January 2017

Clip looks a bit cheesy 80s now, but Farnham at his peak was a phenomenon. To this day that little vocal lick at 2:48 - how?

How sexy is smart?

Have been battling this mongrel for a couple of months now. Whooping cough is on the rise, and both the pro-vax and anti-vax crowds miss the point I think. We're possibly making the same mistakes with vaccination that we also made with antibiotics, we always want magic beans which will mean we don't have to actually think a bit. But with a bit of thought and research, there is a possible way out of the hell of this cough. More later.

Whooping cough part 2. Because it might get you next, whether you're vaccinated or not, and it isn't nice. But there are things you can do that can make you suffer a lot less. The treatment of whooping cough hasn't really changed in a century or more. Effectively there is no treatment that makes much difference, no cough suppressants, inhalers, steroids etc. Antibiotics make no difference to the progression of the disease, unless given very early, and even then the effect isn't large. Whooping cough is also growing in incidence. This isn't just because of people not vaccinating, the vaccines themselves are failing to reduce the incidence of the disease in any permanent way. Great recent summary of what the science is saying at the link below, including "Despite high and increasing vaccination coverage among children and adolescents, pertussis incidence is increasing." You can see that the pro-vax and anti-vax arguments only scratch the surface of what might be going on here, it's complicated. Part 3 will be what you can learn by going back in time about a century, to help defeat this disease.

*facepalm* so the Boomers' answer to the 'hate' that has come about mostly from their trashing of traditional institutions, is more of the same peace and love crap that started the ball rolling. From the same newspaper, some sound advice for the hippie loveniks: "Unfortunately, so much of what passes for activism now centres on an individualised moralism, less about changing the world than about making yourself feel (or perhaps sound) good while all about you everything remains exactly the same."

Memes are great, but (always) a bit of thought and research don't hurt. Like this one, you see it a lot. Bees are NOT dying out, it doesn't take long to find the actual facts. Also shaming people to repost things just generates spam. And maybe it raises some awareness, but whether it actually changes much is a bit open to question.

Those terrible millenials losing touch with the people around them, buried in their devices. Not in the olden days...

Final instalment on whooping cough. This is a table from a pretty famous scientific paper published in 1937. It's a small sample of treatments the Canadian medical researchers concerned (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1562195/pdf/canmedaj00527-0084.pdf) had tried on people with whooping cough. As you can see in every case, giving the patients Vitamin C cleared up the whooping cough in spectacularly quick time. They suggested the Vitamin C was acting to remove the toxins the Pertussis bacteria had deposited in a person's airways, and they followed this up with further studies which showed the same pattern. What they did which then decades of antibiotic enthusiasm forgot was to target the toxic byproducts of the bacteria, rather than just the bacteria itself. (Again antibiotics possibly encouraged a certain laziness in medical understanding of microbes - microbes live in communities, and often have byproducts that contribute to the disease as well.) They believed these byproducts were the reason people coughed for 100 days with whooping cough, long after the bacteria itself should be dead - the body was trying to clear the toxins, but this was very hard work and thus the extreme coughing. As you can see in some cases the coughing stopped in as little as 5 days, after patients were given relatively small amounts of vitamin C. I tried this myself. My cough felt amazingly better on the very first day, which surprised me, in a very happy way. And it's been getting better every day since, so much that sometimes I forget the cough is even there. I've been doing this only about 4 days. So if you have whooping cough or know somebody who has, I'd highly recommend trying some vitamin C. It won't hurt people, so it's a very safe experiment to try. Say maybe 500mg-1000mg a day, or a bit less for children (say 250mg). You can see this is the sort of amounts the Canadian researchers tried in 1937. This is the standard vitamin C tablet sizes you can buy, which makes it easy. There's a lot of research that says Vitamin C can be taken in huge doses without ill effect (tens or even hundreds of grams a day), but I think easiest to start with these lower doses. Too much can give you the runs, at which point you just cut back the dose, it's not harmful. You need to take enough to saturate the amount in your system, which can be a little trial and error (saturation is when you start to get the runs), but it's worth just trying the amounts above to start. If it's not having an effect, try a bit more vitamin C, and if you get the runs, cut it back a bit. There is medical research looking much harder at vitamin C now, and that it may in fact play a critical role in dealing with a range of bacterial and viral illnesses, including pneumonia. Medicine has had no real success with viral disease in particular, and there's a suggestion that vitamin C might be a powerful treatment for a whole range of viral illnesses. And maybe even more. I should add as a footnote that anti-vaxxers also discovered this paper and use it as an argument against vaccination, for whooping cough at least. That debate is a complicated one and not one for here, but I don't think vaccination is properly understood by either those for or against it, so there's a long way to go to get consensus there. Vaccination against whooping cough definitely reduced the rate of the disease pretty strongly at first, although as in the previous paper I posted, it's now fighting back and the vaccines are struggling. So the question is still an open one. I am vaccinated and will continue to get boosters as well, so it's not either/or for me. And for babies the vaccination has without question saved thousands of lives. But vaccination may not stop you getting the cough, and vitamin C may be the best friend you've ever had if that happens.

Schubert, probably the greatest songwriter ever, not just because he composed over 600 of them before he died at 31 (and amazingly that was only a fraction of the music he composed), but because in the process he was pretty much the inventor of songs themselves, as a form of music. Songs dominate popular music today - easy to forget somebody had to invent them as a form in the first place.

'Terrifying' and 'crisis' might be a bit over the top. But still pretty sober stats, a person commits suicide on average every 3 hours in Australia, and it's the leading cause of death for people aged between 15 and 44. Also interesting to wonder why the highest rate of suicide for men (who are 3 times more likely as a whole to commit suicide than women) is in the 85+ age bracket. The lack of legal euthanasia options?

Remember those vacuum cleaner salesmen who would come door to door, and leave people a couple of grand poorer with a great machine but scratching their heads wondering why they agreed to buy one? This video seems a bit like that. It's been getting a lot of shares and furious agreement on FB. It's that instant emotional 'oh yeah!' that people seem to get from it that rings alarm bells, for me. It's a master salesman at work, and I'm not questioning his serious intent (although this is how he makes his living), but this is the arguments he actually makes, about Millenials: 1) they feel entitled 2) they're narcissistic 3) they're self-interested 4) they're unfocused 5) they're lazy. Sinek further says this is down to poor parenting, lack of proper relationship skills, and phones and iPads giving Millenials perpetual dopamine fixes (in other words, mind-altering states, like taking drugs). The problem with all of this is that it's completely interchangeable with every 'young people today' argument made for about the last 500 years. Almost to the letter, you can pick any time in history in the last few hundred years and this is what people have said about young people. Any video called "This is Exactly What's Wrong with this Generation" was never really going to say anything else.

Another win for travel.

My foot, absolutely naked.

Nobody is giving away RVs. Google is simple to use people.

It's a good question.

My wife is a librarian so I'm nervous criticising this! But librarians aren't really there to just find information for you, so I'm safe. Sometimes I wonder if people really understand how Google works. Google doesn't give you 100,000 random results, instead it finds the results that say 100,000 (or more) people found the most helpful, to them. So it's like having 100,000+ librarians searching for you.

Every summer the debate happens, is it better to open or close windows and doors, to keep a house cool? It depends. Nice summary here, but generally keep it open at night and closed during the day. But only if your house is insulated. http://theconversation.com/how-to-keep-your-house-cool-in-a-heatwave-21991

If you think dole bludgers are the problem, you're one of the reasons Trump succeeded. This guy gets it.

Hahaha, GOLD. It would be nice if 2017 was the year when we started to attack the screwers rather than the being-screwed.

Trump was elected by people who feel (usually rightly) screwed by the way countries are being run. So every time a Hollywood star gets up and trashes Trump, I'm sure it gives them a warm inner glow, but it just makes the problem worse. So Meryl's rant was stupid, if the aim is to combat Trump. It will just have enraged and energized Trump supporters even more, and reinforced in their minds that the 'elites' (including Hollywood stars) are on the side of the people screwing them.

I was one of those critical of John Howard and Peter Costello's massive 'middle class welfare' increases to family payments during the mining boom. But to give Howard his due (I don't think Costello was ever a fan), he saw it as a type of wealth redistribution, towards families, and that's not such a bad thing. All over now though. Amazing what this current crop of feral accountants we have running the country will do just to get a budget into the black. Lots of low hanging fruit at the top end of town, they're not going anywhere near it. Keep kicking the people who can least afford it. http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/lifestyle/parenting/are-you-on-top-of-centrelinks-family-benefits-changes/news-story/f4a8d17aa561572e9bedd6b91dd8c938?utm_content=SocialFlow&utm_campaign=EditorialSF&utm_source=DailyTelegraph&utm_medium=Facebook

Love it

The big modernist revival in homes in the last couple of decades - open plan everywhere, everything white and chrome and glassy and boxy, complete saturation with light, lots of hard floors with exhausting echoes etc. is (for me) as boring as modernism was when it was first invented. It's all about visuals and not much about the visceral, about how things look rather than how they really feel. Sometimes it's the spaces that are purely functional that avoid that sort of self-consciousness. Like old workshops, haberdasheries, general stores, sheds. Spaces that feel less like a showroom and more embracing and intimate.

Amazing research, data can really change lives. Gun violence in the US shows patterns very like contagious diseases. Nearly always the problem is heavily concentrated in very small areas, amongst very small groups of people. This means the problem is much more 'treatable' than first thought.

Still gold, a year later :)

"Haven't had a really hot summer for a few years now", he said. What could go wrong.

I posted this a few years ago, but think it's so important and interesting that it's worth revisiting. Harris also has a stake in the whole science-religion wars (he's a devout atheist), but that's irrelevant for this particular case, the science he speaks about is well established. A massive public health issue. https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-fireplace-delusion/

3 out of 4 Australian homes now have air conditioning. With rising electricity prices (some of which is due to the extra demand from air conditioners), these cost a bomb to run and make the climate warmer in the process - bit of a vicious circle. There's a new technology called indirect evaporative cooling, and it costs about 10% of what it costs to run a traditional air conditioner, for cooling. Also unlike older evaporative coolers, this new technology produces completely dry air, and chills the air as much if not more than a refrigerated air conditioner. They're already installed on many commercial buildings but they're being slow in bringing out residential models. So everybody should write to them and ask, to speed it up! You can find out about the technology here, and there's a contact link to write to them. It's Seeley, major air con supplier. http://www.climatewizard.com

Ha.

With apologies, Cameron Stevenson.

Come on Queensland, this is the one smart thing you ever did. Don't change it.

I'm a wee bit late, but Happy Birthday :)

40 today? Big birthday! Enjoy

Climate sceptics seem to have very long summer holidays, they go extraordinarily quiet in the hot months.

Robert Quillen once described Americanism in this way, although it's probably a global thing now. "Using money you haven't earned to buy things you don't need to impress people you don't like."

Work sets you free. There are so many things for us to ponder about this Nazi sign, in 2016, let's learn from something that millions died to get rid of, and remember that it all started very small, in lack of respect for others. History doesn't repeat, but it sure does rhyme, as Mark Twain said.

Does anybody else remember Michael Bentine's Potty Time?

Such a big show-off.

People are still obsessed with Trump, and not with what made him possible. He's a distraction. And as this piece says, the other side of the political fence - the progressives - are masters at "gorging themselves on symbolism", and actually achieving nothing..."there’s a difference between things that look different and make you feel good, and things that make a difference and actually do good." Obama, or the Obamas, definitely made progressives feel good. They're lovely people. Trudeau is the same in Canada. But the test has to be things that make a difference and actually DO good, not things that make us feel good.

Happy Birthday Katy, it's been a while!

Does that really say 75? Happy Birthday!

Obviously these 8 guys work about 500 million times harder than the 3.6 billion leaners. Duh, supply and demand. https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2017-01-16/just-8-men-own-same-wealth-half-world

Muso memes to start the day.

My own history is a father who grew up under the extreme nationalism of the Nazis. So I've never found any national days much chop to be honest, patriotism can be a very dangerous thing. Being proud of your country is fine, patriotism though is telling other people how to be proud of their country. How to be an Australian. Let people work that out for themselves, there's more than one way, it's like a grown-up version of fighting over toys. People can be proud of their country without having to be told how that should look. This article deals nicely with some of the usual claims, like "it's in the past move on", and makes the very valid point - if that's true, why don't we say the same thing about Anzac Day? And "this all happened long before I was born, I'm not responsible". A classic misunderstanding of how history works, the Magna Carta happened in the past too and we all enjoy the freedoms that came from that, like fair trials and democracy. So we can't just cherry pick the bits of history we want to keep, and the bits we don't. I don't have a strong view about changing the date, which is the title of the article, I'm more interested in national days and patriotism more generally. But there is a clear argument for changing the date too, which should be THOUGHT about rather than people just wetting their pants and going off on predictable rants. I'm a big fan of people pausing to think.

Can't wait :) Brian May is an international treasure, and has one of the world's greatest collections of stereoscopic photography. Including these, will be a fascinating insight into this still misunderstood band, which he of course founded.

Is there a chance this will now mean we'll pay the same (less) for Vegemite here in Australia as they do everywhere else in the world? It's a disgrace, outrageously expensive.

"You're only young once, but you can be immature forever." Germaine Greer One way to look at the problems in the world is to ask just how many people properly develop into mature adults. And how many don't, living a sort of permanent adolescence, in what interests them, their hobbies, their views, their finances, their emotional resilience. And how much they use up the world in this inability to know themselves and to just be, endlessly bored and anxious and needing distraction from their own selves.

How often do you think people who go into the highest levels of public life look in the mirror and wonder if it was all worth it? Would Obama trade his time as President for some of his lost youth?

Be the person who doesn't care what other people think.

The anglepoise lamp is a classic of design. It seems to defy gravity because you can put it in just about any position, and it will seem to float there. Your body is designed to do a similar thing, but no gym or workout or exercise program will tell you that. Your body will support you effortlessly in your everyday sitting and standing and walking, and whatever else, with no effort needed from you. Learning how to use it like that is much more important than any workout.

Kids need structured ways to push boundaries. Rites of passage. Otherwise they just try to emulate adult behaviour, using drugs and drink for example. @[1240225973:2048:Dave Nell Thompson] @[100003561960932:2048:Chelsea Walsh] @[1103698174:2048:Lydia Balat Commins] @[738682522:2048:Nicole Stevenson]

The Alps must be one of the most magical places on the planet. The world over the rich have taken control of beautiful alpine landscapes. Which is a shame, but then you can still visit, if you sell one of your kids or your kidneys.

With that 'do Scarlett bears a striking resemblance to you @[584373168:2048:Peita Vincent]

"It’s just the latest manifestation of the dangerous illusion that it is possible to have democracy without political parties—and that street protests based more on social media than sustained political organizing is the way to change society."

Amidst the great collective orgasm of protest, some people are still thinking. "Progressives on both sides of the Atlantic are on the sidelines, unable to comprehend what they are observing."

The symmetry of this graph speaks for itself. Politics without unions means governing for the top 1% of society alone. Join a union. Your opinion is hot air without them.

Happy Birthday a day late, because everybody else was saying it yesterday, it's more special this way :)

I do like this pic. So it gets a reposting.

Hooray! And only one thing missed - that we already have the institutions to do the heavy lifting. They're called unions. They know how to do it, they've done it before. "But it is up to the left to do something with this energy. This can go one of two ways. The anti-Trump marchers can follow the chaotic, confused demise of the Occupy Movement. Or, they can organize into an effective political force like the Tea Party did. Which means much more than carrying placards and shouting slogans. After all, as the sun set on Washington on Saturday, not much had actually changed. Donald Trump is still going to sleep in the White House, where the bulletproof windows will block out any noise of the protesters at the gates outside. And not one comma has been changed in the Republican agenda. Today’s marches didn’t actually achieve anything concrete. It was therapy. It created a sense that those opposed to Trump are not alone, it gave hope that all is not lost, and it gave people a sense of purpose. But none of those things will actually move the levers of power. Change requires more than a rally. It requires people to organize. It needs citizens to run for office, and if not to run, then to support those who do. Change needs money. It needs calls and letters to Congress. And, above all else, it needs votes." Scott Gilmore.

Me filming a Coke Zero commercial in bad-fitting sunnies. And some guy auditioning for Karate Kid. You'll never guess where.

Happy Birthday wine goddess! See you later :)

Happy Birthday Sarah :)

And when they get there, they'll learn the one thing nobody is talking about. That most of politics doesn't happen in government. It has to be organised outside of government. So they'll get there and like every other well-meaning person or group who ran for parliament and succeeded, realise that they're pretty powerless to change much at all.

Edmund Burke saw institutions as the heart of public life, and that rampant individualism was the source of public breakdown. Modern conservatives have been destroying institutions as fast as they can manage, which puts them completely at odds with him, ironic given that he's their hero. The passion in protests around the world at the moment is a sure indication that institutions have broken down. No amount of protesting will restore them. That's our real task, not complaint but re-building. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/10046562/Edmund-Burke-the-great-conservative-who-foresaw-the-discontents-of-our-era.html

Except, in very hushed tones, this: http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124

I'm not popular in thinking tourism and travel are a bit of an unrecognised plague on the planet, driven hugely by Westerners who use up other places to try to relieve a deep existential boredom, that they feel but don't understand. Barcelona has had enough. "As tourists, we hate it when our trips are spoilt by them. But we often don't recognise ourselves as part of that selfsame heaving mass. What cities need, we tell ourselves, are people like us, and not those we define as undesirable. The undesirables, meanwhile, are eyeing us with the same thought. Perhaps to make cities like Barcelona a better place for everyone, we should all consider sacrificing our own visits and find somewhere a bit more off the beaten track to ruin."

There are still people who think Ozzie house prices are too high because of a lack of supply. Not enough land release etc. "It's all supply and demand", that sort of rubbish. Property developers have used that one for years, it makes them rich. New land release in little old Lithgow, $200K+ to get an empty block less than 1000 square meters. Yeh, the problem is supply, *cough*.

The French Prosecutor responsible for coordinating executions during The Great Terror in the French Revolution apparently said on his own way to the guillotine, "so will your bread be any cheaper tomorrow, you fools?" History repeats because we get way too focused on leaders.

Every year I give a plug to Margaret Court, an astonishing sportsperson who is not properly appreciated. Serena Williams has just won her 23rd grand slam singles title, which is amazing, but still one behind Court's 24. But you don't get a true sense of Court's achievement until you look at ALL grand slam titles, including doubles and mixed doubles. Court won 64 grand slam titles in total. Williams has 38. Federer, who gets so much praise, doesn't even make the top 10 in total grand slam titles for men. Rafael Nadal is not even in the top 20. Court also: - is the only woman to win the mixed doubles grand slam. And she did it twice. - she won nearly 92% of singles games she played, and the same nearly 92% of all grand slam finals she played. Those are unequalled stats. - she had children while amassing these records. - Court is the only tennis player in history to to complete a multiple slam set, twice, in all three disciplines: singles, women's doubles and mixed doubles. Thanks to Scott Tully for reminding me last year that Heather McKay, the almost unbelievable Australian women's squash legend, may even surpass Court in genius. McKay did not lose a single game between 1962 and 1981, and won the British Open (the Wimbledon of squash) 16 times in a row.

"As usual, the left and centre (myself included) are beating ourselves up about where we went wrong. There are plenty of answers, but one of them is that we have simply been outspent. Not by a little, but by orders of magnitude. A few billion dollars spent on persuasion buys you all the politics you want. Genuine campaigners, working in their free time, simply cannot match a professional network staffed by thousands of well-paid, unscrupulous people. You cannot confront a power until you know what it is. Our first task in this struggle is to understand what we face. Only then can we work out what to do." Join a union, people. Join two, I have. That's the 'professional network' for all of us non-billionaires. The only thing these people are frightened of is organised and sustained resistance, they smile at protest, they see it as like farting into the wind. But they fear unions, this article describes again how hard they fight to destroy unions. That tells you all you need to know.

Have been waiting to trial this, saw it first in our winter and now the heat is here, time to give it a go. Zero energy air con. http://inhabitat.com/this-amazing-bangladeshi-air-cooler-is-made-from-plastic-bottles-and-uses-no-electricity/

Helicopters are fickle, cruel beasts.

This one lets German industry off the hook a little, it was more actively financing and supporting Hitler than is suggested here. But otherwise a good summary. All bad things in politics come from people being excluded and impoverished, like the Germans after WW1. The people eventually have had enough, and unless you offer them some practical way to take control back over their own lives, they'll rush to populists every time. Getting rid of or protesting against the populist leaders achieves almost nothing, and probably makes things worse. It angers the people who saw the populist as their salvation. Why the obsession with Trump is almost as dangerous as the man himself. I'll keep playing the broken record. Join a union. That's the *practical* way to restore the peoples' input to politics, and it's simple and cheap to do. Smashing unions was one of the first things Hitler did. Unions are the counterbalancing force in all democracies, without them they fall apart. The Germans are smart, they now have some of the strongest unions in the world. It's been great for business, and for civil peace.

Happy Birthday!

Remember Dumb and Dumber?

Another way to look at Trump's success (thanks Scott Tully) is to look at how ordinary people have lost power in politics. Those are the people who voted for Trump, although the rest of us have lost power too and voting for somebody else wouldn't have changed it anyway. In the US, legislation has on average a 31% chance of passing. If the Bill is favoured by the public, that chance rises to 32%. If the public doesn't like a Bill, its chances of passing fall to 30%. In other words the public means diddly squat to legislators. However when a Bill is favoured by the richest 10% of Americans, it passes on average 65% of the time. When a Bill is opposed by the richest 10%, the chance of it passing drops to 0%. I'll re-post the graph below that shows the way out of this mess. Trump isn't the problem, he's what the problem made possible. Join a union people. Now. Fast.

Dear summer Was nice meeting you again. Please go away.

Looking for that perfect TV dinner tray?

For years unelected cranky old bastards like this have been telling everybody how to run the world. Now we have a chance to see how that would work out. It's called Trump.