Brlogsbane

Brlogsbane has moved!

2007-11-27T22:08:00.000+10:00

Brlogsbane has moved to Wordpress, with a very pretty new appearance and lots of interesting stuff coming up soon.

The new address for Brlogsbane is: http://brlogsbane.wordpress.com/

The new rss feed is: http://brlogsbane.wordpress.com/feed/

Jamie.

BBC News: the top 10 arguments against global warming, with responses

2007-11-18T17:01:00.000+10:00

The strangest thing about Today Tonight's story about The Chaser ...

2007-11-16T19:44:00.000+10:00

... is that 15 minutes of a Today Tonight reporter bullying and gloating that the law is on their side it seems more like the kind of thing that The Chaser would play to humiliate Today Tonight, and not the other way round.

There must be plenty of people who think the opposite, so I guess it's a bit of a Rorschach test.

If you haven't seen the story, go here: Link.

(Thanks to Lachlan for the link, and everyone else who pointed out the story.)

Australia sees fantasy differently

2007-11-08T07:24:00.000+10:00

Here's an observation I don't understand the meaning of.

Three leads from Australia:

The Age: "A popular children's toy found to contain a chemical that the human body turns into the party drug "fantasy", or "GHB", has been banned in three states..."

NEWS.com.au: "An award-winning children's toy has been recalled because it contains a chemical which turns into a dangerous party drug when metabolised in the body."

Ninemsn: "Concerns are rising that drug-users may flock to Victorian toy stores after that state's authorities failed to withdraw from sale a popular children's toy that metabolises into the party drug fantasy when eaten."

Contrast with these headlines and leads from around the world:

CNN International: "'Date rape' drug in children's toy"

International Herald Tribune: "Toy beads found to contain precursor to 'date rape' drug"

Wall Street Journal: "Retailers around the world scrambled to pull a popular toy called Bindeez off the shelves Wednesday after a chemical in some shipments of the Chinese-made product was found to mimic the effects of the so-called date rape drug."

Reuters: "Australia announced a nationwide ban on Wednesday on around 1 million Chinese-made toys after investigations showed they contained a chemical which metabolises when swallowed into a date-rape drug."

BBC News: "Australia has issued a nationwide ban on a Chinese-made toy after it was found to contain a substance linked to the date-rape drug GHB"

Study finds significantly more antioxidants in organic produce

2007-10-28T22:38:00.000+10:00

From Times Online [link]:

Researchers grew fruit and vegetables and reared cattle on adjacent organic and nonorganic sites on a 725-acre farm attached to Newcastle University, and at other sites in Europe. They found that levels of antioxidants in milk from organic herds were up to 90% higher than in milk from conventional herds.
As well as finding up to 40% more antioxidants in organic vegetables, they also found that organic tomatoes from Greece had significantly higher levels of antioxidants, including flavo-noids thought to reduce coronary heart disease.

There are also non-nutrition-related reasons for choosing organic produce. I don't buy any organic food at the moment, but it's something I've been thinking about.

Because of the flakiness of many of the people who promote organic food, it's easy to dismiss the whole thing as rubbish. I was unreasonably dismissive of organic food until fairly recently, but I've had to think twice since reading Michael Pollan's life-changing Botany Of Desire. Pollan only touches on organic farming briefly, but makes a very strong case for choosing to buy organic over conventionally-farmed produce.

Health website DrGreene.com has a feature about 'strategic' organic shopping, listing the organic products that would have the greatest impact if you switched to them: Link.

Zsa Zsa Gabor

2007-10-26T00:33:00.000+10:00

Vanity Fair has an unforgettable article about Zsa Zsa Gabor and Prince Frédéric von Anhalt: Link. So unceasingly, mind-bogglingly bizarre that I'm going to have to read it again.

Robyn Hitchcock - "I Often Dream Of Trains"

2007-10-24T22:52:00.000+10:00

Andrew Charlton on interest rates and the election

2007-10-17T22:00:00.001+10:00

Andrew Charlton has an article in the new Monthly about the myths surrounding interest rates and government. Excerpt:

The second aspect of the government's economic spin is that budget deficits cause high interest rates. ... At the launch of his 2004 election campaign, Howard said, "Nothing is more certain than if economic policy is allowed to slip into the hands of those who, when they last had control of it, delivered five budget deficits in a row, that there will be massive upward pressure on interest rates."

There is, in theory, a relationship here. It is as follows: if the budget is in deficit, then the government's tax intake is less than its spending. To pay the bills, it must borrow the shortfall. And when the government goes to the money markets to borrow, it increases the demand for the pool of available funds for loan. By increasing the demand for funds, it raises the price of funds: that is, the interest rate. If the government adds itself to the queue of people wanting money, it makes it harder and more expensive for the private-sector borrowers to get cash, meaning that they are less likely to borrow and less likely to invest and spend.

This sounds logical, and indeed it is. It's logical, but it is not significant. Australia is, of course, part of a global economy: neither the nation's government nor its businesses are constrained to borrowing in the domestic economy. They meet their financing needs not just in the lap pool of Australian savings but in the ocean of world savings; and the impact of the government's borrowing on global debt markets is near negligible.

This is a principle well known in the United States, which has long since lost the fiscal fetishism that still holds Australians in the thrall of budget surpluses. Says the American journalist James Ledbetter: "Today the thesis that such measly sums [moderate budget deficits] could control or even significantly influence the overall economy will produce, at best, polite throat-clearing from the average American banker of businessperson."

...

When government's face recessions and crises of confidence, they try to prime the pump by spending and going to debt, to get shoppers back in the malls and CEOs back in the investing game. At the same time, the central bank pitches in by cutting interest rates to defibrillate the economy with a shock of cheap credit. In recessions, low rates and high deficits go hand in hand. Even in a boom, where excessive government spending can over-stimulate the economy, the relationship between rates and deficits is weak.

...

[M]onetary policy is based on the level of activity in the entire economy, of which stimulus from the government is just one small part.

Charlton describes wonderfully the precise moment when Labor lost my vote at the last federal election:

In 2004, the then Opposition leader, Mark Latham, had the opportunity to call Howard's bluff, to point out the errors in the prime minister's claims about interest rates and trust that an honest argument, backed by economists and the Reserve Bank, would cut through the the electorate. Instead, Latham proffered a marker pen and an oversized sheet of cardboard inscribed with three promises that made up what he called the "Labor Low Interest Rate Guarantee". Sheepishly, Latham signed a commitment to put "downward pressure on interest rates" by, you guessed it, "keeping the budget in surplus ... and bringing down net debt".

