Budget comments

Short summary: it's all a con.

A lot of the reaction tonight is pretty positive, but those taking a more cynical view seem to me (of course!) to have the more realistic take on it.

This summary here on ABC Online seems pretty right. It's not taking spending cuts seriously at all. Of course, as Turnbull had warned, severe spending cuts were not necessarily good in current circumstances anyway. However, (again as Turnbull complained tonight,) Swan was selling the need for "inflation fighting" spending cuts before today, but he hasn't really delivered on his own promise.

There was an economist writing in the Courier Mail today who argued that assessing the likely effect of a budget on inflation was extremely difficult and depends on assessing the effect of all cuts and spending programs in the entire budget. This makes a lot of common sense, but I can find no link.

In any event, it seems clear that the $2 billion net savings in the budget as delivered will make next to no difference to inflation. Are people forgetting that only a couple of days ago Access Economics was claiming that every $3 billion dollars saved would prevent a .25% interest increase? Some months ago, Ross Gittins claimed that it would take an extra $10 billion in surplus (or a surplus of 2.3% of GDP) to have the equivalent effect. I think I heard that this budget has a surplus of 1.8% of GDP. Therefore, even on Access Economics more 'optimistic' view of how effective spending cuts could be, any praise for this being an inflation fighting budget seems distinctly premature.

On the nature of some of the savings, Alan Kohler made this interesting point I haven't seen elsewhere:

One of the big savings measures is a bit of a fiddle though. The cancellation of the $959 million “Australia Connected” fund that was awarded to Singtel Optus and Elders has been counted as a saving, but the $4.7 billion National Broadband Network amount that replaces it is not counted as an expense because it hasn’t been spent yet and is not detailed in the forward estimates.

And on the point of the "future funds," which really are there just to delay large infrastructure spending until the lead up to the next election, the Crikey budget blog notes this:

...Wayne Swan today indicated both the capital and interest would be spent on appropriate projects. Given the expected inflation environment over the next few years – and the fact that, when it comes to infrastructure, we are suddenly playing catch-up for years of State Government neglect – it’s hard to work out how expenditure by these funds won’t have a similar inflationary impact several years hence as they would now.

The Opposition has made the point that its education endowment fund was a permanent fund that earned ongoing income to upgrade universities; it was not simply a pool of capital to be spent and disappear over a few years.

As I say, all a con.

On the other big political issue of the week (the Medicare surcharge levy adjustment), there is no denying that there was a logical argument for increasing the limits, as there is with taking bracket creep into account in tax tables. But also as with tax bracket creep, governments that adjust too quickly are not really helping their bottom line.

Given that there was no adjustment for 10 years, some adjustment was justifiable now. But to take it from $50,000 to $100,000 for a single person is just ideology at work, not logic. (I've had a quick look at CPI figures for 97 to 07, and it looks to me like $67,500 would be the correct inflation adjusted figure.)

Isn't that effective "tax cut" going to have an inflationary effect?

There's no doubt a significant number of single people will first drop out of private health insurance because of this change, followed by more married couples when the funds increase their already barely tolerable premiums because of the loss of the single people.

It's the first case of a unexpected and clearly bad idea borne of Labor ideology for this government. As Tony Abbott ably argued, it is very likely to make dealing with the problems within the public health system much worse in the long run.

UPDATE: I typed this last night then forgot to post it. I see now that Andrew Bolt was making the same points. Peter Hartcher makes the case for it actually being bad for inflation.

UPDATE 2: I hear that Malcolm Turnbull is running with the case that it is actually going to stimulate inflation, and he may be right.

So, to get my criticisms in order:

It's not that I was looking for a budget that did cut into people's income (eg by not delivering the tax cuts,) but the government is trying to sell the budget on pure spin, as Bolt says.

Swan is selling increased tax as a "saving": does that really make sense? Some of the other savings may well be illusory too, as noted above.

Putting the surplus into funds to be spent in future might not be such a bad thing, provided the process of identifying infrastructure spending comes up with sound projects. From that point of view, the budget is a bit of a "wait and see" proposition, as it may or may work well in the future.

It's not a budget that deserves strong condemnation; on the other hand it is not one that deserves praise either.

It is definitely the most highly "spun" budget we have seen for many years.

Slow blogging

Work, and a need for deep meditation in my underground bunker in preparation for the forthcoming release of a couple of unusually highly anticipated movies, is likely to keep me from posting much for a week.

Also, for whatever reason, I have been finding it harder to find particularly "blog worthy" stuff on the internet in the past few weeks. (Hence my need to post on the rather mundane topic of rating the Indiana Jones movies. Last night, I watched another vaguely remembered Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis movie - Sailor Beware - with my son, and enjoyed it a lot. I am tempted to try to explain here why, but I'm not particularly good at that style of writing anyway.)

Anyway, there is likely to be something in the Budget that I will write about, so don't go away for too long.

Moving CO2

Carbon Dioxide Capture And Storage: Grasping At Straws In The Climate Debate?

This short article argues that there is strong reason to be skeptical of CO2 storage being able to be done at the scale really required to be effective:

The Climate Panel sees CCS as offering great potential. In various scenarios it accounts for between 15 and 55 percent of the reduction of greenhouse gases by 2100...

The problem is, according to Anders Hansson, that CCS is still a relatively untested method.

“There are a number of small facilities, in Norway, for instance, where they capture and store a million tons of carbon dioxide per year. Swedish Vattenfall is starting a pilot facility in eastern German this summer.”

Globally, a total of some millions of tons per year is being stored today within the framework of CCS. But to live up to the hopes placed on CCS requires the storage of several billion tons. In other words, this involves gargantuan volumes. In fact, carbon dioxide would be the world’s largest transported good.

“In full scale this technology only exists in the imaginations of the people developing it,” says Anders Hansson. “It’s overly optimistic to place such great faith in it, considering all the uncertainties found in the scientific literature.”

Back to the egg

Another year, another column from Tracee Hutchison about childlessness, and her resentment that politicians tend to concentrate spending on supporting families.

Last year, Tracee said this (in reference to Bill Heffernan's famous "barren" comment about Julia Gillard):

Despite John Howard's and Peter Costello's attempts to distance themselves from their wayward senator's latest spray, they are the culprits of turning the family values mantra into political paydirt and their imminent budget sweeteners to families will reinforce it.

Forget about the clever country we once aspired to be, we've become the conception country.

Exactly as I predicted, the Labor Party attitude is not pleasing her either. From today's column:

Why should single, childless people, many of whom are struggling to find relevance in a kids-and-couple dominant culture, be forced to pay for other people's children through a combination of taxes and imposed maternity leave levies? Isn't that a bit like rubbing our noses in it? Very inconsiderate if you ask me, especially when there's nothing in either budget for us.

The first part of today's column is all about how she has ended up accidentally childless.

I'm not unsympathetic to the sorrow that a single woman in her early middle age may feel at the realisation that they probably are not going to ever have a kid. (Although, as I have said before, I don't know why many modern women who know they want children will still waste years and years sleeping with partners who won't commit to the idea.)

That said, I don't know that Tracee exactly gives credibility to her argument that single people are "ignored" by government by explaining first that she walks this emotional precipice when someone just tries to make small talk with her:

And then, at some point, the mere thought of being asked one more time if you have children makes you want to shriek like a madwoman or slap the nearest person to you very hard indeed. You opt, of course, for a dignified silence for fear of being whispered about in unbecoming sentences such as "no wonder she can't find a fella …"

With such a sound and rational grounding in the issue, she should run for the Greens for Parliament.

A slight overstatement, perhaps

Danger of infection in surgery preparation - National - smh.com.au

There's an orthopedic surgeon upset about idiosyncratic rules in Sydney hospitals:

Dr Robert Molnar has for the past six months unsuccessfully sought an explanation from the Health Department as to why he is not permitted to use alcoholic surgical preparation solution on his patients at Westmead Hospital, yet he is able to at St George and Sutherland public hospitals.

