Worth a look

ABC TV: Captain Cook

I kept forgetting it was on, but from what I did see, the 4 part documentary about Cook which recently ran on ABC was very good.

I did see most of the last episode, about his ill-fated final voyage. I didn't realise how strangely Cook behaved on that trip, or how the reason for this is still only a matter of speculation.

I recommend watching it if it is repeated soon.

Class Act

Lateline - ABC

Peter Costello gave a fine performance on Lateline tonight. The transcript is not up yet, but you can watch the video already.

He does not give any impression of a man who will be caught up in extended bitterness over what could have been. Disappointed, sure, but not full of bile and bitterness.

The difference between how John Howard and Peter Costello have handled the election defeat, compared to Keating and Latham, is remarkable. (It's true that on the Labor side, Kim Beazley was a good loser, but he seemed a bit too comfortable in that role for the good of the Party!)

Self explanatory

Oh.. my... God

Before I get to the main point, while I type this I can see Shirley Bassey on TV performing at the 2005 Royal Variety concert from England.

What gives with Ms Bassey? How old is she? It feels like she should be about 80, yet she has looked exactly the same for the last 40 years. I can only assume that she is either:

a. some triumph of plastic surgery (but doesn't have the very obvious over-worked looks of many American stars),
b. a singing robot, or
c. she has sold her soul to the Devil.

She is the best preserved ancient singer in the world; she makes Cliff Richard look like a geriatric prune.

OK, I can't avoid the main point now.

What the hell are the parliamentary Liberals thinking?? Did Peter Costello vote for Brendan Nelson as leader just in case he (Peter) has a change of heart and wants to take a stab at leadership in 18 months time?

Does anyone in Australia, anyone at all, think that Nelson will be a better leader than Turnbull. No? I didn't think so....

I can't stand Nelson. Everyone I have heard on the media or in real life talking about Liberal leadership since the election has said they like Turnbull.

The theory that the party really just wants Nelson to hold the seat and take all the punishment of the first couple of years of opposition before they get serious and appoint Turnbull has some merit.

But jeez...do we have to really go through the embarrassment of having the 3rd or 4th rate contender as leader first?

Willing to take bets on this

The party's over and Liberals will soon be history - Opinion - smh.com.au

Steve Biddulph is a psychologist best known for his books on raising children (boys in particular). Makes him sound as if he might be a bit on the conservative side? Ha! His Wikipedia entry shows he lives in Tasmania and helps fund the SievX National Memorial Project. Not conservative markers, to say the least.

In any event, his analysis of the election result (linked above) makes for an erratic read.

First, he claims that the Liberals will die because all Western governments have become "centrist." (Well, both parties moving to centrist positions is true, although I still can't see why you can't have 2 centrist parties with sufficient differentiation to make a contest.)

Second, the environment is the future's big issue. (Possibly true.)

Thirdly, the Western economy may be about to undergo a major collapse, and this was possibly a "good" election to lose. (Possibly true, although his claim that "We are a civilisation in collapse" is a warning sign that his analysis is about to go off the rails.)

Fourthly: in the face of imminent civilisation collapse:

Labor is the right party to manage this.

What? What does he base that on?:

Despite the widespread belief after years of cynical politics that politicians are all the same, Rudd and Gillard are not in power for power's sake. I am willing to stake my 30 years as a psychologist on this, but I think many observers have also come to this conclusion.

LOL! (Especially for Kevin.) But Steve finds them to be altruists pure of heart:

Kevin and Julia, as Australia already calls them, want to make this country a better place for the people in it. In the coming times of deprivation, they have the value systems that will be needed to care for the sudden rise in poverty, stress, and need. They also have the unity.

As opposed to Liberals who, I suppose, want to crush the coming mass of starving enviro-peasants under their heels and send them back to the workhouses again.

No, Steve Biddulph wants us to be more like a fairy tale Europe:

The big lie of Liberal supremacy was economic management. In fact, they knew how to generate income, but not how to spend it. We could have been building what Europe built in this past decade - superb hospitals, bullet trains, schools and training centres, low cost public transport of luxurious quality, magnificent public housing. We pissed it all away on tax giveaways and consumer goods.

Oh come on. I suppose Paris is caught in strikes and riots because everyone decided that perfection could be just a little more perfect?

I don't have time to do the Googling to show the aspects of Europe today that do not compare favourably to Australia under Howard. But you know they are out there.

No Steve is just a Greenie dill after all.

A brief history of hand washing

Our Enemy Hands - New York Times

Sex tourism with a twist

Older white women join Kenya's sex tourists | U.S. | Reuters

Clearly, it's a day for distasteful sex stories:

The white beaches of the Indian Ocean coast stretched before the friends as they both walked arm-in-arm with young African men, Allie resting her white haired-head on the shoulder of her companion, a six-foot-four 23-year-old from the Maasai tribe.

He wore new sunglasses he said were a gift from her.

"We both get something we want -- where's the negative?" Allie asked in a bar later, nursing a strong, golden cocktail.

She was still wearing her bikini top, having just pulled on a pair of jeans and a necklace of traditional African beads.

Bethan sipped the same local drink: a powerful mix of honey, fresh limes and vodka known locally as "Dawa," or "medicine."

She kept one eye on her date -- a 20-year-old playing pool, a red bandana tying back dreadlocks and new-looking sports shoes on his feet.

He looked up and came to join her at the table, kissing her, then collecting more coins for the pool game.

The women in this story are 64 and 56.

Bosses: if you like to live dangerously...

...then bring out this game at the office Christmas party for the boys and girls in Administration to play:

Keep your pants on

It's from Japan, and it's so politically incorrect it's very funny.

If it was to be used at a public service party, there would be enquiries, sackings, appeals and possibly a royal commission.

Yuck factor

Catherine Deveny connects election wins, Kevin Rudd and sex in a way that is just creepy, even if she is trying to be funny.

And was Kevin trying to tell the nation last night that he was a virgin on his wedding night? (Twice he made the quip that "We were in unchartered territory the day before we got married.") Too much information, as they say.

With Lefties feeling relaxed enough to have sex again after 11 years, I am expecting Canberra to turn into something like the court of Charles II. (Except that I assume King Kevin himself will abstain.)

UPDATE: Andrew Bolt's comment on the Kevin Rudd 7.30 Report interview is pretty accurate. Kevin sending his MP's out to do "homework" is just silly, and will not provide the accurate information that a few 'phone calls in each State would probably provide anyway. (What happens if a homeless shelter is not in an Opposition MP's electorate?) It seems almost perversely designed to irritate his own MPs.

Memory block

This is bothering me.

I know that I was somewhere in the last 5 years or so where I found on a shelf an old book which was a memoir written by Winston Churchill's doctor. I spent a bit of time reading interesting sections. I remember that he thought that Winston had a mild heart attack during the War. I remember his talking about attending the leader's conference at at Malta near the end of the war. It was pretty interesting.

But - for the life of me I can't remember where it was that I found the book and had time to read bits of it. I remember being surprised that the book was there at all. It seems in memory that it was accommodation somewhere; but the type of place where there was a bookshelf where past visitors could leave books.

It's just that I don't recall staying in any place like that for years. I don't recall staying anywhere without children interrupting reading for years; but I don't recall the kids being with me. I have been waiting for the memory of where I was to come back, but it is refusing to.

This is not a very interesting post.

Hitchens on Mitt & Mormonism

Mitt Romney needs to answer questions about his Mormon faith. - By Christopher Hitchens - Slate Magazine

Of course, don't expect Hitchens to take kindly to the Mormons; but really, it is a religion that deserves a lot of stick. I like this line in the article:

The Book of Mormon, when it is not "chloroform in print" as Mark Twain unkindly phrased it, is full of vicious ingenuity.

Reading the Koran has much the same effect on me. As I have noted before, these "one author" books just don't believe in good narrative. (OK, I know the Koran has a rather complicated history.)

The God wars

I meant to link to a New York Times article earlier this month which discussed the question of whether famous (and aging) atheist philosophy Antony Flew had really become a theist or not. (The general tone of the article was leaning towards the view that Flew had been manipulated by pro-religionists.)

Here's the article. I recommend reading it first before reading the further useful commentary by one of the people involved over at The Tablet this week. (Linking to The Tablet is often problematic. If you have trouble with that link, try the link in the blogroll at the side.)

A nice day for a walk

Earth keeps Moonwalkers from harm - space - 25 November 2007 - New Scientist Space

Oh good. The Heinlein-ian idea of boy scouts going hiking on the surface of the Moon may be able to happen yet:

Every month brings about seven straight days of relative safety from the flux of energetic charged particles from the sun, as the moon dips through the Earth's magnetic field.

