Perhaps I should switch my health inadequacies to obesity...

Lack of exercise responsible for twice as many deaths as obesity

More battery news

The Train of the Future Might Be Battery-Powered - CityLab

I'm surprised I had not heard of this before:

This week, the U.K. has been quietly making transit history: it’s just brought the country’s only battery-powered passenger train into service. The train, fitted with lithium phosphate and hot sodium nickel salt batteries, is now undergoing a trial run shuttling passengers on a 12-mile stretch to the northeast of London. You can see a video of it below (spoiler: it looks like a regular train). If it works as it should, it will be able to make its journey without any connection to electrification.

Sick videos on the rise

I was somewhat amused to see at JB Hi Fi the other day a display stand of new DVDs (one containing the kid's movie The Box Trolls, actually, which I was supposed to review but never got around to it) with a hand written notice on the surround that was something like this  "Must watch - sick videos!"

I blame Taylor Swift.  She's like, totally sick.

Makes some sense, I guess...

The math of one-night stands and long-term relationships

Maybe another round of climate change and economics commentary due on the 'net

I see that an article appeared at Nature Climate Change on Monday with this abstract:

Integrated assessment models compare the costs of greenhouse gas mitigation with damages from climate change to evaluate the social welfare implications of climate policy proposals and inform optimal emissions reduction trajectories. However, these models have been criticized for lacking a strong empirical basis for their damage functions, which do little to alter assumptions of sustained gross domestic product (GDP) growth, even under extreme temperature scenarios^{1, 2, 3}. We implement empirical estimates of temperature effects on GDP growth rates in the DICE model through two pathways, total factor productivity growth and capital depreciation^{4, 5}. This damage specification, even under optimistic adaptation assumptions, substantially slows GDP growth in poor regions but has more modest effects in rich countries. Optimal climate policy in this model stabilizes global temperature change below 2 °C by eliminating emissions in the near future and implies a social cost of carbon several times larger than previous estimates⁶. A sensitivity analysis shows that the magnitude of climate change impacts on economic growth, the rate of adaptation, and the dynamic interaction between damages and GDP are three critical uncertainties requiring further research. In particular, optimal mitigation rates are much lower if countries become less sensitive to climate change impacts as they develop, making this a major source of uncertainty and an important subject for future research.

The only commentary I have seen about this so far is at The Atlantic   Its key point is this:

Researchers from Stanford University found that the current price of climate change is more likely six times as much, approximately $220 for every ton of carbon produced. Using a new model to calculate the number, the researchers took into account the economic damage that catastrophic climate events, like storms or crop loss, could pose to a country’s GDP over time. “If climate change affects not only a country's economic output, but also its growth, then that has a permanent effect that accumulates over time,” Frances Moore, co-author and environmental scientist, said.

 But then they go on to note that many others think that the study might be too pessimistic.

The other point made in the Atlantic is that the study emphasises how poorer countries are estimated to do worse:

Another intriguing aspect of this new model, however, is that it also incorporates the economy’s ability to adapt to damage from climate changes and acknowledges that warming temperatures will economically affect high- and low-income countries differently. "There have been many studies that suggest rich and poor countries will fare very differently when dealing with future climate change effects, and we wanted to explore that," co-author Delavane Diaz said. The researchers noted that because poor countries are on average hotter than rich countries and have less rigid infrastructure, they might suffer greater economic costs due to climate change. “If temperature affects economic growth rates, society could face much larger climate damages than previously thought” Diaz said. “This would justify more stringent mitigation policy.” 

I'm guessing then the "do nothing because I hate taxes and government generally" crowd will say something like "see, this means we must make poor countries rich as fast as possible so they don't suffer as much as if we keep them poor.  And that means - they should burn more fossil fuels!"

But the dog chasing its tail aspect of such an argument should be obvious, shouldn't it?  How could you ever work out with confidence that they can grow wealth to a sufficient level fast enough to make the future adaptation to climate change adequate?  (Short answer - you can't.  They want the globe to take a gamble on their mere, ideological motivated, hunches.)

The study does have the benefit of bolstering the Pope's likely position (in a coming encyclical) that climate change is a matter of crucial social justice, and that therefore Catholics should indeed take it seriously.

