Snow "contradiction" noted, again

Climate contradiction: Less snow, more blizzards

Consider:

 — The United States has been hit by twice as many of the most extreme snowstorms in the past 50 years than in the previous 60 years, according to an upcoming study on extreme weather by leading government and university climate scientists. This fits with a dramatic upward trend in extreme winter precipitation—both rain and snow — in the Northeastern U.S. charted by the National Climatic Data Center. 

— Yet the Global Snow Lab at Rutgers University says that spring snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere has shrunk on average by 1 million square miles in the last 45 years.

 — And an upcoming study in the Journal of Climate says computer models predict annual global snowfall to shrink by more than a foot (.3 meters) in the next 50 years. The study's author said most people live in parts of the United States that are likely to see annual snowfall drop between 30 and 70 percent by the end of the century. 

 "Shorter snow season, less snow overall, but the occasional knockout punch," Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer said. "That's the new world we live in." 

Ten climate scientists say the idea of less snow and more blizzards makes sense: A warmer world is likely to decrease the overall amount of snow falling each year and shrink the snow season. But when it is cold enough for a snowstorm to hit, the slightly warmer air is often carrying more moisture, producing potentially historic blizzards.

Exceptions not noted

BBC News - Hollywood star Nicole Kidman: 'My life is totally normal'

Well, except for the bit about being paid to urinate on a young co-star, a feature of a recent movie which just keeps on getting mentioned again and again in the Australian media.  Last time I noticed  was here, but the story has been around for at least a year.

What's more, the movie itself has long been released in the US and make the staggeringly unimpressive sum of $693,286.   This figure is spectacularly low.   Have we had to listen to how Nicole didn't worry about really urinating on Zac for a year all in the hope that it can get the movie to crack $1,000,000 internationally?

Or maybe the problem is the movie does not live up to the trash billing.  The Age story (my first link) in fact notes:

 Of course, you don't really see that happen. You see her face; you hear a splash.

So let me get this straight:  for some reason of authenticity, or PR purposes, or something, Zac Effron let something most people would call degrading in any situation be done to him for real.   And it is not on camera at all?  That could have been achieved by a sound effect added later?

Actors must be stupider than I thought.... 

Right wing gun nuttiness on display

PJ Media - Would New Gun Laws Spark Widespread Civil Disobedience?

I would normally call the PJ Media site, well, not exactly moderate given where the American Right is at the moment; let's just say it's not usually prone to promoting the Glenn Beck nuttier than a fruitcake section of the Right.

But have a look at this article which seems to be positively licking its lips in anticipation of American gun owners openly ignoring Federal and State laws re gun ownership.  And hey, it notes with barely contained glee, people with 3D printers will soon work out how to make 30 round magazines in their basements anyway.  (As to why people want to have 30 round magazines - well, if the government tells them they can't have them, that's incentive enough, right?)

And have a read of the comments that follow, where a fair number are happy to anticipate not just civil disobedience but armed rebellion.

Truly - what has caused a large element of the Right in America to turn this way?  Is it a result of a decade of self induced brain washing caused by the internet and Fox News?   It's really remarkable, and worrying.

The remaining sane on the Right there just have to speak out more.

Update:  found via David Frum, The Onion reports on a captive breeding program being the only hope for repopulating centrist Republicans:

According to members of the Initiative to Protect the Political Middle (IPPM), centrist Republicans, who once freely roamed the nation calling for both economic deregulation and a return to Reagan-era tax rates on the wealthy, are in dire need of protection, having lost large portions of their natural terrain to the highly territorial Evangelical and Tea Party breeds.

"Our new program is designed to isolate the few remaining specimens of moderate Republicans, mate them in captivity, and then safely release these rare and precious creatures back into the electorate," said IPPM’s Cynthia Rollins, who traces the decline of the species to changes in the political climate and rampant, predatory fanaticism. "Within our safe, enclosed habitats, these middle-of-the-road Republican Party members can freely support increased funding for public education and even gay rights without being threatened by the far-right subgenus."

Working within a narrow three-election-cycle window to reverse the decline before extinction becomes imminent, political conservationists told reporters they have already begun the arduous process of tracking down members of the elusive breed of sensible, non-reactionary public officeholders, which a generation ago was one of the most plentiful GOP species in existence.

 Heh.

Brooker on the horses

On the downside: bad meat and angry meteors. On the upside: awesome footage | Charlie Brooker | Comment is free | The Guardian

I thought Charlie Brooker had a quite a few funny lines in his column about the European horse meat scandal.  For example:

First we had an equine restaging of Soylent Green in which we all, as a nation, looked up from the trough for a moment to spit out a lump of unidentified sinew. It turns out thousands of us may have gobbled off a horse. The shredded stallion scandal shows no signs of abating, and last week went international, as it was revealed the meat in your microwaved lasagne has racked up more air miles than Elton John by the time it hits your tonsils. Seriously, did you see the maps showing the route it takes? France, Luxembourg, Romania … it's like James Bond, but deader and dumber and minced up and eaten....

 But about 10 minutes later the finger of blame pointed back home, as British police began raiding meat plants all over the country. Let's face it, chances are none of us has actually eaten a cow since about 1998. It's been horse, horse, horse. And it won't stop there. They'll be turning up evidence of peopleburgers next. I know it and you know it. Might as well get used to the idea: you are a cannibal, and have been for years.

Sunday fun with the tablet

A free Android app that was getting top billing on Google Play this morning probaby means lots of people made something like this today.   This is the road in front of my house:



And here a scene later in the day, from the balcony:



What fun for kids.  And adult kids.

Fish pie noted

For the first time tonight, I tried making a fish pie (using a white sauce base), combining details from a couple of recipes.  It was pretty successful, so, for my own reference:

Ingredients:  about 300 g each chunky white fish and salmon.   Around a dozen shelled prawns and about the same number of scallops (more if you can afford them - but ones from Hervey Bay are selling for nearly $50 a kg!)

Put the seafood in a bowl and add juice of a lemon, and half of the rind finely grated.  Add about a teaspoon of salt, some pepper, and put in the fridge for half an hour while you do the sauce.  Turn over on to 200 degrees.

Put on 2 or 3 eggs to hard boil.  ( I used three - I think 2 might be enough next time.)

Finely slice one leek.  Melt 60 g butter and fry the leek gently til soft (about 8 minutes.)  Add 35 g flour and stir for a few minutes, making a roux.  Take off heat and slowly add 375 ml (1 1/2) cups of milk, or add some cream in lieu of a portion of the milk.  Put back on heat to thicken it.  Add 2 or 3 tablespoons of grated parmesan, or tasty cheese, if you like.  Thrown in some herbs; parsley or tarragon are probably most appropriate.  Add some salt if needed, but it's a bit of guesswork, given that the fish has been salted too.  If sauce seems a bit too thick, add a bit of white wine..

Thrown in the seafood and lemon juice from the fridge, a cup of defrosted peas, the boiled eggs roughly chopped, and stir it up.  Add more rind from the lemon and a bit more pepper.

Put in pie dish and cover with a sheet of puff pastry.  Brush with beaten egg and put in the oven for 20 - 25 minutes.

It makes for a very rich sauce which probably entirely detracts from the health benefits of the fish, but it's not the sort of dish you're going to eat every week.

Bad Astronomer on the Russian meteor

BREAKING: Huge Meteor Explodes Over Russia.

Phil Plait has an excellent collection of Youtube videos up at the above post showing the Russian meteor.