Umm, you can stop getting your face on TV for a little while now, Kevin

My first priority: Rudd - National - smh.com.au

Kevin Rudd turned up at a school again today, to say nothing special except that he really wanted schools to get new computers in a hurry. (Strange how he was shown standing in a room full of computers when he said this.)

What was it that Mark Latham said about Kevin?

UPDATE: I complained during the campaign that Rudd seemed to be making quite a fetish out of computers. (Fetish in the anthropological sense: the Chambers definition is "in primitive societies: an object worshipped for its perceived magical powers.")

Then, in the link above that mentions Mark Latham's assessment of Kevin, it notes that one of Latham's criticisms is that he (Kevin) "never writes anything".

Is it possible that Kevin thinks computers will be the saviour of education because he doesn't use them much himself? Surely he realises how ubiquitous they are in households and schools already. (Admittedly, school equipment is often old, but then again in primary schools they are teaching pretty basic stuff.)

Also: here's a post with the detailed extract of Latham's account of the episode of Rudd crying about his mother's death. In the ABC interview (my previous link), Rudd flatly denies that he cried at all, or made the threats Latham claims. (According to Latham, Rudd was "in a very fragile condition," and is simultaneously crying but still pleading to be made shadow Treasurer!)

If Latham's account is true, it hardly gives me a lot of confidence that we have a new Prime Minister who is ready to take on a lot of pressure.

Someone is not telling the truth, and I would love to know who.

Strange science time...

Have you all missed my posts on strange/weird science? (Presses ear against monitor but hears nothing.) Thought so!

Anyhow, Mild Colonial Boy brought to my attention The Telegraph's version of last week's story that maybe astronomers have caused the early destruction of the universe by looking at it.

It's a curious idea which I don't understand at all. It's only appeal is that it has a certain urban myth, cautionary horror tale character about it. ("And as they led the girl away, they warned her, 'Don't look back. Don't look back..' But she didn't heed the warning...etc".)

The second science story from last week which made no sense at all was this one from Nature, which revisits Schrodinger's cat:

Johannes Kofler and Časlav Brukner ... say that the emergence of the 'classical' laws of physics, deduced by the likes of Galileo and Newton, from quantum rules happens not as objects get bigger, but because of the ways we measure these objects. If we could make every measurement with as much precision as we liked, there would be no classical world at all, they say.

It's not "decoherence" that solves the problem, they say, but simply the fact that measurements are imprecise on the macro scale:

The researchers show that it depends on the precision of measurement. If the measurements are a bit fuzzy, so that we can’t distinguish one quantum state from several other, similar ones, this smoothes out the quantum oddities into a classical picture. Kofler and Brukner show that, once a degree of fuzziness is introduced into measured values, the quantum equations describing an object’s behaviour turn into classical ones.

.....watching ...quantum jumps between life and death for Schrödinger’s cat would require that we be able to measure precisely an impractically large number of quantum states. For a 'cat' containing 10²⁰ quantum particles, say, we would need to be able to tell the difference between 10¹⁰ states – too many to be feasible.

If correct, it is difficult to see what this would mean. Is it fair to say that, if we had the eyes of God, we would all look like fuzzy wavefunction balls, with no clear edge to our bodies at all? (I am sure that all anti-religion scientists would hate that as an image, as it sounds like it is offering a possible explanation for the reality of Reiki healing, or other New Age-y ideas.)

Alternatively, does it mean that any living thing, if its life is dependent on a quantum outcome, is in reality in a type of simultaneous dead and alive state? In the article, they say:

"We prefer to say that they are neither dead nor alive," say Kofler and Brukner, “but in a new state that has no counterpart in classical physics.”

Well, that's as clear as mud then!

My Coalition leadership wish

I have already made the point over at Caz's blog, but I reckon the best Coalition leadership team would be Turnbull and Julie Bishop. (Pity that the Nationals would have to give up their deputy position for that, but geez they are getting increasingly irrelevant, aren't they?)

The earlobes, the earlobes!

Gillard main.jpg (JPEG Image, 300x383 pixels)

Ever since making an off the cuff comment on Saturday night that Julia Gillard seems to have very large earlobes, my site meter has indicated that there have been half a dozen hits here (at least) resulting from Google searches of "Julia Gillard earlobes".

Doesn't that seem odd?

Anyway, proof that I am right can be found in the picture linked above. It seems to show she has 2 piercings in her left lobe at least. I think she could fit a few more in, easily!

UPDATE: Julia is our new PM, and this has caused a sudden upsurge in the number of hits to this blog by people who specifically Google "Julia Gillard earlobes". I can't decide if I should be honoured or disturbed. Anyway, to keep all such visitors happy, I have found the most explicit ear lobe photo of Julia ever. Knock yourselves out:



UPDATE 2: Maybe it was the lighting. Maybe she's been wearing some particularly pendulous earrings lately. But for whatever reason, Julia's earlobes struck me as particularly big on the "Great Debate" tonight. And more and people seem to be noticing, given the hundreds and hundreds who have arrived here via Google searches. Here's a screenshot from tonight:

Flanagan on Howard

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | A decade of John Howard has left a country of timidity, fear and shame

Richard Flanagan puts his typical over-the-top slant on the downfall of John Howard:

Howard had promised that Australia would be relaxed and comfortable under his rule, yet this year Australians had become more fearful and suspicious of each other than ever, a state of affairs that Howard's government seemed happy to exploit.

Er, well with all the water gardening murders going on, it's no wonder:

Every mainland capital city now has a water supply crisis so severe that people have been murdered by neighbours for watering gardens.

I think the number of people is precisely "one", isn't it?

Actually, as far as Flanaghan columns go, this one is surprising for actually giving credit that some things he approves of happened under Howard. (Increased immigration, closer ties to Asia, gun laws, the Timor intervention.) Of course, Richard seems to think these happened despite of Howard, not because of him.

Then its back to the bad:

For a decade Howard's power had resided in his ability to speak directly and powerfully to the great negativity at the core of the Australian soul - its timidity, its conformity, its fear of other people and new ideas, its colonial desire to ape rather than lead, its shame that sometimes seems close to a terror of the uniqueness of its land and people.

Yeah, that fits in real well with the list of things you just approved of, doesn't it, you dill.

As you would expect, the big worry for Richard is that Rudd is Howard lite:

Was this Howard's greatest victory: the creation of a Labor party in his own image?

He might be onto something there.

Of course, you can rely on Guardian readers to join in soon with their own horror stories of the True Character of Australia. There aren't many comments yet, but I like this one:

People evaporated off the street.

That must account for the slightly greasy smudges left all across Australian city footpaths. It's all that remains of the evaporated.

In other news...

The New York Times has run a couple of articles indicating that some countries well advanced in the development of wind power are starting to get leery of it:

In the United States, one of the areas most suited for wind turbines is the central part of the country, stretching from Texas through the northern Great Plains — far from the coastal population centers that need the most electricity.

In Denmark, which pioneered wind energy in Europe, construction of wind farms has stagnated in recent years. The Danes export much of their wind-generated electricity to Norway and Sweden because it comes in unpredictable surges that often outstrip demand.

In 2003, Ireland put a moratorium on connecting wind farms to its electricity grid because of the strains that power surges were putting on the network; it has since begun connecting them again.

And in Germany, they are starting to run out of places to put them:

In Germany, where 20,000 wind turbines generate 5 percent of the electricity, advocates say wind will be critical to meeting the government’s goal of generating at least 20 percent of all power from renewable methods by 2020. But the industry’s growth is slowing for a variety of reasons.

Germany is running out of places to put the turbines because of restrictions on the location and height of the devices. And rising raw material prices are making wind farms more expensive to build.

“Under the current circumstances, Germany’s climate protection targets are not achievable,” said Hermann Albers, the president of the German Wind Energy Association.

Remember: Kevin Rudd has promised us the same renewable energy target. Germany has much smaller area over which to send the energy they chose to generate with wind or other renewables, and has been hard at developing it for years. (They also claim they can do it without new nuclear plants.)

I can't see there is a hope in hell that Labor's target is achievable in Australia.

The bad news keeps coming...

Matt Price has died, aged 46. Very, very sad news.

UPDATE: more detail and recollections of friends and colleagues this morning. I noted this too:

It was a measure of the respect that Matt was held in that John Howard took time out during a frantic election campaign last week to visit him at his Mount Hawthorn home.

What a nice gesture. Not reported previously (not that it should have been either,) but still indicates the fundamental decency of the ex PM.