But back to the big picture of this entire exercise.   People who read me regularly will know that I am deeply skeptical of this whole economic forecasting on a scale out beyond (say) 20 or 30 years; especially so when the point is to try to factor in something about which the regional effects still remain rather uncertain.  (It is easier to be confident about the "big picture" than the regional one in climate change.)

It seems that at least part of this article bolsters my skepticism.  (Although they do continue to put enough faith in the whole dubious forecasting exercise to make one of their own.)

But I have another question:  can any economist type who reads this tell me if there is anything equivalent that has ever been attempted in economics?    And if so, was it successful?

Medicare backlash took a while

It seemed to take an inordinate amount of time for the backlash against the government's attack on bulk billing to get into gear, didn't it?   (Well, a month anyway, even though I said at the time that the effect on GP practices was going to be big, and general patient bulk billing was surely going to go because of it.) I suppose Abbott and his advisers may have thought it was a good idea to announce it in the run up to Christmas, as people are too distracted getting ready for the holidays.

But you know a backlash against this government is strong when even Judith Sloan says she can't see the sense in the policy.  (And even she notes that Abbott as health minister used to think that policies that increased bulk billing services to the public were a good idea.)

And remember the Adam Creighton tweet where he said doctors deserved a pay cut because the AMA had opposed the co-payment?  Well, it looks like it won't  be happening at all, given the Senate.    So sorry, Adam:  your desire to see incomes cut to everyone except you seems to have not panned out in this case.

The tough French

Charlie Hebdo: No one in Europe is tougher on terror than France. That didn't stop the attacks.

Interesting article here on how France has long been using very rigorous surveillance and anti-terror laws. 

It's true, it didn't stop recent terror incidents, but the article notes that they had a pretty good run before that.

Lost heads in history

I've stumbled across a couple of reviews of a book that came out last year:  Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found by Frances Larson.

While I hate the idea of decapitation as a method of execution or murder, it's always interesting to read some history about it.   I'm not sure that I had heard before that it was novelty seeking Westerners who helped create a market for the creation of shrunken heads:

Larson’s most telling case study is the saga of the shrunken heads that can be seen today in museums. Collected avidly by 19th-century explorers and scientists, they seemed proof of the bestial nature of native peoples, and the West’s superiority. Yet, as Larson demonstrates, the market was created by such collectors, who often unwittingly bought shrunken monkey-heads or caused murder to be committed. Whites themselves were seen as head-hunting ghouls by indigenous people, even as they supplied the demand.

I also hadn't heard before that the audience was somewhat displeased with the efficiency of the guillotine:

The guillotine, created during the French Revolution to be humane, terrifyingly accelerated the production line of execution and effected the Terror. The initial spectators felt cheated. Its action was too quick for the eye to see; there were no enjoyable writhings or screams.

I had not heard of Jameson, of the whiskey family, and the scandal caused when it was claimed he had paid for a slave girl to be killed by cannibals (I have read elsewhere that he - sort of - denied it, but in a way that left considerable doubt.) And as for skulls of the Japanese in World War 2 - I think I read in Chickenhawk that US soldiers in Vietnam were not above doing the same thing:

The most grotesque of Larson's anecdotes from this period concerns one James Jameson, a naturalist in Henry Stanley's equatorial party, who in 1890 paid African soldiers to kill and cannibalise a girl while he watched, sketchbook in hand. He was also said to have had the head of a murdered man shipped home and stuffed for domestic display by a taxidermist in Piccadilly.

Jameson's tale is emblematic, in part because of the public horror that greeted accounts of his grim antics. Mostly, people have found decapitation quite acceptable in limited circumstances, only objecting to the act or the spectacle when it seemed to be flaunted a touch too cruelly. The trophy hunting of American soldiers during the Second World War is a case in point. Larson has read numerous diaries and letters in which men serving in the Pacific admit to boiling Japanese heads in oil drums, bleaching skulls to make candlesticks or amusing themselves by tossing pebbles into the open cranium of a dead enemy. Many cleaned, painted or jauntily inscribed skulls ('This is a good Jap!') were sent home as souvenirs, but it was only in 1944, when Life magazine published a photograph of some GI's sweetheart with a skull grinning away on her writing desk, that the army and the government publicly deplored the habit.

Sensitive, aren't we?

Could climate change have played a role in the AirAsia crash?