With that one gesture Latham told Australians that the bogus link which the Coalition had made between deficits and interest rates was genuine, that Labor had a lot to apologise for from its last time in government, that the only way for the party to be accepted in the political mainstream was to confess its sins and never re-offend. Standing on the podium in front of the cardboard guarantee, Latham looked like a schoolboy blustering his way unprepared through a class presentation. He looked down at the ground as he uttered the phrase "fair dinkum". He knew he was being dishonest, and knew he was selling out past Labor governments and making it harder for future Labor leaders.

The former Governor of the Reserve Bank, Ian Macfarlaine, gave last year's Boyer Lectures. I recommend it if you want to know more about what the Reserve Bank does, why interest rates change, and what influence government has on it. You can listen to them online here.

The Onion: Conceptual Terrorists Encase Sears Tower In Jell-O

2007-10-16T07:23:00.000+10:00

Link. Excerpt:

While officials have yet to determine the purpose of the attack, a number of potential theories have emerged, including the sudden deregulation of the U.S. economy, the destruction of culturally significant landmarks, and maybe the fact that man, in his essence, is no more than a collection of irrational fragments, incapable of finding reason where no reason exists.

A secret communiqué leaked by the Prophet's Collective, however, decries these theories and several others as being "completely off," and goes on to call the American people "cultural infidels."

Though many Chicago residents are still attempting to wrap their heads around the attack, some in the Windy City have refused to classify the Jell-O encasement as a terrorist act at all.

"I'm no expert, but I know terrorism when I see it," said Kathy Atwood, a Hyde Park mother of four. "Where is the devastating loss of life and massive destruction of infrastructure? This doesn't move me to run for my life at all."

She added: "Real terrorism takes years of training and meticulous planning. My 6-year-old kid can make Jell-O."

Peter Combe @ the Zoo, October 21

2007-10-15T19:47:00.000+10:00

Peter Combe is doing a tour of concerts across Australia playing his classic children's songs... at over-18's venues. What a great idea.

Link to a clip of him performing 'Juicy Juicy Green Grass' recently in Adelaide. It made me giddy.

(Thanks Keir for bringing this to my attention.)

Andrew Bolt and Piers Ackerman

2007-10-14T02:40:00.000+10:00

Andrew Bolt and Piers Ackerman, two of my least favourite writers, both have good columns this week.

Bolt's article about the backlash against the Sudanese is mostly right on the money: Link.

And Ackerman's personal attack on Kevin Rudd sums up a lot of what many people I know are feeling about him: Link.

I don't really buy his line that Rudd is worse than Howard, but I certainly have the feeling that he's no better. This all still leaves open the question of who has the better policies, and I just don't know what to think about that yet.

Jammie Thomas on the RIAA lawsuit

2007-10-06T12:19:00.000+10:00

If you didn't hear the news: This week the major music labels won a civil suit against Jammie Thomas, a 30-year-old single mother from Minnesota. She was found to have shared 24 songs, for which she has to pay $220,000 in damages.

Just to reiterate: $220,000 for sharing 24 songs.

Under wacky US law, these penalties are largely at the discretion of the jury - and she could have done a lot worse. The Iconoclast blog has a post about the instructions given to the jury; here's one:

JURY INSTRUCTION NO. 22: In this case, each plaintiff has elected to recover "statutory damages" instead of its actual damages and profits. Under the Copyright Act, each plaintiff is entitled to a sum of not less than $750 or more than $30,000 per act of infringement (that is, per sound recording downloaded or distributed without license), as you consider just. If, however, you find that the defendant's conduct was willful, then each plaintiff is entitled to a sum of up to $150,000 per act of infringement (that is, per sound recording downloaded or distributed without license), as you consider just.

In determining the just amount of statutory damages for an infringing defendant, you may consider the willfulness of the defendant's conduct, the defendant's innocence, the defendant's continuation of infringement after notice or knowledge of the copyright or in reckless disregard of the copyright, effect of the defendant's prior or concurrent copyright infringement activity, and whether profit or gain was established.

The Recording Industry Association of America has pursued similar lawsuits against thousands of other people, but Jammie Thomas's case was different because she refused to settle out of court. She says she's innocent, so it went to court, and she lost big time.

On her Myspace page, Jammie talks about the result:

To all those who have stumbled across my site due to the recent coverage of my battle against the RIAA, welcome. For those who did not know, I was sued by the RIAA for illegally downloading and uploading music on the Kazaa network. I refused to settle as I DID NOT do this and I was not going to be bullied, PERIOD.
I will thank everyone, old and new friends alike, for all of their well wishes before the trial, during the trial and after the verdict was read. Yes, I lost. Although I may have lost this battle, I refuse to lose this war.

What made me lose? Main thing is money. I don't have it, the RIAA does. Simple as that. I couldn't afford certain things I needed; my attorney (who is a complete sweetheart of a man who took this case knowing full well what my finances are like so thank you, thank you 'Batman') gave everything he could, so we trudged ahead full steam with what little resources we had. In the end, it wasn't enough.

I truly hope no one sees this as my hand out, as that is not the case. I have not solicited any resources from anyone except advice and maybe a point in the right direction (kudos to you Mr. Ray Beckerman). I still refuse to hold my hand out. Consider it my Native Pride.

I have seen some reports about me being devistated after the verdict was read, and guess what? I was. I wonder if there is a person out there who wouldn't be upset after a jury says you're responsible to pay $222,000 for something you didn't do. I was inconsolable. I will fully admit to being a single mom of two boys living paycheck to paycheck. Potentially having 25% of my wages garnished for the rest of my life will not only hurt me, but it will hurt my family as well. Will that stop me? NEVER!!

Some of you may be asking, "What's the next step?" Well, I first need to calm down, which I have done, a little. Then, I need to strategize with Batman and figure out what my options are. So, for those of you rooting for me, stay tuned as there is more fight left in me. For those of you rooting against me? I hope you never find yourself in this same situation or one similar to it as you will then know what I know now and look back upon your actions with shame.

There's another post for those of us whose immediate reaction to the story was: "How can I send her money?"

Some of you have sent me messages asking where to send money to assist with paying this debt. I must tell you first, from the bottom of my heart, I thank you for your kindness. Now, this debt isn't finalized. There are more options available my attorney is currently seeking out before I am stuck with this ridiculous bill from the RIAA. We'll worry about the debt part once it's finalized that I will have to pay it. Also, other's have been asking where to send money to assist with an appeal (I'm not saying there will be one yet, but there might be). If you feel you would like to help with an appeal, any correspondance can be sent to my attorney, otherwise known as Batman :D, at the address below. IF you decide to send something (and please do not take this as me asking, I know alot of you are in the same financial boat as I am, so I could never ask you to send money), please send it marked with my case number 06cv1497 Capital Records v Jammie Thomas, to:

Chestnut & Cambronne
Attn: Brian Toder
3700 Campbell Mithun Tower
222 South Ninth Street
Minneapolis, MN 55402

Superbad and Ratatouille

2007-10-01T21:35:00.000+10:00

Two movies at the cinema right now, Superbad and Ratatouille, show that Hollywood is still capable of producing pure, perfect entertainment. I highly recommend both.

