Near miss noted

Crikey - Sky not falling, just passing quite close

An "intruder" asteroid was detected by Australian comet hunter Rob McNaught at an observatory on Siding Spring Mountain on Friday night and will have a close encounter with Earth at about 1am tomorrow.

The object, estimated to be around 35-60 metres at its widest, is similar in size to the dead comet shard that exploded with the force of a large hydrogen bomb over a then largely uninhabited region of central Siberia on 30 June 1908.

This time there will be no collision, but the object catalogued as 2009 DD45 will come as close as around 63,000 kilometres from the earth’s surface somewhere over the Pacific west of Tahiti.

Ready for your close up, Your Excellency?

Glenn Milne informed us on the weekend that Governor-General Quentin Bryce has, for reasons unknown, been requesting (and getting) briefings from government officials including the head of the Defence Force, the head of Foreign Affairs, and Treasury. This is not normal, apparently:

A spokeswoman confirmed the official briefings by three departmental heads was the first of its kind in the 107-year history of the office.

If I were the suspicious type who found this Governor-General kind of irritating (oh, wait a minute, that is me) I would say that it sounds something like a reverse palace coup in the planning. I suspect Bill Shorten (still dating the GG's daughter, I assume) may be installed as first Australian Emperor if the Labor Party loses the next election. (Remember you heard it here first, unless someone at Andrew Bolt's has already noted this.)

But even before this weekend's news, I had been meaning to point readers towards the gallery section of the Governor-General's website. I would be curious to know who selects the photos there, as it seems that under Quentin Bryce's reign there has been a significantly increased emphasis on having her appear, if at all possible, in every single photo. (There are very few exceptions.)

Now of course, any gallery of the activities of an GG is going to mainly feature scenes in which the he or she appears. But try this: go to the archives and compare, say, the 2007 photos of our last Governor-General to those of Quentin Bryce. Under Michael Jeffery, you will find quite a few photos of other people without the GG being in shot. (There are a couple of "Santa" photos too; if one ever appears while Quentin Bryce is there, I would be looking very closely at the eyes to check that it isn't her.)

Back to the current photo selections: the one from 9 November 2008 in particular (see a full-sized version here) makes it seem that there is a distinct emphasis now on Governor-General herself, rather than the office.

Not very endearing for this reader, at least.

Perfectly apt, really

Imagine ... Lennon's classic played on church bells

Apt because it is to be performed in an Anglican cathedral.

But he's getting really tired of eating crackers

Parrots teach man to speak again - Telegraph

Proof the internet is evil

Internet 'is causing poetry boom' - Telegraph

Opinion Dominion explains...

It's war: minister takes aim at defence | smh.com.au

Our Defence Minister thinks his department is "at times incompetent".

No doubt it is. The problem is that, at least as far as the uniform side of the fence is concerned, they expect people who may be quite good and competent at one job (flying a plane, being an engineer or battlefield tactician) to be sensible and competent in another role they never really intended taking on when they joined (management of personnel, running a quasi-judicial system for disciplinary breaches, conducting fair internal enquiries.)

Time and again, you can see a person who may have been quite good at his or her original job making a complete hash of the more generalist duties that certain positions may require. It's not for lack of attempted training and assessment; Defence spends an inordinate amount of time on management training, and assessment is continual. It's just that some people with good technical skills in some areas just don't seem to be able to engage common sense when it comes to other areas.

It's often truly puzzling as to how some really bad decisions can be made by uniform men or women who are clearly not dumb. Of course, this also means that Defence then has to spend an inordinate amount of time on internal review of such decisions.

I don't know the answer; maybe its inherent in having a relatively small defence force. But it is still discouraging.

Local food in Japan

This is a feature of Japanese towns and cities that I have often noticed as being quite different from most Western cities:

"Locally grown for local consumption" is a common practice in many cities in Japan. Small plots of urban land dedicated to farming can be found in cities of all sizes. Kunio Tsubota of the Kyushu University Asia Centre writes in Urban Agriculture in Asia: Lessons from Japanese Experience "The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) estimates that about 1.1 million hectares of farmland exist in "urban-like areas" and are producing ¥2.6 trillion worth of products."

Tsubota states that municipalities desire some farmland in urbanized areas because the land provides open areas necessary for emergencies, residents don’t want buildings constructed on green spaces, and that it’s more cost effective to grow crops than to convert urban farm plots into parks, and then maintain the parks.

One thing I have noticed, though, is that a lot of these Japanese urban farms may be right beside busy roads, and I wonder whether car and truck exhausts so close leaves a residue on fruit and veggies. (I guess it would just wash off anyway.)

There are parts (but getting smaller over the years) of some Brisbane suburbs which still contain small market farms. In fact, fruit and vegetables brought in some of the Vietnamese dominated shops, which I think get their stuff from such local farms, can be incredibly cheap compared to the supermarket. We usually get our pork from a "pork butcher" that seems to supply all the local restaurants too, and is always cheaper than the supermarket.

Urban farming therefore makes some sense, doesn't it? (As does living near asian migrant areas!)

Further to that Tarantino post...

A few posts back I had a link to a Guardian blog which embedded the ugly trailer for Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" (yes, that spelling is apparently correct.)

The trailer is also on Youtube, but this time it has the Motion Picture Association of America preview rating at the start, which says the preview is "Suitable for All Audiences".

Are they mad?

Probably as mad as Quentin Tarantino, who thought that Kill Bill was a film that would be quite fun for boys and girls above the age of 12.

Given that he displays an emotional age of a 13 year old boy (and an unpleasant one at that,) I shouldn't be surprised. (Look at how juvenile most of the comments following any Tarantino clip on Youtube are as well.)

That young men should be getting excited about such a splatter-fest film is not a good sign. The only positive thing is that critics have become cynical of Tarantino's endless repetition of his one trick oeuvre.

Mad grandmother

BBC NEWS | Americas | US fortune 'not solely for dogs'

Talking about the $8 billion estate of the late Leona Helmsley, the article notes:

Helmsley also left $12m to her pet dog, Trouble, while explicitly leaving out two of her grandchildren.

A Manhattan judge later reduced the trust fund for the nine-year-old Maltese to $2m and the grandchildren received $6m each.

How do you spend even $2 million on a dog? Diamond encrusted collars?

On David Cameron's loss

A lesson for us all in a short life, well lived | Libby Purves - Times Online

Libby Purves writes very well about this.

High speed skepticism

Expanding broadband to bail out economies - International Herald Tribune

This article notes:

In recent weeks, the United States, Britain, Canada, Germany, Spain, Portugal and Finland have all included measures to expand broadband access and to bolster connection speeds in their planned economic stimulus packages. Australia, France, Hungary, Ireland, Japan and South Korea have announced separate broadband plans, according to a compilation by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development...

While analysts agree that investing in communications technologies makes economies more competitive, they are skeptical about whether the promised gains will materialize quickly enough to make the spending packages - ranging from €11 million, or $14 million, in Hungary to $7 billion in the United States - effective recession-busters.

Indeed. Count me as a skeptic when it comes to claims about how high speed internet to the likes of the back of Bourke is going to supercharge the Australian economy. According to the article:

...investments in telecommunications typically generate positive returns, said Olivier Pascal, an analyst at Analysys Mason, a consulting firm. Complex economic models show that every $1 spent on network improvements increases the gross domestic product by $1.30, he said. And that does not include the increases in productivity that such investments generate, he added.

He said that the same models showed that "allocating spending to telecoms will create far more jobs than giving it to, say, agriculture."

When I can download lunch, print it out at my desk and eat it, I'll be a little less skeptical.

Of course, I like high speed internet as much as the next time wasting internet junky, and it's nice to develop it for rural populations. It's the claimed benefits to the economy that I doubt, especially when it's just about ramping up speed to cities which already have relatively good speeds. At least one company in France has a similar view:

A top executive of Vivendi, which controls SFR, the owner of French fixed and mobile networks, said recently that faster connections would simply worsen the problem of online piracy, undermining Vivendi's music, movie and games businesses.

"Today, fiber serves no purpose," Philippe Capron, chief financial officer of Vivendi, was quoted as saying by a French business paper, La Tribune. "There is no new revenue stream and no supplemental service to offset the considerable investment. All that it does is to encourage the illegal downloading of films."

Let's hope so

Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds: the worst film ever made?

Go to the link to see the trailer for a film which, with any luck, will be the last ever made by QT. As the Guardian's Paul McInnes says:

If this film isn't the work of a man who not only has nothing left to say, but is revelling in his ability to continue not saying it, then I don't know what is.

File under "what the hell are they thinking?"

Spider-Man musical set for 2010

Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark will include the story of the superhero's origins and will feature music and lyrics by U2 members Bono and The Edge.

This'll probably give Jason Soon nightmares.

Not happy Clive

Crikey - Hamilton: why we should stick to carbon trading regardless

Clive Hamilton's take on why Australia should forge ahead with an ETS is an interesting read. He does set out the differences in approach between it and a carbon tax pretty well.

Mind you, I still don't agree with his conclusion, which seems to be "yes I know, the ETS Rudd is giving us is useless anyway, but every other nation is going to use ETS so we have to use it too, regardless of its effectiveness."

There's also a surprising suggestion made:

A case could be made to modify the CPRS so that those who want to do more than respond to higher energy prices can do so. In fact, they can do that already, by clubbing together and buying emission permits that they simply retire so the aluminium smelters can’t get their hands on them.

Hamilton argues that the fluctuations in carbon price are something that just have to live with, because it is easier for politicians to handle:

Against this, a carbon tax fixes the price of pollution through the tax rate and leaves it to the market to decide the amount of pollution. Business has certainty but the environment pays for it. If Australia has a legally binding emissions cap, as we now do under the Kyoto Protocol and will have again under a Copenhagen agreement, then the government will be compelled to adjust the tax rate frequently and by large amounts as it tries to hit the target.

Imagine the politics of that, remembering that the GST rate is virtually cast in stone. Politically, it's infinitely easier to let the price fluctuate in the marketplace, with the peaks and troughs smoothed by business planners.

I don't know about that line "Business has certainty but the environment pays for it." As I noted recently, I am swayed by the argument that sufficient business certainty is exactly what is needed to drive investment in a relatively rapid change to cleaner technology.

UPDATE: as for the idea that people might help reduce actual emissions by buying up permits and taking them out of the hands of industry, Andrew Macintosh writes:

....the extent of abatement through such voluntary action is likely to be tiny.

The operating revenue of Australia’s four largest conservation organisations is around $60 million per annum. Let’s make the wildly optimistic assumption that all of this money is directed to buying and retiring permits, which will cost around $25 each and will equate to one tonne of CO2-e. This would reduce emissions by 2.4 million tonnes, or less than 0.5% of Australia’s annual total. This is hardly the type of rescue package the CPRS needs.

A contemplation on modern life - the forgotten hankerchief

Today I forgot to put a clean hankerchief in my pocket as I left the house.

When I was a child, I always had a kid-sized hankerchief in my pocket. It was used for my nose mainly, but were also pretty good at mopping up blood from skinned knees, blood noses, and lost baby teeth. When very young, if I was in need of taking a few coins to school, my mother used to tie them into the corner of the hankerchief, so they weren't jangling loose in my pocket. I used to like the idea that one could be used as a tourniquet if I was bitten by a snake or had a cut artery. They were, in short, very useful and quite comforting.

As a middle aged adult, I continue to find them useful. Now, tissues will be used during any heavy cold instead of carrying the phlegm in my pocket all day. However, when you have young children, a large kerchief in the pocket is still extremely useful for drying hands after visits to the toilet, mopping blood from their skinned knees, etc. Even when not with my own children, my habit on going to public toilets (especially if I am about to use my hands to eat) is to finish drying my hands with my hankerchief, and then use it to protect my now clean hand when opening the exit door. They remain a very useful thing to have where ever I am. I feel lost today due to my morning oversight.

It seems to me that somewhere between the 1960's and 2009, they fell out of fashion. I am reasonably sure that no children take them to school anymore. I doubt that many adults below the age of 40 use them much either. A couple of Christmas's ago, a nephew with 3 young children of his own saw me using my hankerchief to dry my kid's hands and said "that's a handy thing to have." Indeed.

The range of hankerchiefs available in shops now seems very small; the last time I looked, it seemed quite hard to find reasonable quality ones. They are either very cheap thin things, or quite expensive. The tissue has replaced it all, but really, I find them not even half as useful.

Why did the utility of the hankerchief get lost in the modern world? Or am I mistaken, and they are more popular than I know?

If, dear reader, you have a good hankerchief experience to share, please let me know. Their rightful place in the scheme of life needs to be restored, and the campaign may as well start here.

Now they listen to him

Peter Schiff - Radio National Breakfast - 25 February 2009

There's no transcript available, but you can listen to what Peter Schiff said this morning about the fundamental debt problem of the USA. It sounded quite convincing and quite scary.

I see from his Wikipedia entry that he has taken to talking like a survivalist lately, which is a bit of a worry. But I don't know that that affects the credibility of his diagnosis of the problem.

Back to ocean acidification, greenhouse gas, etc

Here's a round up of interesting stuff about greenhouse issues, all in one post so that readers who don't believe in it can skip right over!

* There's a study out on Great Barrier Reef coral which indicates ocean acidification (lowering of the ocean pH) has already been underway for some time. (Seems very technical work, and I wouldn't be surprised if other scientists argue about this.)

* It seems that at least some molluscs get heavier shells with more CO2 in the water, rather than lighter. This paper is based on some tank experiments, and is pretty noteworthy because it seems to show how little is properly understood about the biological processes in calcification.

The authors note, however, that heavier shell production (or just normal shell production) in some species seems to be at a price. (Like less muscle, reproductive changes.) It's still not a very encouraging sign that everything is OK under increased ocean acidification. (In fact, I seem to recall some article that was about a period in prehistory when molluscs ruled the oceans. Must go looking for that.)

* Ross Gittens writes this morning about the Rudd ETS and Penny Wong's recent counterattack on the idea that individual efforts to "reduce carbon footprint" don't change emissions overall. Ross says Rudd and Wong are being misleading in their claims:

It's true only in an arithmetic sense that anything we do "contributes directly" to Australia meeting its emissions target. Everything contributes to the bottom line of the sum. But, because the bottom line is controlled under the scheme, any helpful contribution we might make just leaves more scope for others to make unhelpful contributions.

When Wong says strong actions on our part help make it easier for governments to set lower emissions targets in future, the future she means is after 2020. As it stands, the only changes governments can make under the scheme are to the "trajectory" or path we travel to get to an unchanged destination level of emissions in 2020.

Why has the Government constructed its scheme in such a strange, off-putting way, which fact it has then wanted to conceal and obfuscate?

So, the point that individual actions to live more frugally leaves more room for industry to increase CO2 is correct.

(As I understand it, a carbon tax can't be really based on a set target, so there is a degree of guesswork involved in knowing where to set the tax so as to achieve a desired level of reduction. However, monitoring its progress should be a much simpler task, I would have thought; and you remove a lot of the "money for nothing" aspects of permit trading and derivatives markets that make me so sceptical of ETS as a concept.)

* I asked over at Harry Clarke's blog last night, but don't know the answer yet. Has anyone done any extensive work on how a carbon tax would work? ETS has been in favour for so long, I don't think there has ever been much in the way of discussion in the popular media about how you could make a carbon tax work.

My assumption had been that a carbon tax would mean each country concentrates on assessing it's own emissions, and the effect the tax is having on them. However, I suppose it is possible to have a system of credits involved too, and if credits could be gained for overseas offsets, you would have much of the same rorting possible as has been shown under the present European ETS.

Burning offsets

Just wanted to note that in a post in November 2006 I wrote that, although I considered action against carbon dioxide emissions was warranted, one of the things of which I remained very sceptical was:

Carbon offset schemes which involve growing trees, especially if they are in areas where bushfires are a distinct possibility.

As Andrew Bolt has noted, it would appear that at least some carbon offset plantings have been burnt in Victoria, with more under threat.

Wouldn't it make sense to do most of your planting in regions where bushfire is relatively rare - such as Queensland?

Great ideas in British education

Rod Liddle writes (but without links to the source of these stories, unfortunately) as follows:

+ Children at a junior school in Cambridgeshire were asked to write down as many rude and obscene words as they could think of, as part of some ill-conceived campaign against bullying. Parents weren’t too happy. One mother said she was disgusted “when my 10-year-old showed me an exercise book with words like c***sucker, d***head and fat arse rewarded with a tick from the teacher”.

Meanwhile, in a similarly fatuous attempt to combat Muslim extremism, pupils nationwide are to be asked to empathise with suicide bombers, to see the world as a nihilistic Islamic psychopath might see it.

Schools have long since given up on inculcating a sense of right and wrong in their pupils; the whole notion is outdated and, frankly, authoritarian. Which is something to be thankful for when a 12-year-old child screams “fat arse” at you and then detonates himself. At least he was able to empathise.

Rats in her underwear

We're the ones caught in the rat trap

Melanie Reid in The Times writes of an pretty "full on" rat infestation of their house:

The rats started stealing my clothes. One morning, I found my shirt jammed hard down a hole in the floor behind the washbasin in my bathroom. When I tugged it out it was shredded: the rats had been trying to drag it down to make a nest. They just miscalculated its size. Confronted with unassailable evidence, I did an audit of my underwear, and found half of it had disappeared. My husband, table-leg at the ready and a desperate look in his eye, swore that it wasn't him. Nightly, it seemed, the rats had been on forays to tug my discarded knickers and socks underground.

Kind of amusing, from a distance.