This is not a bad article that deals with turbulence, aircraft and climate change, and which approaches the topic very cautiously.

But boy, some people in comments have gone off about the question even being asked in the heading.

Big batteries, big future?

Although it essentially reads like an advertisement for one company's industrial batteries for deployment on the grid, it is still interesting to read this interview at Forbes on the topic.

It does seem increasingly likely that putting money into solving the energy storage problem with renewables may be a better use of money than building nuclear reactors.

As for those who moan about "what about Africa - its poor need coal!" - I would have thought that the media coverage of small towns suffering with the ebola outbreak last year would have given people an idea of the problems with electricity infrastructure in those countries.  Get out of the major cities and they look poor - very poor, with ramshackle infrastructure of all types.   It's not going to just be a question of building a coal burning power plant - there is huge work to be done with building and maintaining a grid.

The topic has been under discussion recently at Rabbett Run, where the good professor maintains that localised renewables are the best solution for a country where getting infrastructure built and maintained across large distances is a major issue.  Sounds very likely correct, to me...

Just silly....

Not long now and the atheists will be joining in too

Surge of radical Buddhism in South Asia

Bodu Bala Sena (BBS, the Buddhist Strength Force), a nationalist
Buddhist group with a notorious reputation, is being blamed for the
incident. Galagodaaththe Gnanasara Thera, the group's leader, gave a
speech around the time of the riots in which he claimed that the
Sinhalese Buddhist population was under serious threat from the Muslims.
This instigated further violence by large mobs, which attacked mosques
and burned down shops and houses in Muslim neighbourhoods.

I now will be distracted trying to think of a cool name for a group of radical armed atheists.  I mean if the Buddhists are now being thugs, the atheists can't be far behind...  

A good Krugman summary

Voodoo Time Machine - NYTimes.com

A nice list of the way the current Republicans have been wrong, but their ideological devotion prevents them admitting it.

Rising seas remembered?

Ancient Aboriginal stories preserve history of a rise in sea level

Why it's worth the trouble

Research affirms sexual reproduction avoids harmful mutations

The statute books not always a reliable guide

One of the interesting things in the story out of Egypt today about a bunch of men being acquitted after being arrested on national TV for being at a bathhouse is this:

Five of them - the owner of the bathhouse and four staff members - were tried for facilitating "parties of debauchery, orgies among male homosexuals" in exchange for money. The 21 others were charged with practising debauchery and "indecent public acts".

It is not illegal to be homosexual or engage in homosexual acts in Egypt. But the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA) says the charge of "debauchery" is often used to crack down on homosexual activity in the country.

The charge is more often used in cases involving prostitution, but Egyptian legislation - specifically Law 10 of 1961, On the Combat of Prostitution - mentions "prostitution" and "debauchery" together.

The Collins English Dictionary defines the world as "an instance of extreme dissipation"; other descriptions relate to "sensual pleasures".

Homosexuality remains a social and religious taboo within Egypt. However, the country is not the only place where, while not illegal, it is punished or discouraged using other laws.

Goes to show that it's not always a simple matter of seeing what's on the books to know how laws are used in a country.

I also saw at the end of the LA Times report on the matter:

Other often-ostracized groups have been targeted as well; on Saturday, an Egyptian court sentenced a 21-year-old man to three years in prison after he declared on Facebook that he was an atheist.

 And this in a country where the President just got kudos for calling on Islam to reform itself.  He's got his work cut out.

Even more reason to not see a movie

I missed this lengthy commentary at the New York Review of Books in December which is an even stronger attack on The Imitation Game for inaccuracy than the one I had previously linked to.

It sounds to me very much like what happened with the Anthony Hopkins version of Shadowlands - the bones of a true life story but with the details changed enough "for dramatic purposes" that the movie ends up not being all that true to the spirit of the characters it portrays.

Tolstoy re-visited

Somewhere on the net tonight I saw brief mention of Tolstoy having had a venereal disease as a young man, and thought to myself "did I know that before?"  Googling around, I stumbled across a lengthy extract from Paul Johnson's Intellectuals, which I read around 20 years ago, and indeed, it did have a full chapter on the many - and I mean many - character flaws of Leo, including the bit about VD. 