The rules vary across hospitals: alcoholic solution can be used at Fairfield, Concord, Prince of Wales, Royal Women's and Royal Prince Alfred hospitals but is barred at Liverpool, Nepean, Gosford, Canterbury or Royal North Shore.

And why does this matter? Apparently, the alcohol based ones are known to offer better protection against post operative infection:

A Sydney orthopedic surgeon, Doron Sher, said that if the surgeon was appropriately educated the risk of fire was minimal.

"There is evidence in the literature showing that infection rates are lower using alcoholic Betadine," he said. "I use the alcoholic solution when I get the option because I believe that you get a lower infection rate."

But I like this line in the report best, as I assume this conclusion hasn't been verified in studies:

Dr Molnar had used an aqueous antiseptic to prepare the skin.

"You may as well spit on the wound...." he said, noting that alcoholic solution could be used at most private NSW hospitals.

Overdose?

Will changed a week before overdose death - National - smh.com.au

Isn't it an odd choice to be calling a death by Nembutal an "overdose". According to Wikipedia, there are very few things Nembutal can be used for in humans, and of course its fame now is mainly as euthanasia groups' preferred suicide drug.

Seems a bit like saying someone died of a rat poison overdose.

Ridiculous

This bud's for you, and you, and you too - Los Angeles Times

Go and read this piece by Joel Stein that shows how unbelievably farcical "medical marijuana" is in California.

(I always assumed such a system was a joke, but it's a much bigger joke than I ever imagined.)

Pilot shortage

Somehow, I seem to have missed reports about the international pilot shortage. Yesterday, I heard someone on the ABC putting figures on it, and I can't find a link. However, there's already an estimated shortfall of several thousand.

The plight of pilots in China seems particularly harsh. From The Economist in April:

The state is being so heavy-handed because it fears a mass walkout. It maintains an iron grip on pilots through lifetime contracts, enshrined in state law, which they must sign in return for receiving pilot training. With growing demand from the 20 private airlines that have started up in the past four years, these contracts seem like handcuffs. The CAAC requires pilots to pay 700,000-2.1m yuan to break their contracts. This week Shanghai Airlines filed a lawsuit against nine of its pilots demanding even more (35m yuan) if they continue with their plans to leave the company.

The CAAC's figures show a shortage of 5,000 pilots and predict that 6,500 more will be needed by 2010. The lack of local facilities is prompting Chinese airlines to send groups of students to Canada, Australia and Spain for training.

MSNBC had a story about the international shortage mid last year:

Figures released by International Air Transport Association show that global air travel will likely grow 4-5 percent a year over the next decade, though the aviation boom in India and China is expected to exceed 7 percent....

India and China alone will need about 4,000 new pilots a year to cope with their growth.

By comparison, Germany's Lufthansa — one of the world's largest airlines — employs a total of just over 4,000 pilots.

On average, airlines need 30 highly trained pilots available for each long-haul aircraft in their inventory. For short-haul planes they need less, between 10-18 flyers.

Those figures for the number of pilots an airline needs for each aircraft seem surprisingly high, but what would I know about running an airline.

Anyhow, maybe it is all the more reason to build airships. (I figure pilots don't have as much to do on them, and they could get more sleep on the flight.) Or, there is always this solution:


Yes, a small company in Mexico wants to build you a strap on rocket helicopter. (Mexico? Well, I guess they would come in handy for border crossings.) But before you place your order, read the rocket helicopter designer's personal history (from the "About us" heading on the company website):

At the school I was a trouble kid and I ended psychoanalyzed in the Conduct Clinic for abnormal behavior because I didn't liked the school, because they try to teach me things that I didn't want to learn and they don't teach me what I wanted to learn!, it was just a communication problem!.
The only two subjects I liked too much was physics and chemistry unfortunately this classes was only two times per week, I hated the rest of the subjects and the school was a boring place for me.

This was a constant fight with my teachers because I considered that my brain has a finite capacity to keep formulas and data that are important for me and not the name of the horse that was rode by El Quijote or the dates and places of the Napoleon fights and another stupid things that I don't care and never used in my life.

I skipped the school (play hockey) many times and went to work as a helper at a speed garage that prepared racing cars, there I learned a lot of mechanics, to weld, to paint, to work the fiberglass, to modify engines for racing, to port and polish the race car heads, etc., this was the things I wanted to learn and not all the garbage that the teachers wanted me to remember.

Sounds like a young Speed Racer, really.

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal has an article today about shortages in all jobs to do with the airline industry, and the safety concerns that this is causing. (Some estimate a shortage of pilots in the order of 42,000 worldwide by 2020.) The most surprising snippet:

In Brazil, pilots at TAM Linhas Aéreas SA last year overshot a São Paulo runway and smashed a new Airbus jet into a building during stormy weather, killing more than 190 people. The pilots were apparently confused about how to reduce engine power and apply reverse thrust.

For those of you who can't get enough of Indiana Jones talk

Indiana Jones Returns, to Steven Spielberg’s Delight - New York Times

Getting tired yet of my linking to material on the new Indiana Jones movie? If so, just skip this.

The article above discusses the series generally, and makes some good points about the Spielberg action style. He has, fortunately, never been into the frenetic cutting of action scenes, an annoying feature of nearly all action movies now. (The same can be said of nearly all dance movies of the last few decades too.) Spielberg is nice enough not to diss all action movies that take that approach, but he's being too kind. It rarely works for me, as it reduces the realism and impact of action when you can tell you are watching a stunt that was repeated umpteen times to allow for all those edits from different angles.

The article also notes this about what remains one of my all time favourite movie sequences:

The perilously long and complicated opening sequence of “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” for example — in which a song-and-dance number (“Anything Goes,” sung in Mandarin) turns into a wild slapstick action scene involving a diamond, a poisoned drink and an elusive vial of antidote, and ends with Indy and his companions jumping out of a plane in a rubber raft — delivers that sort of giddy, mildly deranging stimulation. The staging and the cutting have the “can you top this?” audacity of a silent comedy, and the timing is slyly impeccable: it’s about the length of a Keaton two-reeler.

"Temple of Doom" remains my favourite of the series. For me, it struck exactly the right tone of wit and slapstick humour to offset the action and any violence. Ripping the heart out of a chest never bothered me; it always seems to have been intended to have been revealed as a magic trick anyway. (On the other hand, I always felt that Raider's more serious tone made the impalings and other violence too intense for much of the potential audience of under 9 year olds.)

As for "Last Crusade", it has always struck me as a particularly uninspired in terms of both script and direction. As with the 3rd Star Wars, many of the action sequences were so obviously re-hashes from the first movie of the series, it was very disappointing. I have re-watched it recently, and it remains quite a dull experience.

I always have felt that it was odd that both the Star Wars and Indiana Jones series peaked in the middle, yet friends and critics at the time were a little disappointed with the second instalment. Later, it seems opinions were revised of Empire Strikes Back, so that virtually everyone now agrees it was the best of the the lot. Temple of Doom may also be a bit better appreciated now too, I suspect.

So it's fingers crossed for the new movie, but expectations may yet be dashed.

Lane goes racing

I've never been convinced that the Wachowski brothers deserve respect, and the idea that they could make what I recall as the least interesting Japanese anime of the 1960's into a good movie seemed a particularly unlikely proposition.

So, it's with pleasure that I read Anthony Lane's amusing review of Speed Racer. He writes:

A four-year-old will be reduced to a gibbering but highly gratified wreck; an eight-year-old will wander around wearing a look that was last seen on the face of Dante after he met Beatrice. But what about the rest of us? True, our eyeballs will slowly, though never completely, recover, but what of our souls? I reckon the M.P.A.A. should use the advent of “Speed Racer” to revive an old ratings symbol: a big Roman X, meaning “of no conceivable interest to anyone over the age of ten.”

Or, as Stephen Colbert put it "it's the classic story of boy meets seizure inducing lights".

Just resign

Buswell made 'sexual noises': woman | The Australian

So, today we get all the detail of the "chair sniffing" incident. While I have no doubt there are other politicians who are just as crass and immature, a leader can't maintain credibility with a highly publicised incident like this. He should just do everyone a favour and resign. Have another cry and get it over with, Troy; there's probably a place waiting for you on Melbourne's Footy Show anyway.

And at the national level, I would be close to recommending the same to Brendan Nelson. Let's face it:

a. he was voted in by a narrow margin when a couple of eligible voters were absent;
b. his "listening tour" was ill-conceived and is most memorable for the repeated image of him playing with kids on a monkey bar;
c. most journalists rightly view his habit of having a heart breaking anecdote ready for every occasion as being just a tad bizarre and unconvincing. Glenn Milne says today "Nelson, bless his sincerity, is like a piece of emotional blotting paper."

At 9% preferred PM he has no credibility to be leader.

The most surprising thing to me about today's Newpoll was the 4% swing toward the Coalition, which I can only put down to the electorate being more cynical about the 2020 Summit than most media journalists expected (Yay!)

Surely Nelson himself is helping shave a few points off the Coalition's popularity. If so, it may be that the Coalitions "true" primary vote is currently very close to 40%, which seems to me to be not too bad at this stage of the electoral cycle.

So, is there any point to Brendan hanging on any longer? I can't really see it.

Monbiot catches up with me

George Monbiot: If there is a God, he's not green. Otherwise airships would take off | Comment is free | The Guardian

Hey, I first mentioned the return of airships as a possible way to reduce CO2 emissions back in August 2006! (The topic got more space in my post of November 2006.) What's more, hydrogen filled ones were mentioned in my March 2008 list of brilliant ideas for the 2020 Summit.

Now Monbiot is promoting the idea of hydrogen airships (see above). Well, actually he mentions one which would use both hydrogen and helium, which may well be a good idea.

I'm tempted to refer to myself as a blogging prophet who is not being adequately recognised in the blogosphere, and to take up wearing sackcloth and eating locusts in the desert. (Which, incidentally, may just mean a move into the backyard, as Brisbane's normal winter dry spell has already kicked in with a vengeance, it seems.)

Nuclear notes

Alternative dares not speak | The Australian

Alan Moran writes about Garnaut's interim report, noting that it doesn't mention the "N" word.

He mentions a bit of history of interest:

Now there's a rich irony. ALP ministers, many of whom have spent their lives demonising nuclear power, may soon have to start promoting it. Actually, that's a U-turn not without precedent, as nuclear power was once strongly advocated by the ALP: in the mid-1970s, the Dunstan government in South Australia even claimed that a nuclear industry in the state would create 500,000 jobs.

That would be one way Kevin Rudd's reputation would soar in my eyes: if he could actually lead his party into accepting nuclear. (Go have a look at Pebble Beds, Kevin.)

Speaking of nuclear, and energy generally, the Mother Jones current issue is all about the topic. In the article about nuclear, it notes:

To be useful as nuclear fuel, uranium ore has to be refined into uranium oxide (the yellowcake of Niger fame) and then enriched—turned into pellets of 4 percent U-235. The sole U.S. plant that enriches uranium for civilian power reactors, located in Paducah, Kentucky, accomplishes this via an energy-hogging process that consumes 15 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year. Even so, carbon emissions for the entire nuclear fuel cycle come to no more than 55 grams of CO₂ per kilowatt-hour—roughly even with solar. By 2010, when the U.S. Enrichment Corporation is slated to switch to the more efficient method used in Europe, that number should come down closer to 12 grams per kilowatt-hour—on par with wind.

Naked singularities again

Here's a recent paper from arXiv that proposes how naked singularities may form instead of black holes. (My earlier post about naked singularities possibly being created at the LHC is here.)

The more recent paper does not mention the LHC, but the mechanism it describes still seems relevant (correct me if I am wrong, anyone.)

As this paper says:

Spacetime singularities belong naturally to the realm of quantum gravity. We believe that only a complete quantum gravity theory will be able to describe naked singularities properly, dissecting them conclusively or even restoring the WCCC in a more fundamental level.

So: no one knows exactly what a naked singularity would be like, yet (according to some) they may be created in the LHC. (There's a short note on a CERN publication about naked singularities.)

OK, the argument against worrying about them will be the same as that for mini black holes: the earth and all astronomical bodies are constantly bombarded by higher energy particles, and if that hasn't created a naked singularity danger, then nor will the LHC.

And the reason for questioning this might be same as the argument regarding mini black holes: namely, cosmic naked singularities would presumably shoot off at near relativistic speeds , whereas those at the LHC would sometimes have low speed. Maybe ones that hang around a something more to worry about? Also, I am a little curious about what would happen if two of them meet, as would seem more of a possibility in the LHC than in nature.

Meanwhile, we sit around twiddling our thumbs while CERN takes its sweet time to publish the delayed safety paper.

Local electricity storage

A few posts back, I indicated I would do some Googling about household electrical storage, so that my future solar Stirling engine powered house would still let me watch TV at night.

Seems there's not many choices around. Of course, the truly dedicated can buy a huge number of lead acid batteries already, but they have a pretty short life. One site claims that nanotechnology will let us build superbatteries, but as to how realistic this proposal is, I have no idea:

Today, using lead-acid storage batteries, such a unit for a typical house to store 100 kilowatt hours of electrical energy would take up a small room and cost more than $10,000. Through revolutionary advances in nanotechnology, it may be possible to shrink an equivalent unit to the size of a washing machine and drop the cost to less than $1,000. With these advances the electrical grid can become exceedingly robust, because local storage protects customers from power fluctuations and outages. Most importantly, it permits some or all of the primary electrical power on the grid to come from solar and wind.

Still, there does exist one form of battery which allows a lot of electricity to be stored. Futurepundit talked about them last year: sodium sulphur batteries. He links to a USAToday story about them, which includes a photo.

They are big and expensive and used for a many houses, not just one. They appear to be largely a Japanese idea. The New York Times reported last year that one company in America is looking at using them for storing windpower. (The article also notes that they operate at more than 800 degrees F, which makes it sound like you wouldn't want even a small one in your backyard.)

So, OK, they won't fit in my backyard, but they sound a fairly promising idea if used on neighbourhood scale.

Of course, another Japanese idea may help in any plan to live off the grid: house sized fuel cells, which I have mentioned before. I wonder: can you turn these on and off easily, as required, and not affect their efficiency in the process? And can you get away with using bottled natural gas for them, instead of mains gas?

Funny how many of these energy ideas are coming from Japan, hey?

Houses as art

Dezeen’s top ten: houses

Oddly, I found this link via Posthuman Blues.

In another life, I would have liked to have been an architect. (Must be all that time I spent designing houses with Lego. I don't think they even make the roof blocks any more.)

That said, you do have to laugh at the impracticality of some architect ideas for residences. Those that irritate me in particular are the ones that have enormous slabs of glass for walls, as if there is no human desire for privacy. (They also make no sense as far as energy efficiency is concerned.)

However, regular readers would recall my fondness for canvas, in the form of tents and upmarket yurts. Well, I learn from the story above that some architects from Chile have come up with a house which is sort of part normal wall and part tent, and you can readily buy plans off them.

Yes, it's probably got problems in terms of how long you could expect it to last, but the photographs make it look very appealing.

That Austrian case...

Dungeons & Austrians - New York Times

See the link for an opinion piece that points out that the basement incest case is not the first horror basement story from Austria.

Actually, when I saw what the article was about, I thought it might delve into the whole question of whether European horror fairy tales actually do spring from something twisted in the collective unconscious of the area. It doesn't go there, but there'll be an academic somewhere who does.

Meanwhile, it's curious that in Australia, the city that has the general reputation for the most vile and twisted murders is Adelaide, which is seen as having both strong English and (in the hills at least) German influence.

Boris wins; exile threatened

Mayoral election results: Live | Politics | Guardian Unlimited

Of course, with Boris Johnson winning the London mayoral race, over at The Guardian there's an amusing outpouring of name calling of Boris voters (who are obviously just too stupid to vote for Ken), and empty threats of self exile from the city/country.

What is it about lefties and this precious "if the majority don't vote like I do, I cannot live here" attitude? People used to say that conservatives had a "born to rule" attitude, but it's clear that such a belief in entitlement (based on their superior intellect and morality, of course) has long since passed over to the followers of the other side of politics.

PS: Surely even those who hate him would have to agree that Boris made a very gracious acceptance speech. Maybe he will end up like Schwarzenegger: a somewhat unexpected great success when put in the right position.

PPS: Tigerhawk has a good post about the adolescent nature of this "if my candidate loses I will leave politics/the country" attitude.

PPPS: Or, to put it as Nige does at Bryan Appleyard's blog:

What has struck me in all the interviews with those on the losing side - Ken of course included - is the unspoken assumption that a Tory advance represents a reft in the very fabric of space-time, a fundamental anomaly, that can only be the result of 'mistakes', of 'not listening', of a failure to get the message across. I've often noticed this mindset in leftists, the assumption that their project is not only right but self-evidently right, and those who don't buy into it either haven't understood it or are outside the pale of rational discourse, irredeemable and best ignored or sneered at .....

Ocean issues again

Growing ocean dead zones leave fish gasping - earth - 01 May 2008 - New Scientist Environment

It's all inconclusive as to what will happen in future, but it's consistent with my position that the effect of CO2 and possible warming on the oceans is the clearest reason to do something about greenhouse gases.

Well deserved snark

By far the most annoying, bitter, nasty, know-it-all blogger on the left in the last few years is Ken Lovell at Road to Surfdom. His post this week about Iran and most of the world's (not just America's) concern about its nuclear program is his typical schtick: informed by his reflexive anti-Americanism and his apparent confidence that he can tell more about the true state of the world from Adelaide [correction: Tweed Coast?] and his selective reading on the 'net than the governments of the Northern Hemisphere. (Anyone who thinks he has a good point on Iran should read this Economist article first.)

No one bothers any more trying to engage him in debate; he was always snide and insulting in response, and presumably just enjoys the company of the regular sycophantic, and even crazier, commenters. Yet other blogs of the more moderate left refer to some of his posts every now and again with approval. I guess the left loves company, no matter how unpleasant.

I simply can't stand him.

Ah, that feels better.

UPDATE: I see that Ken has psychoanalysed my intense dislike of his blogging style as being due to my not having a regular half dozen commenters who chime in after nearly every post with stuff along the lines of "oh, that's so right, but it's even worse than that."

I don't intend making snark attacks a regular feature here. The post was inspired by the fact that I have noticed more moderate lefties linking to him lately, and my knowledge from past experience that there is absolutely no point in challenging his views at his own blog.

UPDATE 2: Good grief. Someone at Club Troppo's Missing Link today has compared me to JF Beck . It would seem they just believed Ken's characterisation of this blog, rather than actually read it. (Nothing against JF, but somehow I don't think I count as a right wing death beast.)

Also, I don't think Ken realised how few hits there normally are here. His pointing out to the world that I had a snark attack against him has probably trebled my normal weekend hit rate.

A stirling engine for the backyard

I mentioned the Infinia Corporation a year ago, and with all this talk of solar power, I thought it would checking if this alternative idea (of small scale solar thermal using stirling engines) is still around.

It is, and it seems as if they have recent significant funding and (presumably) may be selling the product soon. Their main product of interest should look something like this:

It is, apparently, a 3kW stirling engine that provides electicity, and the website claims that it has a 24 % energy conversion efficiency, low maintenance, and will be(I think they say somewhere) cheaper than solar cells.

I want one for my backyard, simply because they look cool and you can (presumably) also roast a chicken in the focal point of that dish. (Any passing crow that wants a rest on that engine part might be in for a shock, too.)

Now, if only there were economical and small electricity storage systems big enough to get your average house through the night. This calls for another round of Googling!

Fear and loathing in London

Be very afraid: Zoe Williams on the possibility of Boris Johnson as mayor of London

Zoe Williams and a bunch of artistes are all in a frenzy over the distinct possibility that Boris Johnson will be mayor of London.

I haven't heard such hyperbole about a politician since, well since the headier days of Webdiary while John Howard was at his peak. Zoe says of Boris:

He despises gays and he despises provincials (you are all right with Boris if you come from Liverpool but don't sound like a Liverpudlian. Once you've been to public school, then you are from postcode POSH), and he despises Africans. He despises them, and he despises those of us who would hold such judgments to be bigoted and inhuman.

One of the funniest comments that follows is by fashion designer Vivienne Westwood:

"Boris as mayor? Unthinkable. It just exposes democracy as a sham, especially if people don't vote for Ken - he's the best thing in politics. Unthinkable."

Yes, democracy is right and proper only if your candidate wins, hey, Vivien?

About boating accidents

Harbour death crash witness: 'They wanted to party' - National - theage.com.au

The thing that always seems kind of surprising to me about boating accidents is how easily they seem to kill people.

It's probably because the most common form of transport accidents (in cars) often occur at high speed; therefore it is easy to imagine that the crush of metal will kill. Boats, on the other hand, unless they are racing, don't give the impression of travelling fast enough to cause that much mayhem if they collide. But of course, the passengers are unrestrained, and always have water handy in which to drown.

The other thing is that boating crashes are more unusual; it's often hard to imagine how people fail to see other boats in their path or near them. It's probably the more unexpected nature of boating fatalities that make them seem more tragic.

Not sure it's a good idea...

Tom Cruise set to make M:I4

The Mission Impossible series has gone like this:

M:I1 - Cheesily very enjoyable; that De Palma can really direct well when motivated (8/10)

M:I2 - seems to have killed John Woo's career, and none too soon. Awful (2/10, just for curiosity value of the Australian locations.)

M:I3 - better than M:I2 (well, that was no challenge), but directed by some hack who can't compose shots for the big screen, can't move a camera well, and seems to enjoy sadistic scenes a little too much. 4/10.

Can't de Palma, who admittedly is getting on a bit, make a come back? Or even Tom's pal Spielberg? Otherwise, there's not much hope.

Apostasy

A question of belief | Comment is free

Here's an interesting article on the very real problems that apostates from Islam (threat of death in some countries being the big one, but there are many other consequences in other countries.)

It was surprising to read this:

In Sudan and in some states in Malaysia, capital punishment is permitted. In Saudi Arabia, Mauritania and Iran, death remains a real possibility for the convert as although it is not specified in law, the countries can invoke this penalty through their application of sharia.

Malaysia? I wouldn't have thought it could happen there.

On going solar

The very sensible Robert Merkel has a very useful post at LP about why government subsidies for solar cell power don't really make much sense overall.

Despite the arguments he convincingly explains, individuals who install the systems and take the benefit of the government subsidies will feel as if they are doing good. It's easy to understand why, when they can look at their roof on a sunny day and think "I am making my contribution". It's a pity the world is more complicated.

Itchy "art"

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Artists catch head lice for show

Clearly, after 100 years or so, it's getting harder and harder to be an avant garde artist.

Who knew primary school children and the homeless were walking art installations?

How to win friends and influence people

Beer and wine tax rise proposed | The Courier-Mail:

A 300 PER CENT increase in beer and wine taxes is being proposed by the Rudd Government's new preventive health taskforce as families battle rising petrol, grocery and mortgage prices.

A stupid dream, then away

Work (and tax!) pressure is likely to keep me from posting/reading the internet much for a few days.

In the meantime, on Saturday night I was woken mid-morning by a child, causing me to remember this stupid dream. Some sort of alien invasion of earth had resulted, not in death or destruction, but just in all men being treated very unfairly. Wages were docked (I forget what for), and we were forced to sleep in some tiny, claustrophobic dormitory type arrangement. At work, a woman co-worker, when shown my pay slip, just found it amusing. I was very disappointed with her inability to see the injustice.

Then a different woman and I were outside an office window, a few stories up, in some window cleaning gantry set-up. It was early morning, and a robot guard was walking down the silent street. We froze, and he didn't see us, so we continued our break in into the alien controlled building. Inside the office, there were jewels, from which voices came, and then 2 of the aliens themselves made an appearance. They just looked like men in silly colourful pantomine alien costumes. They were very easy to kill. I think I stabbed them with something.

The last impression I have is of sitting in a chair with my feet up on a desk, satisfied that I could kill as many of these aliens as I want.

Now I can usually work out pretty quickly what quirky combination of day time stuff has lead to a particular dream. In this case there was certainly an element of Dr Who, which I had been watching on Friday, but the injustice to males took a while. But then I remembered seeing the heading for an article about child support somewhere recently, and that must be it.

Either that or I just have a generic fear of aliens as feminists (or feminists as aliens?), even though they are easy to defeat.

An anecdote too far...

I Peed On Fellini - Book Reviews - smh.com.au

Bruce Elder provides a short review of David Stratton's autobiographical "I Peed on Fellini". (I have read somewhere that Stratton was not sure that the title was a good idea, but presumably someone in publishing convinced him. Let's hope it's not the same editor advising Peter Costello.)

Anyway, the review notes that the book has:

... some very amusing and extraordinary anecdotes (the story of Bob Ellis and the used condom is as fascinating as it is grotesque).

There's no way I'm going to buy the book just to find out what that is about, but it's impossible not to be curious.

That renewable target

This is another post where I try to get my head around energy issues from some Web sources. Anyone who has more accurate figures readily at hand is welcome to correct me.

I just saw some of Skynews Eco Report, in which the Rudd government's 2020 target of 20% energy from renewable sources was being discussed. (Can't find it on the Web yet.)

I think the female guest said that by 2010, Australia will have 2% of its electricity generated from renewables, and the 20% target by 2020 is made even worse by expected growth in demand for electricity (via population growth, presumably) in the same period.

However, this 2 % figure isn't right (or maybe I misheard her); a parliamentary paper from 2000, which I have referred to before, said we were already at something like 10% for electricity from renewables, but it was supposed to increase (by mandated government target) by 2% by 2010. Maybe that is the source of the 2% figure?

This 2004 fact sheet, from the Renewable Energy Generators Association, gives a better idea of the problem. It appears that, as of 2004, it didn't look likely that the mandated increase would be met. The problem has been that, after the enormous boost the Snowy Hydro scheme gave to renewable energy, the total proportion of renewable energy for the nation subsequently went into a pretty steady decline, as growth in demand was met by fossil fuels.

If I can follow the second table on that fact sheet correctly, it seems to be saying that:

a. total 1997 renewables was 16,000 GWh;

b. even to keep at 10.5% of total electricity by 2010, it would require an additional 9,500 Gwh from renewables;

c. to get to 12.5% by 2020 would take an additional 21,000 GWh;

d. to get to Labor's 20% target will take close to 45,000 GWh.

But: that government paper I linked to above said that close to 90% of the renewable electricity in 2000 was from hydro electric; a source which is presumably incapable of any significant further growth.

Actually, looking at the government's 2004 MRET (Mandated Renewable Energy Target) Review, it seems that they are now counting solar hot water as a renewable energy source, and in a table in that paper, they have hydroelectric down to 36% of renewables, and "deemed solar hot water" at 26%. (That figure for solar hot water seems kind of high, and almost a bit of a fudge to me.)

The MRET report does seem to confirm that an extra 20,000 GWh is needed by 2020 just to get to 12.5% renewables target. I assume that the REGA paper is therefore correct in its figure of 45,000 GWh to get to 20%.

The issue of how to treat hot water systems confuses the issue. If it were not for them, I would have said the following seems to be the case: we currently seem to get only about 2,000 KWh from renewables other than hydroelectric (that's 10% of 16,000 GWh, plus some extra to allow for changes since the 2000 paper). To get to 20% renewables by 2020 (an additional 45,000 GWh,) would therefore require the amount of current non-hydroelectric renewable electricity to be increased by a factor of (roughly) 23!

So, whatever windfarms, solar and other (non hydroelectric) electricity we have now, it has to increase about 23 times in 12 years.

(As I say, maybe intensive increase in solar hot water changes the figures somewhat, but as that seems not to be discussed much as a strategy, I am guessing that it won't be what rescues us.)

No wonder there is scepticism as to the target, and the Liberals are starting to argue that it will divert resources from the more important task of developing clean coal, which is actually much more important on a global scale. Greg Hunt may well have a good point here.

Anyway, it still seems pretty clear to me that the general public has no idea of the scale of the problem.

Newt and climate change

Here's a video that I didn't see coming:



The We Can Solve It Project, which the Pelosi/Gingrich ad promotes, has close connections to Al Gore. Although it seems Gingrich has been promoting Green conservatism for some time, it is surprising that he should promote a Gore project, given other comments he has made about him and environmentalism generally in the recent past.

Spielberg time

Return of the storyteller | The Australian

Steven Spielberg is doing publicity for the new Indiana Jones movie, and The Australian has a long interview today.

Nothing too surprising in it for someone (like me) who reads or watches every Spielberg interview he can. But there is this slightly amusing bit:

Spielberg is courteous and generous, without front, yet with that slight distance celebrities adopt to stay sane. He’s just seen Kevin Rudd on television, meeting George Bush: “I was very impressed – is he Labor or Liberal?”

Tracee's excited

From a little sorry, big things may grow - Opinion - theage.com.au

With sentences such as this, Tracee Hutchison will not just be in Tim Blair's sights, she's painting a big red bullseye on her pants and waiting for the kick:

...when I heard those historic words from Rudd's landmark sorry speech again this week — as part of a re-recording of an anthemic song about Aboriginal land rights due for release on Monday — few things could have convinced me more of the magnitude and significance of the metamorphosis this country is experiencing on a daily basis.

And this:

A little thing is growing. We have a chance to sing from the same songbook. And we can dare to be hopeful again.

Calm down, Tracee. Just get back to us in 5 years time, and tell us if your excitement was justified.

That'd be right

Concrete examples don't help students learn math, study finds

For some time I have been meaning to complain about the way maths is taught these days at primary level, and the story above gives me a good excuse to do it now.

While I can't be the only parent to doubt the value of the methods now used in early maths teaching, I have particular reason to be irritated with it.

That's because my son has a clear developmental language delay. His general IQ is fine, but it would seem that the way his brain processes and remember language is just not quite what it should be, so that (for example) at age 7 he still needs a lot of correction with the tense of very common verbs, and must receive directions in short, clear sentences.

The problem is, as his teachers acknowledge, the way maths is taught now is very verbal, and a language development delay can therefore cause a much stronger "knock on" delay with maths than in the past. You didn't need much language to memorise tables, or to learn the one set method of how to do simple maths operations. You do need solid language when the maths questions and exercises are all framed in something akin to "real life" examples, or when they don't show just one way of doing a simple mathematical exercise, but 3 or 4 ways of thinking about it and letting the child work out the way that best suits them.

Parents with kids in primary school will know what I mean.

Michelle Malkin had a post late last year about some particularly silly sounding American maths texts. Maybe ours are not as bad as that, but the video she has in that post does illustrate the "multi-method" approach that is taken here, even from Grade 2. The video link is here.

Anyhow, this is all by way of introduction to the link above, in which some researchers argue that the overuse of "real life examples" for teaching maths may not in fact help kids learn the basic concept behind the example. That sounds counter-intuitive, but they have experiment to back them up.

So, great, here we have a hint of what might be a coming maths education equivalent to the "whole word / phonetics" debate of the last decade or two. Maybe in 10 year's time there will be a lot less "real life" examples or problems for primary school kids, and more straight forward maths as per the 1960's.

In the meantime, my son will have been somewhat disadvantaged by current educational fads.

The irritating thing is that older class room teachers can recognise fads in education, but can nonetheless be pretty helpless in being able to counter them.

