The ABC joined the ranks of woomeisters by reporting on the views of the “Australian Vaccination Network”:

The Australian Vaccination Network lobby group says more testing of the swine flu vaccine needs to be done before it is given to the public. The Federal Government has ordered 21 million doses of the vaccine developed by CSL.

Unfortunately giving air time to these woomiesters just encourages them and that is not something our nationally-funded broadcaster should be doing.

The Australian Vaccination Network, despite its harmless sounding name, is a full blown Anti-vaxxer organisation.

If you look at their website, all pictures of babies and wildflowers, they just appear to be one of those mushy alternative medicine types, but when you read what they say in detail:

We believe it is a parent’s right to choose what’s best for their child…some would say that this is one of the most basic rules of any civilised society.

Vaccines have never been tested

The gold standard of medical science is the double blind crossover placebo study. This test has never been performed on any vaccine currently licensed in Australia. In an astounding leap of logic, contrary to all rules of science, vaccines are assumed to be safe and effective and therefore, it is considered to be unethical to withhold vaccinations for the purposes of testing them.

Vaccines can cause serious long-term side effects

According to medical reports, children are now less healthy than they have ever been before. More than 40% of all children now suffer from chronic conditions, something that was unheard of prior to mass vaccination.

Vaccines do not necessarily protect against infectious diseases

For the very real risk of both short and long-term side effects from vaccines, parents are asked to allow their children to be given vaccines that at best, will provide a temporary sensitisation to illnesses and at worst, can make their children more susceptible to both opportunistic and infectious illness. As evidenced by the recent whooping cough outbreak in SA, the only Australian state which actually records vaccination status in cases of infectious illness, 87% of all those who contracted whooping cough and whose vaccination status was known were fully and appropriately vaccinated.

Pharmaceutical companies have paid for almost all vaccine research to date

Just as the tobacco companies paid for corrupt and incorrect research which purported to show that tobacco and tobacco products were safe for human consumption, so too the pharmaceutical companies have paid for and produced almost all of the research into vaccines.

Some childhood illnesses have beneficial aspects and therefore, prevention may not necessarily be in the best interests of the child

Measles, for example, has been used in Scandinavian countries to successfully treat such autoimmune conditions as eczema and many studies have performed which show that children who do not contract measles naturally as a child are more likely to suffer from certain cancers later in life.

With lists like this it is not even clear where to start:

There is ample evidence vaccines are effective, mass vaccination helped eradicate smallpox, which once killed as many as every seventh child in Europe.

While claiming the need for serious testing of vaccines, AVN can make wild assertions that children are less healthy than every before (tell that to families of the 19th century with their child mortality rates) and that chronic conditions are associated with the rise of vaccinations.

Pretty much all drugs produced by Pharmaceutical companies are tested by those companies, are AVN suggesting that all pharmaceuticals be avoided?

The measles is good for you!

They just link misinformation together in a long line of false assertions. As the Australian Sceptics report they:

…ignores the fact that this is an open debate rather than the back-room conspiracy which it claims vaccine production and distribution to be. It is happy to quote scientists claiming this vaccine is not safe enough, while it usually claims that scientists are silent on the risks of vaccines. It provides publically-available statistics and information on side-effects while at the same time claiming that such information is not available.

This double standard is also shown in the AVN demanding a full scientific investigation of vaccine safety and efficacy while promoting homeopathic treatments that have been scientifically proven to have no efficacy beyond a placebo effect and no effective ingredients whatsoever.

The ABC reporting this rubbish is no different to them reporting the anti-psychiatrist viewpoints of the Scientologists.

The firepower story continues to drag along. Dan’s article updates us on the latest outcomes in the case. It has been an amazing case of lies and deception and gullibility and greed. Everything that is wrong in humanity is summed up in this case.

I was watching the new episode of “City Homicide”* and the photographer who is killed at the beginning of the show is using a Mac, which is not surprising for a creative type, but the cop uses one as well! I can tell you that I have absolutely no doubt that that is completely unlikely.

It now seems that every single show or movie I watch has macs in it** which makes it appear if makes are the only kinds of computers in the world.

I actually find this a little annoying and am wondering if all the movie and TV studios have tied up some kind of contract with Apple.