He also explains that it is unlikely to be associated with the asteroid due to skirt the Earth tomorrow morning; but as he says, it's quite a coincidence.

And quite scary when you consider this meteor would not have been so big, yet the shock wave seems to have broken a lot of glass.

Update:   How can I not embed one of the compilation clips for this fantastic looking event:



Also - isn't it weird how, in all of these clips, you don't see cars stopping and folks looking at the sky?  Are Russians so pessimistic (or phlegmatic) that something that has a fair resemblance to a morning nuclear strike just causes them to shrug their shoulders?   "Oh, Viktor, if we're lucky, maybe work will finish early today."

Further Update:   I dunno, the world seems to be a dangerous place this week.   Lightning strikes on the Vatican, asteroids passing so close I think I felt the breeze off it, and meteors.   Time to consider this important question from 1980 which I stumbled across last night:



(And readers might also be amused to read the top comment about that clip on the Youtube site.)

Update:   for reasons I can't work out, on my Android tablet only, this second clip sometimes comes up as Blue Oyster Cult, not the intended Safety Dance by Men Without Hats.)  Why would that be?

Andrew Bolt, Watts up With That crowd lose again

RealClimate: Urban Heat Islands and U.S. Temperature Trends

A new analysis of the US temperature record concludes:

  The simple take-away is that while UHI [Urban Heat Island] and other urban-correlated biases are real (and can have a big effect), current methods of detecting and correcting localized breakpoints are generally effective in removing that bias. Blog claims that UHI explains any substantial fraction of the recent warming in the US are just not supported by the data.

Andrew Bolt should be interested in particular.

He has been spending days demanding apologies from people who have been disputing the accuracy of the statement that there has been a 16 year pause in global warming.

Hey Andrew, why don't you lead by example:  in 2011 in a series of posts at this blog (see one of them here) and in a series of comments I left at your blog, I pointed out that you had interviewed Anthony Watts in 2010 and he finished with the statement that he believed up to .5 of a degree (about 2/3 of 20th century warming, you added) of the increased temperature in the US could be due to poor siting of thermometers at weather stations.

Andrew Bolt, you have never corrected the Watts' wildly incorrect estimate, despite repeated invitations in your blog comments threads to do so.   It was particularly worthy of comment because Watts' own co-authored paper had, within a surprisingly short time of his claim in Australia, disproved his long campaign alleging that poor siting of thermometers was a huge issue that could debunk global warming - a campaign which you also promoted for years, following his lead.  

Bolt is an extreme hypocrite, and has become an obnoxious commentator on all matters political.

A useful link for the upcoming vacancy....

As found on this Flickr account:

Great moments in science fiction - Part 1

This could keep me entertained for a while:  I see that Project Gutenberg has a whole science fiction bookshelf set up now.   Most of the stuff is old, although there are some big name authors in there. 

So, I'm just looking at titles of stories and books I have (mostly) not heard of before, and finding some great bad lines.  The first:

“A quantum jump—that’s the way to beat the Reds,” the colonel had said a thousand times. His well-worn expression had nothing to do with quantum mechanics—the actual change in atomic configuration due to the application of sufficient energy. Rather, it was a slang expression referring to a major advance in inter-planetary travel due to a maximum scientific and technological effort.

And that was 1958.  Wait 'til you see what the 1930's and 40's bring me.

Robot rodent

One Per Cent: Robotic tormenter depresses lab rats

Well, the article is short on details, but the key point is that the Japanese have designed a rat robot whose task it is to depress other rats.

Other ways of inducing rat depression sound rather crude:

Rats and mice get their sense of smell severed to induce something like depression, or are forced to swim for long periods, for instance. Other methods rely on genetic modification and environmental stress, but none is entirely satisfactory in recreating a human-like version of depression for treatment. Hiroyuki Ishii and his team aim to do better with WR-3.

I feel sorry for the rats.

The article does go on to note another report that shows the problems medical researchers face when relying on rodent models for human diseases.  It starts: 

 For decades, mice have been the species of choice in the study of human diseases. But now, researchers report evidence that the mouse model has been totally misleading for at least three major killers — sepsis, burns and trauma. As a result, years and billions of dollars have been wasted following false leads, they say.

 A bit of a worry.

More Popery stuff

John Paul II vs. Benedict XVI: Popes, abdication, and Catholic hypocrisy. - Slate Magazine

Saletan is right - some Catholic writers are doing (not so convincing) rhetorical distortions to explain why it was right for JPII to hang on to the job til death, and also right for Benedict to let it go. 

I think that most of the laity in fact thought it wasn't particularly wise of JPII to hold onto it to the end.   In contrast, Benedict gets brownie points from most Catholics, I think.

A Pope Benedict explanation

Pope Benedict’s resignation: Why the pontiff failed to complete his reforms of a wounded Catholic Church. - Slate Magazine

Despite his pre-Papal reputation as an enforcer for rigid orthodoxy,  at the time he was made Pope, I remember Paul Collins saying that he was a more conciliatory figure between the liberals and conservatives in the Church than people realised.

The article above from Slate really confirms this:  pointing out that nearly all of Ratzinger's time in the Church during and since Vatican II has been concerned with this unresolved issue of how the Church responds to "modernity", and has been about trying to find a middle way.

It is well worth reading.

I found Pope Benedict a much more likeable Pope than I expected.   Sure, he's stuck on views on reproduction, contraception and sexuality which have rapidly changed in the laity he leads, but there were signs even there that he saw nuance, with his recent comment regarding condom use.  He specifically supported international action on environmental issues including, of course, the key one of greenhouse gases.  I think he made statements consistent with the Church's general concern about unfettered free markets hurting people.  (Which probably fell on deaf ears with the American Catholic Republican dills who think Ayn Rand had something useful to tell them.)  He even made a sort of semi approving statement regarding Teilhard de Chardin, who I think will prove to be an important figure in a re-framing of Catholic thought and theology as response to evolution.  (At its heart, I think the Catholic issue with "modernity" does come down to the unresolved issue of how the revolution in the scientific understanding of the universe and biology affects the doctrine of Original Sin, with knock on effects for the New Testament and subsequent Church understanding of the role of Jesus.)

So there was quite a lot to like, really.

The task of the new Pope will be extraordinarily hard.  The truth is, if you do allow all liberal and progressive elements to have their way under the umbrella of the Church, they can end up talking themselves into nonsense positions, such as saying it doesn't even matter whether Jesus really existed.  (See my old posts on what happened with St Mary's Church at South Brisbane.)  Weaving a way between giving conscience and woolly spirituality full sway on the one hand, while having a belief community that shares common values and understandings of why they join together on the other, is not an easy job....

Update:  further support for the "Pope Benedict was more liberal than you thought" position is to be found in this article at Salon.  I'll quote their section on economics in particular:

In countless speeches and letters, Benedict expressed an economic ethic that Fox News would label socialistic. In just that one address to the diplomatic corps, for instance, Benedict stressed the importance of universal education; the need for “new rules” stressing ethics over balance sheets to govern the global financial system; and the importance of fighting climate change in tandem with global poverty.

Sure, he phrased these views in terms of general principles rather than specific policy demands, and they happen to be very much in keeping with the long history of Catholic social teaching. But they were, all the same, not exactly a consensus view for an international Catholic audience that includes millions of people living in countries that do not educate girls. And they are certainly not a consensus view in places, like the U.S., where religious traditionalism has made common cause with laissez-faire economics to a much greater degree than it has in Benedict’s Germany.

John Paul II won the love of American conservatives through his Cold War alliance with Ronald Reagan; Benedict, coming to the papacy during the Bush years, played a rather different tune on issues dear to the right, from preventive war to unrestrained markets. “In many respects, democratic socialism was and is close to Catholic social doctrine,” he wrote just before his papacy, “and has in any case made a remarkable contribution to the formation of a social consciousness.”

Dogs understand human perspective, say researchers

BBC News - Dogs understand human perspective, say researchers

Dogs are more capable of understanding situations from a human's point of view than has previously been recognised, according to researchers.

They found dogs were four times more likely to steal food they had been forbidden, when lights were turned off so humans in the room could not see.

This suggested the dogs were able to alter their behaviour when they knew their owners' perspective had changed....

 It found that when the lights were turned off, dogs in a room with their human owners were much more likely to disobey and steal forbidden food.

The study says it is "unlikely that the dogs simply forgot that the human was in the room" when there was no light. Instead it seems as though the dogs were able to differentiate between when the human was unable or able to see them.

What does Sheridan know?

Administration was not Benedict's forte | The Australian

What a weird little column by noted [/sarc] Papal commentator Greg Sheridan about Pope Benedict's resignation.

He also seems to be a paid PR consultant to George Pell.

I think it's hard to imagine Cardinal Pell having any support for the top job now, given his recent less than convincing performance on the Australian franchise of the Church's child abuse scandal.  But how much Australian TV other Cardinals watch is probably doubtful.

Update:  I see Pell is way, way down the list as far as the bookies are concerned.   Good.  (Funny to see Lance Armstrong on the list.  Maybe he's been injecting holy water.)

Oh dear, Japan...

Shops tout schoolgirls offering shady 'refreshment' services to men - AJW by The Asahi Shimbun

Japan's reputation for having lots of men willing to engage in pretty immature fantasy continues:

Tokyo police have started to crack down on the rapidly booming "JK rifure" industry, where girls clad in high school uniforms are paid to massage the limbs of male customers or lie alongside them in private rooms....

An Asahi Shimbun reporter was dispatched to one of the JK rifure shops in Akihabara.
A girl dressed in a sailor-style school uniform introduced herself as a 17-year-old, second-year senior high school student in a second-floor apartment of a multi-tenant building. Hit songs of AKB48, a popular all-female group of young idol singers that perform in an Akihibara theater, were playing in the background.

"Do you know about 'options'?" she asked the reporter in her cramped partition, about the equivalent of one tatami mat, separated by curtains. She pressed the reporter to order optional services, such as a light hug and lying with her head resting on his arm, both of which can last 10 seconds and cost 1,000 yen ($10.75) each.

A seventeen year old girl's head on your arm for 10 seconds for $10?   Talk about desperate for contact, or any kind.

(I must admit, though, it does remind me of an episode of Frasier, in which Niles made a confession to his brother about being so desperate he was paying women to touch him - via manicure.)   

Full service crossing

I found it surprising to read of this incident in a New York Times account of crossing the Atlantic on Cunard's Queen Mary 2.   I suppose I would be less surprised if it was a more "down market" company and ship; but then again I may be being unfair to them too.  Here's the story ("Cree" being the writer's wife - age not specified):

What is it about ships (and trains and planes) and sex? We were left to ponder this question with fresh avidity after an unfamiliar QM2 waiter approached Cree early one afternoon while she was reading alone by a window in the ship’s pub. 

This waiter, Cree reported later, was quite good looking, in a manner that resembled the actor Andy Garcia. He stood weirdly close. He made small talk and ended by remarking, “If there’s anything I can do to make your trip more enjoyable, let me know.” He walked away, then he strode back to Cree 15 seconds later and whispered, making eye contact, “Anything.” 

This sotto voce invitation was a great gift to us — to Cree, to me, and to a friend, Will, who was traveling with us — because for the rest of the crossing we lasciviously uttered, at least hourly, what we decided should be the new Cunard motto: “Cunard. Anything.”

That's interesting...

Just for those like Rupert Murdoch who say "what's happened to global warming" when they see a big snowstorm in the US, this graph has turned up at Huffington Post and a few other places.  It's a wonder this clear increase in extreme precipitation  hadn't been noted before (as far as I can recall):

Kevin still wants revenge

Upload of swearing video was a crime: Rudd - Seven News Queensland

What a silly man is Kevin Rudd.  By keeping alive the (not very interesting to anyone other Kevin) intrigue over who got their hands and posted his sweary video last year, he's making it clear he wants revenge and that it's still a party with an internal war going.

Maybe it's a good thing:  surely his supporters in Parliament can't think it's wise of him to still be stamping his feet about this?  Will it convince them that it's really not a good idea to see his return as leader?    Maybe they'll finally shut up.  

No need for smoke signals from Rupert

Gee, Rupert Murdoch going on Twitter has sure made it easy for his editors to know which way to slant their coverage, hasn't it?  No more second guessing what will please him.  

Of course, the highly slanted coverage of global warming/climate change over the last few years in the likes of The Australian and on Fox News indicated that he had personally gone cool (ha ha) on the topic, after being a "believer" in the need for global action on emissions.  He professed to having left skepticism behind in 2006. 

So how's Rupert feel about  it now?  Well, we learned in 2011 that Fox News was explicitly under management directions to pooh-pooh climate change:

"[Journalists should] refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question."

but that's not directly from Rupert, and it may well be (in fact, it's likely) that he is cynical enough to just let his more right wing outlets make money by pandering to beliefs he personally doesn't share. 

But some of the latest Twits from Rupert directly show his mindset:

  

Funnily enough, Rupert, what happened to global warming in January was that the global figure, according to the UAH satellite record which skeptics usually say they trust most, showed a sudden leap upwards from December:

And who eyeballing that graph can really come away with confidence that there's a halt to global warming going on when you look at the 20 or 30 year history?

Rupert needs to read more sources other than his own papers and the Wall Street Journal.  Probably needs to retire, too.

Tea or coffee?

I quite liked Richard Glover's column this morning, which starts as follows:

The popularity of tea in the 17th century, I read this week, was a crucial factor in the expansion of the slave trade. This made me feel guilty about my early-morning ritual - properly brewed tea sipped in bed while reading the newspaper and picking nits from my partner's hair.

In truth, I shouldn't feel too bad because I don't take sugar. The sugar, you understand, was the problem; the popularity of tea brought a surge in demand for a sweetener, which created the need for vastly expanded sugar plantations, which in turn led to a boom in the slave trade.

Coffee, meanwhile, is said to have had a much more noble impact on history. I remember a book from a few years ago in which the writer Tom Standage argued that coffee led to the Enlightenment.

Here's his theory: once coffee arrived in Europe, coffee shops started taking over from pubs as the place where people would meet and talk which meant people were no longer completely pissed when they tried to strike up a conversation. All over Europe, people suddenly started making sense instead of just sounding like your Uncle Terry midway through lunch on Christmas Day. Sober for the first time in six centuries, they rapidly came up with the idea of rational thought.

It's a tough comparison for those of us who prefer a nice cup of tea: on one hand you have Jean-Jacques Rousseau knocking back an espresso while inventing universal education; on the other, a bunch of tea-desperate Poms waving off a fleet of miasmic slave hulks in order to summon up their next sugary hit.

I'm not sure what the reference to nits in his wife's hair is in there for, though.  Ignore that, and the rest is very witty.

