Hating regulations because they're regulations

I know that it is actually probably more complicated than it may first appear - the matter of what claddings are allowed to be used on high rise buildings.   I say this because I was reading the CSIRO's guide on the matter, produced in 2016, which can be found via this page.

Nonetheless, I find it difficult to not marvel at the stupidity of the libertarian response to the Grenfell fire, with people like Stoat (who is on the right side of climate change, but otherwise likes to take contrarian positions on various things) saying things like:

But buildings *are* very heavily regulated. They are not “deregulated”. This can just as easily be seen as a failure of the “regulate everything and all will be well” approach

And he cites Tim Worstall:

So, layer upon layer of intrusive regulation and government made this happen.
The solution is more layers of intrusive government and regulation. That’ll work, won’t it?

As someone says in response to Worstall:

I don’t know, but what do you suggest as an alternative? Fewer fire regulations? No fire regulations?

And someone back at Stoats writes:

Timmy’s argument is ludicrous: the Graun describes how the designers and builders failed to comply with the building regulation requirement that “the external envelope of a building should not provide a medium for fire spread”, and other factors contributed to the death toll. Timmy jumps to:
“So, layer upon layer of intrusive regulation and government made this happen.”
False as the regulations are not “layer upon layer”, they have repeatedly been revised, tested, and reexamined in relation to experience, as well as getting watered down by dogma against regulation.
Ludicrous as, by Timmy’s argument, regulations against murder make murders happen.

The other ludicrous line that some on the Right are running is that the building was only clad in flammable cladding because of Green/climate change regulations for insulation.    (Some have been trying to bring EU regulation into it too - which hardly makes any sense if it is true that Germany does not allow the use of this material on its buildings.) 

This was pretty quickly extensively fact checked and found to be the misleading furphy that one might expect it to be.  It seems that the Right has become so stupid as to not even want to admit that insulation on buildings is an inherently good thing for, you know, making a residence more comfortable to live in.   (The link notes how the Grenfell tower had windows that for safety reasons could not be opened far - making it hot in summer.  And I assume that any residence in London benefits from insulation in winter.) 

This is a case where common sense makes sense:   this is a problem of inadequate/poorly designed/poorly enforced regulation.   It's nonsense to take a line that it's due to over regulation.

Bad reasons for eating animals

I was watching the 7.30 report on dog meat being eaten in Bali (a relatively recent cultural innovation, apparently), and I annoyed to see one old Balinese guy say he eats it because it keeps you healthy, especially in winter.

What is the name for the belief that eating particular animals is particularly good for you, in certain ways?   Most notoriously, it pervades Chinese medicine, and other Asian cultures, but I suppose it hangs around in lots of other continent's native cultures too:  the idea, in a generic sense, that eating a particularly strong or fierce animal (or a particular organ of it) will pass on some of its character to the eater.

It kind of drives me nuts:  a quasi spiritual idea that has been responsible for the endangerment of so many species for completely spurious reasons.  (Or is it a case of a placebo effect meaning it actually does help people?  But even if it is, can't they move onto using sugar pills instead of God knows what animal's penis, or heart, or whatever?)

I know people aren't evil for eating dogs, although my personal fondness for them means, of course, that I wish people wouldn't.  And, I know, they aren't endangered and never will be.   But if the motivation is simply because they are supposed to be particularly healthy for you - that just annoys me in particular.

Another 50 year anniversary: You Only Live Twice

Every time I see a Space X rocket landing vertically, I'm reminded of You Only Live Twice - the first Bond film I saw as a child , at a drive in, and it remains a Bond favourite to this day.

The Japan Times points out that it's the 50th anniversary of the movie, and has a lengthy account of Fleming's interest in Japan, which centred around the exploits of an Australian reporter, Richard Hughes, who was (apparently) transmogrified in the novel into one "Dikko" Henderson.  The story goes like this:

After less than a year in Tokyo, Hughes, sensing the imminence of war with Japan and keen to alert Australia and America to the danger, packed his own notebooks full of sensitive information and headed back to Australia at the beginning of 1941.

When the war ended, Hughes returned to live in Japan, now under American Occupation, and became manager of No. 1 Shimbun Alley, a rowdy foreign correspondents’ club situated next to the residential wing of the Soviet Embassy. The club was the meeting ground of reporters, former soldiers and spies, many of whom conducted illicit liaisons in its bedrooms.

The Cold War deepened in 1948 over the Berlin Airlift. Hughes was dismissed as manager of the club and swore never to return to it. At the same time, he started working as a foreign correspondent for London’s Sunday Times, under its foreign manager Ian Fleming, who had played a distinguished role in British naval intelligence during World War II and presided over many crucial covert operations.
Hughes now created his own intelligence network by founding the Baritsu Chapter, supposedly the Asian section of the Baker Street Irregulars, a Sherlock Holmes appreciation society first founded in the U.S. in 1934. “Baritsu” is the name given to a fictional form of martial art that Holmes is described as using to defeat his arch-nemesis, Moriarty, while wrestling with him at the Reichenbach Falls.

Hughes went on to become a double agent, fooling the KGB, and (much later) took Fleming on a boozey research tour of  Japan for the novel.

Worth reading in full...  

Would you buy a Nimble Dragon?

There seems to be some renewed effort from the nuclear power industry generally to push small, modular nuclear reactors.   I say this based on an interview I heard on Radio National one recent morning with what sounded like a PR person for the industry out to sell the idea.   Actual product ready to sell, though, is still not around, despite years of talking about this potential industry.

But I see in the Japan Times that the Chinese may now be trying to develop this as a market:

China is betting on new, small-scale nuclear reactor designs that could be used in isolated regions, on ships and even aircraft as part of an ambitious plan to wrest control of the global nuclear market.

Within weeks, state-owned China National Nuclear Corp. (CNNC) is set to launch a small modular reactor (SMR) dubbed the “Nimble Dragon” with a pilot plant on the island province of Hainan, according to company officials.

Unlike new large scale reactors that cost upward of $10 billion per unit and need large safety zones, SMRs create less toxic waste and can be built in a single factory.

A little bigger than a bus and able to be transported by truck, SMRs could eventually cost less than one-tenth the price of conventional reactors, developers predict.

Sure they make great mobile phones, but not entirely sure (to put it mildly) that they have the runs on the board re environmental responsibility to trust a nuclear reactor shipped out from there.

Strop it

I was at Target recently, hanging around the (mainly women's) toiletries while my daughter looked  for a possible gift for a friend, and noticed that on a "discount" shelf they had a cheap version of one of the razor blade sharpening products that I had occasionally noticed at The Razor Shop; but at $20 or $30, I hadn't ever bought one.

The Blade Buddy only cost $5, so I bought it out of curiosity.

The operative part is just a slab of rubber or silicon, I'm not sure which, with some ridged sections, and all you do is rub the razor blade upwards on it (with a bit of shaving cream for lubrication) about 15 to 20 times before shaving.  It doesn't take long.

The packaging says it works by "re-aligning" the blades, or some such, which sounds very improbable, so it was with low expectations that I started using it.

But, I have to say, I think it is working.   I did start with a new blade cartridge (a cheap 4 - or is it 5?- blade razor that Coles and Woolworths both sell), but after a week, I have the distinct impression that it feels sharper than if I hadn't used the Buddy device.

Mind you, I have been able to get about 3 to 4 weeks out of one of these cartridges anyway, so maybe it is an illusion.  But I don't think so.

When I google the topic, I see that there is actually a lot of material out there saying that these razor cleaning devices do work just by cleaning the blade, in a very similar way to the old "stropping" of a blade on a leather strap.   Makes sense.

In fact, there is also material out on the web about just using old denim to "strop" a cartridge razor.  And one guy - whose video I haven't properly watched - claims to have gotten 3 years out of one cartridge(!).  Maybe there's black magic involved...

Nevertheless, it seems clear that there is good reason to believe you can get very substantial extensions to the "normal" life of razor cartridges.    And to be honest, I don't mind the procedure:  it makes shaving more feel more, well, ritualised.  (You have to remember that I enjoy using shaving soap and a brush, too.)

Given the ridiculous cost of brand name, multi-blade cartridges, I am very surprised that this is not better known.   Certainly, I had never thought of it before - I just assumed that cartridge blades were so thin that they developed pits and holes that you couldn't do much about it.

It would seem I was mistaken. I will revisit the topic in a month or two's time...

Update:   more on using denim jeans to strop a razor cartridge.  The guy claims to be using the same cartridge for 8 months at the time he wrote that...

Ridiculous performance art

I suppose there will always be eccentrics, and/or the disturbed, who will want to create performance art involving blood and gore.   

What I find a bit more disturbing is that they can find a paying audience. 

Bruni on the state of political discourse

Bruni's column ("I'm OK - you're pure evil") about the coarsening of political discourse in the US, and in particular the dangerous role of social media in the process (something of a favourite theme of mine) is pretty good:

Over the past decade in particular, the internet and social media have changed the game. They speed people to like-minded warriors and give them the impression of broader company or sturdier validation than really exist. The fervor of those in the anti-vaccine movement exemplifies this. So did the stamina of Americans who insisted that Barack Obama was born abroad — and who were egged on by Donald Trump.

Admirers of a responsible politician or righteous cause coalesce quickly, but the same goes for followers of a hatemonger or crackpot. One good articulation of this came from David Simas, who was Obama’s political director, in a New Yorker article by David Remnick that deconstructed the 2016 election.

What people find on the web “creates a whole new permission structure, a sense of social affirmation for what was once unthinkable,” Simas told Remnick. Obama, in his own comments to Remnick, picked up that thread, saying, “An explanation of climate change from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist looks exactly the same on your Facebook page as the denial of climate change by somebody on the Koch brothers’ payroll.”

“The capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal — that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate,” Obama added. Suspicion blossoms into certainty. Pique flowers into fury.

Writing about last week's shooter of the Repbulican Congressman:

His life online reflected the goosing, goading, amplifying power of social media and the eminence of outrage in public debate. As Michael Gerson noted in The Washington Post after the shooting, today’s partisans “have made anger into an industry — using it to run up the number of listeners, viewers and hits.” Mocking and savaging political opponents have been “not only normalized but monetized,” Gerson added, and he stated the obvious, which needed stating nonetheless: “If words can inspire, then they can also incite or debase.”

Left wing violence revisited

Good article at NPR:  

FACT CHECK: Is Left-Wing Violence Rising?

Some extracts:

The idea that some on the far left are openly condoning violence is a red flag for extremist group monitors.
"This is a dangerous game; people are going to die. No one's died yet, but it's just a matter of time," says J.J. McNabb, an expert on political extremism at George Washington University.

McNabb says white supremacists and neo-Nazis are widely condemned — and deservedly — for their violent tendencies. But she says the Antifa shouldn't get a pass on their violence just because they oppose white supremacists....

Still, their numbers are tiny in relation to the mainstream political left. And, say experts, it's misleading for right-wing groups to suggest that the Antifa are more violent than right-wing extremists.

"The far left is very active in the United States, but it hasn't been particularly violent for some time," says Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism.
He says the numbers between the groups don't compare.

"In the past 10 years when you look at murders committed by domestic extremists in the United States of all types, right-wing extremists are responsible for about 74 percent of those murders," Pitcavage says.

You have to go back to the 1970s to find the last big cycle of far-left extremism in the U.S. Both Pitcavage and McNabb say we have been in a predominantly far-right extremist cycle since the 1990s — the abortion clinic bombings and Oklahoma City, for example. And, more recently, racially motivated attacks such as the one at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, the mass shooting at a black church in Charleston, S.C., and last month's stabbings on a commuter train in Portland.

Megan, Megan, Megan...

Just at a time when millions of people in Britain, Australia and other countries have been watching TV and saying "What?? Governments haven't been bothered to regulate whether developers can wrap a 30 or 40 story apartment building with stuff that can burn intensely and wildly out of control far beyond the reach of any firefighting service?!",  along comes Megan McArdle to write an article with the lines:

When it comes to many regulations, it is best to leave such calculations of benefit and cost to the market, rather than the government. People can make their own assessments of the risks, and the price they’re willing to pay to allay them, rather than substituting the judgment of some politician or bureaucrat who will not receive the benefit or pay the cost.

Opportunistically,  she also concentrates on just one safety matter relevant to the Grenfell fire - the decision not to try to retrofit a sprinkler system.

Megan, Megan, Megan:  this is such a extraordinarily tone deaf time to be talking the benefits of  letting markets (and residents) decide relative levels of safety because (so your argument goes) everyone makes safety trade offs (such as living further out in a city and taking the risk of dying in a car crash while commuting), I cannot believe the editor at Bloomberg let you publish it. 

She does make the following concession:

Grenfell Tower, of course, was public housing, which changes the calculation somewhat. 

Yes!   Because it wasn't a case of market choice at all for those residents. 

But even then,  she tries to make anti-regulation hay while the building is still smouldering:

And yet, even there, trade-offs have to be made. The government spends money on a great number of things, many of which save lives. Every dollar it spends on installing sprinkler systems cannot be spent on the health service, or national defense, or pollution control. Would more lives be saved by those measures or by sprinkler systems in public housing? It’s hard to say.

Look, there is time to make a statement of the bleeding obvious - not all government funded enterprises can be made perfectly safe if the cost of doing so is going to be astronomically high - and there is a time to instead make another bleedingly obvious one:   it is a bad idea for governments to leave it up to builders to decide whether to make high rise apartment buildings flammable, especially when the additional cost to use non flammable material is small.  


Just as I wrote a couple of weeks ago that you could expect anyone in the media to be pilloried if  their first reaction to a major Islamic terrorist attack (like Manchester's) was be to start comparing it with furniture accidents fatalities,  Megan deserves all the criticism she will undoubtedly get for making the wrong argument at the wrong time.

Update:  some example of Twitter reaction:

Poor New Zealand

Well, I didn't know this:

A new report by Unicef contains a shocking statistic - New Zealand has by far the highest youth suicide rate in the developed world.

A shock but no surprise - it's not the first time the country tops that table.

The Unicef report found New Zealand's youth suicide rate - teenagers between 15 and 19 - to be the highest of a long list of 41 OECD and EU countries.

The rate of 15.6 suicides per 100,000 people is twice as high as the US rate and almost five times that of Britain.

I suppose it is not a great surprise to read that the rates are particularly high amongst young Maori and Pacific Islander males - it ties in with what happens in the Australian aboriginal population.

I also learned something new and surprising about the Australian suicide rate at this site:

Suicide rates in Australia peaked in 1963 (17.5 per 100,000), declining to 11.3 per 100,000 in 1984, and climbing back to 14.6 in 1997. Rates have been lower than this since that year. The age-standardised suicide rate for persons in 2015 was 12.7 per 100,000. 

Why was 1963 a peak year for suicide?   Certainly puts nostalgia for the Golden Age of Menzies into a bit of perspective...

Some media observations

*  why do people care so much about what Mia Freedman and her "what women talk about" website Mammamia say or do?    I gather she's an "oversharer", as (it seems to me) a lot of women now tend to be.  I also take it that she unintentionally upset an obese guest but many people (mainly women) don't see it that way.   Big deal.

*  I think that Benjamin Law often writes well  in his Weekend Magazine gig for the Fairfax press, but I have tried a couple of times watching his (more or less) autobiographical family comedy/drama-ish show The Family Law, and can't say that I'm impressed.   Much of the humour is based on his oversharing/embarrassing mother, and is often somewhat scatological (something of Law's special field of interest, apparently) but it really seems to me that the jokes and writing are strained, despite a cast that is doing their best with the material.   I feel I have to say it, again:  I don't think the material produced by Australia's gay writer/comedians is all that funny, but they do seem to have the orientation that makes funding their shows a whole lot easier at SBS or the ABC than it really deserves.   (Come on, Josh Thomas fans, attack me again for not liking Please Like Me.)    I wanted to like Law's show - it's even made in Queensland, a rarity for Australian TV, and I'm sympathetic to Asian family comedy - but I just don't find it worth watching. 

*  I see that Pirates 5 has already made $600,000,000:  maybe will top $700 million?   (The last one made more than a billion dollars, believe it or not.  I think this one will come in well under, but still nothing to be sneezed at.)    I wonder if a No 6 will be on the way.  

How's that Trump isolationism going?

The Pentagon will send almost 4,000 additional American forces to Afghanistan, a Trump administration official said Thursday, hoping to break a stalemate in a war that has now passed to a third U.S. commander in chief. The deployment will be the largest of American manpower under Donald Trump's young presidency.

Urban planning revisited

Simon Jenkins' take on the Grenfell first sounds a bit extreme...: 

How many times should we say it? Don’t build residential towers. Don’t make or let people live in them, least of all families. They are antisocial, high-maintenance, disempowering, unnecessary, mostly ugly, and they can never be truly safe. No tower is fireproof. No fire engine can reach up 20 storeys, period.

Towers are again raising their heads across the urban landscape, creatures of egotistical architects, greedy developers and priapic mayors. We gasp at their magnificence, their extravagance, their sheer height. Yet like Grenfell they are alien creatures in a British city. They do not converse with their context, they thumb their noses at it.

...but he has a point, at least when it comes to government funded housing for the relatively poor.

I've heard it said elsewhere recently, but high rise is not necessary for high density:

Hence the most “crowded” parts of London are not around towers but in eight-storey Victorian terraces. The boulevards of central Paris have treble London’s residential density without towers. Westminster council’s aborted Paddington Pole, at some 60 storeys, had fewer housing units than the high-density street housing suggested by its opponents. The tall blocks wanted by Boris Johnson for Clerkenwell’s Mount Pleasant estate are at a lower density than the low-rise town houses proposed by the consultants Create Streets.

And, I am also reminded of Kevin McCloud's 2010 documentary on lessons to be learnt about high density living from the Mumbai slums.   And also, how Japan manages to cram in extremely high density but with most residential blocks of relatively limited height. 

What bullet?, and up the Nile

That was some pretty amazing TV, as the ABC journalist in the Philippines gets a neat hole in the neck, and doesn't realise why until he has an x ray.  (Hey, there's a bullet in there.)  If you missed it, you should watch it.

I have also been meaning to recommend the (possibly repeated? - it's from 2010) Joanna Lumley's Nile series that been showing on ABC.   Surely no one could possibly dislike Lumley - or is it just a 50+ male thing that I believe the entire world must surely find her charming?   Anyway, her travel shows are always entertaining and enlightening, and this one where she is travelling right up to the source of the Nile shows her in some very isolated places (Sudan, parts of Ethiopia) way, way off the normal tourist track.  

Last night, where she was visiting a spring that is considered the source of the Blue Nile, and which is considered by the local Christians to be holy water with miraculous curative powers (even curing HIV, according to some type of priest!) was really remarkable.  An earlier episode featuring the old guy on a boat in the Nile who said devils lived around that particular part of the river, and could appear in any animal or human form, and had once set his boat alight, was also remarkable as an example of the grip that old religious/superstitious belief still has in that part of the world.

Good viewing.

Get the boss

Another story of Islamic inspired lawfare, this time in Dubai:

DUBAI: A senior bank manager was arrested last week after a Muslim colleague filed a complaint accusing him of insulting Islam.

E.D. from Goa, India, was taken into custody within hours of the incident at the Bur Dubai branch of a local bank on June 7. He was held at Al Raffa Police station before being released on bail.

The complainant T.A., 30, from Bangalore, India, said his boss E.D. made religious slurs against him and ridiculed Islam when he asked him for leave to go to Makkah for the Umrah piligrimage.

“This happened during our morning huddle. In front of several staff members, E.D. mocked me saying that if I was so keen to perform Umrah then instead of the Kaaba, I may as well take rounds (tawaaf) of his villa in Victory Heights,” T.A. said in an interview with XPRESS.

“I was shocked but I kept my cool and told my boss that he had no right to make such blasphemous comments against my religion but he remained unrepentant and went on to blame Muslims for terror attacks including the recent one in London. He also made jibes at my appearance, particularly my bloodshot eyes. He said they make me look as if I was drunk. I told him they were caused by lack of sleep during Ramadan but he refused to listen and said Ramadan was a month of giving but all that I gave him during Ramadan was pain. The same day I filed a police complaint.”

Violence and politics

The Trump supporting Right, be it in American or Australia is, virtually by definition, too blind and/or stupid to argue with.  

So, after the shooting in Virginia today,  they will bounce off the walls with ridiculous arguments about violence being committed only by the Left, and newspapers critical of Trump having "blood on their hands", while completely and utterly having no problem with Trump repeatedly vilifying Mexicans and other immigrants en mass for political purpose, and barely being able to find time to comment on subsequent racially motivated killings.  

They will not acknowledge the existence of Right wing violence and extremism in the US, and would not read an article such as this one, which appeared recently at PBS  putting some perspective on matters.   The point made:   Islamic extremist attacks have distracted the public (but not Homeland Security) from the very real and ongoing issue of Right wing extremist attacks:

Between 1990 and 2014, the ECDB has identified 38 homicide events motivated by Islamist extremism that killed 62 people. When you include 9/11, those numbers jump dramatically to 39 homicide events and 3,058 killed.

The database also identified 177 homicide events motivated by far-right extremism, with 245 killed. And when you include the Oklahoma City bombing, it rises to 178 homicide events and 413 killed.

Although our data for 2015 through 2017 are still being verified, we counted five homicide events perpetrated by Islamist extremists that resulted in the murders of 74 people. This includes the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, which killed 49 people. In the same time period, there were eight homicide events committed by far-right extremists that killed 27 people.

These data reveal that far-right extremists tend to be more active in committing homicides, yet Islamist extremists tend to be more deadly.

Our research has also identified violent Islamist extremist plots against 272 targets that were either foiled or failed between 2001 and 2014. We are in the process of compiling similar data on far-right plots. Although data collection is only about 50 percent complete, we have already identified 213 far-right targets from the same time period...

  Far-right extremists, who typically harbor anti-government sentiments, have a higher likelihood of escalating routine law enforcement contacts into fatal encounters. These homicides pose unique challenges to local law enforcement officers who are disproportionately targeted by the far right.

A good article.

I also thought Peter Beinart's article in The Atlantic The Blurry Line Between Violence Talk and Violent Action was moderate and balanced and appropriate.

Clean coal, Finkel, etc

To be honest, I've been busy and haven't heard enough about the Finkel review proposal regarding a clean energy target to know whether it's all good, or a bit fanciful.   (My suspicion is that the modelling is a bit fanciful.)   But it has the feeling of "a lot better than nothing" about it, nonetheless.

I am encouraged by the fact that it would seem that the Abbott objections are not getting all that much support from within the party room, and even Barnaby Joyce seems to be giving up the argument and just wants to get this divisive issue behind him.

Could it be that the Coalition is genuinely in a process of permanently sidelining the climate change fake skeptics, lukewarmers and conservative culture warriors for whom a matter of science has become, weirdly and corrosively, an emblematic issue?   I'm starting to get my hopes up...

In the meantime I remain completely skeptical about clean coal, and hope the Coalition does not fund it.

High rise fire

This tragic London apartment tower fire raises the question - what is it that burns so well in a tower block like that?   I reckon that the sight of a high rise almost entirely on fire internally is shocking because I would normally assume that it would mainly be only furnishing and curtains that can really burn well, so shouldn't any fire be readily contained to within one apartment, or at worst, one floor?  

But it obviously doesn't work like that...

I see that there is a Wikipedia entry up for the Grenfell Tower fire already, and it notes this:

In November 2016, a residents organisation, Grenfell Action Group, published online an article attacking KCTMO as an "evil, unprincipled, mini-mafia" and accusing the Borough Council of ignoring health and safety laws. The Group suggested that "only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of [KCTMO]". The group had also published articles criticising fire safety and maintenance practices at Grenfell Tower.^[12][13]

This is going to be in the news for quite a long time, by the sounds.

Magnetic eels

Hey, Norway gets a mention, too:

Now, researchers at the University of Miami and the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research have shown that the eels use Earth's magnetic field to determine which direction to swim. In a Norwegian fjord, they placed locally caught glass eels in a mesh container that was suspended from a surface float. A camera recorded the behaviour of the eels and the team found that they tended to swim in a southerly direction at ebb tides. The same glass eels were then placed in a specially designed tank in which they are shielded from external stimuli such as daylight. Magnetic fields were applied to the tank, which effectively rotated the magnetic north–south axis by 90°. During periods of ebb tides, the team found that the eels oriented themselves in a southerly direction as defined by the applied magnetic field. This led them to conclude that the glass eels navigate using Earth's magnetic field in a manner that is linked to the local cycle of tides. This, they believe, could help the eels to use the tides to reach freshwater in rivers. "It is incredible that these small transparent glass eels can detect the Earth's magnetic field," says Miami's Alessandro Cresci. "The use of a magnetic compass could be a key component underlying the amazing migration of these animals," he adds. "It is also the first observation of glass eels keeping a compass as they swim in shelf waters, and that alone is an exciting discovery."

TV recommendations

*  the "invisible city" series showing on SBS on Sunday nights - where they go underneath various Italian ancient cities and map them in 3D detail with laser scanners - has been really interesting.   Last week's episode, about Rome itself, really surprised me as to the vast extent of ancient, empty quarries underneath it.   (As well the awesomeness of Roman engineering generally.)   You see some of the scanning results at this website, and I'm sure it would still be able to be viewed in the SBS on Demand.

*  Last night's Foreign Correspondent about the large Kerokbokan prison on Bali was pretty fascinating too.  A more or less self run (by the inmates) prison, it seems a remarkably happy and relaxed place, despite serious overcrowding.  (Apparently, the prisoners who never attempt breaking out despite the relatively low tech security arrangements.)   Perhaps it has a not so scary atmosphere because most of the prisoners are just unlucky drug users/couriers/dealers?    Or is it because there is pretty access to drugs within the prison - a point the show did not spend any time explaining?   (With the relaxed looking monthly family days, smuggling drugs in does not look like a problem at all.)

With shows like these, I always feel like chaining News Ltd columnists and whiny Catallaxy economists to a chair and make them watch such quality TV which is unmatched by commercial networks.   Do they want us to only watch fake reality TV contests and pathetic things like shows made about other people watching shows?