Notes:
* Which despite being obviously# set in Melbourne, seems to have signage for a ‘State Police” rather than Victoria Police, in some attempt to make the show cityless and stateless. this is either just petty Australian parochialism or an attempt to sell the show on the world market.
# to me
** Bones, they show that I watched last night also had Macs. the other interesting thing about Bones (another forensic pathologist show) is that it appears that forensic pathologist have little programs for providing nifty animations of almost any process they undertake in the lab.

This article is about a company making beer using a yeast recovered from amber 45 million years old.

Carl Zimmer, the science journalist has an article up at Corante (whatever that is), which takes an interesting look at Toxoplasma gondii. This is the parasite that cats have that is the reason pregnant women are not allowed to handle kitty litter.

The toxoplasma parasites live in the gut of cats, producing eggs which are excreted and are picked up by other animals in their surrounds, like rats. But to complete the life cycle the toxoplasma must return to the host, the cat. For this to happen the rat must be eaten by the cat. But generally rats have a fear of cats, which Carl Zimmer reports has been shown by experimentation:

The scientists studied the rats in a six-foot by six-foot outdoor enclosure. They used bricks to turn it into a maze of paths and cells. In each corner of the enclosure they put a nest box along with a bowl of food and water. On each the nests they added a few drops of a particular odor. On one they added the scent of fresh straw bedding, on another the bedding from a rat’s nests, on another the scent of rabbit urine, on another, the urine of a cat. When they set healthy rats loose in the enclosure, the animals rooted around curiously and investigated the nests. But when they came across the cat odor, they shied away and never returned to that corner. This was no surprise: the odor of a cat triggers a sudden shift in the chemistry of rat brains that brings on intense anxiety.

But when the rats were infected with the toxoplasma (which gets into their brains) their behaviour was different:

The scent of a cat in the enclosure didn’t make them anxious, and they went about their business as if nothing was bothering them. They would explore around the odor at least as often as they did anywhere else in the enclosure. In some cases, they even took a special interest in the spot and came back to it over and over again.

The toxoplasma actually infected the rats brain to make them less scared of cats, so that they are more likely to be eaten by cats, allowing the toxoplasma to return to the cat-host and reproduce in its gut.

Now this toxoplasma also infects humans, and half of all people are estimated to be infected. We also know that half of all people are dog people, and half are cat people. How did that half become cat people? I think we know now. They are all infected with toxoplasma gondii.

In related news, there are lots of these parasites that effect animal behaviour, for example, so as to make ants climb high to release their spores:

The Big Picture Has a series of beautiful photos from the Cassini mission as it passes Jupiter.

My favourite picture is of the storms on saturn:

But check them all out!

The Red One is a recent digital camera produced by the Red Digital Camera Company. The camera shots at greater than HD and at up to 120 frames per second, which allows the production of great slow-mo video.

As an example, here is a clip shot on the Red One.

skate – shot on red #1347 – 120 fps from Opus Magnum Production on Vimeo.

The music is ‘It’s Alright’ by Bang Gang and the site appears to be the Trocadéro in Paris.

JG Ballard has just passed away. Described by the New York Times suchly: Ballard would eventually be deemed worthy of his own adjective, “Ballardian,” defined by the Collins English Dictionary as “resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard’s novels & stories, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes & the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.”

It is always difficult to get a sense of an author from a short passage, but this is from a short story, Voices of Time:

The dome was in darkness, all the windows shuttered, but the generator still hummed in the X-ray theatre. Kaldren stepped through the entrance and switched on the lights. In the theatre he touched the grilles of the generator, felt the warm cylinder of the beryllium end-window. The circular target table was revolving slowly, set at 1 r.p.m., a steel restraining chair shackled to it hastily. Grouped in a semi-cicle a few feet away were most of the tanks and cages, piled on top of each other haphazardly. In one of them was the enormous squid-like plant had almost managed to climb from it vivarium. Its long translucent tendrils clung to the end of the tank, but it body had burst into a jellified pool of globular mucilage. In another an enormous spider had trapped itself in its own web, hung helplessly in the centre of a huge three dimensional maze of phosphorescing thread, twitching spasmodically.

All the experimental plants and animals had died. The chimp lay on its back among the remains of the hutch, the helmet forward over its eyes. Kaldren watched it for a moment, then sat down on the desk and picked up the phone.

While he dialed the number he noticed a film reel lying on the blotter. For a moment, he stared at the label, then slid the reel into his pocket beside the tape.

After he had spoken to the police he turned down the lights and went out to the car, drove off slowly down the drive.

When he reached the summer house the early sunlight was breaking across the ribbon-like balconies and terraces. He took the lift to the penthouse, made his way through into the museum. One by one he opened the shutters and let the sunlight play over the exhibits. Then he pulled the a chair over to a side window, sat and stared up at the light pouring through into the room.

Two or three hours later he heard Coma outside, calling up to him. After half an hour she went away, but a little later a second voice appeared and shouted up at Kaldren. He left his chair and closed all the shutters overlooking the front courtyard, and eventually he was left undisturbed.

Kaldren returned to his seat and lay back quietly, his eyes gazing across the line of exhibits. Half asleep, periodically he leaned up and adjusted the flow of light through the shutter, thinking to himself, as he would do in the coming months of Powers and his strange mandala, and of the seven and their journey to the white gardens of the moon, and the blue people who had come from Orion and spoken in poetry to them of the ancient beautiful worlds beneath golden suns in the island of galaxies, vanished for ever now in the myriad deaths of the cosmos.

JG Ballard, The Voices of Time, 1960.

It seems like you cannot go past a TV show or movie at the moment that they do not have Apple computers lying around the place. I was watching 30 Rock just before and when they went to check some Puerto Rican website, they of course wandered over to Jack Donaghy’s computer which looked like a 24″ iMac:

This is of course the same computer that I use:

I have heard that even hardcore geeks are into macs because it is Unix based and thus is essentially a Unix computer with a nice GUI, so all the linux geeks get into them.

I know I have posted on this in the past, but there are now available large high-res photos on the Chaiten volcano (with the lightening and what not) at the Big Picture website.

Chaiten Volcano

While on the topic I do recommend popping over to the Big Picture every now and then, they have some great news photography at a higher resolution than you will find elsewhere.

Pharyngula is a science blog by PZ Myers, and he does not take much liking to the suggestion that Alzheimer’s is caused by extraterrestrials.

I can see why a scientist would not be a great fan of the article:

Dr. Salla specifically documents Manipulative Extraterrestrials that use mind control weapons technologies, that interfere with human cognitive functions. Could Alzheimer’s be a side effect of an alleged interference in human cognitive functions?

…Dr. Salla, Dr. Lash, and other learned researchers suggest that such human conditions as Alzheimer’s and Dementia may be appreciated by becoming aware of Manipulative Extraterrestrial interference against human free will.

…The Bible itself in pre-translated forms, as presented by Biblical scholars, actually contains specific warnings against these apparent Manipulative Extraterrestrials, who have apparently sought to interfere in human cognitive/neurological processes.

It would appear that aliens are “Archons” are manipulating our minds, causing diseases and we were warned in the bible before the aliens manipulated our minds to remove the references in later bibles.

Where are these ideas coming from? Searching on the name Dr John Singh turns up another interesting article, also on the website of “The Canadian” this one entitled Totalitarianism as a Manipulative Extraterrestrial Ruse:

…research on the Gnostics, suggests that Manipulative Extraterrestrials called “archons” as “trojan horses”, seek to infiltrate human institutions. David Icke’s testimony inspires consideration on whether signs of activity, that is voided on basic human decency do not suggest the work of an alien intruder, operating in a mimicked human form, using the simple technology of virtual reality…Adolf Hitler, another dictator that ruled over Nazi Germany, in the same era of Joseph Stalin, has been documented as acting as an operative of Manipulative Extraterrestrials, in the perpetration of Crimes Against Humanity, which include the Holocaust. Adolf Hilter has been historically documented as being a member of the UFO oriented Thule society, before his rise to power.

The David Icke reference is an interesting one, but for the moment continuing with the current path the presentation of these articles on a seemingly mainstream paper’s website does seem a bit funny. Admittedly I haven’t heard of it, but I have heard of the Australian, and this seems comparable? Looking at the front page, the first article is about Obama, uh oh….

Hitler became infamous for talking “hope” and peace through “non-aggression packs”, as he prepared for the violence of invasion and “Blitzkrieg” (lightening war).

“Hitler? Are you kidding me?” you might ask. But, who in Germany during the 1930’s in a time of sought democratic renewal, would have predicted the that Germany would start a World War, under a dictatorial government, that would seek to use concentration camps? “Concentration camps? We don’t have those.” Well, that’s not what the evidence suggests, according to investigative journalists that notably include Alex Jones. Mr. Jones and others allege such camps are ready and waiting to accept “designated occupants”

I should note that the article is also written by Dr John Singh. I suddenly realise we are in woo-woo territory. When you scroll down the articles, an awful lot of them seem to involve extraterrestrials:

Manipulative extraterrestrials and mind control

Capitalism: An alien ideology from who were as human being [sic]

Hurricanes and the Bermuda Triangle

Ethical Extraterrestrials and the maturation of the galactic culture

Florida: UFO’s, extraterrestials and the parachutist

(I would also note a number of articles about transgender issues. Go figure).

So we are talking about a UFO website with links to Gnosticism and thus to broader Conspiracy Theory issues. Which provides the link to David Icke, who, on googling, turns out to be a leading proponent of conspiracy theories. From his wikipedia article:

At the heart of Icke’s theories is the view that the world is ruled by a secret group referred to as the “Global Elite” or “Illuminati,” which he has linked to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, while not denying that these are an anti-semitic hoax. In 1999, he published The Biggest Secret, in which he wrote that the Illuminati are a race of reptilian humanoids known as the Babylonian Brotherhood, and that many prominent figures are reptilian, including George W. Bush, Queen Elizabeth II, Kris Kristofferson, and Boxcar Willie.

This is great, you want your conspiracy theories Big and Beautiful. The Jews running the world was a bit simple, and the ET’s going around re-writting the bible and giving us all headaches is not really up there. But George Bush and the Queen being secret reptilian humanoids, now that is a conspiracy theory you can love. We are in Dr who territory with that one.

I always kind of knew these theories were out there, but to see them all out there so blatantly makes you pause. Kind of like running bare foot into bindies in the grass and having to back out very slowly. In this particular case there is also a big turd with the bindies:

David Icke is coming to Melbourne in April 2009! Truth Movement Australia is putting on an event- you can book tickets now!

I was listening to the In Our Times episode on vitalism, and suddenly the story of Frankenstein’s monster make more sense.

If you remember Dr Frankenstein creates a creature by animated a body through the use of electricity.

As outlined in the radio program, vitalism dealt with the ‘spark of life’ the thing that gave a living human life, the thing absent from the dead. As knowledge and science advanced in the 19th century electricity came to be seen as a candidate for this ‘spark of life’. For example one scientist was able to make a dead frog legs twitch by running electricity through them.

Matthew Yglesias posted on the lack of ‘fighters’ in Star Trek:

The Imperial Star Destroyer of the Star Wars universe is a hybrid battleship/aircraft carrier, capable (according to Wikipedia) of carrying 72 TIE fighters plus auxiliaries, but also capable of fighting it out ship-to-ship.

All of this makes me wonder why the ships in Star Trek are so clearly cruisers and battleships, rather than aircraft carriers. As far as I can tell, no race in the series employs vessels that act as motherships to large numbers of fighters.

Clearly this is a question that calls for a made-up answer. So what I would say is that most likely in the Star Trek universe it’s not technologically feasible to equip a craft smaller than a Defiant-class starship with deflector shields. You could attribute that to the physics of the deflector fields themselves, or the need for a large power supply, or what have you. Either way, the upshot is that piloting a small craft in battle would be tantamount to suicide.

In sympathy with Matt’s call for imaginary answers, I think this issue requires serious consideration. However, i think the real question is why the Imperial Star Destroyers in Stars Wars had fighters at all.

The use of a large mother-ship with smaller fighters attached is an obvious homage to the aircraft carriers of World War Two, particularly the Pacific Theatre of the war where they were a decisive component of the American forces.

These aircraft carriers were a combination of a mother-ship with associated fighters. But it was the nature of the medium that made this work, that is the fighting was occurring a the interface of water and air. It allows the combination of water-based large, heavy, slow ships with air-based light, fast fighters.

You don’t see this occurring in other aspects of earth-side modern (or world war two) warfare. You don’t see tanks mother-ships with little fighter tanks, or long range bombers with little fighters tucked inside them.

This is also relevant the the space medium of the Imperial Star Destroyers. Both the ISD and the fighters travel through the same medium and would seem to be little reason to create separate types of space craft (that is, it is going to be more effective to make big ships – or small – but once you know that your best strategy is to make as many of those as possible).

So the question for Star wars, and Battlestar Galactica, is why have fighters at all?

SBS played an old science fiction movie, Outland on TV last night. This is a kind of space western staring Sean Connery.

The interesting thing that struck me while watching the show was the way future technology was presented in the film. While there were aspects that were obviously ‘futuristic’, such as the location on the moon Io and the space suits, there were aspects that were not so futuristic but rather quite ‘of the time’ (1981).

One was the very seventies LED style displays:

Also of its time was the green screen computer display:

The computer paper was also an interesting addition. This type of paper would hardly be recognised by young kids today, the dot matrix and daisy wheel printers it was used with have all but disappeared.

There would appear to be a couple of reasons were using this technology in the film, the most obvious one being the very technological constraints of the show. The production of futuristic buildings and environments is relatively simple through modelling and filming effects, the more specific technology is more difficult to reproduce. What does a futuristic computer look like, and in any case how do you create one?

The other reason is more cultural. At the time, certain technology was considered ‘cutting edge’ and ‘modern’, for example personal computers and LED time displays. For a movie trying to show its futuristic setting, it is actually easier to use contemporary technology that is familiar to the audience than trying to invent a futuristic that may be unrecognisable as such to the audience.

This also explains the computer paper. Nothing says future technology in 1981 more than computer paper, even if thought about logically it is unlikely to be used a hundred years in the future.

The Boston Globe has some of the best pictures of the new Large Hadron Collider that I have seen.

(The pictures are much larger than the one shown above).

The LHC, a massive instrument constructed collaboratively by Governments around the world to search for the most fundamental and elusive particles in physics, seems to me to represent all that is best in the world.

Note: Little known factoid gleaned from the Wikipedia page above: In the novel ‘Angels and Demons’ by Dan Brown the LHC is used as a weapon to fire at the Vatican. That facts confirms everything I ever thought about Dan Brown.

The Phoenix spacecraft, recently arrived on Mars, has uncovered, below where its engines blew away the soil, what potentially looks like ice.

See more at Universe Today.

These imagines of a storm over a volcano in Southern America are quite amazing:

http://megagalerias.terra.cl/galerias/index.cfm?id_galeria=30734 http://megagalerias.terra.cl/galerias/index.cfm?id_galeria=30734

I think I can safely predict that some Science Fiction movie director is going to pick up on those images and we will see invading alien spaceships that look surprisingly similar to those lightening infested dust clouds.

I was accidentally watching this ABC Science show on TV (Sleek Geeks), and I saw an interesting article on Deja Vu, which gave a different cause than the one I have assumed for a long time.

On the show they described the sense of Deja Vu to be dues to the interaction of certain memory paths in the brain. The feed to your brain from your eyes gets fed to the cerebral cortex at the back of the skull, and due to the length of time taken to get there, a lower quality feed of what you eyes are seeing is fed to the front of the brain, just in case you need to undertake any emergency action (eg jump out from the front of a car). This second fed is usually almost immediately discarded if not used, however if you do use it, then you will also see the full colour back-of-the-skull feed straight afterwards, giving you the sense of Deja Vu.

Personally I like my theory, although I cannot remember where it came from (or did I make it up). When the brain records visual images processes them it looks in your memory for previous version (I remember being here before). Like any pattern matching process, it is liable to the occasional error, so that you come up as having a match when there really wasn?t one. On these occasions, you can?t actually remember a prior memory (there is one) but you feel as if you have been there before.

As report at Pink Tentacle japanese researchers have developed a Human Area Network (HAN). This goes nice along with the Local Area Network (LAN), the network all the computers in your building at work, and the Wide Area Network (WAN) that links all the LANs that your company has.

The HAN is smaller than those, it is based on a small device that you drop in your pocket that puts out a weak electric field that extends across your skin, so that you can make a network connection with anything you touch.

This is so cool, if the device was installed in something that you routinely carry you (say a mobile phone) then you could synch it just by touching your computer while it is you pocket. I want one!

On the news the other night, it was reported that the new Airbus airplane, the A380, a giant passenger airplane that can carry 800 passengers, flew into Melbourne to test out the facilities. From the photo below you can see how the airplane dwarfs those around it.