On other Anzac Day posts

Anzac Day gets so much written about it now, I find it hard to come up with anything original to contribute. But each year I can always count on some dubious post or comment from Larvatus Prodeo on the topic.

This year, Mark Bahnisch proposes that it was Paul Keating who played an important role in "reviving" Anzac Day to the current high regard that it seems to enjoy in the community today.

I am far from convinced. I don't recall Anzac Day ever being really "on its last legs" in the 1980's, as Mark suggests. (He doesn't sound like the type of teenager/young man to be attending marches at the time to see first hand, but I could be wrong.) However, it does seem clear that in the last decade or so it has become embraced in a way that was not predicted.

I don't really have an alternative explanation to push here, but I suspect that the increasing loss of grandparents who were WWII veterans may have had something to do with it.

For a Keating skeptic like me, his forays into history were a matter of trying too hard to impose his views and his sense of the "right" type of patriotism on the population, and as such came across as posturing and a tad insincere. I feel certain I would not be on my own in that reaction.

At least in Australia, the power of politicians to influence community attitudes on such matters is easily overestimated, I reckon.

The most puzzling thing Mark says is in his comment 9 to his post:

I think his [Keating's] purpose, as I’ve said, was to lay to rest the stoushes over conscription and the massive sectarian divide that Billy Hughes opened up. Implicit in this, and sometimes explicit, was a view that WW1 probably had been futile - an Imperialist adventure. He tried to weave it into a new story, but the hereditary defenders of the British Empire vented their fury accordingly.

In the thread, Geoff Honnor at comment 19 challenges this; it would appear neither he nor I can recall any "venting" against Keating on the issue of the worthiness of WWI. As Honnor says, the disenchantment with that war overall seems to have been pretty much immediate.

Similarly, John Quiggin repeats an older post of his in which he makes the comment that Gallipoli campaign was bloody and pointless, as indeed was the whole of WWI, a war of which "nothing good came ...." The surprising bit is that he then says that the danger now seems that we will forget this.

Really? What is evidence that there is any risk at all that young people will start to think that either Gallipoli or WWI were really worthwhile exercises that had good results? They certainly wouldn't be getting that idea from their school teachers, that's for sure.

If the past is another country, it sometimes seems that the left is too.

Getting ready for May 22

Indiana Jones and the Heap of Old Junk - Features, Film & TV - The Independent

Here's an interesting article on the very murky history of the so-called Aztec crystal skulls, which feature in the next Indiana Jones movie.

The movie starts both here and in the States on 22 May, with its first public outing at Cannes on 18 May.

Attacking the facilitators

Good ideas lost in the translation - Miranda Devine - Opinion - smh.com.au

Miranda Devine's take on the 2020 Kevin Summit sounds pretty accurate. She doesn't trash it entirely (well, OK, she trashes about 95% of it), and she largely blames the outcome on the business management "facilitators."

Worth reading.

So much for those clean, Green, Europeans

Europeans switching back to coal - International Herald Tribune

From the article:

Over the next five years, Italy will increase its reliance on coal to 33 percent from 14 percent. Power generated by Enel from coal will rise to 50 percent. And Italy is not alone in its return to coal.

Driven by rising demand, record high oil and natural gas prices, concerns over energy security and an aversion to nuclear energy, European countries are slated to build about 50 coal-fired plants over the next five years, plants that will be in use for the next five decades.

And why might some countries need to build more coal plants?:

Enel, like many electricity companies, says it has little choice but to build coal plants to replace aging infrastructure, particularly in countries like Italy, which prohibit nuclear power

The story goes on to talk about vague hopes for CO2 capture from European plants. But surely, finding suitable places within densely populated Europe is going to be a much bigger challenge than in the relatively vast open spaces of the USA or Australia.

I think they should give up on that idea, and either make it into powder that you can bury anywhere you have a large hole to fill, or algae.

Deveny right

Lefties miss Howard - Opinion - theage.com.au

It's hard to disagree with Catherine Deveny's general idea here, that Lefties like her are feeling a little deflated over not having John Howard to hate. (Phillip Adams used to say that hatred of Howard kept him alive. I wonder if he goes to the doctor more often lately.)

As Deveny says: "The left loves a whinge, a wine and a rant."
And her line about John Howard being like "an ex-boyfriend we're over" rings true too: "We don't want him back, but we want to know he's suffering."

The funniest thing about her column , though, is inadvertent. She characterises the Howard years as follows:

...people felt disillusioned and powerless with a government that ran on spin, dog whistles, scare campaigns, pork-barrelling and fear-mongering.

Sounds like a description of the 2020 Summit to me. (OK, the summit was not technically the government, but the way it was run, it may as well have been.)

It especially had all the elements of "dog whistling" that the left used to love to attack.

A very funny Colbert

This segment from The Colbert Report, on current international food problems, is really top notch comedy writing:

The coming cat peril

Are cat colonies a legal and ethical part of nature?

(Answer: no, no, no, no, No!)

From the article (about feral cats in California):

While most states are stricter in their regulations regarding feral cats, case law in California legitimizes feral cat colonies. These colonies are established or tended by well meaning "caretakers" who believe that cats have a right to live in nature. They are fed and watered daily by the these caretakers. In some parts of the state -- Sonoma County for example -- colony densities approach three to five colonies per square mile and may have 20 or more feline members.

Realizing that one pair of cats, having two litters of five kittens per year, can exponentially produce over 400,000 cats in a lifetime, can we begin to understand the problem. And it is a worldwide problem. A recent study in Australia found more than 12 million feral cats in the country; feline experts in the U.S. peg the number of feral cats here at 70 million.

At that rate, it is clear we soon will not have enough ground to stand on: (400,000 x 6,000,000).

But then again, maybe there's a reason I am not a demographer.

More on anti-Semitism and its spread

Report: Muslim anti-Semitism 'strategic threat' to Israel | Jerusalem Post

It's an interesting report on the changing nature of anti-Semitism. An extract:

Among the report's most worrying findings is the growth over the past three decades of uniquely Muslim roots to older European versions of anti-Semitism. Without discounting classical Christian Europe's canards regarding secret Jewish conspiracies, the ritual slaughter of non-Jewish children and other allegations of Jewish evil, anti-Semitism in the Muslim world increasingly finds its own, Islamic reasons for anti-Jewish hatred through new interpretations of Islamic history and scripture.

From the Koranic story of a Jewess who poisoned Muhammad, to the troubled relations between Muhammad and the Jewish tribes of Arabia, radical Islamist groups and thinkers have been using extreme anti-Semitic rhetoric that has grown increasingly popular with the Muslim public, particularly in Iran and the Arab states. Using well-known Koranic texts, these groups have been mapping out the Jews' "innate negative attributes" and teaching a paradigm of permanent struggle between Muslims and Jews.

The goal of this "Islamified" anti-Semitism, according to the report, is to transform the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a national territorial contest which could be resolved through compromise to a "historic, cultural and existential struggle for the supremacy of Islam."

Sounds about right to me. And the problem is, once you have a significant part of your population brainwashed with such stuff, how does the leadership talk them back down into a compromise with a side that that has been cast as inherently evil?

Just a politician

Kevin Rudd has shown the resolution to that age old riddle "what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object". Clearly, the answer is that there is no such thing as an irresistible force, as demonstrated by the inability of any force to separate our Prime Minister from a television camera. (Or perhaps I got that wrong, and there is an irresistible force: that which draws Kevin into the orbit of the nearest camera. You choose.)

Yesterday, after the 2020 Kevin Summit, I saw him on both Sunrise and The 7.30 Report.

On the latter, he was clearly in disingenuous politician mode:

KEVIN RUDD: .... For the Government, and remember for the 11 years or 12 years that the Howard Government was in office, the opportunity for a top down review of the entire taxation system was there. Instead they want for partial activity on consumption tax, and a partial activity on business tax. And business regulation.

KERRY OBRIEN: I think you'd have to acknowledge, I don't want to get bogged down in this, that embracing the consumption tax is one of the biggest single tax reforms in this country's history?

KEVIN RUDD: I would disagree with that. I think it's a different form of taxation but when you come to the overall impact of income tax, of company tax, personal income tax, company tax, indirect taxes, the transaction taxes of the States, and the overall effect of the combined taxation system, measured against global tax competitiveness, previous Government didn't do anything of the sort.

Of course, Kerry didn't press Kevin on this. (There remain very, very few occasions when Kerry O'Brien has shown him any aggression at all.) But, one would have thought these follow up questions might have been appropriate:

"You do recall, however, that the GST was intended by the Howard government to have a bigger effect than it eventually did, eg by removal of stamp duty, but political compromise prevented that?"

"Do you still stand by your assessment of GST as a "fundamental injustice"?

"Does your pre-election insistence on their being no GST increase under your government make a 'top down' review of taxes something of a pointless exercise, if you are going to cordon off that possibility?"

But instead Kerry went off tangent onto the completely out of the blue matter of whether Rudd liked "Advance Australia Fair". Nothing like pressing the serious issues, hey Kerry?

How very reasonable (sarcasm mode)

We can accept Israel as neighbour, says Hamas | World news | guardian.co.uk

From the report:

Hamas said today it would accept a Palestinian state on land occupied in the 1967 war, but it would not explicitly recognise Israel.

Jimmy Carter sees this as progress, but:

He [Carter] acknowledged that Hamas still refused to recognise explicitly Israel's right to exist, or to renounce violence, or to recognise previous peace agreements. The movement did not agree to speed the release of an Israeli corporal captured two years ago, although it did tell Carter it would let the soldier, Gilad Shalit, write a new letter home to his parents to prove he was still alive.

And how about stop teaching your children that their neighbours literally want their blood for dinner.

More important than the 2020 Summit

BBC NEWS | Muslim call to adopt Mecca time

Muslim scientists and clerics have called for the adoption of Mecca time to replace GMT, arguing that the Saudi city is the true centre of the Earth.

Mecca is the direction all Muslims face when they perform their daily prayers.

The call was issued at a conference held in the Gulf state of Qatar under the title: Mecca, the Centre of the Earth, Theory and Practice.

Of course, if we are going to fiddle with Mean Time, we should be considering Nambour as the birthplace of the new dawn.

A Quest on a quest of his own

CNN reporter in sex, rope and drug scandal - World - smh.com.au

I don't watch much of CNN, but this guy (whose name I never even went out of my way to check) has long been on my radar as having a particularly irritating style. ("Boisterous and quirky" is how this report describes him.)

He's a lot more quirky than we first thought, it seems.

So that's what I forgot over the weekend..

US neo-Nazis gear up for Hitler's b'day | Jerusalem Post

From the article (which appeared last week):

America's neo-Nazis will be staging a series of events and rallies across the US next week to mark the 119th anniversary of the birth of Adolf Hitler on April 20, 1889....

The events include on April 19 an anti-immigration march in Washington DC, a "family friendly" cookout in memory of Hitler in Morganton, North Carolina, for members of the white supremacist website Stormfront...

Still, it's not too late to join in the fun:

On April 26, Crew 38, a group close to the violent neo-Nazi group Hammerskin Nation, will hold an "Adolf Hitler Memorial and BBQ" in Houston with a swastika lighting.

Seriously, is it at all conceivable for there to be any better definition of "loser" than being a neo-Nazi in the 21st Century?

Unbelievable

Police charged Down's syndrome boy with mental age of five - Times Online:

When two police officers came to interview Jamie Bauld, a polite, friendly Down’s syndrome boy with a mental age of about 5, he welcomed them with a big smile and a handshake. As the officers read him his rights and charged him with assault and racial abuse, he agreed with everything they said, then thanked them for coming to see him.

Yesterday Jamie’s parents told The Times that they had been through a seven-month ordeal with the Scottish legal system over what they described as a minor fracas between two youngsters with learning difficulties.

Jamie, 18, cannot tie his shoelaces or leave home on his own, nor can he understand simple verbal concepts such as whether a door is open or shut. But his parents said that he was charged with attacking a fellow student, an Asian girl who also had special needs....

They believe that he was a victim of the zero-tolerance policy on racism under which police have to respond to any complaint, however minor.

Summit reaction

The most disturbing and dis-spiriting things about the 2020 Summit do not include the entirely predictable fact that it ended up with barely a single entirely novel idea. Rather, they were:

1. the sight of the assembled "best and brightest" during the final summing up session appearing to think that it was all an outstandingly worthwhile exercise;

2. Kevin Rudd being so very obviously buoyed by all the love in the room.

I didn't fully appreciate before that the Australian "intelligentsia" (and a considerable number of business leaders as well) were such a needy bunch that this faux act of being "listened to" would make them all swoon. Who knew that the media would (by and large) also roll over?

Of course, the papers are letting their "usual suspects" be as cynical as they like; but there is no doubt that the editorial stance of the Fairfax press in particular has been entirely gullible on the issue of the value and purpose of the exercise. The ABC TV coverage's "bookend" comments that I saw (although I missed most) were so bad they gave the impression that Rudd's PR team had a direct feed into the teleprompt.

Honestly, it has actually felt like watching a insidious process of corruption of the nation.

Maybe my badly shaken faith in the common sense of the people will be partially restored if we get some cynicism reported via some - any - disillusioned attendees over the next few days.

But you know what this whole exercise has made me secretly yearn for? Some actual, immediate crisis or disaster for this PM to have to make a hard decision about; rather than this nauseous concentration on both building up his own profile and defusing potential enemies.

UPDATE: Annabel Crabb has written up the summit as a religious event all about the PM, and this line struck me as the funniest:

On one visit to the Economy group, he [Rudd] arrived among a standing group of summiteers and promptly seated himself on the floor. He did not wash anyone's feet or anything, but the "Suffer the little economists to come unto me" theme was obvious enough nevertheless.

Don't believe him

The Sakai is the limit - Food & Wine - Activities & Interests - Travel

In this story in the Sydney Morning Herald (mainly about one very expensive restaurant in Tokyo,) the writer claims of he and his wife:

We had thought we could cope on a daily food and transport budget of $100 or just under ¥10,000. But whether we are in the glittering Ginza or the relative grunge of Electric City, our only affordable meal seems to be tiny watery noodle meals with small servings of beer or sake.

These little lunches, whether from semi-automated train station cafeterias or battered old diners, cost an easy $30 combined and still leave us hungry enough to chew our hands.

Now, unless Mr Thompson and his wife have unusually large calorific needs or desires, this is absolute rubbish.

Anyone can find a filling and tasty meal in Tokyo, especially at lunch, for around $8 to $12. Apart from the train stations, the department stores all have good, cheap eating. It's not even hard in upmarket Ginza. And it's not all noodles I am talking about either.

The one thing I routinely tell people about Japan is that, while accommodation is relatively expensive (and hotel rooms are small for the price), the cost of eating is not so expensive, unless your do want to go to higher end restaurants or eat all the time in your hotel.

If the SMH wants to pay me to demonstrate the ease of eating on $45 a day in Tokyo, I would be happy to oblige.

A very American end of the world

Escape, Carolyn Jessop's memoir of life with the FLDS, condensed. - Slate Magazine

Slate gives us a handy summary of some of the beliefs and practices of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (being the Texan group which recently had the kids removed.)

This part is particularly odd:

In a favorite children's game, called Apocalypse, kids act out the FLDS vision of the end of the world. According to FLDS lore, Native Americans who were mistreated and killed in pioneer days will be resurrected in the end times, when God will allow them to wreak vengeance on those who wronged them (the presumably also-resurrected settlers). In return for this indulgence, "resurrected Indians" will also be "required to take on the job of protecting God's chosen people"—FLDS members—by killing FLDS enemies with invisible tomahawks that can sever a person's heart in half. Very cowboys and Indians!

Bad, bad idea

Rock bottom | Comment is free

Have a look at the trailer at the movie website (there's a link in the article.) Yes, it looks like just about the worst concept for a movie comedy, ever.

Photo time

I went camping the weekend before last, and I have a few photos to prove it:


This tent is old. I bought it when I was about 18 or 19, used it for a few years, then packed it away for about 26 years until having kids inspired me to resume camping again. To my surprise, it had not rotted away or been consumed by vermin. Now I get to bore any other family we travel with by explaining this story of remarkable tent longevity, and making "how long can a tent last?" observations, every time I am setting it up or taking it down. Oh - the yellow inflatable canoe - it's nearly as old too.


This is sunrise the first morning. Either that or a thermonuclear explosion over distant Caboolture. (I'm such a romantic.)

This type of skinny spider was everywhere:


But for a really weird looking one, try this:


If it's a new species, it should be named after Des, who was the one who spotted it and insisted I take a photo just in case he was its discoverer.

The last photo is of sunrise on the second day, with added cloud:


The place, incidentally, was the Lake Somerset Holiday Park, which is huge, has excellent facilities, and very friendly management. Just bring something that floats in which to potter about, and it's great.

Over 45? Sit down, relax

Exercise May Lead To Faster Prostate Tumor Growth

What all middle aged men have been waiting for: an excuse to sit around and get fat.

The experimental model that this is based on is not exactly close to real life, though:

The researchers implanted prostate tumors subcutaneously in the flanks of 50 mice and then put half of the mice in cages with exercise wheels and half in cages with no wheels. All mice were fed the same diet. On average, the exercising mice ran more than half a mile each day.

So, next thing is to try to do this a bit more realistically:

The researchers are currently conducting a validation study, in mice, in which tumors are injected directly into the prostate, thereby better simulating human prostate cancer, Jones said.

Just how big is a mouse prostate? How do you tell if it's enlarged?

So-called neutral

Washington Watch: Doing good business with evil | Jerusalem Post

An interesting opinion piece from the Jerusalem Post, complaining how the Swiss will deal with whoever they like (currently, Iran) if it suits them.

The whole topic of the role Switzerland played during WWII is something about which I don't know much. Put it on the almost endless list of "things worth reading a book about one day." (I like to imagine that this is what heaven is for: a very, very long time to catch up on reading.)

Contradictory evidence

Study Sees an Advantage for Algae Species in Changing Oceans - New York Times

Bah! Just after I spend time catching up on ocean acidification, and trying to encourage readers to worry about the effect on carbonate-incorporating algae, a new study indicates that they have actually done better under increased CO2 levels, contrary to previous studies and expectations. (Who would have guessed that it makes a difference if you bubble gas into the water, rather than simply add acid to it?)

Neither the article above, or the other one it links to, talk about whether this means this is an automatic way the earth is increasing the oceans as a CO2 sink. But my guess is that it can't be hurting in that regard.

However, the article also says that this research doesn't mean the coral reefs are safe from acidification.

And: I also wonder whether someone will come up with a concern about too much algae being produced in some regions with too much acidification. As I mentioned in my earlier post, I didn't think you really wanted a lot of certain types of algae in shallow waters.

More information required.

And no gloating please, Andrew Bolt.

UPDATE: It gets worse (for my previous post.) According to the Ocean Acidification blog, there's an article in Science that is claiming we simply don't know enough to be able to dismiss coral reef's ability to adapt to increased acidification. I think the suggestion is that other types of coral will simply replace the ones that are more sensitive to it.

But then: the worriers have made a response already. And they make the point that, when corals have disappeared in the past due to high ocean acidification, they have taken millions of years to recover.

It's a big gamble, isn't it? My gut reaction is still that increasing the acidity of the entire ocean by a factor of 2 or 3 over a relatively short period of time (a century or so?) is a dangerous experiment to be playing. We can't even stop the first part of it, due to the lag time in CO2 absorption, but we can try and stop the worst of it.

Boeing 777 crash still a worry

There was a safety bulletin put out by the British Air Accident Investigations Branch in February 2008, regarding the Boeing 777 crash at Heathrow.

The circumstances of the accident are described (while at 720 feet from landing, one engine reduced power, followed by the other within 7 seconds, and then they wouldn't respond to the request for increased thrust.) There was some rubbish found in the fuel tanks, but it seems that is not the obvious answer. The fuel itself did not seem to be contaminated.

Odd, hey? At the end it says they are looking at the high pressure fuel pumps, and the fuel system generally.

Rice woes

As Australia dries, the world suffers - International Herald Tribune

I didn't realise until recently that Australia's rice production was internationally significant. Normally:

Annual world production totals 600 million tonnes with only 25 million tonnes traded outside the country of origin. While Australian rice represents only around 0.2% of world rice production, remarkably Australia exports represent over 4 % of world trade.

That's about a million tonnes of rice. But we won't be exporting a grain this year:

A few dozen growers - most using water pumped from underground - will harvest just 18,000 tonnes for domestic consumption, it is forecast.

But one thing that puzzles me about this is the question of where we grow rice in this country:

Rice is grown on some 145,000 ha of land, mainly in the irrigated areas of south-eastern Australia. Eighty per cent of rice produced in Australia is of medium-grain Japonica varieties, which are well suited to high summer temperatures without the humidity of tropical climates.

Huh? Haven't we routinely got water to excess in the Ord River dam in WA, as well as in many North Queensland dams? Isn't rice generally well suited to the tropics?

Here's my brilliant Australia 2020 suggestion: let's try growing rice where the water is! (Thank you, thank you, it was nothing really.)

Three words

PM's 2020 pledge for every child | The Australian

So this is Rudd's great idea for 2020 Australia? Expensive, unnecessary, and lame.

At least someone at the Sydney Institute called it right:

Barclays Capital chief executive Nicholas Johnson, who in moving a vote of thanks said: "I thought he was meant to be an economic conservative, sounded like an old-fashion socialist to me".

That can be arranged...

Emissions will drop when we end the reliance on coal

The link is to Kenneth Davidson's column in The Age today, which begins:

IF FORCED to choose, I would prefer to live on top of a nuclear waste dump than a carbon dioxide dump, which is both the Government and Opposition's preferred method of dealing with the greenhouse gas emissions from burning coal to produce electricity.

Actually, I share quite a bit of Davidson's scepticism about geosequestration of CO2 from coal fired plants ever being viable on a large scale.

UPDATE: seeing I have lately had a surge of new visitors (thanks, AB!), I should refer people to a post I did about geosequestration last year, which notes some new ideas that sound somewhat more promising to me that trying to pump huge volumes of gas into the ground.

Be prepared to be shocked

Our Local Correspondents: Up and Then Down

If you are interested in elevators (and who isn't?), you must read this very long essay about them in The New Yorker.

I must admit I didn't know this:

In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button’s power. It’s a little like prayer.

Wasn't it around the early 1990's that call buttons in the economy section of aircraft also mysteriously stopped having any effect?

A notable passing

One of the great physicists of the 20th century, John Wheeler, has died, aged 96. The New York Times obituary is here, but for a very personal observation of what he was like as a teacher, go to this tribute at Cosmic Variance. He certainly sounds like a lovely man.

Look who the Truthers have for company

Ahmadinejad casts doubt over 9/11 | Jerusalem Post

The Iranian President must be spending time on Truther websites:

Though Iran has condemned the al-Qaida attacks on New York and Washington in the past, this was the third time in a week Ahmadinejad questioned the death toll, who was behind the attacks and how it happened.

"Four or five years ago, a suspicious event occurred in New York. A building collapsed and they said that 3,000 people had been killed but never published their names," Ahmadinejad told Iranians in the holy city of Qom.

Robert Fisk must feel proud.

IT Crowd returns

The second series of The IT Crowd starts on the ABC tonight. It's one of the very few recent British sitcom-ish shows that makes me laugh, but the humour is very silly. Here's 8 minutes from the first series, which gives you a good idea of the characters: