Why people don't like politics

Treasurers' debate: either intellectually dishonest or no intellect

From Michael Pascoe's pretty accurate take on last night's Q&A debate between Hockey and Bowen:

But ultimately it was the same old routine, leaving the voter with the same old quandary: is it a matter of intellectual dishonesty or an absence of intellect?

Neither Bowen nor Hockey could or was prepared to level with the audience on the nation's looming taxation demands, a failure highlighted by both sides running away from improving the GST. Labor ran further and faster than the Liberals on that score, but the Liberal performance over any “big new tax” other than their own and perpetuating an illusion of a lower tax future has been at least as shameful.

The Coalition has been wildly successful in flogging the government debt horse and Hockey showed no inclination to dismount, never mind that the beast is only one-fifth equine and four-fifths canard. Chris Bowen attempted and failed, like his predecessor, to put the deficit issue in perspective. The pink batts have stuck.

And that was the core of the problem on display last night: a government incapable of standing on the relative success of its fiscal big picture thanks to the focus on failures in detail and looking after some select union mates; an opposition that's so successful in beating up the government's shortcomings that it hasn't had to go beyond sweeping generalisations and the Magic Pudding aspects of Hockeynomics.

Both have finished up abandoning principles and squawking “me too” when the other seems to have a policy that's a vote winner – the Coalition on Gonski, Labor on something as loony as a Northern Territory company tax haven.

Direct Action dismissed, and ignored

At least Fairfax is making an effort to deal with an important election issue.

All the dirt on carbon is a pretty good explanation of the issues with both Labor's and the Coalition's CO2 cutting plans.  

In this Factchecker article, they look at the recent claim by the Climate Institute that Direct Action must at least cost several billion more than claimed to reach its target.  The assumptions made in the Institute's analysis do indeed appear very conservative (that is, looking at the most optimistic take possible on the Coalition's plans) and it still comes up short.

And at the SMH, at least, the website is noting aspects of the latest leak of the next IPCC report.

Meanwhile, at the news.com.au website, the most popular story is "man inserts fork into penis".   Good job, Rupert...

The hard slog

The very individual journey of novelists

There's a nice, brief story here about the ways different authors work.  I hadn't read before about how Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird:

  I have been thinking recently a lot about the unique Harper Lee who wrote one novel in her life, To Kill a Mockingbird. There is a marvelous documentary about her called Hey Boo. In her twenties she came to New York from Alabama and accumulated a bunch of not quite finished stories. Kind friends who had extra money gave her a gift of a year off from her job at an airline reservation counter. A publisher found her very rough draft of her novel to be appealing and gave her a contract. For what she called two terrible endless years, she revised and revised until the book took its final form. She revised it in an old NYC apartment smoking endless cigarettes. And she never published anything again. She was working on something else for a time.

Election talk

Ben Eltham's summary of the last week in politics seemed pretty accurate to me. Insiders yesterday was great - George Megalogenis and David Marr versus Gerard Henderson.  Henderson claimed hypocrisy on the part of George - George promised to email him the articles where he did criticise Labor for late submission of policy costings in 2007.  I doubt he is making it up.  Will Henderson retract in his weekly column?

But on the issue of Coalition non costings, Peter Martin has an interesting take on it today, in which he notes that their tactic of getting three prominent, independent minded economist/bureaucrats is  surprising, given that part performance indicates they will have no reservations about criticising dubious costings.

As for my take on matters:  it seems elections are just won or lost on "the vibe" lately*.  I mean, the Howard government hadn't really done much to warrant a loss to Rudd - it was just the sense that Howard had hung on too long and run out of steam and ideas that led to a Labor victory  which was barely based on policy at all.

This time around, the reverse is happening.  "The vibe" is that minority government didn't work - which is pretty bizarre given the long term and beneficial changes to education, disability care and carbon pricing which it achieved.  The Coalition doesn't have to worry about making sense as far as to  how it will reduce a deficit which is very manageable - it's just "the vibe" that it must be reduced quickly and Tony will look after that.