Tracking voters with Google

2007-09-28T10:16:00.000+10:00

One of the news media's approaches to spicing up the particularly boring upcoming election is to report breathlessly on how new technology is changing democracy. News.com.au has an article today about the supposed usefulness of Google Trends to track what Australian voters are thinking. Excerpt:

Metering the internet search terms used by Australians, Google's special tool can compare voteres' searching habits. 'Liberal' is currently more searched for than 'Labor', except in the ACT.

Here's my explanation: 'Liberal' is not just the name of a political party, it's also used in lots of other contexts: liberal democracy, liberal arts, small 'l' liberals.

'Labor', on the other hand, is a word that, in Australia, refers to primarily to the political party. Anywhere but America, if you're not referring to the political party, you spell it differently: 'labour'. And 'labour', even if some Aussies do spell it 'labor', doesn't have as many popular meanings as 'liberal': there's childbirth, there's toil, and there's the labour force.

So, if the general public weren't searching much for either of the parties, you'd probably expect 'liberal' to be a more popular search term than 'labor' in Australia. And that's just what you get. The exception is the ACT, where so many people are in government, and might be researching their possible new bosses.

Conclusion: comparing search terms for 'liberal' and 'labor' tells us nothing new.

The article goes on to compare searches for 'health care' versus 'economy' or 'climate change'. If you go to Google Trends, you can see some of the problems with this approach.

The first problem is sample size. The article sez:

While the number of Australians using the search engine to find information on many key election issues has fluctuated throughout 2007, health care was the most consistently searched for term.

But people in the Northern Territory, the ACT and Tasmania are searching more for climate change than any other election issue.

Now, we don't know exactly what terms the journalist was tracking here, but we can do a very rough search of our own to get an idea of the order of magnitude we're talking about.

Say we compare "climate change", 'economy', and "health care" for Australia for the past year: Link. Google Trends does not tell you how many people actually did a search; they give you a series of graphs with an unlabeled axis for the number of searches. But we can see from the shape of the graphs that we are probably not talking about tens or hundreds of thousands of searches.

It looks to me like it's more on the scale of dozens of searches. It's easier to get a sense of the numbers if you look at individual states. Climate change wins out in Northern Territory because nobody searched for the other two terms. In Tasmania, there's an exactly equal number searching for 'economy' and "health care", and that number is exactly three-quarters of the number that searched for "climate change". My bet is four people searched for "climate change" in Tasmania.

With the bigger states, it's harder to judge the numbers. But look at this plot for the term 'economy' in New South Wales: link. The line jumps up and down erratically, and drops flat to zero for weeks at a time; my guess is that the rate of searches for 'economy' could be as low as between zero and thirty in a week.

This doesn't bode well for making comparisons between search terms; as a rule of thumb, if your sample size is as small as the readership of Brlogsbane, your statistics are useless.

Let's assume the numbers of searches are much bigger than I've estimated. There's still the problem of assuming that people's search terms give an indication of what's on their mind. Thing is, there are a million reasons to search for any particular term (are you interested in the issue of health care, or are you trying to find health care?).

Here's the searches I've made in the past few days, and why I made the searches:

"inka essenhigh": I found an old post-it that I'd written "Inka Essenhigh" on and forgotten about
"baked beans choice": I've been digging baked beans lately and wanted to see which brands Choice magazine recommended (SPC and Bi-Lo, if you're interested)
"johnny luther htoo": I heard the incredible story of Johnny and Luther Htoo, the guerrilla leaders in Burma, on an archived episode of This American Life, and wanted to find out more
"dirigisme": I read something that mentioned dirigisme and couldn't remember what it meant
"black snake diamond role": Black Snake Diamond Role is an album I've wanted to buy for months, and was trying to find a good price for

Do these things say anything about what I'm concerned about? Hell, no.

You could probably gather from 'dirigisme' that I was reading about economics. If I searched for other words on that subject ('inflation', 'taxes', 'central bank'), I might be counted among the Aussies with the economy on their minds - which isn't the case.

If instead of "johnny luther htoo", I'd worded my search as "htoo burma", I'd be counted among the people following what's going on in Burma - which is true, but a coincidence.

Maybe more important is what I didn't search for: almost everything that's been on my mind lately.

If Google Trends was counting tens of thousands of searches on Labor or the economy, it might be useful as a blunt-instrument tool to get a sense of what internet-users were thinking about in politics. But it's not; it's even more useless than Newspoll!

The myth of exercise and weight loss

2007-09-27T21:31:00.000+10:00

Gary Taubes's article in New York Magazine gives a nice rundown of the evidence that exercise does not cause weight loss: link. Many of you will already be familiar with this stuff, but I still found Taubes's article an interesting and fun read. Three excerpts:

Ultimately, the relationship between physical activity and fatness comes down to the question of cause and effect. Is Lance Armstrong excessively lean because he burns off a few thousand calories a day cycling, or is he driven to expend that energy because his body is constitutionally set against storing calories as fat? If his fat tissue is resistant to accumulating calories, his body has little choice but to burn them as quickly as possible: what Rony and his contemporaries called the “activity impulse”—a physiological drive, not a conscious one. His body is telling him to get on his bike and ride, not his mind. Those of us who run to fat would have the opposite problem. Our fat tissue wants to store calories, leaving our muscles with a relative dearth of energy to burn. It’s not willpower we lack, but fuel.

...

[P]ost-workout, we get hungry: Our fat tissue is devoting itself to restoring calories as fat, depriving other tissues and organs of the fuel they need and triggering a compensatory impulse to eat. The feeling of hunger is the brain’s way of trying to satisfy the demands of the body. Just as sweating makes us thirsty, burning off calories makes us hungry.This research has never been controversial. It’s simply been considered irrelevant by authorities, all too often lean, who have been dead set on blaming fatness on some combination of gluttony, sloth, and perhaps a little genetic predisposition thrown in on the side.

...

As it turns out, it’s carbohydrates—particularly easily digestible carbohydrates and sugars—that primarily stimulate insulin secretion. “Carbohydrates is driving insulin is driving fat,” as George Cahill Jr., a retired Harvard professor of medicine and expert on insulin, recently phrased it for me. So maybe if we eat fewer carbohydrates—in particular the easily digestible simple carbohydrates and sugars—we might lose considerable fat or at least not gain any more, whether we exercise or not. This would explain the slew of recent clinical trials demonstrating that dieters who restrict carbohydrates but not calories invariably lose more weight than dieters who restrict calories but not necessarily carbohydrates. Put simply, it’s quite possible that the foods—potatoes, pasta, rice, bread, pastries, sweets, soda, and beer—that our parents always thought were fattening (back when the medical specialists treating obesity believed that exercise made us hungry) really are fattening. And so if we avoid these foods specifically, we may find our weights more in line with our desires.
As for those people who insist that exercise has been the key to their weight-loss programs, the one thing we’d have to wonder is whether they changed their diets as well. Rare is the person who decides the time has come to lose weight and doesn’t also decide perhaps it’s time to eat fewer sweets, drink less beer, switch to diet soda, and maybe curtail the kind of carb-rich snacks—the potato chips and the candy bars—that might be singularly responsible for driving up their insulin and so their fat.

Previously and relatedly on Brlogsbane: Compulsory reading about food and nutrition.

'It Happened One Night' on Google Video

2007-09-25T22:39:00.000+10:00

Frank Capra's 1946 romantic comedy It Happened One Night is on Google Video for free: link. I really like and recommend this movie. Unlike most romantic comedies, it's actually romantic and funny - and it never gets sappy. Great fun.

Bjorn Lomborg on global warming

2007-09-14T21:10:00.000+10:00

I read an interesting article about Bjorn Lomborg in the New York Times [link]. Lomborg will get a lot of media attention in the coming weeks, and I recommend approaching the skeptic with skepticism.

I was originally going to post this article with positive comments about Lomborg, but upon looking just a bit closer, I found deep problems with what was quoted in this article alone. Let's have a closer look, shall we?

Since record-keeping began in the 19th century, the sea level in New York has been rising about a foot per century, which happens to be about the same increase estimated to occur over the next century by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

This is tricky because sea levels don't rise equally everywhere (that might sound silly, but consider the fact that the height of the land can change locally). Say we take for granted that the above is true for New York.

Then the natural question is: are sea levels expected to rise globally at the same rate as they did in the past century?

The answers are in the IPCC report Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis - Summary for Policymakers (PDF link).

Globally, the average sea level has risen about 17 centimetres in the past century - about half a foot (see page 7 of the IPCC report).

As to how much sea levels are expected to rise, that's a bit more complicated. The IPCC doesn't just make one prediction for the next century - there are just too many different things that can happen in a century. Instead, they make a series of predictions, each based on different scenarios.

In some scenarios, the world focuses more on rapid economic growth, and in others the world focuses more on ecology. In some, globalisation makes people, ideas, and technologies very mobile. In others,the world becomes more fragmented. Different scenarios have different levels of reliance on fossil fuels, and different patterns of population growth, energy use, technology, and so on. Predictions are usually given for six scenarios.

In the best-case scenario - the more integrated, more eco-friendly world - the estimate is that sea levels will rise between 18 and 38 centimetres. In the world with rapid economic growth relying heavily on fossil fuels, the estimate is between 26 and 59 centimetres (see page 13 of the IPCC report).

So, is the predicted rise for the next century equal to the rise in the past century?

The short answer is 'no'.

The long answer is: The low-end of the error bar on the prediction for the best-case scenario overlaps with the high-end of the error bar for the rise in the past century. In the other, more realistic scenarios, there is a much bigger difference.

Onto another of the articles amazing claims:

He calls Kyoto-style treaties to cut greenhouse-gas emissions a mistake because they cost too much and do too little too late. Even if the United States were to join in the Kyoto treaty, he notes, the cuts in emissions would merely postpone the projected rise in sea level by four years: from 2100 to 2104.

Years ago, Lomborg made a similar claim in his previous book, The Skeptical Enviromentalist.

Scientific American published a rebuttal to the book, which addressed that claim. Stephen Schneider writes:

[Lomborg argues that] the Kyoto Protocol, which caps industrialized countries' output of greenhouse gases, is too expensive. It would reduce warming in 2100 by only a few tenths of a degree--"putting off the temperature increase just six years." This number ... is based on a straw-man policy that nobody has seriously proposed: Lomborg extrapolates the Kyoto Protocol, which is applicable only up to 2012, as the world's sole climate policy for another nine decades.

Just to make that clear: Lomborg's projection is based on the scenario where the Kyoto Protocol is enforced, but nothing else is done after that.

Schneider again:

Every IPCC report has noted that carbon dioxide emissions need to be cut by more than 50 percent below most baseline projections to avoid large increases in concentration in the late 21st and 22nd centuries. Most analysts know "Kyoto extended" can't make such large cuts and that both developed and developing nations will have to fashion cooperative and cost-effective solutions over time. This will take a great deal of learning-by-doing: international cooperation is not a common experience. Kyoto is a starting point. And yet Lomborg, with his creation of a straw-man 100-year projection, would squash even this first step.

This is not to say that everything Lomborg's saying is baseless. But sometimes you need to consider the assumptions he works on. For example:

Hotter summer weather can indeed be fatal, as Al Gore likes us to remind audiences by citing the 35,000 deaths attributed to the 2003 heat wave in Europe.

But ... winter can be deadlier than summer. About seven times more deaths in Europe are attributed annually to cold weather (which aggravates circulatory and respiratory illness) than to hot weather, Dr. Lomborg notes, pointing to studies showing that a warmer planet would mean fewer temperature-related deaths in Europe and worldwide.

The second factor is that the weather matters a lot less than how people respond to it. Just because there are hotter summers in New York doesn't mean that more people die â in fact, just the reverse has occurred. ... [The] number of heat-related deaths in New York in the 1990s was only a third as high as in the 1960s. The main reason is simple, and evident as you as walk into the Bridge Cafe on a warm afternoon: air-conditioning.

Lomborg argues that global efforts should focus not on reducing global warming, but on economic development.

If you're worried about stronger hurricanes flooding coasts, he says, concentrate on limiting coastal development and expanding wetlands right now rather than trying to slightly delay warming decades from now. To give urbanites a break from hotter summers, concentrate on reducing the urban-heat-island effect. If cities planted more greenery and painted roofs and streets white, he says, they could more than offset the impact of global warming.

He's done cost-benefit analyses, and concluded that the money would be better spent on fighting malaria, aids, malnutrition, and poor drinking water.

All of this makes sense as an argument. But it's based on two unspoken assumptions that I personally don't buy.

First is the assumption that the only important costs of global warming are the human costs. Safeguarding cities and helping people afford air-conditioners would help us out, but it doesn't do anything about the ecological effects. Extinct animals, destroyed ecosystems: none of these seem to factor as important. Even if the natural world would bounce back eventually (which I'm certain it would), there remains the question of whether it is right to destroy it now.

The other assumption is that there is one big purse of money that we can either spend on fighting global warming or fighting all other ills. This is a false dilemma. The world can, and does, spend money on both. Yes, a dollar spent on fighting global warming is a dollar you could have spent fighting malaria, aids, or malnutrition. But the same goes for any dollar you spend. Why single out global warming?

Bjorn Lomborg is very good at appearing credible. By appearing to stake out the middle ground, he makes it hard to criticise him without seeming like an extremist. I've just picked apart that entire article, for example, and it's made me really self-conscious about looking like a zealot. But there really is nothing, in that article at least, to suggest that he's anything but a garden variety anti-global warming pundit, throwing about carefully-chosen factoids. He doesn't seem to be in the middle ground at all.

I'm keeping an open mind about him, though, because there's always the chance this article didn't do him justice.

JD Twitch's Pitchfork Mix

2007-09-14T11:13:00.000+10:00

The music site Pitchfork has started a series where they ask great DJ's to make mixes for free downloads from the Pitchfork site. The first one in the series is by Scottish JD Twitch, and it's fantastic, eclectic fun. The free mp3, plus a tracklisting and interview, are here: Link.

The highlight for me is a track called "Rational Culture" by Tim Maia. JD Twitch sez:

We played in Sao Paolo and Rio in February and the promoter who brought us over really treated us like family. And he knew we really like vinyl and particularly all the Tropicalia from the late 60s and early 70s and he pulled me this record when I was there and was like, "You have to have this record!" And I just really fell in love with it. The guy is a member of some really bizarre religious cult. It's kind of the equivalent of the Scientologists in Brazil, maybe a little more far in than that. And he made this record to try and promote his religion. But I think this song, there is something really great about it.

Shorpy

2007-09-13T21:55:00.000+10:00

Check out Shorpy Vintage Photos - The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog. Here are a few that struck me, with Shorpy's captions. Click to see bigger.

August 1912. Another picture of little Annie Fedele, 22 Horace Street, Somerville, Massachusetts, doing piecework, which usually entailed putting the finishing touches (buttons, or collar and waistband trim) on a mostly completed article of clothing. The garment manufacturers paid a few cents for each piece that was done. Photograph by Lewis Wickes Hine. Link.

Bill Snyder and Hattie at the Central Park elephant house in 1922. 5x7 glass negative, George Grantham Bain Collection. Link.

August 1912. Tenement home work (piecework for garment makers). "Annie Fedele, 22 Horace Street, Somerville, Massachusetts. This is one of the places she works on crochet." Photo and caption by Lewis Wickes Hine. Link.

August 1912. Somerville, Massachusetts. "Annie Fedele, 22 Horace Street. Doing crochet on underwear in dirty kitchen. Said she often works here and eats out in the back yard. The people are supposed to do the work only under certain restrictions, but when the inspector and the one who delivers the goods are not around, they do as they please. A good illustration of the difficulty in trying to regulate Home Work." Photo and caption by Lewis Wickes Hine. Link.

January 1911. Boys working in the #9 breaker of the Pennsylvania Coal Co. mine at Hughestown Borough near Pittston, Pennsylvania. In this group are Sam Belloma of Pine Street and Angelo Ross of 142 Panama Street. Link.

January 1911. Shaft #6, Pennsylvania Coal Co. mine at South Pittston. "At the close of the day. Waiting for the cage to go up. Small boy in front is Joe Pume, a Nipper, 163 Pine St." Photo and caption by Lewis Wickes Hine. Link.

June 1911. "A Suggestion for Dependent Widows. Mrs. Bessie Hicks, a widow in the mill settlement at Matoaca, Virginia. She has no children large enough to work in the cotton mill, so she is starting a little store in her home." Photograph and caption by Lewis Wickes Hine. Link.

August 1938. "Itinerant photographer in Columbus, Ohio." 35mm nitrate negative. Photograph by Ben Shahn, Farm Security Administration. Link.

The orchestra at a square dance in McIntosh County, Oklahoma. Photograph by Russell Lee for the Farm Security Administration Office of War Information, c. 1939. Link.

Maybe We Should Try Coddling The Terrorists

2007-09-13T19:12:00.000+10:00

In this fake op-ed in The Onion, Bill O'Reilly is finally won over by the absurd opinions he accuses his opponents of having. Classic satire. Link.

Trusting the customer

2007-09-13T18:56:00.000+10:00

Jason Kottke had a good post months ago about a street donut-and-coffee vendor in his neighbourhood. Instead of running a cash register, he lets the customers give him the money and then take the correct change out of a tray of money that's just sitting there. Link. Excerpt:

If you were the CEO of a big business -- say, a movie studio, music company, or multinational bank -- you'd have been tearing your hair out at this scene. He lets his customers make their own change?!?!! How does he know they're making the correct change? Or putting down any change at all? Or even stealing the change? Where's the technology that prevents the change from being stolen while he's not looking? Surely there's a machine that could be invented to keep track of it. Bad, bad, bad! Unclean, unclean! Does not compute...

Hold on there, Mr. CEO, don't go all HAL 9000 on us. Ralph probably does lose a little bit of change each day to theft & bad math, but more than makes up for it in other ways. The throughput of that tiny stand is amazing. For comparison's sake, I staked out two nearby donut & coffee stands and their time spent per customer was almost double that of Ralph's stand. So, Ralph's doing roughly twice the business with the same resources. Let's see Citibank do that.

It's also apparent that Ralph trusts his customers, and that they both appreciate and return that sense of trust (I know I do). Trust is one of the most difficult "assets" for companies to acquire, but also one of the most valuable. Many companies take shortcuts in getting their customers to trust them, paying lip service to Trust™ in press releases and marketing brochures. Which works, temporarily and superficially, but when you get down to it, you can't market trust...it needs to be earned. People trust you when you trust them.

Music by Os Mutantes, visuals by ... ?

2007-09-13T16:00:00.000+10:00

The 50's song you are most likely to hear in a bar or a gym is Jackie Wilson's 'Reet Petite', not because it's a wonderful song (which it is), but because Aardman Animations made a cool claymation filmclip for it in the 80's. Take away the claymation filmclip and it would be just another exuberant two minutes of joy that you'd need to venture into AM radio to hear.

Who knows how many awesome bands don't even enter our radars because they don't have the right video concept to complement their song and create their image?

With YouTube, the need for a song to have a filmclip leads to an odd phenomenon: fans making their own filmclips. Often these clips are just people sharing their attempts at a funny dance. But sometimes it's something really special - or at least bizarre.

For example, one Mister Bungle fan went to a lot of trouble to make a filmclip for "Pink Cigarette". The results are mixed, but his heart is clearly in the right place: Link. Another guy had a sort of a go at making a film-clip for one of the coolest rock songs ever recorded, Roxy Music's "Both Ends Burning". There's something inherently hypnotic about a husky guy with a microphone headset sort of pretending to drive a car: Link.

I'd like to share a few wonderful songs by the tropicalia band Os Mutantes, and, because they pre-date MTV, the only way to do that is to link to user-generated filmclips on YouTube.

"Baby"

This song is so beautiful and simple:

"Panis et Circenses"

Unique, dark, politically-charged Brazilian psychedelia. Kind of like a Portuguese-language "A Day In The Life", recorded under a military dictatorship.

User 'Junin' on songmeanings.com provides this translation of the lyrics:

I wanted to sing a song enlightened by the sun
I've left the clothes upon the flag poles in the air
I've the tigers and lions out in the backyard
But the people in the dinning room are busy at getting born and dying

I ordered a pure-steel bright dagger
To kill my love and I did
At 5 o'clock on the central avenue
But the people in the dinner room are busy at getting born and dying

I ordered them to plant dream leaves in the solar garden
The leaves know how to look for the sun
And the root look for, look for

But the people in the dining room
Those people in the dining room
But the people in the dining room
Are busy getting born and dying.

Finally, their best-known song over here, "A Minha Menina". Great fun. The clip here falls into the category of "people sharing their attempts at a funny dance". The previous two clips suited the tone of the songs pretty well, but this one's a bit flat... His dancing needs to be at least two orders of magnitude sillier to match the song.

Jonathon Haidt on the moral psychology and the misunderstanding of religion

2007-09-13T14:22:00.000+10:00

Jonathon Haidt researches the psychology that drives our moral instincts, and how our moral instincts drive cognition. He has a brilliant article in The Edge where he outlines some of his theories, and then looks at Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion and a few of the other popular anti-religion books that have come out in the past few years. Link.

Haidt lists his "four principles of the new synthesis in moral psychology" - basically, a set of conclusions about how humans think about morality. Then he looks at Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, asking: "Do these new atheist books model the scientific mind at its best? Or do they reveal normal human beings acting on the basis of their normal moral psychology?"

The result is a much more even-handed look at these issues than I've heard from anyone on either side of the moral divide lately.

Principle 1. We tend to make judgments intuitively, and then use reasoning to support our initial judgment.

It's clear that Richard Dawkins (in The God Delusion) and Sam Harris (in Letter To A Christian Nation) have strong feelings about religion in general and religious fundamentalists in particular. Given the hate mail they receive, I don't blame them. The passions of Dawkins and Harris don't mean that they are wrong, or that they can't be trusted. One can certainly do good scholarship on slavery while hating slavery.

But the presence of passions should alert us that the authors, being human, are likely to have great difficulty searching for and then fairly evaluating evidence that opposes their intuitive feelings about religion. We can turn to Dawkins and Harris to make the case for the prosecution, which they do brilliantly, but if we readers are to judge religion we will have to find a defense attorney. Or at least we'll have to let the accused speak.

Principle 2. Language and reasoning have evolved primarily for social interaction, not for finding truth.

Just look at your stream of consciousness when you are thinking about a politician you dislike, or when you have just had a minor disagreement with your spouse. It's like you're preparing for a court appearance. Your reasoning abilities are pressed into service generating arguments to defend your side and attack the other. We are certainly able to reason dispassionately when we have no gut feeling about a case, and no stake in its outcome, but with moral disagreements that's rarely the case.

...

This is where the scientific mind is supposed to depart from the lay mind. The normal person (once animated by emotion) engages in moral reasoning to find ammunition, not truth; the normal person attacks the motives and character of her opponents when it will be advantageous to do so. The scientist, in contrast, respects empirical evidence as the ultimate authority and avoids ad hominem arguments.

The metaphor for science is a voyage of discovery, not a war. Yet when I read the new atheist books, I see few new shores. Instead I see battlefields strewn with the corpses of straw men. To name three:
a) The new atheists treat religions as sets of beliefs about the world, many of which are demonstrably false. Yet anthropologists and sociologists who study religion stress the role of ritual and community much more than of factual beliefs about the creation of the world or life after death.

b) The new atheists assume that believers, particularly fundamentalists, take their sacred texts literally. Yet ethnographies of fundamentalist communities (such as James Ault's Spirit and Flesh) show that even when people claim to be biblical literalists, they are in fact quite flexible, drawing on the bible selectivelyâor ignoring itâto justify humane and often quite modern responses to complex social situations.

c) The new atheists all review recent research on religion and conclude that it is an evolutionary byproduct, not an adaptation. They compare religious sentiments to moths flying into candle flames, ants whose brains have been hijacked for a parasite's benefit, and cold viruses that are universal in human societies. This denial of adaptation is helpful for their argument that religion is bad for people, even when people think otherwise.
I quite agree with these authors' praise of the work of Pascal Boyer and Scott Atran, who have shown how belief in supernatural entities may indeed be an accidental output of cognitive systems that otherwise do a good job of identifying objects and agents. Yet even if belief in gods was initially a byproduct, as long as such beliefs had consequences for behavior then it seems likely that natural selection operated upon phenotypic variation and favored the success of individuals and groups that found ways (genetic or cultural or both) to use these gods to their advantage, for example as commitment devices that enhanced cooperation, trust, and mutual aid.

Principle 3. "Morality is a set of constraints that binds people together into an emergent collective entity."

Dawkins is explicit that his goal is to start a movement, to raise consciousness, and to arm atheists with the arguments they'll need to do battle with believers. The view that "we" are virtuous and our opponents are evil is a crucial step in uniting people behind a cause, and there is plenty of that in the new atheist books. A second crucial step is to identify traitors in our midst and punish or humiliate them. There is some of that too in these booksâatheists who defend the utility of religion or who argue for disengagement or dÃ©tente between science and religion are compared to Chamberlain and his appeasement of Hitler.

Principle 4. "Morality is about more than harm and fairness."

Psychological explanations of morality have often focussed on two impulses: caring and the desire for fairness (for example, Kohlberg's stages of moral development, reciprocal altruism, or kin selection).

The question that's been neglected is, in Haidt's words, "Why do so many societies care deeply and morally about menstruation, food taboos, sexuality, and respect for elders and the Gods?" Haidt says it is unreasonable to just dismiss these things as purely cultural, and suggests three more psychological foundations for morality: group loyalty, respect for authority, and purity.

In Letter to a Christian Nation, Sam Harris gives us a standard liberal definition of morality: "Questions of morality are questions about happiness and suffering… To the degree that our actions can affect the experience of other creatures positively or negatively, questions of morality apply." He then goes on to show that the Bible and the Koran, taken literally, are immoral books because they're not primarily about happiness and suffering, and in many places they advocate harming people.

Reading Harris is like watching professional wrestling or the Harlem Globetrotters. It's great fun, with lots of acrobatics, but it must not be mistaken for an actual contest. If we want to stage a fair fight between religious and secular moralities, we can't eliminate one by definition before the match begins. So here's my definition of morality, which gives each side a chance to make its case: Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, practices, institutions, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible. In my research I have found that there are two common ways that cultures suppress and regulate selfishness, two visions of what society is and how it ought to work. I'll call them the contractual approach and the beehive approach.

The contractual approach takes the individual as the fundamental unit of value. The fundamental problem of social life is that individuals often hurt each other, and so we create implicit social contracts and explicit laws to foster a fair, free, and safe society in which individuals can pursue their interests and develop themselves and their relationships as they choose.

Morality is about happiness and suffering (as Harris says, and as John Stuart Mill said before him), and so contractualists are endlessly trying to fine-tune laws, reinvent institutions, and extend new rights as circumstances change in order to maximize happiness and minimize suffering. To build a contractual morality, all you need are the two individualizing foundations: harm/care, and fairness/reciprocity. The other three foundations, and any religion that builds on them, run afoul of the prime directive: let people make their own choices, as long as they harm nobody else.

The beehive approach, in contrast, takes the group and its territory as fundamental sources of value. Individual bees are born and die by the thousands, but the hive lives for a long time, and each individual has a role to play in fostering its success.The two fundamental problems of social life are attacks from outside and subversion from within. Either one can lead to the death of the hive, so all must pull together, do their duty, and be willing to make sacrifices for the group. Bees don't have to learn how to behave in this way but human children do, and this is why cultural conservatives are so heavily focused on what happens in schools, families, and the media.

Conservatives generally have a more pessimistic view of human nature than do liberals. They are more likely to believe that if you stand back and give kids space to grow as they please, they'll grow into shallow, self-centered, undisciplined pleasure seekers. Cultural conservatives work hard to cultivate moral virtues based on the three binding foundations: ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity, as well as on the universally employed foundations of harm/care and fairness/reciprocity. The beehive ideal is not a world of maximum freedom, it is a world of order and tradition in which people are united by a shared moral code that is effectively enforced, which enables people to trust each other to play their interdependent roles. It is a world of very high social capital and low anomie.

It might seem obvious to you that contractual societies are good, modern, creative and free, whereas beehive societies reek of feudalism, fascism, and patriarchy. And, as a secular liberal I agree that contractual societies such as those of Western Europe offer the best hope for living peacefully together in our increasingly diverse modern nations (although it remains to be seen if Europe can solve its current diversity problems).

I just want to make one point, however, that should give contractualists pause: surveys have long shown that religious believers in the United States are happier, healthier, longer-lived, and more generous to charity and to each other than are secular people. Most of these effects have been documented in Europe too. If you believe that morality is about happiness and suffering, then I think you are obligated to take a close look at the way religious people actually live and ask what they are doing right.

Don't dismiss religion on the basis of a superficial reading of the Bible and the newspaper. Might religious communities offer us insights into human flourishing? Can they teach us lessons that would improve wellbeing even in a primarily contractualist society.

You can't use the New Atheists as your guide to these lessons. The new atheists conduct biased reviews of the literature and conclude that there is no good evidence on any benefits except the health benefits of religion. Here is Daniel Dennett in Breaking the Spell on whether religion brings out the best in people:
"Perhaps a survey would show that as a group atheists and agnostics are more respectful of the law, more sensitive to the needs of others, or more ethical than religious people. Certainly no reliable survey has yet been done that shows otherwise. It might be that the best that can be said for religion is that it helps some people achieve the level of citizenship and morality typically found in brights. If you find that conjecture offensive, you need to adjust your perspective. (Breaking the Spell, p. 55.)
I have italicized the two sections that show ordinary moral thinking rather than scientific thinking. The first is Dennett's claim not just that there is no evidence, but that there is certainly no evidence, when in fact surveys have shown for decades that religious practice is a strong predictor of charitable giving. Arthur Brooks recently analyzed these data (in Who Really Cares) and concluded that the enormous generosity of religious believers is not just recycled to religious charities.

Religious believers give more money than secular folk to secular charities, and to their neighbors. They give more of their time, too, and of their blood. Even if you excuse secular liberals from charity because they vote for government welfare programs, it is awfully hard to explain why secular liberals give so little blood. The bottom line, Brooks concludes, is that all forms of giving go together, and all are greatly increased by religious participation and slightly increased by conservative ideology (after controlling for religiosity).

These data are complex and perhaps they can be spun the other way, but at the moment it appears that Dennett is wrong in his reading of the literature. Atheists may have many other virtues, but on one of the least controversial and most objective measures of moral behavior—giving time, money, and blood to help strangers in need—religious people appear to be morally superior to secular folk.

My conclusion is not that secular liberal societies should be made more religious and conservative in a utilitarian bid to increase happiness, charity, longevity, and social capital. Too many valuable rights would be at risk, too many people would be excluded, and societies are so complex that it's impossible to do such social engineering and get only what you bargained for. My point is just that every longstanding ideology and way of life contains some wisdom, some insights into ways of suppressing selfishness, enhancing cooperation, and ultimately enhancing human flourishing.

But because of the four principles of moral psychology it is extremely difficult for people, even scientists, to find that wisdom once hostilities erupt. A militant form of atheism that claims the backing of science and encourages "brights" to take up arms may perhaps advance atheism. But it may also backfire, polluting the scientific study of religion with moralistic dogma and damaging the prestige of science in the process.

John Lennon's Jukebox on Google Video

2007-09-07T00:30:00.000+10:00

John Lennon had a portable jukebox in the 60's which carried 40 records. This is a BBC documentary about those songs: it features a whole lot of wonderful, wonderful music, and a glimpse into how Lennon put songs together. Highly recommended: Link.

Via smashingtelly.

Martin Buscaglia

2007-09-05T19:37:00.000+10:00

An album I'm loving at the moment is the Martin Buscaglia's El Evangelio Segun Mi Jardinero.

It's hard to find information about Martin in English (he's Uruguayan), but I can say for sure that he's a colossal talent. El Evangelio is amazingly eclectic - a mix of funk, tropicalia, hip hop, psychedelic pop, samba, dance, jazz, and genres that I've either never heard of or that Martin invented himself. It's also really good. It's all done with a sense of fun and exploration, and reminds me of artists like Prince, Mr Bungle, the Beta Band, Odelay-era Beck, Transport, Gomez, and, above all, the Tropicalia artists.

This live clip on Youtube is a sampling of different bits from the same concert. It gives a hint at the inventiveness and humour of the guy. Hear how cool the music is, see how well he works the crowd, and make sure you see the song towards the end performed with tincans and handclaps alone!

