Thinking big

Mystery haze appears above Ceres' bright spots : Nature News & Comment

The article says Ceres is "at least" 1/4 water.   It's also about 1,000 km across.  If I had time, I'd work out the weight and volume of ice, then.  But I see a report from 2005 says it might be more fresh water than on all of Earth.

That could go a long way towards making the Moon a livable place.   Got to get Ceres there first, though.

But what's the diameter of the Moon?  Only 3,500 km?   I imagined it would be bigger than that.  Well, I wouldn't recommend smashing Ceres into it, then.  Although I guess it could be a way of making some nice, ice rings around the planet.    

Coming up to the 4 year anniversary

Today:

Remember when Bronwyn used to be on Senate "waste committees"?

Found via a collection of old Laurie Oakes columns:



Update:  20 years later:

On February 2, 2013, Mrs Bishop - then shadow special minister of state and for seniors - charged taxpayers more than $1000 for the use of a car.

Bronwyn Bishop charged the taxpayer more than $1000 for the use of a car the day she attended the Opera Australia performance of La Boheme at the Domain.

Sausage panic

A bag of ‘fat, chemicals – and hepatitis’: why Britain has stopped eating sausages | Life and style | The Guardian

Look, it's the Guardian, so I could expect a bit of food snobbery to be on display.  But still, if Britain has "stopped eating sausages" it seems to me that Australia might have gone in the other direction.   Upmarket flavoured sausages seem more common than ever, as do German style sausages.   I wouldn't be surprised if Australians are eating more than before...

Quite right

Does anyone but the IPA want to hoist the Union Jack over our history again? | Jason Wilson | Comment is free | The Guardian

I started a post along similar lines a few days but never finished it:  it's rather rich of the IPA, as the alleged  champion of academic freedom and competition in education to be complaining when universities exercise the discretion they already have to market towards more "pop" history than "traditional" history.  (And I say that as one who is somewhat skeptical of the value of modern pop history.)

I wonder how Bronwyn's taking the idea of Tony placing her "on probation"?

Down

Let's see.   Jeremy Clarkson is still making high school boy sniggers about "fudge" and anal sex;  Bronwyn's hair hasn't resigned yet (I suspect investigative journalists need to check whether any parliamentary allowances have gone into hairspray purchases - I don't know that the amount used would be covered by a mere Speaker's salary);  a never ending round and round again GST discussion is going on somewhere;  oh look, Helen Dale has tweeted that Bronwyn bus/copter joke but seems not to have acknowledged who came up with it first days ago; The Australian is devoting thousands of words to how Bill Shorten is supposedly in trouble and not how Abbott would lose an election now, just as he would have for the last 18 months or so;   Andrew Bolt still thinks John Cristy is the only climate scientist who is right, and reads nothing from the thousands of other scientists who explain why he is wrong;   Slate has become paywalled after too few articles;  so has the New Yorker, grrr....

All in all, things on the net seem a bit repetitious and boring recently.  

The Trump Effect: "What? Our base are idiots?"

As a person who's been complaining for years about the the American Right's move away from common sense and evidence based policy in favour of culture war and ideology, it's an entertaining, if not particularly edifying, thing to watch the part of the Right wing commentairiate that is (just) reality based enough to see that Trump is an idiot grinding their teeth over his popularity.

But of course, even those commentators could not fault him on his approach to climate change:

Though he will often tweet links to articles that cast doubt on the reality of climate change, and call it a hoax himself, the lion’s share of his tweets that mention global warming have to do with snow and cold weather.

Since he began tweeting about the topic in November 2011, a comprehensive count reveals Trump has used complaints about cold weather to doubt or attempt to refute climate change 31 times. He has used cold weather and unexpected (or unwanted) snowfall to do so eight times, and tweeted five times solely about snow to refute mainstream climate science. In total, the business magnate tweeted 44 times, mostly in the winter, about how mainstream climate science was a joke because it was cold and/or snowy....

Trump actually has blamed the Chinese for the “concept of global warming,” which is patently false.

 And does this sound familiar to Australians?:

Trump has had a vendetta against wind energy going back to when he began to fight the planned construction of an offshore wind array in Scotland he said would impact the views from a golf course he was building. In 2012, he said that Scotland would go broke if they built the array while losing tourism to Ireland. “I am a world class expert in tourism,” he said.

I'm sorry, Right wingers dismayed with Trump, your one with the idiot on this, and your first step back towards mainstream rationality is to start believing scientists on climate change....

A nice story for a Monday

Michael J Fox on Back to the Future fans: ‘The most genuine people I’ve met’ | Film | The Guardian

In case you missed the single funniest tweet on the Bronwyn affair...

Fly away Bronnie

Update:  I've realised that what this needs is a stream of smoke coming out of the back of her as she returns to land.

If only I didn't have to work....

Senator who got there via "stupid" questions stupidity of voters

Voters are adults and don't need a nanny state to make choices for them

The Senator who will be chairing a self promoting enquiry on matters which his level of government doesn't control anyway has this to say:

If we persist in thinking people cannot make simple decisions about what
to eat, when to drink or what games to play, why then do we think they
can do something as complicated as choosing between different political
visions? If people are so stupid, should they even be allowed to vote?

Oh, the irony of this question being raised by a Senator who got there only via the position on the ballot paper and a name deceptive to those who don't pay attention to politics.

Rat Catcher to the Queen

Jack Black, the royally endorsed Rat Catcher of Victorian England, had a mention in this blog before.  (Back in 2007!)

But here's another interesting article about him, with additional details of what people did for entertainment before there was TV:

By the age of ten, Black was getting commissions to catch rats for cash, but his real money came from selling rats for gaming. Rat-baiting was a popular London tavern pastime in which dog owners would set their dogs in a pit and bet on their dog’s ability to catch a set number of rats, sometimes by the dozen, in a matter of minutes. Enthusiasts bet on the speed of a dog’s rat-killing abilities (one famous contender, Billy, tore apart a couple dozen rats in a minute and a half). The “sport” was so popular that the government wanted a cut, and put a tax on rat-killing dogs. Jimmy Shaw, the proprietor of a pub that held one of the most popular rat-matches in town, had hundreds of caged rats at the ready culled from suppliers across the country, including Jack Black. 

As for the reputation for rats generally, it was all bad:

 The rat’s reputation for having an insatiable sexual appetite, coupled with their supposed predilection for cannibalism, made them the perfect Victorian enemy of lawlessness and sexual deviance. James Rodwell wrote in 1850: “[Rats] have no laws, either civil or religious, to govern them, so to call them Socialists, Communists, or Rats, to me ‘tis equal; for, in my mind, Communism, Socialism, and Ratism are terms synonymous.” Rodwell’s passion for exposing rats as an apocalyptic force while obsessively chronicling their behavior puts him somewhere between early anthropologist and crank. Chapter headings of his second book “The rat: its history and destructive character”, include Thievish Propensity of Rats, How the Rats of Scotland Can Carry Eggs, Rats Standing on Their Heads, Three Cannibal Rats Swallowing Nine Others, The Unreasonable Fear of Rats, and A Rat and a Ferret Snuggling Together in the Author's Bosom.