And possibly the worst thing - the correction to the Australian dollar is likely to make very significant changes for the better for the Australian economy pretty soon.  On Inside Business yesterday, there was also some commentary that the global economic outlook is finally starting to look a little brighter.   It will be very annoying, but an Abbott government will benefit from such changes which are completely beyond any Australian government's control.

*  I think it was George on Insiders who mentioned "the vibe" yesterday too, but I had been thinking about writing this comment before I saw that.  Great minds thinking alike, etc..

Age, a birthday, and encroaching silence

My mother turns 90 tomorrow, and a pleasant family gathering happened today at the aged care facility where she now lives.

Her health held up well until about the age of  87, when a decline in mental function started to become apparent, and pretty quickly set in at a more rapid rate.  The specialist had referred to it as Alzheimer's, but he also noted that her brain had a quite distinct shrinkage, even allowing for her age, and more on the left hand side than the right.   I suspect this may account for her sudden decline of ability with language.  This happened really quite quickly, pretty soon after moving into aged care.  In fact, so quickly that a mini stroke seemed also a possibility, but at her age and with some dementia already clear, further investigation is not high on the priority.

She recognises us all, we are sure, but it is unclear how much of what she is asked she understands.  Most visits are lucky to get a "what?" or "what d'you say?" as the sole response  (and I mean sole - she only speaks once during the entire visit, if you are lucky).  But then suddenly, she will sometimes respond to something indicating she did understand a comment clearly.   To take a mundane example, we were watching TV a few months ago and that awful Celebrity Diving show was on.  I said "oh, that's Denise Drysdale" (a minor TV celebrity, most notably in the 1970's), and Mum's immediate response was a knowing "yeah".   But to more useful questions or comments like "how are you?" or "did you see X today" (when I know a brother or sister has been in) invariably gets no response at all.  (Of course, her short term memory was already going before she went into the home, so I don't really expect her to remember even if the other visitor only left an hour before me.  But the point is more that she attempts no comment at all.)

I have noticed this about the other residents too.   The dinner table, for example, is silent.  No one tries to speak; perhaps because even the ones who can communicate well (and there is at least one pleasant lady there who is an enthusiastic reader and is capable of pretty normal conversation) know that they can't get a good response from most of the others.   That is the most unnatural thing about the place - the stony silence at meals.

I wasn't around too much as my grandmother (my mother's mother) aged - she lived to 96 I think - but I do recall that she always lived in a silent house, and herself grew increasingly silent and withdrawn as she aged.  Mind you, her house had always silent, except for the sounds of a grandfather clock.  That always felt a bit creepy to me - she long outlived her husband, who I barely remember, and had lived separately from him for many years anyway - but living alone in a small house with just this grandfather clock noting each passing second, minute and hour always made it feel as if she had been noting the passing of time towards death since her 60's.  My mother used to say the same thing - she hated the silence in Grandma's house and always had the radio on at home to hear music throughout the day.  In fact, her loss of interest and ability in turning the CD player or radio on was a sign that she was changing a couple of years ago.

Along with the silence there is the increase in sleep.  At least it is peaceful.  Mum can get around - just barely - with a walker, but seems happy to sit and doze and watch TV or DVDs the staff put on. They do get her out of her room for some attempts at stimulating group activities, but I have my doubts that they can be very successful, given the apparent lack of abilities of most of the residents. 

So it's a case of happy birthday, but tinged with inevitable sadness at watching the decline of a formally active and quite strong woman.  There are people with much, much worse aging stories, of course; and it's nothing like the tragedy of children dying.  But still, it seems an unfortunate design of a universe for it to allow for protracted mental decline and the slipping into silence.

An executioner's tale

I have read about Live by The Sword somewhere before, but don't think I've mentioned it here.

From its review in Literary Review (which I was looking at in hard copy at the newsagent this morning - it does seem a very high quality read):

This is a marvellous book about a fascinating subject. It is, in a sense, a portrait of a serial killer. Frantz Schmidt was employed between 1578 and 1618 as the official executioner (and torturer) of the prosperous German city of Nuremberg. Over the course of his career he personally despatched 394 people, and flogged, branded or otherwise maimed many hundreds more. His life is also a tale of honour, duty and a lasting quest for meaning and redemption.

The penal regimes of pre-modern European states were harsh and violent, heavy on deterrence and the symbolism of retribution. Towns such as Nuremberg needed professional executioners to deal with an ever-present threat of criminality through the public infliction of capital and corporal sentences. Punishing malefactors with lengthy periods of incarceration was an idea for the future, and would probably have struck 16th-century people as unnecessarily cruel. Methods ranged from execution with the sword (the most honourable) to hanging (the least), and from the relatively quick and merciful to the dreadful penalty of staking a person to the ground and breaking their limbs one after the other with a heavy cartwheel. This was not a world of mindless violence: the punishments Schmidt imposed were carefully prescribed by the city authorities, down to the number of 'nips' (pieces of flesh torn from the limbs with red-hot tongs) convicts were to receive on their way to the gallows.

Schmidt kept a diary, and it is from this that his life and views are re-created in this book.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing is how he got into the business:

His own apprenticeship as an executioner was the result of a catastrophic fall in family fortunes, originating in an episode of almost cinematic vividness. In October 1553, the erratic and unpopular Prince Albrecht Alcibiades von Brandenburg-Kulmbach suspected three local gunsmiths of plotting against his life. Invoking an ancient custom, he commanded a hapless bystander to execute them on the spot. Frantz's father, Heinrich, had no option but to carry out the commission and, tainted by the act, no options thereafter but to become a professional executioner. Nearly three-quarters of a century later, after a lifetime of devoted civic service, his son successfully petitioned the imperial court for a formal restitution of the family honour so that he could see his own sons enter the medical profession. Schmidt himself was a killer, but his true vocation was as a healer. He tortured and executed hundreds of people, but claimed to have treated more than fifteen thousand patients in and around Nuremberg. This is not as paradoxical as it seems: executioners often doubled as medics, drawing on their unrivalled practical knowledge of human anatomy.

The original incident sounds like something bizarre from a Tarantino film, no?

The Economist gets stuck into animation

New film: "Planes": Crash landing | The Economist

Sure, it's in the Prospero blog at the Economist, so it's not in the main part of the magazine itself, but it still seems odd to be reading a complaint about the recent quality of Pixar animation at that website.  He is right, though:

Just look at Pixar’s recent offerings. Its newest film, “Monsters University”, was a middling prequel. Last year it released a sequel, Mr Lasseter’s own little-loved “Cars 2”. The previous film, “Brave”, was a muddle: its director was replaced halfway through. And while the preceding film, “Toy Story 3” was a triumph, it was also a “threequel”. It has been a long time since a Pixar film was celebrated for its innovation. Now Mr Lasseter is credited as the executive producer of “Planes”, and as the co-writer of its co-called “Original Story”.

Disney has produced solid fare under Mr Lasseter’s stewardship—“The Princess And The Frog”, “Tangled”, “Wreck-It Ralph”—but the golden age his fans predicted has not arrived. Meanwhile, cartoons from rival studios, including “The Croods”, “Rango” and “Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs”, have beat him at his own game.

More memory coming

Denser, Faster Memory Challenges Both DRAM and Flash | MIT Technology Review

Given that I get along well with tablets that have only 16G memory (I have the option of expanding the Samsung, but haven't had the need yet), it's kind of hard to imagine what use the much larger potential storage will be.  Still, onwards and upwards:

 A new type of memory chip that a startup company has just begun to test could give future smartphones and other computing devices both a speed and storage boost. The technology, known as crossbar memory, can store data about 40 times as densely as the most compact memory available today. It is also faster and more energy efficient....

“It will be much denser and faster than flash because it is not based on moving electrons around or on transistors,” says Wei Lu, a professor at the University of Michigan whose research led to the development of crossbar memory. Lu is also a cofounder and chief scientist of the Santa Clara, California-based startup Crossbar, which is commercializing the technology. He notes that initially the company is developing its technology to replace flash storage.

Demonstration crossbar memory chips are being made by TSMC, the world’s largest contract chip manufacturer. Crossbar says that the current version of the technology can store one terabyte of data (1,000 gigabytes) on a single chip 200 square millimeters, about the size of a postage stamp. By comparison, the densest flash memory chips on the market today store 16 gigabytes on a single chip.

Ken Parish explains from Darwin

Ken Parish is a great writer at Club Troppo, who unfortunately does not post often enough.

But here he is, doing a thorough take down of  both Abbott and Rudd for talking up exclusive economic zones for the Northern Territory. 

Come to think of it, Ken was a "Gillard must go" supporter too.   Rudd's silly, opportunistic ploy must hurt him more than me, then...

Campaign suggestions

You know what I think is sorely needed in the Labor campaign?

A speech the equivalent of the Bill Clinton one in the Obama campaign, which clinically took apart the Republican economic policies as just not making sense.   There is plenty to work on in a similar vein in the Coalition policies.  They are, essentially, claiming that costings don't matter, and that people should simply trust them that they can save billions and billions easily while at the same time discarding revenue raising measures introduced by Labor and not introducing any of their own.  They are going for a environment policy that not an economist in the land believes can work at the cost claimed.   They are claiming (quite falsely) that the Commonwealth cannot legislate away the need for the States to agree to a GST rise.  They are saying GST will be part of a tax review, but it will never go up. 

It shouldn't be made by Kevin Rudd, though.  As with the Obama campaign, it needs someone else who people tend to trust, or someone whose judgement on economic matters is trusted. 

Finding someone on the Labor side like that is the challenge.  Hawke is getting too long in the tooth.

You know, if he could wind back the desire to conduct a bitter personal attack on Abbott, and avoid self aggrandisement about what he achieved (a big ask, I know), I think Keating might actually plausibly be the best to do it.   Perhaps as a warm up to the Rudd campaign speech?  Sure, people remember him as arrogant; but even so they do give him some credit for understanding economics and being able to run with reforming, economic common sense.  Or does the image of one Labor PM the public took the baseball bat make too many laugh with glee that they are going to do the same to his "friend" Kevin?  (In fact, what has Keating ever said about Rudd - I can't remember.)

I'm just trying to be useful...

A new Miyazaki

The Wind Rises English trailer: The new Miyazaki movie looks haunting.

Ooh.  Slate brings us news of a new Miyazaki film, which is proving popular in Japan.

I see I didn't mention in my post about Arrietty that at the end of the DVD there was a pretty amusing interview with Miyazaki himself (in Japanese.)   It is well worth watching to get an idea of his views on the Japanese animation industry.  (He reckons it's a lot more fragile than people would imagine.)

Go, Lenore...

No one can make Tony Abbott's climate plan add up, so he should do the maths | World news | theguardian.com

Lenore Taylor makes some points about Tony Abbott and his "direct action" plan which are obvious but being pretty much avoided by Rudd.  (I assume his thinking is "stay away from the carbon tax; people don't like to be reminded about it.):

It’s not that “direct action” can’t work to reduce carbon emissions. It’s that the Coalition’s Direct Action plan – cobbled together in a couple months after Tony Abbott took the Liberal leadership and ditched the Coalition’s support for emissions trading – can’t work for the money that’s on the table.

And almost no one thinks it can. Not the business groups that have for years now been unsuccessfully seeking detail. Not academic experts who have studied the various sources of carbon abatement it proposes. And not anyone who has sought to model it.

The Coalition has responded to the latest effort – from Sinclair Knight Merz/MMA and Monash University's Centre of Policy Studies – by shooting the messenger, suggesting the modellers and the Climate Institute who commissioned them are not “objective”.

But exactly the same question has been raised by pretty much everyone who has looked at Direct Action. The Treasury actually calculated the shortfall would be much bigger than the $4bn the new modelling has estimated by 2020.

And, as Abbott’s own frontbencher Malcolm Turnbull explained in 2011, continuing with Direct Action would become prohibitively expensive in future years.

On 4 February 2010, Abbott wrote this about his newly minted Direct Action plan: "Our policy is also much cheaper. We have estimated that it will cost $3.2bn over four years ... Our policy has been independently costed. A team of economists at the respected firm Frontier Economics says our policy is both economically and environmentally responsible."

But the managing director of Frontier Economics, Danny Price, said at the time it only made sense as a transitional plan, a precursor to either a more developed set of “Direct Action” regulations, subsidies and “reverse auctions”, or, more likely, some version of an emissions trading scheme.

But no, Kevin, let's talk about corporate tax rates in the Northern Territory in 2018...

Kevin Rudd: "I can still be as silly as the next politician"

Poor John Quiggin.  He runs a civilised blog; his economics seem to me to be about 300% more reliable than  the guff that comes out of Catallaxy; yet he seemed to have a complete blind spot towards the problems with Kevin Rudd.  If anything, he was aggressively against Julia Gillard because, he argued, everything she had put in place had been Kevin's brilliant idea anyway.

No, some of us argued:  what you should consider is that Gillard got some things done by doing the hard slog, working collaboratively, and not just coming up with ideas by doodling on the back of a envelope during a plane flight.  (My evidence for that:  changing education and disability funding after getting reports and recommendations first; the negotiations that led to carbon pricing; how Kevin came up with the NBN.)

Well, those of us who were pro-Gillard can at least take some bitter satisfaction that it would appear our view of Kevin has been reinforced by his sudden (partial) adoption of Coalition policy and rhetoric about the bright future of the North, if only tax rates would drop there.

Admittedly, Rudd's policy seems more limited than Coalition ideas (which sound a tad more grandiose, but are really just to have a good hard look at what to do after forming government), but the worrying aspect of it is - how did he arrive at this idea?  What collaboration within his team and instant Ministers took place before it was announced? 

It's a very worrying sign.

From one end to the other

BBC News - Mouth bacteria may trigger bowel cancer

Researchers say they have uncovered how bacteria may set off a chain reaction leading to bowel cancer. 

Fusobacteria, commonly found in the mouth, cause overactive immune responses and turn on cancer growth genes, two US studies reveal.

The microbes had been linked with colorectal cancer before but it was not known whether they were directly involved in tumour growth.

The early findings are published in the journal Cell Host & Microbe.

In addition to potential new treatments, the discovery could lead to better early diagnosis and prevention, experts hope.

The first study, carried out by Harvard Medical School researchers, showed that fusobacteria were present in high numbers in adenomas - a benign bowel growth that can become cancerous over time.

The same researchers also did tests in mice showing that the bacteria speeded up the formation of colorectal tumours by attracting special immune cells that invade and set off an inflammatory response which can lead to cancer.

Kevin Rudd: "I can be as silly as the next politician", and some free advice

Kevin Rudd rules out new coalition deal to form government | World news | theguardian.com

As I criticised Tony Abbott for a premature ruling out of forming a minority government, it's only fair that I call out Kevin Rudd for coming up with a similar line.  A case of "if Tony jumped over a cliff, would you too?" being a pretty ineffective line that mothers can use on their future politician sons, I guess.

In any event, we can safely assume both of them are lying.

Here's some other free advice for Mr K Rudd:

1.   enough with the "selfies":  when two ABC comedy shows (the Gruen Transfer team, and The Chaser - with the latter being quite a bit less annoying than usual in their outing last night) spend time on this, it's time to quit.

2.   let's firm up on policy implementation on how you plan to help diversify the Australian economy.  If it needs something like the Hawke approach, talk about that.  Your mysteriously popular (with a segment of the population) personality alone, everyone in the media has now agreed, is not going to get you across the line.

3.  If you're calling out the Abbott approach to budget (as indeed you should) don't fling around rubbery numbers.  If $70 billion is a dubious figure for the Abbott "budget hole" (and all media say it is), don't use it.    You're the side with the immediate issue with rubbery figures - be conservative with your claims about the other side's rubbery figures.   Let's face it - with the public, a convincing sounding $50 billion costing hole is just as bad a $70 billion one.

4.  There will be no harm in putting the boot further into Murdoch papers, but in doing so you have to run a fine line of not appearing to blame them for your polling position, even if they should be (at least partly).   It's one of those weird contradictions of politics:  of course the media plays a major role in how the state of politics is perceived, but people punish politicians who note it and complain about how the media is reporting politics.

5.  Let's see more of your new Ministers on TV and in the news.  They'll remind people that you aren't taking the old team to the election.

Just my suggestion...

Checking in again with the Abbott powerbase...

The "rocketman" post

As mentioned a couple of posts back, I was delighted (much more so than my wife, children, or any other person in the vicinity, it seemed) to see a "rocketman" again last Sunday.  Here's video of him doing a daytime practice at the same Brisbane showgrounds where we were:



The guy doing the flying is David Clarke, who calls himself "Ozrocketman."  (Not sure I'm keen on the name, but it hardly matters.)   He has his own website, and is an ex RAAF aeronautical maintenance engineer who appears to have decided to try to make a business out of promotional flying using his own, homebuilt jetpack rocketpack.  Good luck to him.

On his site there's an excellent video from a kid's TV show explaining how this old "rocketbelt" design (famously built by Bell Laboratories in the late 1950's) works:



For a simplified illustration of why there are three tanks, see this:

David Clarke refers to "ten years" of research to make his own personal rocketpack, although it's a little hard to see why it would take so long these days - there seem to be many enthusiasts on the Web.  I think I have mentioned before on this blog that you can even order one from a Mexican aviation company.  Their website looks flashy, but honestly,  I wouldn't be paying the deposit without some good reassurance that they are still in business.  It would also appear that you might still be able to buy one from an American company which claims their model can fly for up to 75 seconds.  (That seems optimistic - most sites talk of a about a 30 second maximum.) 

Interestingly, it's via the Mexican company's website that I found an ad for a 2010 Discovery documentary about another Australian named David who wanted his own rocketbelt.  Here's the blurb:

Australian jet pilot David Mayman builds and flies his own Rocket Belt. This is the story of a tenacious Australian Jet Pilot, David Mayman, as he strives to achieve his childhood dream of building and free-flying his very own Rocket Belt, only to discover he faces a nearly impossible task. Collaborating with the world’s leading Rocket Belt engineers David risks life and limb to become the world’s next Rocketman. ROCKET COMPULSION will take the audience on a ride that shows point blank why less people have flown Rocket Belts than have walked on the Moon.

In fact, the documentary has its own website too, with a page of short video clips from it, including this one talking about the history of its design:



But by far the oddest tale of what has happened with a rocketbelt is the story of three Americans in the 1990's who went into a partnership to build their own one for profit.  They had a spectacular falling out; one of them was murdered, the rocketbelt went missing, and the partner who had taken it was kidnapped, kept in a box and threatened with it being thrown in the sea.

The story has been the subject of a book, but you can read about it at this site, or just watch the embedded videos there summarising the story.   Pretty amazing.

But going back to technical stuff:  Howstuffworks explains the dangers and expense involved in the hydrogen peroxide rocketbelt:

 Rocket belts run on hydrogen peroxide fuel, which is not explosive on its own. This makes rocket belts slightly safer than jet packs. When the hydrogen peroxide is combined with pressurized liquid nitrogen and a silver catalyst, the chemical reaction generates superheated steam that shoots out of twin rocket nozzles at 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit (704.4 degrees Celsius). There's no flame, but it's still extremely dangerous. The result is 800 horsepower or about 300 pounds of thrust [source: CNN.com]. Hydrogen peroxide is a good, reliable fuel, and it's only by-product is water. However, it's very expensive, costing about $250 per gallon (3.78-liters). Each flight uses almost all of the fuel in the tank -- about seven gallons (26.5-liters) per flight.

Some other sites make mention of the pilot having insulated pants legs to make sure the superheated steam doesn't burn them.  I guess you certainly wouldn't want to be too close under a "rocketman" hovering over you. 

 But given their limited flight time, it was interesting to read of an attempt in the 1960's to develop an actual jet powered backpack, which I might have read about before, but forgotten:

In 1969 Wendell Moore and John K. Hulbert of Bell Aerosystems had Williams Research Corporation design a turbojet small enough to be carried on a man's back. The jet was mounted with the intake facing the ground and the exhaust shooting upward to a pipe that split the outflow and pointed back down. Two nozzles were located just in back of the pilot's shoulders similar to those on the rocket belt. The jet had less power for its weight than the rocket engine, but also used much less fuel. Tests were carried out that showed that the pack could carry a man in the air for ten minutes, and with improvements the flight time might reach as long as a half hour (This device turns out to be the one I'd actually seen on the cover of Popular Science). The jet pack seemed to solve the biggest problem associated with the rocket belt: range. Twenty-one seconds was now thirty minutes. 

Here's a photo of this shortlived device from the same site:

Wikipedia (under the entry "Jet pack", but which also talks of the hydrogen peroxide rocketbelt, which just goes to show how confused the terminology in this field has become) gives some further details as to what happened with the turbojet pack:

In 1965 Bell Aerosystems concluded a new contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a jet pack with a turbojet engine. This project was called the "Jet Flying Belt", or simply the "Jet Belt". Wendell Moore and John K. Hulbert, a specialist in gas turbines, worked to design a new turbojet pack. Williams Research Corporation (now Williams International) in Walled Lake, Michigan, designed and built a new turbojet engine to Bell's specifications in 1969. It was called the WR19, had a rated thrust of 430 pounds of thrust (195 kgf, 1,910 newtons) and weighed 68 pounds (31 kg).

The first free flight of the Jet Belt took place on 7 April 1969 at the Niagara Falls Municipal Airport. Pilot Robert Courter flew about 100 meters in a circle at an altitude of 7 meters, reaching a speed of 45 km/h. The following flights were longer, up to 5 minutes. Theoretically, this new pack could fly for 25 minutes at velocities up to 135 km/h.

In spite of successful tests, the U.S. Army lost interest. The pack was complex to maintain and too heavy. Landing with its weight on his back was hazardous to the pilot, and catastrophic loss of a turbine blade could have been lethal.

Thus, the Bell Jet Flying Belt remained an experimental model. On 29 May 1969, Wendell Moore died of complications from a heart attack he had suffered six months earlier, and work on the turbojet pack was ended. Bell sold the sole version of the "Bell pack", together with the patents and technical documentation, to Williams Research Corporation. This pack is now in the Williams International company museum.

 How sad.   Of course, flying with your spine mere centimetres from spinning turbine blades which have been known, from time to time, to shatter and spray out in all directions does make this a design one which few might like to risk.   Still, I assume turbines have improved a hell of a lot since 1969, and I wonder if it will ever be reattempted.

It's taken me a while to find it, but here's some video of the jetpack being flown (and not just in a test setting either: it looks like it got a PR outing to the public):



As it happens, while reading about all of this, news turned up that the New Zealand developed "jetpack" (more like a mini personal flying vehicle, really, but it still looks awesome) has advanced:

The New Zealand makers of a one-person jetpack hope to have it on sale by the middle of next year. The Martin Aircraft company says its jetpack can reach speeds of up to 70 kilometres per hour and soar 1 kilometre high. 

The Christchurch-based firm has been testing its prototype 12 via remote control. 

The New Zealand Civil Aviation Authority said the jetpack has now been issued with an experimental flight permit for development test flying, which allows someone to pilot the aircraft.

 In case you have missed it, this is what they look like:

  

I'm seriously looking forward to seeing one of these at the Ekka in the future.

Q&A reaches new I&A* levels

Last night while composing my account of Sunday's expedition, the ABC's Q&A show was on in the background.

Someone should make a highlight tape of how spectacularly annoying Christopher Pyne and Janet Albrechtsen (who, I only recently realised, separated from her husband a couple of years ago and is now the partner of Liberal heavy weight Michael Kroger) frequently showed themselves to be.   In a further bizarre twist, it seemed to me that Tony Jones kept cutting Penny Wong short in her attempts at responses to yapping Pyne's over the top claims.

I then saw Malcolm Turnbull being very sarcastic on Lateline with Anthony Albanese.  

The one upside of this is that I think the Coalition is already looking very cocky and too self assured that they are going to win the election. 

With only a percent or two to swing in the right seats, this could well come back to bite them.

* Irritating and annoying.

Yet again, an Ekka report

Look, there was no "House of Pork" to be spotted yesterday at the RNA show, but it was replaced by something much more significant:  the re-appearance of a "rocketman" display which I had not seen live since about 1968, by my rough reckoning.

The rocketman deserves an entire post of his own, as it led me today to read up on the history and design of the equipment, and it was more interesting than I expected.

But for this post, some observations:

*   for the last two years, the family has enjoyed the auditorium 30 minute shows, which usually have an anachronistic aspect to them.  (In 2011, it was the "Sideshow Superstars", which was pleasantly grotesque in parts; and last year it was a stage hypnotist act,  a form of entertainment which I thought had died out by about 1990.)   This year it was a pretty standard "magic and illusion" act, by a young-ish performer whose comedy shtick seemed to be to play (or be - he was pretty convincing) the vain, sleazy jerk.   Yes, he even managed a "sometimes when they say 'no', they mean 'yes'" reference about women; a joke played without irony, and which did, to a modern audience's credibility, managed to get only a few groans in response.  The tricks were competently done, but were of a stock standard variety for a stage magician these days, and as such did not really contain any element of surprise, as you could tell from the somewhat muted audience reaction.

I therefore consider this year's auditorium show a failure.  I wonder what they'll dig up for next year.  The Kransky Sisters are (as part of the act, I am sure) from a Queensland country town, and may well have been in the local CWA.  I think they may be worth a try...

*  Now onto the troublesome topic of the evening "ring" entertainment.   This year they did do a large re-vamp,  which had its good points and not so good points.  First, having a so-so female pop star sing (or lip sync?) songs in the distant centre of a stadium, and then get driven around to sing from four perimeter "stages," quickly became pretty tedious.  The fact that some of the dance choreography involved much hip thrusting (and the pre-performance video of the singer was of an extraordinarily overt "I'm a sex kitten thinking about sex" variety), it seemed an appeal to a audience that was simply not there to see such content.

The rocketman bit was given some attempt at context by having a man in an Ironman costume come out for a drive by appearance; the logic seeming to be that although we can't make the dude in the costume fly, we can get someone else airborne for 10 seconds.  Meanwhile, Fake Ironman snuck over to another position where he later pretended to play heavy metal guitar during the fireworks display.   Kind of wacky; but Fake Ironman need not bother turning up again next year.  (Unlike the actual rocketman, who can come back any time as far as I'm concerned.)

The fireworks, flame, laser and water fountain show was actually pretty good and continued the trajectory of increasing complexity that has been evident for the last few years.  I'm not entirely sure how you get a job that involves designing such a show, but I like to imagine how strange some of the suggestions at the brainstorming session may have been when the final outcome includes Fake Ironman doing a bad heavy metal impression.

*  The showgrounds are undergoing major, major re-development, and the new convention centre at the heart of it was open for the first time and looked reasonably impressive in the upstairs area.   However, it seems a very "brave" decision to put food outlets on a newly carpetted convention hall floor.   Curry, wine, satay sauce, waffles with cream and syrupy fruit are all going to find their way onto the floor by the end of the week.   It's going to drive the cleaners berserk, I expect.

Or can someone in the know explain to me the secret to what seems to be a bit of a crazy decision as to how to use the convention room floor space?   Is the carpet of some special stain and oil resistant fabric that will solve this pretty obvious practical problem?  I don't think it was made of carpet squares that can be individually replaced, but I didn't get down on my hands and knees to examine it closely.

The convention centre is of much smaller area than the absolutely massive (and quite recently expanded) Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre at Southbank.  I love that place, and was told a couple of years ago by someone who has worked there for a long time that it is a very successful international convention centre; I hope the new one at the RNA showgrounds can find its niche in the market.

The Abbott powerbase react to the debate

I didn't see the political debate last night:  I was watching a jetpack rocketman doing a 10 second spin around the Brisbane showgrounds instead, which was much more exciting, I'm sure.  (My annual report on the Ekka will appear soon enough.)

But I see from having a quick look at Catallaxy that the sclerotic brains trust of the Abbott power base reacted like this: