IPA line) says he doesn't appreciate their attitude.   How surprising.

Great moments in American "rights" law

Watching what American courts get asked to determine as matters arising from their legislated approach to rights provides some excellent reasons for never going down that path:

The US Supreme Court on Monday let stand an appeals court ruling that seventh- and eighth-grade students in a Pennsylvania school district have a free speech right to wear bracelets proclaiming “i ♥ boobies!”

School officials had asked the high court to take up the case and reverse the ruling to allow administrators more leeway to censor messages worn by students at school. The high court turned aside the appeal without comment.

The bracelets were designed to build awareness of the struggle against breast cancer, and wearing them became a fad among a group of 11- to 14-year-old middle-school students in the Easton Area School District in eastern Pennsylvania.

Rupert knows everything

Has anyone been paying attention to Rupert Murdoch's twitter account lately?   He's taken to making some very big (and very, very dubious) calls:

On Sunday:

 777crash confirms jihadists turning to make trouble for China. Chance for US to make common cause, befriend China while Russia bullies.

Why bother investigating when you can just give Rupert a call?

On 1 March (following the mass stabbing in China):

Obama should all Chinese President following today's incident and say " we both have the problem of Muslim terrorism. Can we work together?"

So, the US has a role to play in dealing with Chinese internal Muslim issues?  What - looking at ways to stop the spread of knives amongst terrorists?  

On religion:

Pope Francis appoints brilliant Cardinal Pell from Sydney to be no.3 power in Vatican. Australia will miss him but world will benefit.

Um, no.  A small rump of hard core conservative right wing Australian Catholics will be sad to see George disappear into the Vatican in a low public profile job.   The large majority of church attending Catholics, including priests and bishops, will be happy to see his pompous style go.  

On the weather, now that he has no young wife with liberal friends:

Wild winter in US, UK, etc. no respectable evidence any of this man made climate change in spite of blindly ignorant politicians.

Rupert confirms he is old and has jumped the shark.   It also sounds like he sits around watching Fox News all day.  I wonder if his new squeeze is already searching the internet for high end nursing homes in Manhattan?

An odd result

In an article in The Atlantic, about how gay marriage has made substantial grounds in public approval in even the conservative Southern states of America, the writer notes this surprising polling result:

While 48 percent of southerners now favor same-sex marriage, only 37 percent of southerners say sex between two adults of the same gender is morally acceptable. To put it bluntly, support for the legality of same-sex marriage outpaces moral approval of same-gender sex by double-digit numbers.

There follows a fair bit of discussion about it in the comments that follow.   

The article also notes the (well known) incredible divide between young folk and old folk on the issue.   I do not really know that anyone has convincingly pointed out the cultural reason as to why this happened amongst younger people, so quickly. 

A very accurate drought prediction?

Climatologist Who Predicted California Drought 10 Years Ago Says It May Soon Be 'Even More Dire' | ThinkProgress

It's not so often that some modelling work seems to have made such an accurate predication, but in this case, the 2004 work seems to have been very close to the mark.

Tamino has a post on the same issue (it's via him that I found the Romm article), taking to task NOAA's Martin Hoerling, who has written that there is no evidence of global warming being behind the Californian drought.

I have noted for years that NOAA has been prominent in issuing quick denials of connections between  AGW and extreme weather.  I'm not sure if Hoerling is the one who has always been behind this policy; I would have to search back a bit.   In any event, as I have argued before, dismissing connections too quickly is not a very sound approach in something as complex as climate and weather.

As I expected

Solidoodle 4: Testing the home 3-D printer.

I have always felt rather cynical about the claims for the revolutionary nature of 3D printers, and this Slate writer's experience with trying out a domestic model seems to justify my doubts.

The open secret

Abbott’s paid parental leave will do little to bring women to the workforce | Business | theguardian.com

Greg Jericho column is pretty good on the topic.

What I find most amusing about this is how everyone - and I mean everyone - knows that Abbott has no support at all from anyone, even within his party, for the policy.  Yet he has decided to stake his reputation on it.

What a loser, with poor judgement.   

Organising health care

What makes a community healthy? - latimes.com

A somewhat interesting article here arguing that differences in how health care services are organised in the US are very important.  I see in the map on the site, nearly all of Texas is shown as performing poorly, but also large parts of California.  Odd.

To Canberra and Back - Part 6

After a week in Canberra, it was time to start heading north, and I wanted to show the family the Jenolan Caves.  I had first visited them on a day trip when I was about 9, and the place left a strong impression.  I would have been in my 20's when I went there again, and this time stayed overnight, enjoying a trout dinner in the old art deco dining room.  It's a great spot at which I could  happily spend days.

The route from Canberra takes you past Lake George (currently empty, I think, but some big wind turbines are to be seen on the other side.)   The most interesting part of the drive is the rather lonely road from Goulburn north.   As you can see from the map, it really only has one, small town on the way, Taralga:

We stopped there for lunch and had some quite delicious store made pies (chicken and leek for me and my son; I forget what the "girls" had.)   Here's the shop (on the right as you head north):

The buildings on the other side of the road (and this is pretty much the centre of town) look like this:

That's a bed and breakfast on the left.  There is an old pub nearby with accommodation, and another one further up the road.  The general store is pretty small, and the cafes probably only do lunch, but there are meals at the pubs.  The Wikipedia entry says it has a population of 312, which is perhaps smaller than I expected, and they do well to have what they do in the town, then. 

The somewhat remote feeling about the place, and unexpected collection of old but relatively well kept buildings, were quite appealing to me.  It would seem my favourable impressions were well founded:

Taralga differs from many towns in that a large proportion of its existing buildings date from the 1860s to 90s (although now subject to later uses) and because most of them are of stone construction - built from the vast number of stones and rocks which litter the volcanic soils for miles around.

These two combined to produce an architectural style which is unique to Taralga - not quite Georgian, not quite Victorian - with a tendency to larger windows and quite substantial construction even for modest dwellings. It also means that the town retains a special heritage of particular interest to the traveller.

I am not sure what one would do if you stayed there, but it was the sort of place I felt I should hang around for a couple of days.  It sometimes gets snow in winter, apparently, which would make it look particularly pretty. 

But on northward, through more pretty empty country, til we got to the famous Jenolan Caves.  I like everything about the place, except (I suppose) how busy it can be during holidays.   I like the setting:

the old accommodation 

the blue water (caused by dissolved limestone) in the pond outside:

even the skinks are a pleasing, golden, colour:

And of course the caves themselves.  We only had time for one, and it was the Lucas Cave, the one I first went into when I was a child:

(No, you don't use the ladder, but the maintenance people who do use to change lightbulbs are pretty brave.) It's hard to do justice to the caves with your basic digital camera, but you get the idea:

They say there are still parts of this extensive network of caves still being newly explored, which is quite amazing given how long these have been a tourist attraction (since the 1860's.)

Unfortunately, the day visit was a bit tarnished by a night spent in some bush cabins beside some extremely rowdy young folk from some overseas place - I suspected Iranians.  The setting was nice - full of kangaroos and a wide open field, but these young pests were chasing each other around spraying soft drink on each other before it was dark, then the music came on and it was party time til we (actually, my wife) shouted at them at 12.30 am.  It would have been better if they were religious Muslims.

Then the trip continued the next day....

Tiny, tiny black holes, again

I haven't spent much time browsing through arXiv lately, which is a pity, because here are a couple of papers of interest spotted today:

*  here's one suggesting that the early universe could have led to the creation of lots of tiny black hole "atoms", which have the unusual feature of having electrons within them, and no charge, and therefore to be very weakly interacting with anything else.  They are therefore suggested as a candidate for dark matter.  (I'm pretty sure black hole remnants have been suggested as a dark matter candidate before, just not this type of micro black hole.)  Interesting.

*  here's another paper, much harder to follow, but it is about the blocking of Hawking radiation if a black is inside of a neutron star.  This is of interest because I thought that the safety of the potential micro black holes created in the LHC was based on studies looking at the long term existence of neutron stars.  I am not sure whether those studies considered the potential for the blocking of Hawking Radiation inside of a neutron star which might not exist inside of a planet.  Someone smarter than me would have to look into this.

More bad PR for India

BBC News - India's invisible widows, divorcees and single women

Another way for the Omega Point?

Physics - Cosmological Constant Redefined

I need an article that explains this better for me, but as my preferences lie towards a universe that will collapse rather than just end in a run away expansion, I am encouraged that there is a way that it might still happen:

The cosmological constant refers to a uniform energy density that presumably could explain the accelerated expansion of the Universe. However, a straightforward calculation of this constant gives an impossibly large value. A new approach to this problem, detailed in Physical Review Letters, involves a slight reformulation of general relativity, in which the cosmological constant ends up being a historical average of the matter energy density in the Universe. Besides predicting a small cosmological constant, the theory foresees an eventual collapse of our Universe in a big crunch.

Because the cosmological constant is, by definition, constant throughout time and space, it’s natural to associate it with the energy of the vacuum. Unfortunately, if one calculates the vacuum energy density from quantum zero-point fluctuations (i.e., when particles pop in and out of existence), the result is a factor of 10120 higher than the value deduced from astronomical observations.

Theorists have tried to “tune” the cosmological constant by assuming that the quantum vacuum energy is cancelled out by some additional energy (for example, coming from a Higgs-like particle). But these solutions have proven to be unstable. Nemanja Kaloper of the University of California, Davis, and Antonio Padilla of the University of Nottingham, UK, have devised a new strategy, in which they rewrite Einstein’s general relativity equations. The new equations effectively cancel out the input from quantum fluctuations, by treating the cosmological constant as an average of the matter contribution over all of space and time. This produces a relatively small cosmological constant, but it also predicts that our current accelerated expansion will somehow stop in the future and reverse direction. – Michael Schirber

I wonder if Frank Tipler feels encouraged too for his Omega Point idea? I haven't read anything about him for a while. He still seems to be on the Faculty at Tulane University.

Beautiful science

Found via Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, here's a spectacular bit of film making by a young guy who works on salmon research at the University of Washington.   It certainly shows you don't need a huge budget to get great nature footage these days.  Watch it in High Definition, full screen.

Salmon Research at Iliamna Lake, Alaska 2013 from Jason Ching on Vimeo.

What a repulsive bunch

So, Republican Mitch McConnell tries to up his popularity with the conservative, gun loving, climate change denying CPAC crowd by walking on with an (antique) gun held aloft.  What a revolting image for a  nation with regular gun massacres.  As this video shows, it didn't actually work when it came to his speech.

Also, have a look at this good commentary on the speech by vile NRA head Wayne LaPierre.

Norton's very funny episode

I don't watch Graham Norton's chat show all that often:  it's sometimes pretty good, sometimes just so-so. 

But last night, while looking for something to watch, I settled on a Norton episode which turned out to be pretty recent.  Featuring Matt Damon, Bill Murray, and the English actor from Downton Abbey (they were all in that Monuments Men movie, which seems to have been a bit of a critical and box office fizzer), it was genuinely very funny and felt very spontaneous. 

I see that my opinion is shared by others.

It is, at least for the moment, able to be watched in full here:

Dubious tax claims

I did note during the week, via Jason Soon's twitter feed, Adam Creighton's claim that the "rich" are obviously paying enough tax because it is only the top 25% of households that pay "net" tax.

I thought this smelt like more right wing, small government economist spinalysis* which is all about dissuading politicians from ever talking about raising high end tax rates ever again; in fact, its motivation is to suggest the rich should be taxed less.  (See IPA, CIS, right wing American economists.  Adam Creighton used to do CIS articles.)

John Quiggin has a short, sharp response. 

*   (I thought analysis which is really all about ideological spin deserved its own word)

Wages non disaster

As Koukoulas says: hardly the wages blowout of an inflexible market.

I would guess that the reduced number of restaurants doing Sunday trade means most people assume that penalty rates in hospitality should come down a bit.   That's probably about the only change to current wages arrangements for which there is any public sympathy.

Today's Rage choice

Well, there are a lot of uninteresting songs and clips still being put out, but I still didn't this mind one, by a new-ish Liverpool band.  It seems a while since I've noticed a band made up of young guys who don't look overly angst-y, and you can certainly imagine them going over big in the young female market, which deserves a break from the female domination of pop at the moment:

Roger lying down with dogs, again

I give Roger Scruton credit for being the rarest of things:  a clearly right wing intellectual who takes a precautionary approach to climate change, and advocates taxation as a means to address it.  (According to this review of one of his books - by Peter Singer no less - Scruton advocates a carbon consumption tax, even though it appears rather impractical to put an accurate figure for such on imported goods.)

So what's Roger doing coming out here and being the headline act, so to speak, of yet another IPA "Western Civilisation Symposium" in May this year?   Unless these symposiums are a bit of a money spinner for the far from poor IPA, it's hard to see why they are running another one.   You can tell from the comments at Catallaxy that the attendees are all more than likely already members of the IPA who are simply attending - and paying - to get the warm inner glow of hearing what they already believe, and to have drinks with people who think Labor and Unions are appalling people, darling, (and causing the downfall of the once great glorious West).

It keeps them off the street for a weekend, I suppose, and from making inane comments at Catallaxy.

But, does Roger know of the IPA's starring role within Australian politics at promoting not only skepticism over political responses to climate change, but disbelief in climate change per se?  

If he is genuine in his concern about a political need to take action about it (as he obviously is if he is promoting a tax as the answer), why would his lend his support to this organisation?

Unfortunately, there is a precedent for this behaviour.  Scruton was caught out as a handsomely paid shill for tobacco companies just over a decade ago.   What an embarrassment that turned out to be, and one would have thought that he might be more careful about his associations in future.  But then, the Institute of Paid Advocacy and him obviously have something in common.

Now, I assume the symposium will not touch climate change, but even so - if there is any prospect that this event is a money spinner for the IPA, or even if he is just helping raise its public profile, he's helping support an organisation that deserves his disrespect and complete disdain if he is genuine about climate change.

I see that Scruton is also doing a Quadrant event.  Similar comments apply.