"Not at all" says Barnaby Joyce

At the ABC:

With the long-term decline in fertility rates among western men, how worried are you about you or your partner's sperm?

Hence the title to the post.  Back to the article:

Up to now, getting sperm tested has involved going to a clinic and navigating embarrassing scenarios while avoiding eye contact with receptionists
.
The tech world claims it has the answer: A wave of startups are offering home-testing technology that's almost as easy as taking a photo of your semen and uploading the results.

Mail-order kits containing a clip-on phone microscope and transparent slides test both sperm count as well as motility - the wriggliness and vitality of the little fellas.

The results for some products have been tested as 97 per cent accurate.

But back to Barnaby.  Apart from crapping on in climate change denial, I see that he has been musing about other big picture things:

With both chambers in a fortnight’s recess, the ASX in blackout period and school holidays in full swing, the sultan of the non-sequitur declared that “if you want zero emissions but you don’t want nuclear power, you should shut up” and “if New York can live with two senators, why does Sydney get nine?”

This latter remark informs his wish to reconstitute the Australian Senate into 38 constituencies, from its existing eight. “Instead of having 12 senators per state, you have two senators per region. By its very nature … it will most definitely represent Aborigina­l people in a better way.” Marvel as, in one utterance, Joyce whitesplains Indigenous constitutional recognition and appropriates it for agrarian socialism.

The plan, like its author, is predictably daft and self-serving. Subdividing the Senate further into geographical zones would be to duplicate the House. 118 years and 46 parliaments in, how has that representative premise served Australia’s first peoples?

The Beetrooter’s semblance of reconciliation imperative evaporates in his real gripe: that “the Senate was supposed to represent the geographic diversity of Australia but all it’s really done is re-entrenched the power of the capital cities, where overwhelmingly all the senators live”. But if nine of 12 senators elected to represent New South Wales live in Greater Sydney that’s probably because 5.2 million of their 7.9 million constituents live there, too. And if you want your inland rail but don’t like the system funding it, you should shut up, right?

The poor fallen hero thinks he’s cooped up on Elba, scribbling riding orders and smuggling them by pigeon to the front line. Funny, 'cos his ideas do emanate that syphilitic whiff of madness.

Joe Aston in the Fin Review wrote that.  He really does not care for Barnaby.

Sort of like the prisons in TV Batman

As a child, I wasn't the biggest fan of TV's Batman, and I still don't care for anything related to the character.   [I've thought of a new way to explain why he does nothing for me - it's the equivalent of the uncanny valley in animation.  By being a purportedly more realistic superhero who just relies on strength and technology, yet still dressing stupidly and with villains that are also costumed up, it perversely feels less realistic to me than the semi mythical or silly physics superheroes like Thor, Aquaman or Superman, where I find suspension of disbelief comes easier.]

Anyway, one thing I do recall from TV Batman was the occasional dig they had at allegedly super liberal rehabilitation prisons:  you know, a super villain being allowed to live with his entourage almost exactly the same as if he were free.  It was a fairly sophisticated joke for a show with a large children's following, really.

So it's remarkable to read of the genuinely super-liberal sounding approach to prisons in Norway that seems to work:

It could be a yoga class at any holistic health retreat anywhere in the world but the participants here at Norway's maximum security Halden Prison are rather far removed from the usual yummy mummy spa clientele. Barefoot murderers, rapists and drug smugglers practise downward-facing dog and the lotus position alongside their prison officers, each participant fully concentrating on the clear instructions from the teacher.

"It calms them," says prison governor Are Hoidal approvingly, as we watch from the sidelines. "We don't want anger and violence in this place. We want calm and peaceful inmates."

Tranquillity does not come cheaply. A place at Halden Prison costs about £98,000 per year. The average annual cost of a prison place in England in Wales is now about £40,000, or £59,000 in a Category A prison.

A uniformed prison officer on a silver micro-scooter greets us cheerily as he wheels past. Two
prisoners jogging dutifully by his side, keep pace.

Hoidal laughs at my nonplussed face.

"It's called dynamic security!" he grins. "Guards and prisoners are together in activities all the time. They eat together, play volleyball together, do leisure activities together and that allows us to really interact with prisoners, to talk to them and to motivate them."

Having had a prison guard once living in the rental house next to mine, who was loud, often drunk, and offered to have his daughter's ex boyfriend's legs broken, I think we might have to scrap all of ours and start afresh if we wanted to follow this approach.

Anyway, back to the big Norwegian turn around:

When Are Hoidal first began his career in the Norwegian Correctional service in the early 1980s, the prison experience here was altogether different.

"It was completely hard," he remembers. "It was a masculine, macho culture with a focus on guarding and security. And the recidivism rate was around 60-70%, like in the US."

But in the early 1990s, the ethos of the Norwegian Correctional Service underwent a rigorous series of reforms to focus less on what Hoidal terms "revenge" and much more on rehabilitation. Prisoners, who had previously spent most of their day locked up, were offered daily training and educational programmes and the role of the prison guards was completely overhauled.

"Not 'guards'," admonishes Hoidal gently, when I use the term. "We are prison 'officers' and of course we make sure an inmate serves his sentence but we also help that person become a better person. We are role models, coaches and mentors. And since our big reforms, recidivism in Norway has fallen to only 20% after two years and about 25% after five years. So this works!"

In the UK, the recidivism rate is almost 50% after just one year.

Even the architecture is chic:

The architecture of Halden Prison has been designed to minimise residents' sense of incarceration, to ease psychological stress and to put them in harmony with the surrounding nature - in fact the prison, which cost £138m to build, has won several design awards for its minimalist chic. Set in beautiful blueberry woods and peppered with majestic silver birch and pine trees, the two-storey accommodation blocks and wooden chalet-style buildings give the place an air of a trendy university campus rather than a jail.

Here's a cell:

 There is a lot more of great interest in the article at the BBC.

A French peculiarity

Is France the only country where homoeopathy has a genuinely large popular following?   For a country that is pretty modern and capable of high tech stuff, this feature of the place is very peculiar:

In a country where nearly 60% of the population uses homeopathic remedies, the French ministry of health’s decision to slash reimbursements for the alternative remedies has sparked outrage among users of alternative medicine.

For the 38 million people in France who depend on homeopathic remedies to cure insomnia, backaches and other medical conditions, getting a good night’s sleep just became a little more difficult. 

“Homeopathic medicines do not provide sufficient public health benefits to justify their reimbursement by the federal government,”the ministry of health announced in a statement released on Wednesday.

Time to talk turbulence

I've never experienced really severe turbulence in an aircraft, but incidents like this one sound really frightening.   

Last year, there was considerable publicity to a study that said global warming will make turbulence over the Atlantic routes, at least, worse by mid century. 

Today's story made me think - do we know whether turbulence is getting worse already?  Major incidents certainly seem to come up in the news more often, but this must be a very tricky topic due to several complicating factors:

*  the increase in global aviation generally
*  whether the increase is happening on routes more, or less, naturally prone to turbulence
*  the active steps airlines, and airline manufacturers, may be taking to avoid the risk of running into it (for example, I presume that modern aircraft radars might be better at detecting danger areas ahead).

It seems there is some research indicating it has already increased:

There is evidence that clear-air turbulence (CAT) has already risen by 40-90% over Europe and North America since 1958 and studies by researchers from the universities of Reading and East Anglia in the UK have shown that as a consequence of climate change, the frequency of turbulence on flights between Europe and North America could double by 2050 and the intensity increase by 10-40%. The same researchers have since extended their previous work by analysing eight geographic regions, two flight levels, five turbulence strength categories and four seasons, and found large increases in CAT.

Not sure if I have posted about this before or not.

Still, an interesting topic, and a somewhat worrying one for the future for the slightly nervous flyer.

Hurricanes getting wetter

Seeing that increased flooding under global warming is a theme here this week, I was interested to read this NYT article:  

As Climate Changes, Hurricanes Get Wetter

In recent years, researchers have found that hurricanes have lingered longer, as Barry is expected to do, and dumped more rainfall — a sign of climate change, said Christina Patricola, a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and a co-author of a study that found that climate change is making tropical cyclones wetter. (Tropical cyclones include both hurricanes and tropical storms, which are hurricanes’ less speedier kin.)

Researchers have been studying the effects of climate change on tropical cyclones because those sorts of storms are driven by warm water. Water in the gulf is 0.5 to 2 degrees Celsius warmer, according to Dr. Prein, who said: “This is really increasing the likelihood of a hurricane to form in this basin. And it will increase the intensity of the hurricane as well.”....

The researchers used climate models to simulate how tropical cyclone intensity, or wind speed, and rainfall would change if hurricanes like Katrina, Irma and Maria had occurred absent climate change and under future climate scenarios. They found that for all three storms, climate change increased rainfall by up to 9 percent.

This study is not the first to find that climate change is causing tropical cyclones to have more rainfall. Studies on Hurricane Harvey found that climate change contributed as much as 38 percent, or 19 inches, of the more than 50 inches of rain that fell in some places. Dr. Patricola’s study broadens the research by using global climate models and analyzing a large number of storms.

 My stupid reader JC will say "don't talk to me about models", probably while New Orleans goes under.   Again.

Own your own crime scene

I see via Washington Post that Michael Jackson's former home, Neverland Ranch, is for sale for $31 million.  (Used to be on the market for $100 million.)

It's..kinda ugly in parts:

And doesn't do much for me in others (that ceiling looks so heavy and oppressive):

But, it is on a pretty nice looking piece of land:

You would think that if it wasn't for the icky associations, it could be made into some high class accommodation.  But good luck with that, buyers.

The jokes write themselves

From Dezeen, the jokes one can make from this are just too easy:

Pratt Institute graduate Garrett Benisch has proposed using biosolids, the organic matter derived from treated sewage, to produce a compostable ballpoint pen and its ink.

Benisch, who just graduated from New York's Pratt Institute with a degree in industrial design, created the Sum Waste pen for his thesis project.

The curvy, translucent writing instrument made from biosolids was featured in the university's year-end design show and won first place in a national competition organised by research group Healthy Materials Lab.

Populist governments and their disregard for expertise

Just as the Trump government has a solid reputation for disdain of expert advice on topics ranging from environmental issues to trade and international treaties, it seems that the populist government in India likes to tell its followers what it wants to hear.  See this (pretty angry) article at Foreign Policy, mainly about India's terrible air pollution, but also other topics:

Speaking from the headquarters of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on May 9, the cabinet member Nitin Gadkari promised a rapid elimination of air pollution. “Delhi will be free of air and water pollution in the next three years,” he said. Gadkari is now the minister of road transport and highways now, but in the years before Modi first became prime minister in 2014, Gadkari was president of the BJP. He said he expected that the air would clear because of the achievements of his political party, which “has done 100 percent corruption-free, transparent, time-bound, result-oriented, and quality work.”

Bringing air pollution down to acceptable levels—not just in New Delhi, but also throughout north India—would indeed be a tremendous accomplishment. But promising to do so within three years is absurd. China, for example, has successfully directed policymaking efforts toward reducing particle pollution, after decades of catastrophic pollution in the north and public pressure once air quality data became easily available online To do so has taken China several years (more than three), has certainly not eliminated pollution altogether, and has required facing unpleasant facts. Central Chinese officials held local governments to account for improving pollution—and moved to address the problem when statistical analysis showed that local bureaucrats were manipulating the numbers. But Gadkari’s unbelievable numbers are coming from the top.

Such absurdities have become commonplace. Gadkari’s promise echoes Modi’s claim the government could eliminate open defecation from rural India by 2019. (Open defecation rates improved, but it remains dangerously common, as independent demographic data shows.) Both numerical deadlines combine wild ambition and a good cause with needless quantitative precession and the absence of any plan that could achieve the result. 

And more about the general attitude of "we know better than experts":

 Unfortunately, the pattern extends beyond the environment. Increasingly, many of India’s leading economists and statisticians have spoken out about the dismantling of India’s systems of official statistics and expertise. Respected statisticians—including an economist whom I know personally from my time at the Delhi School of Economics—resigned from the National Statistical Commission in January, in protest of the government’s refusal to release credible unemployment data.

The government’s top economic advisors and policymakers report being as surprised as everyone else when in 2016 the prime minister, in a move remembered as “demonetization,” suddenly declared that a large fraction of India’s notes no longer counted as currency. In my own field of child health, the Economist reported that UNICEF suppressed data on child stunting because the prime minister’s home state scored poorly. I do not think any of my colleagues in sanitation research seriously believe the government’s response to a December 2018 parliamentary question, which was to insist that sanitation coverage in rural Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh is 100 percent.

Nice of them...

Searching that Samuel Gregg who Helen Dale re-tweeted (he's one of those irritating conservative Catholics who like small government because God wants people to suffer - see how easy it is to argue like him!) led me to a conservative Catholic site which had this news item of some interest:

The Russian Orthodox Church is debating an end to the practice of blessing large scale weapons, including nuclear missiles.
 
Last month, a committee on ecclesial law met in Moscow and recommended ending the practice of blessing missiles and warheads, and suggested that priests should instead bless only individual soldiers and their personal weapons.

According to a report by Religion News Service, Bishop Savva Tutunov of the Moscow Patriarchate said that it would be more appropriate to bless only the warrior who is defending their country, and their own personal weapon–instead of bombs.

“One can talk about the blessing of a warrior on military duty in defense of the fatherland,” said Tutunov.

“At the end of the corresponding ritual, the personal weapon is also blessed — precisely because it is connected to the individual person who is receiving the blessing. By the same reasoning, weapons of mass destruction should not be sanctified,” he said.

The proposal to end the blessings for larger weapons has yet to be approved by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, head of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Weapons systems, including Topol-class intercontinental ballistic missiles, are frequently blessed by members of the Russian Orthodox clergy during military parades and other events. These blessings are seen as a way of spiritually protecting the country.

The ridiculous technique

What's the name for this type of bad faith, nonsensical style of argument, whereby your opponent says X and you claim that this must mean they want Y, while surely knowing Y is a wild exaggeration and caricature of their point?  

Ironically, those on the Right rally against SJW's for using it when talking about gender and sexuality (for example), but they deploy it themselves when it suits.

Drives me nuts, whoever uses it.

Gives me mixed feelings

I mean, who wouldn't want to see the IPA staff, membership, 98% of commenters at Catallaxy, and all hosts on Sky News at Night rounded up and forced into re-education schools in which they are all taught to dance, paint and give up all radical ideas (as defined by me.)  Of course, it would have to be conducted in what would look more like an aged care facility than a young person's school, but still, it's a pleasant dream:

A short history of the "we didn't go to the Moon" conspiracy

This article at The Guardian isn't bad, and reminded me that Fox News - that unique source of the dumbing down of America - revived it with a "documentary" in 2001.

Stand proud, Rupert Murdoch, and all who support him.

Yet more "as I have been saying"...

I recently noted how I have been posting for a while about how solar power expansion should be looking at not replacing otherwise useful uses of land (like agriculture), but working within it.   (Including being deployed on water storage dams and reservoirs.)

Today I read of some paper that says the same thing:

A study released today provides the most complete list yet of the advantages of solar energy—from carbon sequestration to improvements for pollinator habitat. The paper offers a new framework for analyzing solar projects to better understand the full suite of benefits.

The study, published in Nature Sustainability, was conducted by researchers from the University of California, Davis; Lancaster University in the United Kingdom; the Center for Biological Diversity and 10 other organizations.

It suggests a framework for understanding more completely, and ultimately quantifying, the benefits of solar energy, identifying 20 frequently overlooked advantages. For example, solar panels paired with native plant restoration can add habitat while also increasing panel efficiency.

And more:

In the report, the authors:

• Suggest a model for engineering solar energy systems that maximizes both technological and ecological benefits.
• Create a framework for characterizing 20 benefits of installations on different spaces, including rooftop solar; solar on contaminated land; solar over functional bodies of water like reservoirs, water treatment areas and irrigation canals; and solar co-located with agriculture and grazing.
• Make the case for understanding that as renewable energy development is ramped up to address the climate crisis, it shouldn't create unnecessary negative impacts, especially when technology and resources are available to maximize positive effects.
• Suggest how this framework might be useful in policy and regulatory decision-making in order to ensure a sustainable energy transition.

I'm glad my common sense suggestions eventually get taken up in universities, eventually...

A very stupid idea

I'm pretty sure that gender reveal parties started in the USA, although I see they have now spread to Australia too, if this story is anything to go by.

I think they are just the silliest idea, objectionable from both liberal and conservative perspectives, and I do  not understand at all why people would want to have them.

Just be thankful if you're getting a healthy baby of any gender, even intersex for that matter, for goodness sake.

Gunshot wedding noted

From Gulf News, about an unfortunate incident in India:

Patna: A groom was killed in celebratory gunfire during a wedding in Bihar moments after the exchange of vows....

As per the itinerary, a wedding procession reached the house of the bride on the scheduled day and this was followed by the garland exchange ritual.

While the groom was walking towards the wedding venue after the garland exchange ritual, his elder brother whipped out a pistol and started firing in celebration.

Witnesses said the brother fired thrice but the gun got stuck. As he tried to clear the bullets, they fired one by one, hitting him as well as the groom. Both sustained seriously injuries in the incident and were immediately rushed to a nearby hospital. The groom succumbed to his injuries on Monday afternoon while his brother is battling for his life.

“Who will marry my daughter now? Now everyone will call her doomed,” said Kumari’s father Bhuletan Rai, sobbing inconsolably.

Wow.  An idiot brother-in-law kills the groom, and the worry is that the bride will wear the long time consequences?  

What's more, this is a recurrent problem in that part of the country, apparently:

Celebratory gunfire go on unchecked in Bihar despite the authorities putting a ban on them. It has claimed many lives during the wedding season over the years. According to a report, 15 people have been killed or wounded in celebratory gunfire in the past six months.

A wild actor

To be honest, I thought that Rip Torn had stopped appearing in Men in Black movies because he had already died! 

But now that he really has, I see that he had a "colourful" life, continuing into old age:

In 2010 he was arrested after breaking into a bank branch in Connecticut and was charged with carrying an unlicensed firearm, burglary, trespass and carrying a firearm while intoxicated. Police said Torn had broken into the bank thinking it was his home.

After pleading guilty to a number of charges surrounding his possession of a loaded weapon while drunk, he was given a two-and-a-half-year suspended jail sentence in 2010.

Torn also infamously fought director Norman Mailer during the filming of counterculture film Maidstone. In an improvised on-camera scene, Torn — playing Mailer's brother — attacked Mailer with a hammer and attempted to strangle him. Mailer bit Torn's ear in response.

The scene made it into Maidstone's final cut and was apparently planned, but the blood shed by both actors was very real. Torn was reportedly angered by Mailer's direction.

I have a feeling I probably read about the 2010 incident at the time, but it sure didn't stick in my memory.

All about palm oil

At the Jakarta Post, a couple of lengthy, detailed articles about growing palm oil, and whether EU attempts to influence its production are counterproductive, or not.

As I've been saying...

The New York Times writes, after this week's flash flooding in Washington:

WASHINGTON — When almost a month’s worth of rain deluged this city on Monday morning, turning streets into rivers and basements into wading pools, it showed just how vulnerable cities with aging water systems can be in the era of climate change. 

The rainfall overwhelmed the capital’s storm-water system, much of it built almost a century ago to handle a smaller population, far less pavement and not nearly as much water. 

“We’re still approaching this 21st-century problem with 20th-century infrastructure, and it’s completely inadequate,” said Constantine Samaras, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. “And it’s only going to get worse.”

Updating that infrastructure will be enormously expensive, experts warn, not just in Washington but around the country. That’s not only because upgrades are required. In many cases, cities are facing huge backlogs in general maintenance.

Spiderman viewed

Went to see Spiderman: Far From Home last night.   It's very enjoyable.  Tom Holland remains ridiculously charming;  the special effects featuring destruction in locations we don't normally see destroyed were a bit different from the standard Marvel look*; and it is very funny.   (Actually I was laughing a bit more than other members of the audience at some of the silly romance bits between Ned and what's-her-name.)  

I keep telling my son that I am glad Tony Stark is dead - Marvel is lighter and funnier and better off without him. 

*  Sort of a spoiler comment here:   when first watching Mysterio flying around trailing a lot of green smoke I thought of the witch in Wizard of Oz, but I was pleased that later in the movie the theatricality of the look made sense.   Some of his stuff also looking a bit "Dr Strange", who I am very keen see return.

The gripping hand

A somewhat interesting article at Nautilus about how much we should (or shouldn't) read into studies showing that grip strength is weakening pretty rapidly in us modern humans.   (Well, Americans in particular.)

I liked this bit of history:

Pound per pound, babies are remarkably strong. The parent learns this the first time they proffer their finger. In a famous series of experiments in the late 19th century—of the sort one can scarcely imagine today—Louis Robinson, a surgeon at a children’s hospital in England, tested some 60 infants—many within an hour of birth—by having them hang from a suspended “walking stick.” With only two exceptions, according to one report, the infants were able to hang on, sustaining “the weight of their body for at least ten seconds.”⁹ Many could do it for upward of a minute.  In a later-published photograph, Robinson swapped out the bar for a tree branch, to bring home his whole point: Our “arboreal ancestry.”

Going back further:

As the evolutionary biologist Mary Marzke argues, our hands today were literally shaped around millions of years of using and making tools (our cerebral hemispheres, notes John Napier, author of the classic study Hands, expanded as our tool making did). The human hand became an almost perfect gripping machine. That long opposable thumb, enabling what has been termed the “power grip” and the “precision grip,” looms most obvious. But consider also the Papillary ridges, those tougher, thicker parts of the skin, found on the human heel, but also on the human palm—a vestigial souvenir from our time as quadrupeds. Their placement, as Napier writes in Hands, “corresponds with the principal areas of gripping and weight bearing, where they serve very much the same function as the treads on an automobile tire.” Eccrine glands perfectly line the papillary ridge, Napier notes, providing a grip-enhancing “lubrication system.” This sort of “frictional adaptation” does not kick in until we are around 2, writes Frank Wilson in The Hand (before then, we just grip harder).

Gripping, then, is a deep part of our biology and evolution as a species. It’s also part of a long story in which we have been getting weaker for millions of years, largely because of a decline in physical activity. The human skeleton, for example, is “relatively gracile” (weak) compared to hominoids.¹² Those infants tested by Robinson, stout hangers-on though they may have been, can hardly compete with infant monkeys, who can hang on for upward of a half hour. Why? Because they need to. “Modern infants,” as one researcher notes, “as well as their fairly recent human antecedents, do not need to hang on with their hands and feet from the moment of birth.”¹³

I would have guessed that men not sexually partnering much in countries like Japan or China might have activity which compensates for gripping strength loss from automation, if you get my drift.   But perhaps I am wrong...