For Bob and Gina

Lenore Taylor does a good job looking at the politics and improbabilities of the Coaltion's leaked discussion paper about developing Northern Australia:

Several ideas in the developing northern Australia discussion paper were ditched by Abbott almost as soon as they saw the light of day - including different taxation zones (which he conceded was likely to be unconstitutional, the same reason John Howard and Peter Costello rejected it on every one of the many, many occasions it was raised by the Nationals during the Coalition's last term) and the idea of cutting the aid budget by $800 million to pay for new medical facilities in the north.

The Coalition also immediately jettisoned the proposed ''first term initiative'' of moving federal departments to northern Australia. As the government quickly pointed out, many public servants responsible for policy delivery already lived outside Canberra. Presumably the ones advising future Coalition ministers would need to stay within earshot in the national capital.

And since the Coalition is planning major savings from cuts to the public service and sweeping changes to the way it does things, spending money moving people and departments around the country could run a little bit counter to the plan.

If these ideas were so obviously out of the question, it is unclear why they were included in a document sent by the opposition finance spokesman to premiers just last month, and included on the list of things the Coalition ''proposes to do'' in its first term.

She goes on to note that Federal politicians come up with these grand "let's decentralise"plans every decade or so; they never go far, as people tend to want to live where they want to live.

 

But as Lenore notes:

It is clear, however, that the ''visionary'' document aligns almost exactly with the manifesto of the mining magnate Gina Rinehart and others who have formed a lobby group called Australians for Northern Development and Economic Vision.

Erk.  I'm kind of allergic to "vision" in politics.  We can safely assume that Bob Katter would similarly be excited by any discussion of the North. 

And look who else is in on low wages and immigrants for the North: 

The director of the ''north Australia'' project at the Institute of Public Affairs, Dominic Talimanidis, says addressing labour shortages and ''heavily inflated wages costs'' is crucial for northern Australia to ''reach its full potential''.

I have often wondered if Gina is a financial supporter of the IPA.  Their crooked views on climate change certainly align with hers.  But who would know. 

Sounds persuasive...

Here's Paul Krugman, sounding pretty reasonable, if you ask me:

Even Republicans admit, albeit selectively, that spending cuts hurt employment. Thus John McCain warned earlier this week that the defense cuts scheduled to happen under the budget sequester would cause the loss of a million jobs. It’s true that Republicans often seem to believe in “weaponized Keynesianism,” a doctrine under which military spending, and only military spending, creates jobs. But that is, of course, nonsense. By talking about job losses from defense cuts, the G.O.P. has already conceded the principle of the thing. 

Still, won’t spending cuts (or tax increases) cost jobs whenever they take place, so we might as well bite the bullet now? The answer is no — given the state of our economy, this is a uniquely bad time for austerity. 

One way to see this is to compare today’s economic situation with the environment prevailing during an earlier round of defense cuts: the big winding down of military spending in the late 1980s and early 1990s, following the end of the cold war. Those spending cuts destroyed jobs, too, with especially severe consequences in places like southern California that relied heavily on defense contracts. At the national level, however, the effects were softened by monetary policy: the Federal Reserve cut interest rates more or less in tandem with the spending cuts, helping to boost private spending and minimize the overall adverse effect. 

Today, by contrast, we’re still living in the aftermath of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and the Fed, in its effort to fight the slump, has already cut interest rates as far as it can — basically to zero. So the Fed can’t blunt the job-destroying effects of spending cuts, which would hit with full force. 

The point, again, is that now is very much not the time to act; fiscal austerity should wait until the economy has recovered, and the Fed can once again cushion the impact. 

But aren’t we facing a fiscal crisis? No, not at all. The federal government can borrow more cheaply than at almost any point in history, and medium-term forecasts, like the 10-year projections released Tuesday by the Congressional Budget Office, are distinctly not alarming. Yes, there’s a long-term fiscal problem, but it’s not urgent that we resolve that long-term problem right now. The alleged fiscal crisis exists only in the minds of Beltway insiders. 

Still, even if we should put off spending cuts for now, wouldn’t it be a good thing if our politicians could simultaneously agree on a long-term fiscal plan? Indeed, it would. It would also be a good thing if we had peace on earth and universal marital fidelity. In the real world, Republican senators are saying that the situation is desperate — but not desperate enough to justify even a penny in additional taxes. Do these sound like men ready and willing to reach a grand fiscal bargain?

Realistically, we’re not going to resolve our long-run fiscal issues any time soon, which is O.K. — not ideal, but nothing terrible will happen if we don’t fix everything this year. Meanwhile, we face the imminent threat of severe economic damage from short-term spending cuts.

So we should avoid that damage by kicking the can down the road. It’s the responsible thing to do.

Agreed

Groundhog Day: the perfect comedy, for ever | Film | The Guardian

Oh look:  a whole bunch of people think Groundhog Day is just about a perfect film.

I am inclined to agree.  I love it too.

Prime number humour

Largest Prime Number Discovered; People Excited By Prime-Number News Still AWOL | Vanity Fair

The most interesting thing about the story is how odd it sounds to say that numbers are "discovered".   Yes, there's a whole Platonic world of new and exciting, um, mental things out there just waiting to be found.

This seems very unfair....

'Light' sodas may hike diabetes risk: study

Surprise, surprise

Bruce Willis speaks against new gun laws, says movies not to blame for violence | News.com.au

Hardly a surprise.

I get the feeling no one likes Willis much any more, do they?  The last talk show interview I remember with him many years ago indicated he was extremely disillusioned, perhaps bitter, about relationships after his break up with Demi Moore. 

Caution from Ray

U.S. shale oil: Are we headed to a new era of oil abundance? - Slate Magazine

Ray Pierrehumbert doesn't usually turn up at Slate (I see him via Real Climate, though), but here he is suggesting caution about America's newly recoverable oil and natural gas.   This paragraph is worth remembering:

 The flaws in the abundance narrative for fracked natural gas are much the same as for tight oil, so I won't belabor the point. Certainly, the current natural gas glut has played a welcome role in the reduced growth rate of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, and the climate benefits of switching from coal to natural gas are abundantly clear. But gas, too, is in a Red Queen's race, and it can't be counted on to last out the next few decades, let alone the century of abundance predicted by some boosters. Temporarily cheap and abundant gas buys us some respite—which we should be using to put decarbonized energy systems in place. It will only do us good if we use this transitional period wisely. We won't be much better off in the long run if cheap gas only succeeds in killing off the nascent renewables industry and the development of next-generation nuclear power.

 All sounds very sensible to me.

Tofu at home

My wife made tofu at home this week.  I didn't see the process, but it's a lot simpler than I had assumed. 

I'm not the world's biggest tofu fan, but having it served cold this way in summer is very nice as part of a bigger meal.

Blogroll clean up

Time for some more fiddling with the blogroll.

I find I have a large number of Right wing blogs, being a legacy from the days when the Right was making sense.   Now, there's always value in keeping track on what the Wrong are saying and doing, but I really need to balance this up with moderate Right voices (which basically means "ones who stayed sensible while the rest went all Tea Party".)  But commentators who fit into that category are pretty hard to find. 

David Frum fits the bill, I think.   (I like his recent post "Murdered Over Dog Crap" - about a Dallas shooting in which an argument between apartment owners over dog poop seems to have turned into a a double hand gun homicide.  As Frum sums up:

When gun proponents talk about "defensive gun use," they invite us to imagine confrontations where one party is wholly blameless and the other party is murderously aggressive. Gayle Trotter conjured up just such a scenario in her imaginative testimony to Congress: mother alone at home with her babies; three or four or five bad men break into the house; what can she do other than mow them down with her AR-15? In real life, however, defensive gun use typically originates in confrontations to which both parties contributed - and in which the difference between aggressor and self-defender depends largely on the story told by the party who happens to survive.

