For Space Cadets

This month's Air & Space Magazine has a couple of interesting articles. One is about the ongoing work on hypersonic flight, which mentions the leading role played by research being done at the University of Queensland.

The other is about the design work for the new Orion capsule, that is expected to become the workhorse for getting around in space for quite a long time. Unfortunately, it still sounds awfully claustrophobic for the average punter.

What is wrong with Hedley Thomas?

Interview discredits claim by Andrews | The Australian

I am sorely tempted to say he's just an idiot, given the opening paragraphs in this morning's report about the Dr Haneef record of interview:

CLAIMS by Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews that his decision to cancel Mohamed Haneef's visa was based on much more than a mobile phone SIM card given to a second-cousin have been undermined by the release of the second police record of interview.

Police officer Adam Simms, who questioned Dr Haneef during the second interview last month, told him: "Tell me exactly. Now let's not forget, Mohamed, the reason you are sitting here and the reason you've been in police custody is because of this issue with the SIM card -- now it's causing you a lot of grief. We need to be clear as to what is happening with this SIM card. OK?"

How the hell does the fact that the police said that in the record of interview discredit Andrew's claim that there is significant other evidence that informed his decision?

Thomas is now just making no sense at all in his determination to criticise Andrews.

I downloaded the record of interview last night and had a quick read. (At 380 odd pages, with many of them on procedural matters, you really have to head to near the end to get to the interesting stuff.)

While Dr Haneef does answer all questions, I honestly don't think that anyone with an open mind who reads it will come away thinking that it represents some form of complete exoneration of him.

Tit for tat

No it's not another Kevin Rudd post, this time it's about China giving the US a bit of stick over the quality of its soybeans:

China's quality watchdog warns on U.S. soybeans

What's the bet that there is a political motive to this. You reject our lead toys, then don't expect us to like your soybeans.

A curious miracle

A night journey through Jerusalem -Times Online

This article explains the origin of the Muslim's need to pray 5 times a day:

Since the Koran does not provide specific detail of the Night Journey, historians have to draw on accounts by Islamic scholars versed in the Hadith, or prophetic traditions, for the specific details of what Armstong describes as “the most important mystical experience of Muhammad’s life”.

Alighting on the Temple Mount, he was greeted by Abraham, Moses, Jesus and other prophets, whom he led in prayer. Then Muhammad and Gabriel ascended the seven heavens to the Throne of God, who instructed Muhammad on the five daily prayers. According to tradition, God initially said Muslims should pray 50 times a day. But on his way down Muhammad met Moses, who told him to go back and get the number reduced. Moses kept sending Muhammad back to plead with God until the number of prescribed prayers was reduced to five.

As Armstrong points out: “This tradition shows that religion was not meant to be a crushing burden, but a moderate discipline which everybody could manage.”

Abu Sway agrees: “The amount decided on shows that God is merciful, and the intercession by Moses shows that there should be moderation in matters of faith.”

This idea of being caught as negotiator between Moses and God is a curious one.

As a story, it's close to the Genesis one about Abraham bargaining with God over the fate of Sodom, but at least there was something significant at stake there. Arguing the toss with God over the degree of inconvenience of your religion seems a little trite in comparison.

Clever trojan

BBC NEWS | Technology | Trojan holds PC files for ransom

So, this trojan (which downloads itself via IE - ha! - from certain websites) encrypts some files and then tells you to pay up to get them unencrypted.

But how would you pay? I mean, who would be mad enough to send a credit card or account number to the crooks anyway?

You lose anyway

Minister opts for easy path | The Australian

Setting a new definition for "pyrrhic victory" seems to be the main outcome from the Federal Court's decision in the Haneef case yesterday. Peter Faris' fierce criticism of the logic of the case seems very valid.

Both Peter Russo and Hedley Thomas (whose juvenile journalistic contempt for Minister Andrews is just ridiculously overblown) acknowledge that the Minister is probably capable of simply making a valid fresh decision that still removes the visa.

Andrews is appealing the court decision, and why wouldn't he? The government wants "association" to have as broad as possible interpretation, and another Federal Court judge had basically agreed with them. Judge Spender says he just thinks the other judge got it wrong, it can't mean that, otherwise the Minister would be capable of making all kinds of "unfair" decisions.

Why wouldn't the government want this issue settled by the courts once and for all? I strongly suspect the appeal will succeed, even at the Federal Court level.

Yet Hedley Thomas still finds a way of twisting this against Andrews (in the link above). He claims that the Minister is "talking tough but his actions point to a significant backdown".

Huh? I don't see why the Minister is not capable of reviewing the visa decision again even if he loses the eventual appeal.

Hedley Thomas is just one of those commentators to whom the Minister must be criticised, no matter what he does.

Mainly about social workers

Hi, I’m your biological son . . . - Times Online

This article, originally from the NYT, tells the story of a sperm donor's awkward first meeting with his adult biological son.

The story is of interest, and from my conservative view point, shows the uncomfortable weirdness of sperm donation generally, but especially for men who, like this guy, donated "30 or 40 times".

But the main reason I am posting about it is because of this incidental point. The writer is a family therapist, but describes his life as follows:

At 50, I have never married, never raised any children. And about a month before the call, I had reached a point where I was feeling anxious and socially disconnected, no longer relaxed with my friends and sensing there had to be something more meaningful in my life.

This is entirely consistent with my long standing suspicion that the majority of therapists and social workers do not come to the job with much resembling a normal, stable, happy domestic life. Social workers in particular seem drawn to the job because of an injustice they have suffered in their own life, whether it physical or emotional in nature, and this career is their way of helping others who may be also be suffering.

But this seems to me to be a good reason to exclude such a person from a career in which objectivity can be crucially important, especially when they are making decisions about children and their relationship with parents.

My knowledge of this is purely anecdotal, but I have had friends agree with me that all the social workers they knew were themselves a bit of a worry, to put it mildly. And it is certainly not unusual to read things from time to time, such as this story, which support my suspicions.

I wonder if anyone has ever done any research on this, and whether readers have also met social workers with "baggage".

Rudd, strippers, the media (continued)

Next Australian head of state found in topless bar with the New York Post's editor. - By Jack Shafer - Slate Magazine

Mostly, this concentrates on the mysterious absence of any report about it in the New York Post.

By the way, who couldn't draw some enjoyment from watching Rudd's squirming performance on 7.30 Report last night? The fact that he can dissemble with the best of them can't exactly help the image he would like to portray of someone who is not "tricky" like John Howard.

Matt Price in The Australian has a funny line or two about it all this morning, such as these:

The Australian’s blogging system broke down yesterday under the volume of people from around the world who’ve tried to contact us to tell us nobody is interested in whether or not the alternative PM visited a strip joint four years ago.

Blanket coverage on television confirmed The Sketch’s inkling that this was a non-story, not least because most talkback callers on radio thought so too.

True, newspapers across four continents carried the non-story and every website in the land has a chat-room discussion or a poll on whether this sort of behaviour is acceptable for somebody who wants to run the country.

Kevin's reaction, and his ill-advised decision to just keep talking about it yesterday, is the true story now.

Mining disaster goes largely unnoticed

Chinese kin lash out as trapped miners' hopes dim | International | Reuters

I hadn't even heard of this massive coal mining disaster in China until I looked at Reuters this morning:

Anguished relatives of Chinese coal miners trapped in flooded shafts clashed with managers on Monday to demand information, but hopes for the 181 men faded after another day of efforts to pump the mines dry.

The disaster in the eastern coastal province of Shandong is the latest to strike China's coal mines, which -- with over 2,000 people killed in the first seven months of this year along -- are the world's deadliest.

The miners have been trapped since Friday when a burst river dyke sent water rushing into two shafts. Rescuers hold out little hope of survival for many, if not all, of the men who could not outpace the torrent -- 172 in a main shaft and nine in one nearby.

It is pretty amazing how a mining disaster on this scale can attract such little notice in the West, compared to the relatively minor scale of death (9) in the Utah incident.

Creepy

Technology Review: Blogs: TR Editors' blog: A New Use for Your Leftover Embryos

Surely it's not exclusively pro-lifers who find this an objectionable idea:

Couples who have had children via in vitro fertilization are often left with extra embryos--and the rather difficult decision of what to do with them. Embryos can be donated to research or to other couples, destroyed, or left languishing in frozen storage. But now a California-based biotech startup is offering a new option: to use these embryos to create personalized stem-cell lines for couples or their families.

About Shakespeare

I see that Bill Bryson has a new book out about Shakespeare. There's a fairly lengthy extract here from The Times.

Bryson makes this point about Will's personal attitudes:

Even the most careful biographers sometimes take a supposition – that Shakespeare was Catholic or happily married or fond of the countryside or kindly disposed towards animals – and convert it within a page or two to something like a certainty.

In fact it cannot be emphasised too strenuously that there is nothing – not a scrap, not a mote – that gives any certain insight into Shakespeare’s feelings or beliefs as a private person. We can know only what came out of his work, never what went into it.

A recent Doctor Who episode (taking its cue from "Shakespeare in Love", no doubt) again portrayed Shakespeare as a rakish charmer, but it is entirely possible that he was the complete opposite. He may be the beneficiary of the most generously imagined personality ever. Just for a change, I would like some popular fictional work to portray him as intensely dislikeable.

Bryson does make it clear that knowing little of the playwrights of the day is just par for the course. The figures in this extract surprised me:

It cannot be overemphasised how fortunate we are to have so many of Shakespeare’s works, for the usual condition of 16th and early 17th century plays is to be lost. Few manuscripts from any playwright survive, and even printed plays are far more often missing than not. Of the approximately 3,000 plays thought to have been staged in London from about the time of Shakespeare’s birth to the closure of the theatres by the Puritans in a coup of joylessness in 1642, 80% are known only by title. Only 230 or so play texts still exist from Shakespeare’s time, including the 38 by Shakespeare himself – about 15% of the total, a gloriously staggering proportion.

There are bigger gaps in the records of history than I imagined.

UPDATE: I see that Germaine Greer has a Shakespeare book coming out too, and this extract indicates she is good at turning speculation into certainty, as Bryson complains.

The Rudd and the stripper post I had to have

It originally seemed that there was not much to add to the commentary swirling around this, but on second thoughts here's my take on it:

1. Doesn't it irritate anyone else that news websites (and, presumably, the papers) have today got photos of Rudd and his wife standing together with the "wife stands by Rudd" angle? He can't always help what photos newspapers choose to run, but still it seems to me Rudd milks this marriage for political advantage in a more directly cynical fashion than most politicians. It's also kind of pathetic that he should be talking of his wife's forgiveness for something that, on his version, he has little to apologise for.

2. Rudd again uses his "I expect to take a belting in the polls" as his magic formula for ensuring that he doesn't. He's either naive or cynical in the way he uses this mantra in circumstances where most people's immediate reaction is that it won't hurt much, if at all.

3. The fact that he rang his wife about it the next day seems to suggest that he thought she may find out pretty quickly. But how exactly does he think she would have found out at all if it were not for his call? Did he think Col Allen (who, seemingly, was the one who suggested the venue) was taking him there as a "set up" so that he could publish the story in the paper the next day?

OK, maybe it was not the main reason for the phone call at all, but the way Rudd seems to be running the story, that's the impression we are left with. I think most men in Rudd's situation would tell their wife as a precaution if they ended up, more or less by accident, in a strip club, and left as quickly as they politely could; most women in a secure marriage would laugh it off. But I don't think there would be any urgency to tell their wife, and I don't know that saying they had been "a goose" for going there is the terminology that many would use for what he alleges happened.

It seems to me that this part of Rudd's response actually should increase suspicion that something a bit untoward (by which I mean, a bit more than merely looking) happened at the club.

4. How did Downer or Foreign Affairs find out about this? Again, with just the three of them there for a quick drink and then departure, it seems a little peculiar that the story got out at all.

5. Snowden and Rudd both seem to be hedging their bets about recollection by talking about the amount of drinks. (Even this morning, I think Snowden on Radio National used the phrase "as far as I can recall" at least once, while still insisting that it is all a beat up and they left because feeling "uncomfortable".)

6. Col Allen's claim that Rudd "acted like a perfect gentleman" seems capable of having a double meaning when the venue is a club at which "gentlemen" may (I am guessing here) be expected to slip money into the g-string of the performer. Maybe the more bucks you pay, the more gentlemanly you can be deemed! Anyway, if News Ltd is hedging its bets over who is the next PM, Allen would say this, wouldn't he?

7. What's the bet that there are half a dozen Australian journalists doing their best to find someone who worked at the strip joint at the time who can remember if there was a red-cheeked round faced man with an unfashionable haircut asked to leave two years ago. It's very unlikely that further information will be forthcoming.

Although Caroline Overington says the original rumour that has been around for months included nothing about Rudd's behaviour while there, the points noted above all seem to me to suggest that there probably is something more to this story. Whether we will ever find out though seems unlikely.

But still, if this is the only damaging rumour around that journalists have about Rudd's character, I'm very disappointed. He should work on the assumption that he could be even more "humanised" by doing something obviously bad. I am arranging for a carton of K-Y to be delivered to his office, and updating his profile at Australian-Swingers.com, as I write. It's all for his electoral good, you know.

UPDATE: Here's the link to Rudd's interview on AM this morning where they attempted to probe the issue of whether he could actually recall what he did while at the club:

GILLIAN BRADFORD: You're now saying there you had a bit to drink, but yesterday you were saying you were too drunk to remember. That's quite a big difference.

KEVIN RUDD: Well, I've said repeatedly that I'd had too much to drink and I fully accept that and I was asked yesterday whether this had occurred at any stage before. I said, "Well, yeah, actually." 35… When I turned 35 I remember having a family birthday party at home and I'd had too much to drink. I certainly recall that. And on this occasion I had too much to drink as well. But I am not by habit or by reputation or by instinct, you know, a heavy drinker. People who know me around Parliament House would affirm that.

GILLIAN BRADFORD: So just clarifying that, are you relying on Col Allan and Warren Snowdon to tell you you didn't do anything inappropriate, or do you remember yourself that you didn't do anything inappropriate?

KEVIN RUDD: Well, a combination of the above. As I said, I have absolutely no recollection of that, and nor does Warren Snowdon.

GILLIAN BRADFORD: But were you too drunk to remember?

KEVIN RUDD: When you have had a few drinks obviously your complete recollection of events is not going to be perfect. I accept that, I think that just passes the commonsense test. But when I checked with Warren, that was certainly our recollection, and both our recollection is that we were out of there before much time had elapsed.

Ah well, at least reading such discomfit has given me some fun out of all this.

I think what he is trying to avoid saying is something like this: I had such a skinful that, even if I did misbehave in the club, I may not remember it. That's why I immediately rang Teresa the next day to apologise, just in case. But if my mates now say I didn't do anything wrong, well I guess I mustn't have, hey?

UPDATE 2: It's just occurred to me, after reading the AM interview, that now that Kevin claims at least a partial recall of the visit, why hasn't anyone asked him the detail of what he did there? Simply watch with some discomfit (who cares?); be on the receiving end of a lap dance (danger danger Will Robinson;) or shoving a $50 in a g-string (Kevin actually pays for the exploitation of women).

Of course, even if he did do the latter of those things (which are not "inappropriate" for customers to do, but still cast a very different light on the visit,) I suppose no one would expect an honest answer anyway.

But what fun it would be to ask.

UPDATE 3: I just realised that Laurie Oakes did ask Rudd yesterday "were there semi naked ladies there and what were they doing?" To which Kevin07 replies: "....we can't actually recall anything that you wouldn't see at most pubs across Australia..."

Not exactly full of detail. I want to see him squirm more, with direct questions on his activities there, whether they be "appropriate" or "inappropriate."

I am still betting that such details would influence the public perception of his character. I am not saying it would be necessarily fatal to his campaign, but my impression is that everyone is currently painting it as "he came, he saw, he left quickly". I still think the phone call to the wife and "explaining" to her what happened (in the interview he doesn't use the word "confess", even though other media does) is suspicious.

UPDATE 4: Over at Rudd's MySpace page, there are lots of comments of the "good on you mate" variety. Glad to see Kevin has gained the yobbo, stripjoints-are-all-a-bit-of-good-fun vote. (And hey, lefty bloggers, we are talking of a 46 year old bloke dropping in on the joint, not a silly single man in his 20's.)

UPDATE 5: Given that the media knew of this story years and years ago, why is every lefty so certain that it's timing is Liberal party smear campaign?

Even Kevin is not adamant that this is the case. From his AM interview today:

"I've seen reports in the paper today about interjections in Parliament by Mr Downer some months ago, but I make no particular allegations against him," he said.

UPDATE 6: With all the outrage about this at LP, there are few comments with which I can agree, but this one comes close (except for the part about "normally sensible") :

(Sigh) I wish the normally sensible commenters on here were not in such a rush to reassure everybody that of course strip clubs are just a normal part of blokedom, of course the women are all doing this stuff because they really prefer it and of course the pornulation of everything and the insistence of providing naked female flesh everywhere for male enjoyment is just fine and dandy.

UPDATE 7: (Gosh, I just can't stop): Crikey has some interesting background on how this became a story, and it doesn't jibe well with the Libs being behind it. I like this part about Col Allen (whose denial that Rudd did anything improper is being treated as gospel by all Kevvie defenders):

And, for goodness sake, Col Allen, who is variously described in today’s papers as “knockabout”, “larrikin”, “famously brash” and “pugnacious”. They are all euphemisms. There is a nice profile here in which Allen is described as a bully by Stuart Littlemore, and Allen himself admits to occasionally pissing in his office sink during news conferences.

One wonders by what standard Allen judged Rudd’s behaviour in order to pronounce it gentlemanly.

Woops

Biofuels switch a mistake, say researchers | Environment | The Guardian

From the report:

Increasing production of biofuels to combat climate change will release between two and nine times more carbon gases over the next 30 years than fossil fuels, according to the first comprehensive analysis of emissions from biofuels...

Biofuels look good in climate change terms from a Western perspective, said Dr Spracklen, but globally they actually lead to higher carbon emissions. "Brazil, Paraguay, Indonesia among others have huge deforestation programmes to supply the world biofuel market", he said.

The researchers say the emphasis should be placed on increasing the efficiency of fossil fuel use and moving to carbon-free alternatives such as renewable energy.

Black hole questions continue

The speculations as to the fate of black holes continue over at arxiv.org. Why should you care? Because it's possible that the LHC at CERN will start creating very tiny ones within a year or so, and they may have such low velocity that they end up hanging around (or in) the Earth. Would be nice if scientists had a real handle on how they were going to behave, don't you think?

The latest paper to be seen about this is here. The title: "Moduli Vacuum Bubbles Produced by Evaporating Black Holes". The main idea: black holes may have "vacuum bubbles" around them which will make their appearance somewhat different from what Hawking radiation would indicate. The article notes that:

Smaller mass black holes that have already evaporated away could have left vacuum bubbles behind that contribute to the dark matter.

To be fair, the article only talks about larger black holes, and "primordial" ones in particular, but I am curious to know if this is relevant to the evaporation of micro black holes of the type that may be created at CERN.

Another recent paper, which is again hard for the lay person to follow, suggests that maybe the LHC won't produce black holes whether or not large extra dimensions exist. This is due to the effect of what the article calls RG (renormalisation group.) The conclusions:

We have applied the RG to the black hole production scenario in the context of large extra dimensions. This has two surprising effects:
• First, the area of the black hole (which is of the same order as the production cross-section) does not only inherit the UV safety as it was observed for standard
scattering cross-section, but it even gets damped so strongly that it goes to zero.
• Second, the truncation parameter t, which does not play an important role in the
qualitative standard scattering cross-section picture, gets central importance for
the BH threshold. Even more, BH production could be completely forbidden3 for values of t ≤ 1, which according to [6] are perfectly possible.

In the light of such dramatic consequences of the application of RG to the simplest
picture of BH production, we conclude that more detailed studies have to be made
on both sides of the problem. It would be of great interest to see whether the straight forward statements, which were made here, would survive an improved formulation of the BH production threshold, of the RG solutions, and of the determination of the truncation parameter t. If the results persist and t can be determined to be ≤ 1, no black holes will be produced at the LHC whether large extra dimensions exist or not.

The paper notes that this RG stuff had previously been used to predict that the final outcome of black hole evaporation is a remnant which is a "mini black hole of Planckian size". The article which discusses this notes that:

It would be interesting to investigate the possible astrophysical implications of a population of stable Planck size mini-black holes produced in the Early Universe or by the interaction of cosmic rays with the interstellar medium

The suggestion being, I assume, that some of the dark matter in the universe may be very tiny black holes swarming around the place.

As far as black hole remnants are concerned, I noted in a post last year that an arxiv paper suggested they could be a useful source of energy:

If BHRs (Stable Remnants) are made available by the LHC or the
NLC and can be used to convert mass in energy, then the total 2050 yearly world energy consumption of roughly 1021 Joule can be covered by just ∼ 10 tons of arbitrary material, converted to radiation by the Hawking process via m = E/c2 = 1021J/(3·108m/s)2 = 10 4kg.

But how do you actually make it into an energy generator? Shot particles at it in an accelerator? Would it be easy to hit? And more importantly, what does it mean if you drop one, or thousands, into the centre of the earth? Here's some speculation: are some planet interiors already partially heated by captured black hole remnants? Would adding thousands of human made ones be a bad idea?

All questions I am waiting to see answers to.

A very nasty virus

HIV's punch brings on dementia | The Australian

It is a commonly held belief that rates of HIV infection are increasing in some communities because anti-viral therapy has made it seem that it is not a complete disaster to catch the disease, thereby inadvertently encouraging some risk taking behaviour.

I have suggested before that education about the disease ought to address this issue: show a few HIV positive people who are alive, but far from well, despite being on the best therapy available. (Who knows, maybe this line is already being followed in some advertising campaigns directed at the gay community?)

Anyway, this story today serves as a reminder of the seriousness of the infection:

THE reason many people with HIV-AIDS develop dementia has long baffled researchers, but scientists finally believe they have the answer - the virus hits the brain with a one-two punch.

First, a protein on the surface of the virus directly kills brain cells, or neurons. Then the same protein disrupts the formation of new neurons from adult stem cells.

In people, the dementia triggered by the virus, HIV-associated dementia (HAD), slows thinking, memory and even movement.

Perversely, although highly active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART) helps HIV-infected people live longer and with less severe dementia, the prevalence of HAD has not declined.

Statistics from the National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research (NCHECR) at the University of NSW in Sydney reveal that almost 9800 Australians have HIV-AIDS.

According to Bruce Brew -- head of neurology at St Vincent's Hospital in Sydney -- roughly 20 per cent of people with AIDS will develop HAD. Surprisingly, many will remain otherwise quite well.

In the BCC report on the same research, it is noted:

Keith Alcorn, senior editor of the HIV information service NAM, said: "The discovery that HIV affects stem cell proliferation in the brain is bound to add to concerns that people with HIV doing well on antiretroviral therapy may nevertheless face a higher risk of dementia in years to come.

"Antiretroviral drugs have lowered viral load so that HIV will not kill cells directly, but we don't know the consequences for brain functioning of a long-term low level of infection.

"It may be that low level infection is enough to interfere with the regeneration pathways in the way shown in this experiment."

Neat heading

Revenge of the bloodthirsty lesbians - Times Online

Ian Rankin has been criticised for this statement:

The acclaimed writer of the Inspector Rebus novels said in an interview last year: “The people writing the most graphic novels today are women. They are mostly lesbians as well, which I find interesting.”

Further in the report, it states this:

McDermid is one of several prominent lesbian thriller writers, including Patricia Cornwell, Louise Welsh and Manda Scott.

I have never gotten into crime fiction, and didn't know Patricia Cornwell was lesbian. I agree with Rankin that this is a curious thing.

Answer: Yes

Is Second Life just hype? from Guardian Unlimited

Utter hypocrisy

It's no wonder that Labor didn't get very far with spending all of Parliament's question time yesterday trying to embarrass Peter Costello over his 2005 dinner comments.

Surely the public has learnt that, when it comes to talk of leadership and intended challenges, no politician from any party can be expected to be completely honest. It happens with every leadership challenge: denial, denial, denial, challenge.

Kevin Rudd's was no different. Everyone knows politicians lie when it comes to leadership issues.

Julia Gillard on Radio National this morning then tried to pretend it was the government that was swept up in worrying about leadership, when it was Labor that spent all of Question Time on it yesterday. I will get her exact words up later today when I can get them. It was a ridiculous response.

UPDATE: this is my transcript of the audio of the last question Fran Kelly asked Julia Gillard this morning:

Fran Kelly: Just quickly...is it time to stop worrying about who Peter Costello had dinner with two years ago and start focusing on policy issues that voters really care about?

Julia Gillard: I think that’s a question you should really be asking the government. It’s a stale and self obsessed government that is looking at all of these questions. It’s a stale and self obsessed set of ministers who are more worried about who is sitting in what chair more than anything else, they are certainly more worried about that than they are about the future of Australians working families, and it’s a self obsessed back bench that has lost touch with the needs of their constituents and is now much more enthralled by the internal dynamics of the Liberal Party and Mr Howard versus Mr Costello.

How rich is that, given their performance yesterday?

Doomsday machines

Dr Strangelove and the real Doomsday machine - Times Online

Here's an interesting review of a book about nuclear doomsday machines. One was imagined and not built (it's a little hard to see the political/military tactical value of ending all life on earth,) but the other was built in Russia and is, presumably, still in action. This later one is an automated "return fire" computer, and does indeed sound a bit of a worry.

Freakonomics at the NYT

Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog

For those who haven't noticed, the Freakonomics guys are now blogging at the NYT, and the range of topics covered is pretty impressive.

Go have a browse.