Intellectuals remains the most amusingly appalling book about character flaws of the famous that I have ever read.  Even though I am clearly forgetting the details, I remember how much I liked it at the time.  Of course, later it came out that Johnson had engaged in a lengthy marital sexual indiscretion himself, which would not have been quite so hypocritical if he hadn't spent so much time in his columns criticising the British Royal family for not sucking it up and foregoing extra marital relationships as an example to the nation.

Anyway, back to Tolstoy.  Another website (PBS, so the tone is slightly less scurrilous) talks at length about Tolstoy's life-long, um, neuroticism? about women and sex.   It seems he would, in modern parlance, probably be classified as a sex addict, but seemingly spent his entire life not only   intellectually disgusted with it, but also blame shifting onto women. 

It's a wonder his wife went ahead with the wedding at all:

Leo Tolstoy waited until he was 34 years old to marry, but once he had settled on 17-year-old Sofia Behrs, "Sonya," as his bride, he saw that events moved very quickly. At his insistence, but a single week elapsed between his proposal and their wedding on September 23, 1862 -- and in the course of that week Tolstoy asked, really required, his fiancée to read the intimate diaries he had kept for much of his life.

Sonya, the middle daughter of the Tsar's court physician, had grown up in the sheltered, innocent circumstances typical of girls of her class and time, and she had scant knowledge of men, including the man she had agreed to marry, beyond mild flirtation and adolescent fantasy. But now, days before her wedding, she found herself plunged into the sexual autobiography of a vigorous man in early middle age -- page after unsparing page recounting his initiation by a whore when he was 14, the string of impulsive, guilt-ridden erotic adventures with parlor maids, gypsies, and married women, the repeated bouts with venereal disease, and finally, and most recently, the deeply satisfying love affair with a peasant woman, with whom he had fathered a son just a few months before proposing to Sonya.

"I don't think I ever recovered from the shock of reading the diaries when I was engaged to him," Sonya wrote nearly 30 years later. "I can still remember the agonizing pangs of jealousy, the horror of that first appalling experience of male depravity."

 This episode apparently features in fictional form in Anna Karenina.

The article gives a short chronicle of how their marriage deteriorated (and yes, I had remembered that it developed into a high conflict relationship - I wonder if that is made clear enough in that recent movie about the end of his life?).  But this detail shows his incredible insensitivity:

In Sonya's eyes the ultimate affront was "Kreutzer Sonata," a story Tolstoy wrote in 1889 about a man driven by hatred, jealousy, and sexual disgust to murder his wife. Aside from the murder, it was an exact transcription of his feelings about her and the state of their marriage. At the heart of "Kreutzer Sonata" is a savage indictment of marriage as "legalized prostitution," of women as vengeful sirens bent on seducing and controlling men, and of human sexuality itself. For Sonya it was as if Tolstoy had hauled her naked onto a vast public stage and proceeded to sermonize about her moral and physical hideousness. And on top of everything, after railing against the act of love as "perfidious" and piglike, he continued to force himself on her sexually. To her, it was a betrayal worse than adultery. 

I really think he should have spent more time looking into her eyes.   (Ha.)
 

Causation very hard to believe

Circumcision doubles autism risk, study claims - Telegraph

There must be a hundred different ways to confirm or (much more likely) debunk the question of whether they have found anything indicating causation here, given the widely varying populations of males with and without a foreskin around the world.  Must be lots of researchers doing up grant applications on the topic as I write.

Falling in love made easy

To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This - NYTimes.com

I had not heard of this study before, indicating a way to make a couple fall in love (or, at least, push them strongly in that direction?):

“Actually, psychologists have tried making people fall in love,” I said, remembering Dr. Aron’s study. “It’s fascinating. I’ve always wanted to try it.”

I first read about the study when I was in the midst of a breakup. Each time I thought of leaving, my heart overruled my brain. I felt stuck.  So, like a good academic, I turned to science, hoping there was a way to love smarter.

I explained the study to my university acquaintance. A heterosexual man and woman enter the lab through separate doors. They sit face to face and answer a series of increasingly personal questions. Then they stare silently into each other’s eyes for four minutes. The most tantalizing detail: Six months later, two participants were married. They invited the entire lab to the ceremony.

Interesting.  I wonder if there is some connection with mutual eye staring as a common occurrence during or after sex?