Unless you run a home meth lab, you are exceedingly unlikely to face a home invasion by armed intruders. In order to defend against wildly remote contingencies, Americans are instead arming themselves to turn disputes over dog crap into lethal duels.

Yep, he's going on the roll.)

But who else?  Andrew Sullivan's blog I find a bit dull and, of course, too interested in gay rights.  Besides which, he did go absolutely bonkers over Sarah Palin and the imagined fake pregnancy.   Despite his concerns about the current Republicans, I deem him "not blogworthy".

So, readers are invited to tell me of any other politically moderate commentator who has his or her own site which I should note.

As for economics, I get the feeling I should expand a little on the black and white dichotomy of Quiggin and Davidson (the former doesn't post enough, and the latter far too much.)  Harry Clarke sits somewhere in the middle, but I am inclined to add Crooked Timber even though I only know Quiggin on the list of contributors.  Mark Thoma seems OK, and of course I would add Krugman if it wasn't for the New York Times annoying limited paywall.

As for other changes:  goodbye Zoe Brain, who only blogs about transexuals since he became one years ago; Washington Times I looked at about once a year; David Appel on climate change is in; so is The Old Foodie for looking at food in history and Wonders and Marvels for odd and interesting historical stuff; Japundit seems pretty defunct and is gone but Asahi Shimbun has a new Japan and Asia site; and I need new Japanese blogs. Oh yeah, io9 is in too.  As is 1735099, a person who (it seems) has also wisely given up on Catallaxy.

A few other sites I haven't looked at for ages are gone too. 

Climate change as a communist plot

China flags peak in coal usage

China’s decade-long boom in coal-driven heavy industry is about to end as the leadership shifts priorities towards energy conservation, say officials and policy advisers.

The advisers predict China’s coal consumption will peak at only a fraction above current levels after the State Council, or cabinet, last week set an ambitious new total energy use target for the five-year plan ending 2015.

“Coal consumption will peak below 4 billion tonnes,” Jiang Kejun, who led the modelling team that advised the State Council on energy use scenarios, told Fairfax Media.

“It’s time to make change,” said Dr Jiang, who is director of the Energy Research Institute under the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC). “There’s no market for further development of energy-intensive industry.”

The imminent stabilisation of coal usage, if broadly achieved, would mark a stunning turn-around for a nation that is estimated to have burned 3.9 billion tonnes last year, which is nearly as much as the rest of the world combined.

It's not clear from the article to what extent climate change concerns might be a factor behind the decision, but it would seem it must be figuring there somewhere:

Pan Jiahua, who heads a team of climate change economists at China's leading think tank, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told Fairfax Media that the State Council’s endorsement of the energy target had the effect of elevating it into a “political requirement”.

He said officials in local governments and state-owned enterprises would now be judged partly on their ability to meet energy targets while a long list of green slogans, incentives and policies were translating into concrete measures.

Professor Pan said energy security remained the primary motivation behind the measures but last month’s record pollution readings in North China had contributed to the hardening of political will.
“Chinese people have done enough tolerating such bad air,” he said.

Wonders and Marvels missed, until now

From somewhere or other on the web, I recently found a link to the esoteric history blog Wonders and Marvels, which describes itself as "A community of curious minds who love history, its odd stories and good reads".

It lives up to that description: it's a great read, and regularly updated too.  How have I not known about it for so long?

Here is one example:  a post about whether the excessive swearing in Deadwood was historically accurate.  The writer, who loved the show, notes that it had the feel of the West down pat, but the swearing was not accurate.  Amusingly, she writes:

It is hard for us today to imagine the shock value of words like damn and hell a century ago. Many contemporaries of Twain censored themselves thus: d—n, dang, dam, dadburn, blank, even text-messagey acronyms like D.O.G. (danged old galoot).

In an illuminating essay entitled Deadwood and the English Language, Brad Benz quotes Nunberg (again) who writes that if the characters in Deadwood had sworn in a manner authentic to the period, they’d sound like Yosemite Sam. This is surely why Milch took the decision to sacrifice historical accuracy on the altar of dramatic license in this one aspect, in order to give us a sense of the barely subdued violence and rebelliousness of the people of Deadwood. I reckoned this meant that today’s F-word was equivalent to olden days’ D-word.

 And further: 

In the foreword of his book The F-Word, Jesse Sheidlower writes that the word f–k wasn’t even printed in the United States until 1926 in a WWI diary. Even then, it was not used as an expletive but rather in its verbal sense, for the act of intercourse.

The only instances of the F-word I have found from the 1860’s are in the Journals of Alfred Doten, where he uses the word in the verbal sense written in a code of his own devising. (The word appears as vcuk, not very opaque.) Doten and Twain were colleagues moving in exactly the same circles, so Twain must have known it. But Doten’s usage confirms that the F-word was NOT used as a swear word back then.

Well, that's odd then.  Certainly by World War 2, at least amongst the British, it seems it was in common use as a swear word.  (I cite Spike Milligan's autobiographies as authority for that.)  I guess I would have to read the book lined above to find out how it came into common use.

Anyway,  there you go:  I can object to the swearing in Deadwood not just on aesthetic grounds, but on the basis that it is historically inaccurate.    Stupid writers.

Lapierre explains

The NRA’s pathetic excuses for opposing universal background checks. - Slate Magazine

I didn't realise that NRA's Lapierre used to support compulsory criminal background checks for gun shows - 14 years ago.  Now, they oppose it.  That makes sense?  No.

Bernard's right

Media coverage of Gillard election date | Crikey

Bernard Keane complains (as did Barrie Cassidy on Insiders on the weekend) that journalists seizing on the announcement of an election date as if it means this is an immediate election campaign are just nonsensical:

...many journalists just don’t seem to have been able to process what has happened regarding the election date. They are convinced we are now in an election campaign — a “record-breaking seven-month election campaign” as The Australian described it this morning or “a marathon 227-day campaign for both leaders” as another Australian columnist called it. That’s by no means News Ltd bias — an ABC journalist declared Australia “set for its longest federal election campaign on record”; it was an “extended election campaign”, Fairfax journalists said. Others settled, a little less disingenuously, for the term “unofficial election campaign”. 

That misconception might be understandable for the UK Telegraph but not for local hacks. One journalist asked the PM on Saturday about a “sort-of faux caretaker principle that applies because of the announcement of the election date so far in advance” (public servants, of course, would love nothing more than to spend the next eight months doing nothing but tweaking their election briefs and surfing the internet).
 
But you can see the appeal: framing everything through an “election campaign” prism makes journalism easier. Election coverage is, at least the way it is normally done now, easier than regular coverage, because it focuses exclusively on politics — who’s up, who’s down, who’s stumbled, who’s made a gaffe, what do the polls say, who has strayed off-message, who will win. It’s an excuse to abandon content in favour of race-calling.

Framing everything within an election narrative means anything unexpected, or unusual, that doesn’t fit the narrative, either gets ignored (the PM’s speech) or treated, reflexively, as a stumble/gaffe/debacle/disaster. Thus the government was said to be in “chaos”, and “disarray”, suffering “body blows”, because two long-planned resignations were announced on the weekend (Nicola Roxon a “body blow”? Really?).

A very dubious claim

Lefty nonsense: When progressives wage war on reason - opinion - 04 February 2013 - New Scientist

I haven't heard of the pair who wrote this opinion piece for New Scientist, but I reckon they're numbskulls.

First they start with a story of a minor but ineffectual environmental program by Democrats (biodegradable utensils for the cafeteria in Congress), then they acknowledge the anti-science credentials of the Right (climate change, stem cell research, creationism).

They then make this claim:

Progressives are just as bad, if not worse. Their ideology is riddled with anti-scientific feel-good fallacies designed to win hearts, not minds. Just like biodegradeable spoons, their policies often crumble in the face of reality and leave behind a big mess. Worse, anyone who questions them is condemned as anti-science.

We have all heard about the Republican war on science; we want to draw attention to the progressive war on reason.....

For example, progressive activists have championed the anti-vaccine movement, confusing parents and causing a public health disaster. They have campaigned against animal research even when it remains necessary, in some cases committing violence against scientists. Instead of embracing technological progress, such as genetically modified crops, progressives have spread fear and misinformation. They have waged war against academics who question their ideology, and they are opposed to sensible reforms in science education.

This is a big, big stretch.   In fact, it's ridiculous.  The anti-vaccine movement is minuscule compared to the number of people on the Right who think climate change is a socialist conspiracy.  Of course anti-vaccine people are a danger to themselves and others, but the harm they can realistically cause society overall (given that I doubt they have really convinced substantial numbers of the dangers of vaccines) is nothing compared to the potential dangers of climate change. 

Animal research?   Seriously, just how big a crisis is it for science that activists push for more and more alternatives to animal testing?   There's an association in America just about Laboratory Animal Science which claims a membership of 12,000, and I recently noted that in New York tens of thousands of lab mice and rats drowned in a university basement when the former hurricane hit.  Sounds like animal testing is under real threat - not.

GM food?   Human biology at the molecular and genetic level, and the imprecise way genes are inserted into food (and from sources which would not arise naturally) make caution about GM reasonable.  The benefits from it are also likely oversold, I reckon (same as with stem cell research, and for similar reasons - it is hard to fully understand what at going on at the cellular level).  

I am not totally against GM research, particularly if it is for increasing the nutritional value of some foods.  But there are clear signs that some major GM work is not well thought through and has economic motives which don't necessarily coincide with environmental health.  The best example - the weed war which was pretty obviously going to be the likely outcome of Roundup tolerant crops.  Recent stories on that are here and here.

I see that these guys have a book to sell on the topic of lefties and anti science.  No wonder they are exaggerating.

A harder rain is gonna fall...

Increases in extreme rainfall linked to global warming

In the most comprehensive review of changes to extreme rainfall ever undertaken, researchers evaluated the association between extreme rainfall and atmospheric temperatures at more than 8000 weather gauging stations around the world.

Lead author Dr Seth Westra said, "The results are that rainfall extremes are increasing on average globally. They show that there is a 7% increase in extreme rainfall intensity for every degree increase in global atmospheric temperature. "Assuming an increase in global average temperature by 3 to 5 degrees Celsius by the end of the 21st century, this could mean very substantial increases in rainfall intensity as a result of climate change."

Dr Westra, a Senior Lecturer with the University of Adelaide's School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering" and member of the Environment Institute, said trends in rainfall extremes were examined over the period from 1900 to 2009 to determine whether they were becoming more intense or occurring more frequently. "The results show that rainfall extremes were increasing over this period, and appear to be linked to the increase in global temperature of nearly a degree which also took place over this time.

So, it seems the impression I've been getting from recent media accounts of rainfall extremes is correct.

Good to know.

Ross explains

Why voters believe the economy is in trouble

I think Ross Gittins' explanation here of the difference between perceptions and reality regarding the Australian economy is accurate.

The other huge perception issue that Labor faces is that the Gillard government has been in continual crisis due to its narrow numbers in Parliament.  In fact, it seems to me that it is only on the asylum seeker issue that it has not been able to achieve what it wanted to legislatively.

Of course, the one perception issue on which people are right is that New South Wales Labor had been rotten for years.  I don't really see why Federal Labor should be punished for that*, but everyone expects they will.

*  just as I don't see that the Federal Liberal Party necessarily deserves to suffer for the Queensland LNP being a dysfunctional wreck for much of the last 10 years, although admittedly not in a way which has financially profited members... 

Dramatic irony and the pro gun lobbyists

OK, I'll admit it:  I'm one of those who is aware that people are supposed to use "irony" incorrectly all the time, but have trouble remembering its proper meaning.  Checking on the web, though, I see this sub-category for its use:

dramatic irony

noun

irony that is inherent in speeches or a situation of a drama and is understood by the audience but not grasped by the characters in the play.

and that seems a good description for what is going on in the gun control debate every time I read about a perfectly law abiding gun owner who is killed by someone in their family (or of their acquaintance) with a legal gun.

The Sandy Hook killings - Mom killed by her son using her rifles, before going on his school shooting spree.  The family in New Mexico killed by their 15 year old son/brother, all with the weapons his parents legally owned.  (And it seems he had intentions of a bigger killing spree, as with Sandy Hook.)  The latest news on the weekend:  relatively famous military sniper Chris Kyle shot on a rifle range by someone he obviously trusted enough to be handling a rifle near him.

Now, not all ex-military figures are against tighter civilian gun control.  But what were Chris Kyle's views?  As shown on this recent interview, it seems he pretty much accepted the right wing/NRA meme machine on gun control right down the line, even to the point of talking about how much more crime is in Australia because of the John Howard gun laws (yeah, sure) and suggesting that everyone having a 30 round magazine is quite reasonable and if they seek to stop that, well, that's just the slippery slope and soon they'll be disarming Americans entirely.  He may have done his military job well, but when it comes to civilian policy, he had no insights of value.

Here's the thing:  the pro-gun lobby in the US up on the stage just don't seem to "get" the fact that the audience (well, the sensible part of it at least) is in on:  when it comes to the big picture, they are actually making their lives more dangerous by being around guns all the time.   This seems to be so well established in the US and yet is completely ignored every time the NRA and gun loving right wing blogs run some story of how a brave law abiding citizen blew away a home intruder.  Never - and I mean never - do they go on to mention the other side of the ledger:  the number of law abiding citizens who were killed or threatened by someone in the family when a dispute escalated because of the availability of guns.  Nor the amount of accidental shootings in homes and suicides.

Mother Jones  has been collecting some counterpoints to the NRA arguments, and I'll copy some of them here: 

Myth #5: Keeping a gun at home makes you safer. Fact-check: Owning a gun has been linked to higher risks of homicide, suicide, and accidental death by gun.
• For every time a gun is used in self-defense in the home, there are 7 assaults or murders, 11 suicide attempts, and 4 accidents involving guns in or around a home.
• 43% of homes with guns and kids have at least one unlocked firearm.
• In one experiment, one third of 8-to-12-year-old boys who found a handgun pulled the trigger.

Myth #6: Carrying a gun for self-defense makes you safer. Fact-check: In 2011, nearly 10 times more people were shot and killed in arguments than by civilians trying to stop a crime.
• In one survey, nearly 1% of Americans reported using guns to defend themselves or their property. However, a closer look at their claims found that more than 50% involved using guns in an aggressive manner, such as escalating an argument.
• A Philadelphia study found that the odds of an assault victim being shot were 4.5 times greater if he carried a gun. His odds of being killed were 4.2 times greater.

Myth #7: Guns make women safer. Fact-check: In 2010, nearly 6 times more women were shot by husbands, boyfriends, and ex-partners than murdered by male strangers.
• A woman's chances of being killed by her abuser increase more than 7 times if he has access to a gun.
• One study found that women in states with higher gun ownership rates were 4.9 times more likely to be murdered by a gun than women in states with lower gun ownership rates.

Now, if it was only the gun loving folk who were getting killed by virtue of their being unaware of this (or, more likely, having heard of such studies but refusing to believe them), well that would simply be a case of shaking one's head at their foolishness.

The trouble is, of course, that legal guns go on to kill other people too.  People who don't have a choice.  Like at Sandy Hook.

UPDATE:   Slates notes that maybe - just maybe - the NRA is starting to lose ground when its creepy leader is getting hostile interviews on Fox News:

If the National Rifle Association can’t even count on Fox News for a friendly interview, does that mean there's been a shift in the debate? On Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace interviewed National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre and wasn’t shy about calling him out on his arguments. The interview got particularly heated when Wallace brought up the controversial advertisement that criticized President Obama for providing armed security for his daughters but opposing armed guards in all schools, reports Talking Points Memo. (Video after the jump.)

"They also face a threat that most children do not face," Wallace said of Obama's daughters.

"Tell that to the people in Newtown," LaPierre responded.

"You really think that the president's children are the same kind of target as every other school child in America?" Wallace said. "That's ridiculous and you know it, sir."

Hope for some of my readers yet...maybe

The Tablet - Review: The Salvation of Atheists and Catholic Dogmatic Theology

There's quite a good summary of the controversy within the modern Catholic Church regarding its view of the potential for salvation for those outside of the faith.  It starts:

For most of history, Christians thought that the vast majority of people would go to hell. The gate of Heaven is narrow. In the twentieth century, hell fell into disrepute. Christians, including many Catholics, began to think that most people will be saved. God is merciful and loving. Dante would have turned in his grave. He knew who was going to hell and even to which region in hell.

Vatican II does not contain a single reference to hell even when speaking of eschatology. Karl Rahner claimed that the most significant teaching of the council was its “salvation optimism”. Lumen Gentium (LG), the council’s decree on the Church, was the key. It overturned centuries of salvation pessimism: all non-Catholics (which included other Christians, religious non-Christians and non-religious groups such as atheists) could be saved if they were ignorant of the Gospel and they sought God, or the truth, in their conscience. This was a dramatic development of doctrine. Some protested that it was actually discontinuous with previous teachings – and a minority claimed the council invalid. Others have sought to balance this emphasis with what critics have called a neo-Augustinian theology, foreign to the council. The debate continues.  

 This line further down caught my eye:

Bullivant, who teaches theology at St Mary’s University College, Twickenham, London, charts atheism’s complexities and types. He claims that the doctrine of invincible ignorance came into full play at the council and finally allowed the Church positively to appraise certain forms of atheism, when before it could only condemn them.

 Heh.  I didn't realise the Church had developed a special doctrine to describe the Catallaxy blog.

One of the books reviewed in the post argues that the LG decree has been read too often without its qualifications:

They ignore the first chapter of Romans, which is pessimistic. They ignore the footnote referring to Aquinas, which indicates that this salvation is only a “possibility”, not a reality. LG 16 ends with the necessity of missionary work and paragraph 17 develops that theme as an introduction to the decree on missionary activity, Ad Gentes.

That “rather often” suggests a salvation pessimism that was accepted by the Fathers and is not part of a neo-Augustinian plot after the council. 

 It seems to me that a large part of the problem here is that (as far as I know) the Catholic Church has no detailed position regarding what goes after death.   (With good reason, too, given the paucity of detail on the matter in all of the Bible.)  If you assume that most people go to Purgatory, and from there retain the possibility of changing and accepting things they have rejected in life, then that allows a way for ultimate salvation of nearly everyone, doesn't it?   I wonder what atheists would do in Purgatory:  keep interpreting the apparent evidence of their after-death survival in a science fiction way, perhaps?

Old stories and new ideas

Time flies, doesn't it?  I see now that it was back in June 2010 that I first mentioned my wife bringing home some Twilight Zone (the original TV series) DVDs from the Council library on the hunch that I liked the show.  I did, and watched a few episodes with my kids (my son in particular.)

Well, my wife recently repeated the exercise, with a different set of DVDs, and my son remains quite keen on watching it with me.  It pleases me that he likes it, given that I think it still stands up as intelligent entertainment with a substantially more literary aspect to it than what passes for most family friendly TV entertainment today.  Reading the Wikipedia article about the franchise,  I see how important Rod Serling was, not just as producer, but as a writer for the show.   Apparently Warner Brothers still has the rights to 92 episodes written by him, and Leonardo DiCaprio has expressed interest in making a full length movie from one or other of them. By co-incidence, my son also recently saw for the first time the original Planet of the Apes movie, and I spotted Rod Serling as a co-writer of it.  The Wikipedia account of his life indicates he was a pretty interesting character. 

(By the way, another old show, of a decidedly different character, which my son and I have been watching together over summer are the repeats of Red Dwarf on ABC2.  I had not realised how old the original series is - it started in 1988.  I always thought the show was pretty good in a cheerfully low brow science fiction comedy way, and I was annoyed that the new series shown by the ABC just before Christmas seemed to arrive with no fanfare at all, so I missed some of it.  Anyway, happily, my son finds the old series very entertaining.)

But back to the main point:  I have nearly always enjoyed anthology TV series.  I am not sure when TZ was shown on Australian TV; as the first series was made in 1959, it is possible they aired before I was a TV viewer.  In fact, there may not even have been a TV in the house at the time.  (Talk about making me feel old, telling you this!)  Broadcasts in magnificent black and white only started in Brisbane in about 1959,  and my mother has told me that my father resisted getting a TV initially.   Her ordering one without prior approval from the (now long defunct) Waltons Department store caused a bit of a scene at home, with Dad telling her that he would tell the delivery man to take it back.   He didn't live up to the threat, however; the delivery went smoothly, quickly followed by my father becoming the most dedicated television viewer in the household. 

So, the first anthology series I can recall is The Outer Limits, which had a more consistently science fiction bent than TZ.  While I remember it creeping me out quite a bit, no particular story sticks in my mind from my childhood viewing.

Fast forward to the 1980's TV revival of Twilight Zone, which I see now followed the movie (which itself was really only worth watching for the brilliant remake of Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.)   But I remember enjoying much of the revived TV series.  The 1980's then also brought us Steven Spielberg's Amazing Stories, some of which really were excellent, even if the series had a tendency to indulge too often in whimsy.

All in all, I miss such series, and presume that it is a combination of expense and the difficulty of coming up with consistently good and novel stories which prevents them from ever lasting more than a few seasons at a time.

Speaking of story ideas, I recently stumbled across Writepop, which claims it has more than 1,000 story ideas for science fiction which anyone is welcome to use.   While there are only one or two lines that explain the premise, if I were a student who had a fiction writing assignment, I think I would find this a very useful starting point. (A recent half baked idea of mine featuring time travel and the Bible does not seem to have been covered before, I am happy to say.  Now I only need another 91 ideas to match Serling.)

I see that the site io9, which I think I have only ever briefly seen before, has many articles on writing science fiction, and seems to be a generally interesting place to spend time.   It's good to find new corners of the web for a change.

The (very) late review of Brave (and animation talk generally)

The kids and I never got around to seeing Brave at the cinema, but we watched it at home last night on DVD.

What a seriously flawed movie for Pixar.

