So that's what stamp collecting is good for

A Brisbane solicitor was jailed today for having a huge collection of child pornography. An unusual submission was made by his barrister:

His barrister, Ralph Devlin SC, told the court last month that the high number of images and movies were because of an obsessive compulsive disorder.

Mr Devlin said Quinn came from a "family of hoarders" and that he had an obsessive compulsion to collect these images but had since turned his attention toward stamp-collecting.

I guess there had to some good point about stamp collecting, but its jail avoidance potential was one I would never have guessed.

Kerry annoys Howard

I was not able to give it my full attention, but it seemed from what I did see of the interviews on 7.30 Report tonight that Kerry O'Brien clearly annoyed Howard in the first couple of minutes (with a sarcastic "how convenient" quip when the PM said he wasn't going to answer the first question which related to his poor polling.) In fact, all of the questioning of Howard seemed more aggressive than that of Rudd.

Of course you can say "you would say that, wouldn't you", but I still reckon it's true objectively.

I am waiting for the transcript to appear to see if it justifies my impression.

Dealing with pollution in China

In China, a lake's champion imperils himself - International Herald Tribune

Got a government VIP man coming to check out pollution in a famous lake? This, apparently, is how the Chinese dealt with the problem:

In 2001, Wen Jiabao, then a vice premier, now China's prime minister, came to investigate reports of Lake Tai's deterioration. Like most Communist Party inspection tours, word of this one reached local officials in advance. When Wen asked to see a typical dye plant, one was made ready, according to several people who witnessed the preparations.

The factory got a fresh coat of paint. The canal that ran beside it was drained, dredged and refilled with fresh water. Shortly before Wen's motorcade arrived, workers dumped thousands of carp into the canal. Farmers were positioned along the banks holding fishing rods.

Wen spent 20 minutes there. A picture of him shaking hands with the factory boss hangs in its lobby.

It's all rather amusing in a "SGT Bilko" kind of way, as long as you don't have to live there.

Kevin Rudd, what are you going to do about this?

Not if Kevin Rudd has his way

Go nuclear for a third industrial revolution, says EC

There was also a pro nuclear article at Online Opinion a couple of weeks ago that is worth a read.

Labor's evident preference for windmills over any possibility of nuclear is a cop out if they are serious about reducing greenhouse emissions.

Bedroom pitfalls

Better eat a banana | Guardian Unlimited Books

This is an amusing survey of bad fiction writing about sex.

I wish more movies would "leave us at the door" these days too.

A wasted dinner

Why Rudd is not fit to rule | NEWS.com.au

Earlier this year it was mentioned on Insiders that Piers Akerman had had a dinner with Kevin Rudd.

One assumes that Kevin thought he could gain some advantage by breaking bread with one of the nation's biggest Howard supporters, but it has been clear for months that it was wasted effort.

This weekend, Piers explains in very clear terms that he does not trust Kevin one iota:

....I have the gravest concerns about his fitness to head a political party, let alone run this nation.

My main concerns about his character relate to what I perceive to be an unalloyed ruthlessness, a lack of his loyalty to anything but his own short-term political ambitions and his projection of a carefully constructed image that has little or nothing to do with Rudd the man.

While I generally don't pay all that much attention to Akerman, that little summary of The Problem with Kevin seems fair enough.

That rat movie

I finally caught up with "Ratatouille" today.

It's great, although I must admit that I understand why it has not had quite the same degree of box office success as most Pixar fims: I think it is their most adult oriented offering to date, perhaps even more so than The Incredibles (also by Brad Bird, of course.) A lot of the subtle humour depends on an adult understanding of stereotypes surrounding both the French and the profession of cooking.

I would think that most kids under 5 would find it about 15 minutes too long, but on the other hand, my (7 yr old) boy's interest never flagged. Mind you, he enjoys watching Iron Chef too. Both of the kids insisted on cooking something at home after the movie. Some instant pancake mix with some fresh blueberries thrown in did the trick.

Brad Bird handles animated action so well, it makes me wonder if he could bring new perspectives to a live action film. Drawing wild camera angles is presumably somewhat easier than live action, though. You can draw anything, after all.

UPDATE: the movie has been a great critical and box office success in France, where it has (apparently) caused a surge of interest in pet rats . Good to see.

Tim Flannery makes a mistake

This is interesting. According to this post at the Real Climate site (which is, after all, run by Al Gore supporting, actual climate scientists), Tim Flannery's claim this week about greenhouse gases reaching a certain disastrous level ahead of schedule is simply wrong. It appears he got confused by the terminology:

There was a minor kerfuffle in recent days over claims by Tim Flannery (author of "The Weather Makers") that new information from the upcoming IPCC synthesis report will show that we have reached 455 ppmv CO₂_equivalent 10 years ahead of schedule, with predictable implications. This is confused and incorrect, but the definitions of CO₂_e, why one would use it and what the relevant level is, are all highly uncertain in many peoples' minds.

There follows a run down as to how to understand the terminology correctly, which I won't bother reprinting here. The penultimate paragraph says:

The important number is CO₂_e (Total) which is around 375 ppmv. Stabilisation scenarios of 450 ppmv or 550 ppmv are therefore still within reach. Claims that we have passed the first target are simply incorrect, however, that is not to say they are easily achievable. It is even more of a stretch to state that we have all of a sudden gone past the 'dangerous' level. It is still not clear what that level is, but if you take a conventional 450 ppmv CO₂_e value (which will lead to a net equilibrium warming of ~ 2 deg C above pre-industrial levels), we are still a number of years from that, and we have (probably) not yet committed ourselves to reaching it.

The final paragraph comes close to direct criticism of Flannery:

....this is another example where people are quoting from draft reports that they have neither properly read nor understood and for which better informed opinion is not immediately available. I wish journalists and editors would resist the temptation to jump on leaks like this (though I know it's hard). The situation is confusing enough without adding to it unintentionally.

I will wait for Tim's retraction (or, at the very least, clarification) to be made and appear in the media. (Cue crickets chirping.)

I hope she's not expecting a big inheritance...

A Muslim Wife: Observations

Every couple of weeks I check how the Muslim Wife is getting on. (You may recall a previous post in which she told off a relative for keeping a dog as a pet.)

Well, she doesn't post much, but it would seem staying with her family inspires her:

Have you ever watched someone chase after the dunya, only to have it slip from their grasp every time?

Have you ever known someone who piles their plate high with food, yet their body is never satisfied?

Have you ever seen someone who has it all, yet can not appreciate any of it?

Have you ever met someone whose eyes are red with anxiety and whose heart never rests from worry?

Have you ever met someone whose feet are dangling in their grave, yet they deny the inevitability of death?

Have you seen the one whose face has turned black from the absence of Allah in his mind, his heart, his life.....

I have.
I just spent the past week with them.
I'm related to them.

Bloody hell. No matter how genuinely she may feel this way, does she have to diss the relatives on the WWW after every visit? I would love to hear their side of the story.

Divorce Hollywood style

Sheen's gross e-mails to Rich

This blog doesn't make a habit of noting Hollywood celebrity gossip masquerading as news, but this report of what Charlie Sheen apparently said in emails to his former wife is too much fun:

"You are a pig. A sad, jobless pig who is sad and talentless and sad and jobless and evil and a bad mom, so go [bleep] yourself sad jobless pig," reads another.

"You are an evil piece of [bleep]. I can't wait to tell the world what a piece of [bleep] you are. You don't get a [bleeping] dime till this is resolved," says a third e-mail.

Fun? you might say: just standard Hollywood ugly break up conversation really.

Ah, wait for it. The part I like best is this:

....Sheen tried to apologize. "I have been responsible for some of the worst dialogue and venom-spewing behavior in the past few weeks that I can possibly recall, ever," he wrote. "The anger and frustration that our situation has generated is beginning to manifest itself in physical forms and cellular regression."

This is just too deliciously Hollywood silly, isn't it? (It also sounds like he is quite the fan of that very wacky Altered States movie.)

To the islands

Foreign Correspondent

The ABC's Foreign Correspondent this week had a long story on the Faroe Islands - a place I had never heard of before.

As this intro says:

The Faroe Islands, midway between Scotland and Iceland, were settled by Vikings a thousand years ago. Remote and intriguing, they look like something out of a Norse fairy tale.

People live in log houses with turf rooves, speak an ancient Viking language and delight in dressing up in traditional costume and singing Norse ballads.

They also eat pilot whales, even though the amount of heavy metals in them means that the government advises against it. (Shades of eating dolphin in Japan.)

Still, the story was fascinating, the scenery spectacular.

I think it is repeated sometime again over the weekend, and then it turns up on broadband on their website.

A David Byrne road trip

I have previously recommended the journal/blog of the multi-talented David Byrne (ex Talking Head, just in case someone needs reminding).

Apart from his occasional political comments, which could come direct from the pages of Huffington Post and are easily ignored, he writes terribly well; and although he's a New York liberal with somewhat esoteric artistic interests, he seems to take a very non-judgemental attitude to how the rest of his country lives.

Go read, for example, this long entry detailing a recent 7 day road trip he took with his daughter across the southern part of the States. He certainly does not appear to live the lifestyle of the rich and famous, staying at chain motels for example, visiting Dollywood with a completely snob-free attitude, and eating steak across the bar-b-q belt with the best of them. He comments how "sweet" it was when he was recognised at a particular town and signed several autographs.

For those who have been following him for a long time, you might recall that this non-judgemental attitude to ordinary life in the suburbs and malls was clear in his gentle- natured 1986 movie "True Stories". It's not a earth shattering movie by any means, but it is eccentric in a sweet natured way, and the sound track is good. It's well worth watching if it is still to be found at the video library. (I doubt that it is, but I imagine you could still buy it easily enough.)

He just comes across as a smart and likeable man who is interested in everything. Provided you could keep the conversation off current politics, I get the impression he would be one of the great dinner party guests of the world.

Update: possible alternative title to this post: "Oh no! I think I've got a man crush on a New York liberal!"

Keep it to yourself, Deveny

We need a scientific, statistical approach to drugs - Opinion - theage.com.au

Catherine Deveny starts her column on drugs with this:

I haven't taken a lot of drugs in my time, but, like most people my age (I'm 39), I tried almost all of them when I was in my 20s.

Most people verging on middle age have tried "most drugs"? Big call, Catherine, and you perhaps should start speaking to more people outside your own circle.

Of those she does talk to, she reports benignly:

My mates in their early 20s tell me that "only bogans drink" and they prefer to take recreational drugs on a Saturday night. They mention drink-driving laws, the violence associated with drunks and calorie intake. They are not concerned about the long-term effects of drug use....

My kids will take drugs. What am I going to tell them? I don't know yet. But truth will be a large part of it. There'll be a policy that we will pick them up or pay for a cab from wherever, whenever if they are not fit to drive or if things get out of hand. No questions asked.

Seems a good bet that the things she won't tell her kids will include:

* they shouldn't take pills offered at a night club or rave because they have no proper idea what is in them.
* that being caught with virtually any drug on you may interfere badly with future travel plans to the States or other countries.
* that she would really rather they didn't try the experiment of seeing whether or not they have a pre-existing disposition towards schizophrenia, a crippling (often life-long) disease, that marijuana use is now widely believed to encourage to the surface;
* that part of being a young adult is taking your own responsibility for getting home safely from a night out. (Here, dear, just use that credit card linked to my account.)

Deveny is, presumably, the type of person who thinks letting teenagers bring alcohol to a party is responsible, because they will only do it anyway and they should be encouraged to be responsible, blah blah. Funny how many disastrous parties have started that way.

It's one thing to say that you don't want to be a hypocrite and tell your children not to try drugs when you tried them yourself. (Even though that may mean that you simply developed more sense as you got older.) It's another thing to tell your children via the newspaper that you have tried just about everything, and give them tacit encouragement to do the same. As long as they are careful, you know?

The Australian Kevin Party

It's becoming clear that the biggest danger to Kevin Rudd, as soon as he gets IR legislation through the Senate, will be assassination by someone on the Left of his own party. Well OK, maybe not assassination, but a convenient accidental fall from some high point around Parliament House.

Over the past couple of weeks, Kevin has:

* warned all of his shadow cabinet that no one's position is secure;

* had to clarify that by saying he meant no one except for his closest 3 pals;

* then had to reassert his power by saying he alone (and not the factions) will pick the Cabinet membership;

* annoyed environmentalists by going along with the Howard decision on the Tasmanian pulp mill;

* criticised his shadow foreign minister for giving a speech approved by one of his (Kevin's) own staffers;

* on the 7.30 Report tonight, has seemingly added said shadow foreign minister as the fourth person at least "guaranteed" a job in cabinet (though maybe not foreign minister):

But as for the rest of the time team, I will select those on the basis of merit come the outcome of the next election. If we are elected to form the next government of Australia. But Mr McClelland will be part of that team.

(One can only assume that this is to placate McClelland for being publicly ticked off even when he had done everything right to see that Kevin approved the speech); and

* Upset teacher unions by promising to keep the Coalition's school funding system for the next few years.

Oh sure, every Labor politician is currently willing to bite their tongue for now while they think of the polls, but what Rudd is doing seems well designed to guarantee that he will not have loyalty in the long run. Certainly, he is positioning himself as the Prime Minister most likely to be punched in the nose by someone from his own party towards the end of the parliamentary Christmas shindig.

I also note that on the 7.30 Report tonight, Kevin said that even if the Commonwealth takes over hospital funding in the future after a referendum, this doesn't mean that actual control of the hospitals would be in the hands of the Commonwealth:

KERRY O'BRIEN: Well, very quickly, who would run those 750 hospitals?

KEVIN RUDD: In the document we released, we said the Commonwealth, if we went down the option of getting a mandate from the Australian people for the Commonwealth to take over funding responsibility, in taking over funding responsibility the Commonwealth, we said in that document, and we adhere to it right today, will not be running any one of those individual hospitals. The options available are for the States to continue to physically manage hospitals or for them to be managed privately or on a committee basis as the Prime Minister appears to have set up in relation to his Mersey model.

Seems to me that this is not what the public expects from the idea of the Commonwealth taking responsibility for the hospitals.

UPDATE: I see that Andrew Landeryou claims that McClelland was hung out to dry because Simon Crean has been promised Foreign Affairs. He doesn't seem the type, to me.

(Landeryou's blog is a lot of fun at the moment. If you missed the old Youtube video he posted last Friday, go have a look.)

Melbourne place to stay

OK, Melbourne and other Aussie readers. You learnt yesterday that I will be bringing the family there for a short holiday in a couple of month's time, courtesy of Tiger Airlines. Given that there are 2 kids, a serviced apartment would seem to be the go. Seems to me an inner city suburb would be just as good as the CBD, as long as we are near a tram line.

Using on line services for this stuff is a bit of a pain now. There are too many different websites that overlap and cover the same joints.

Anyone have a suggestion for good family accommodation at moderate price?

Mind, meet brain

Mind Hacks: Biting the mind

Mind Hacks is a terribly good blog on all things to do with neuroscience and associated issues. It really is worth checking out every couple of days.

The post above is a particularly clear and concise summary of the brain/mind problem, and I think it is an excellent little bit of writing.

For what it's worth, here's my little comment on it. I understand the position the writer seems to support (property dualism), which he says means:

....that both mind-level and brain-level explanations may explain how we think and behave but at different levels that may not always be reducible.

For what it is worth, I find it a little puzzling to get around the issue of how the mind level of meaning has feedback to the brain level. It is (especially with the computer analogy of hardware and software) easy these days to imagine brain creating mind, but somewhat harder to imagine how the world of meaning that the mind lives in affects the brain.

Words spoken to you can cause a flood of tears. That's sort of odd, isn't it? It's the meaning the words convey, nothing to do with the physical nature of the sounds, that affects your mind which affects your brain and leads to the tears.

Well, I think it's odd anyway.

The importance of washing vegetables

ScienceDaily: Human Urine As A Safe, Inexpensive Fertilizer For Food Crops

"Our results show that human urine could be used as a fertilizer for cabbage and does not pose any significant hygienic threats or leave any distinctive flavor in food products," the report concludes.

Dying to finish

Runner dies, 300 treated as heat ravages Chicago Marathon - CNN.com

People direct their competitive impulse towards all sort of weird and essentially useless pastimes, but those who choose to get a sense of satisfaction out of completing marathons add the additional perversity of doing something clearly bad for the human body.

People get upset about boxers doing self harm, so why does no one talk about maniac runners and their knee reconstructions, other leg and foot injuries, and deaths?

Cheap tickets: a public service announcement

Tiger Airways since this morning is having a 24 hour sale of very, very cheap flights. I have scored a trip from the Gold Coast to Melbourne with the family at a cost of $40 return per person! Huzzah, as they say.

Awful news

Most readers may have already seen this over at Tim Blair's, but it is very unhappy news about Matt Price. Of course, all best wishes, positive vibes or prayers should be directed towards him. He is the most likeable of all the regular political journalists.