The first problem is a technical one:  it could just be our LCD TV is a particularly bad one for low light, but a movie like this which takes place about 2/3 at night (and then often inside a gloomy castle) is hard to enjoy at home without a lot of attempts at re-adjusting contrast and brightness. In fact, I never achieved a satisfactory adjustment.    I suspect a lot of people trying to watch it at home would find this.  The one thing that is really visually eye-catching, though, (when you can see it) is the main character's red hair.  It moves and bounces so realistically that it almost gives the impression of a doll being filmed rather than watching a purely animated effect.

But the big problem is the story.  To my mind, it makes no emotional sense at all.  To summarise:  a well intentioned Queen does the usual thing:  wants to find a husband for her strong headed daughter via an arranged marriage from competing clans.  Mother and daughter argue; daughter is led by magic lights to witch who gives her a magic pie to "change her mother".  Said pie turns mother into a bear.  (?  Why a bear in a fake medieval Scotland?)  Mother and daughter spend a night learning how to get to know each other better - as daughter and bear.  Mother (still as a bear) communicates that she was wrong; daughter makes speech about breaking tradition and everyone "writes their own story".  A bit more to do about the King not realising his wife is a bear, and then bear turns back into mother. Daughter and parents continue living together.

There's a little more to it than that, which I won't bother explaining, but really, this story just doesn't work.  In Brother Bear (a much better Disney film involving people transforming into animals) the "victim" of the transformation had a lesson to learn, and the whole idea of people being able to change into an animal had some resonance in the Inuit tribal setting.   It just doesn't seem to fit into any traditions of Scottish folklore that I've heard about (not that I'm any expert on that, and maybe someone will prove me wrong.)  But what's more - it just didn't seem fair that it was the mother alone who had to undergo the trial in order to learn a lesson.  

Of course it's not the first time that Disney animation has been thematically about a strong daughter finding her own way in life; but this daughter never struck me as a particularly sympathetic character.  Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian probably summed it up well:

Now, in some respects, it is interesting and unusual not to have a conventional love interest, but what we are offered instead is something oddly regressive, binding Merida into the family unit just when she was making that bid for independent adulthood, and we don't learn anything very interesting about Merida or her mum. There was a time when Pixar movies worked gloriously for adults, teens, tweens, small kids, everyone; this one is unsatisfying for all ages.

Interestingly, the Guardian also had a historian briefly talk about the film.  From this, I learnt that some aspects of design in it were more realistic than I expected, but also that bears were not around in Scotland since prehistoric times. 

Now that I've finished complaining about that bit of animation, I saw Rise of the Guardians with the kids over the holidays, and it was a much better experience.   Although it was odd in parts (why the Easter rabbit should be furry version of Crocodile Dundee is beyond me), but there were sequences in the film that did have that emotional effect that was missing in Brave - the explanation of the origin of Jack Frost in particular.   Overall, the movie worked a treat with the audience I was with, even though it is probably fair to call it a more kids-centric film than many others made by Pixar or Dreamworks films.   I see that it only made $100,000,000 in the US (although twice that amount overseas.)  This really counts as under-performing for its quality, and if you are in the market for buying a DVD for some kid you know, I can guarantee this one would please them.  (Not that it is out yet, I expect.)  

It is amazing in its own way, isn't it, when moving illustrations (together with the musical cues, I suppose) can move us emotionally.  As I have said before,  I would be very thrilled to be part of a team that made a successful animated film.

And finally, quite a few places have been putting up this Disney Oscar nominated short Paperman and praising it.  I think it is pretty good, and again shows the sort of magical realism story that is done so well by the medium:

In Utah news

Well, that's kinda amusing.  When following someone's link to the Salt Lake Tribunal on an unrelated matter, I found that it must be one of the few news websites in the world that has a permanent story category heading for "Polygamy". 

A slight improvement for witches

More curbs on Saudi religious police powers | GulfNews.com

Riyadh: Saudi Arabia has set new limitations on the powers of its notorious religious police, charged with ensuring compliance with Islamic morality but often accused of abuses, its chief said on Tuesday.

The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice “once had much expanded powers, but with the new system... some of these powers, such as interrogating suspects and pressing charges,” will be restricted to the police and public prosecution, Shaikh Abdul Latif Abdel Aziz Al Shaikh told AFP.

The religious police may still arrest those carrying out “flagrant offences such as harassing women, consuming alcohol and drugs, blackmail and the practice of witchcraft,” Shaikh said of the new law approved by the cabinet.

However, the cases of such people will be referred to the police and brought to justice, as the religious police will no longer have the right to determine charges against them, he said.

Looking back at 50's science fiction movies

Nuclear monster movies: Sci-fi films in the 1950s were terrifying escapism. - Slate Magazine

Not a bad review of the themes within the genre here.   A pity they don't mention Earth Versus the Flying Saucers - one of my favourites.

I like the section headed "That women are scary" in particular.   (It reminds me of one of the best laughs in Monsters Vs Aliens.)

It was probably carrying kimchi and a Samsung smart phone

South Korea launches satellite to join global space club : Nature News Blog

Bedrooms and penicillin

Syphilis and the Sexual Revolution � First Thoughts | A First Things Blog

Hadn't heard this theory before:

It may have been penicillin, not the Pill, that triggered the sexual revolution, a new study indicates. Hypothesizing that “a decrease in the cost of syphilis due to penicillin [which, in 1943, was found to treat syphilis effectively] spurred an increase in risky non-traditional sex,” the Emory University economist Andrew Francis discovered evidence that “the era of modern sexuality originated in the mid to late 1950s,” prior to the debut of oral contraceptive pills in 1960. (Full PDF here.)

How much do we really know with any accuracy about sexual behaviour on the big scale in previous centuries, though?   I mean, we know there were a heap of prostitutes in Victorian London, but who was their typical customer, and what was happening in the rural areas in the meantime?   You can say the same about any similar period, really:  we may know from both fiction and non fiction written at the time that certain societies may have been more libertine about certain things for certain periods, but without modern methods of crunching numbers,  it's surely always very hard to be certain about population wide behaviours.

More about marriage and kids

Don't mention the M-word - The Drum Opinion (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Jeremy Sammut suspects that academics in Australia are too devoted to supporting "family diversity" to come out and admit that marriage has the best outcome for kids, and single parenthood the worst.

I suspect that he may be right.

I have complained about this before:  if governments want to promote good outcomes for kids, they should really be promoting marriage.  Not de facto relationships.  Unfortunately, as the government saves money by treating welfare recipients living together as if they were a married couple, it seems hard to find a way for the government to encourage people into marriage via how benefits work.

And of course, if they did find a way to do this, we would go through the same boring "but why are you discriminating against us just because we don't have a piece of paper:  are you doubting we love each other?" arguments that we got in the 1970's when recognition of de facto relationships really got a kick along.  

I wonder if anyone really has come up with plausible ways government can encourage marriage.

The Prime Minister getting married to her long term partner would, of course, be a good first step!

Update:  someone in the Atlantic warns against promoting marriage by painting too rosy a picture about it.  Fair enough too.

Simplified forecasts for global temperature

Global Temperature Anomaly Forecasts, January 2013 | Climate Abyss | a Chron.com blog

Last year, climatologist John Nielson-Gammon came up with a sort of simplified graphical way of looking at the global temperature trends, and made some predictions from it.

It only works if there is an underlying global warming, and he's expanded it now to update his predictions.

The method looks pretty convincing, and (so far) works.

I meant to post about it back then when he came up with this, but I don't think I did.  It is well worth looking at.