There's also a filmclip for the single from the album, 'Cerebro, Orgasmo, Envidia & Sofía', the homeliness and strangeness of which reminds me of the glory-days of Rage.

Jesus / Osama: Priscilla Bracks's artists' statement

2007-08-31T00:22:00.000+10:00

I don't get anything out of this kind of art, but I hate how unfair the media has been on Priscilla Bracks, the artist behind Bearded Orientals: Making the Empire Cross. It's kind of amazing that anyone could still be shocked by this kind of art, and maybe Priscilla is shocked too - the artist's statement accompanying the piece makes it pretty clear she wasn't intending to piss anyone off.

Excerpt:

There is a very real possibility that by giving such significant media attention to those who commit crimes and advocate violence, we may inadvertently elevate of them to a status where in some circles, they are perceived as sacred and holy – revered in the same way we revere Jesus.

This work has quite an open text so people are likely to read the image in many different ways. Some have mentioned they see it as a juxtaposition of good and evil, whilst others are interested in its comment on how iconic figures are created.

To me this work is a cautionary tale about our fixation with crime, violence and catastrophe. Access to information is important and there are instances where this has been well balanced with the temptation to sensationalise.

Seems pretty straightforward to me, but coverage like this from the ABC selectively quotes Priscilla to make her sound doughy without conveying what she really meant.

Bearded Orientals seems like typical conceptual art: An artwork too dull to be anything without an artist's statement, an artist's statement too banal to be anything without an artwork to accompany it. But the deep crappiness of conceptual art is another issue altogether - one that doesn't belong in the news pages anyway - and there's no reason to single out Priscilla Bracks for attack.

Nothing to see here folks; leave her alone.

I can't resist linking to Andrew Bolt's considered analysis - in which he takes Bracks's statement as evidence that she "doesn't dare defend what she clearly means". And, yes, he mentions black skivvys and canapes. Link.

Chimps may have better short-term memory than humans

2007-08-30T23:55:00.001+10:00

This video from Slate V covers the amazing research of Tetsuro Matsuzawa, who reckons humans traded short-term memory for other cognitive skills. The clips of the chimps doing memory tasks are amazing, and - naturally - cute: Link.

The History of Information

2007-08-30T23:24:00.000+10:00

I finished listening to the lectures from InfoSys C103: History of Information - one of the many courses that UC Berkeley makes available as a free podcast.

The scope of the course is as ambitious as the title suggests - it's a history of the interaction between humankind, information, and technology, winding for 30-odd hours through the development of writing systems, mass communication, broadcast, etc, and the way these things have shaped and been shaped by culture and human nature. Some highlights that come to mind are:

the history of writing systems (including some great stuff about picture-writing)

the history of the postal service (including the origins of the modern Valentine's day)

the history of broadcast media and politics (including the history of talk radio and how the televised presidential debate changed the nature of politics in America)

the history of advertising (including Roman poetry plugging face-cream)

the evolution of the modern newspaper (including lots of cool early variations on the format that don't exist any more)

the birth of the modern dictionary (and the philosophy behind it)

the early years of the Philosophical Society of London

the history of telecommunication (including stuff the social effects of the telegram, and how the first telephone exchange was invented by a paranoid mortician)

lots about the history of the internet (including the best commentary on Wikipedia I've heard anywhere)

I could go on. It's part history, part technology, part philosophy, partly social science (the good kind). It will enrich your understanding of the modern world. I can't recommend it highly enough. Link / RSS.

Scientists induce out-of-body sensations

2007-08-24T20:16:00.000+10:00

Link.

Seven US soldiers on the state of Iraq

2007-08-23T23:16:00.000+10:00

The New York Times has an interesting op-ed by seven US soldiers at the end of their tours of duty in Iraq: Link. It's a real change to hear news from on the ground there. Journalists have next to no access in Iraq today, so when it's spoken about at all, we tend to only hear the blather of idealogues restating the same opinion they had three years ago -- for or against.

Six months ago I wrote about Iraq, got glum, quoted Billy Bragg, tied myself in knots and said I was 51 per cent in favour of a withdrawal. In retrospect, even that seems pretty naively optimistic about the occupation.

In case you missed it, see George W. Bush this week comparing Vietnam to Iraq as an argument for staying: Link. His analogy benefits from the fact that we don't know how fab things might have gone in Vietnam if America had stayed the course there.

Slate article on Tony Wilson

2007-08-21T08:37:00.000+10:00

Slate has a nice article about the recently deceased Tony Wilson (founder of Factory Records and the Hacienda club, and the guy 24 Hour Party People was about): Link.

Bert's third axing

2007-08-13T00:11:00.000+10:00

Bert Newton's What A Year has been axed, following the fate of Bert's Family Feud and 20 to 1, the other shows he's done for Channel 9 in the past couple of years: News.com story.

It's been depressing to see the kinds of pathetic light entertainment filler Channel 9 has put Bert in. Good Morning Australia on Channel Ten would counted as 'pathetic light entertainment filler' too, but, somehow, for me it worked.

There was something really special about the often no-name guests, the dozy pace, the cozy atmosphere, and Bert's self-deprecating, slightly subversive style: his knowing looks to camera; his talking to Tonia Toddman in filthy double-entendres; his subtly mocking the guest psychic; his strange interactions with Belvedere, the boy-faced crew member. With its three hours of relaxed crappiness and the frequent, disjointed throws to infomercial interviews, Good Morning Australia was a show which virtually insisted that you only half pay attention, soaking up Bert's charisma as you do other things. Perfect morning television.

The shows Channel 9 stuck Bert in were exactly the wrong types of show for him. He's still on contract with 9; here's hoping they find something better for him. From the News.com story:

One of his former colleagues at Ten said many at the network were saddened at the disappointing response to his new programs on Nine.

"You have to understand, a lot of people loved Bert here," the source said.

"He was with us for a long time, but here he was a star because, with our youth line-up, he was kind of an oddity.

"Over at Nine, where their viewers and stars are a lot older, he was just another guy who had been around forever, so he couldn't really make a big impact.

"There was this whole cult thing that started to build about how 'Bert was cool' when he was a big name at Ten.

"Nine obviously hoped to cash in on it, but, once again, they didn't seem to get it."

Norman MacCaig: "Summer Farm"

2007-08-11T22:41:00.000+10:00

There's not much as perfect as Norman MacCaig's "Summer Farm", which my dad showed me years ago, and which still amuses, surprises, buzzes, and pulses.

SUMMER FARM

Straws like tame lightnings lie about the grass
And hang zigzag on hedges. Green as glass
The water in the horse-trough shines.
Nine ducks go wobbling by in two straight lines.

A hen stares at nothing with one eye,
Then picks it up. Out of an empty sky
A swallow falls and, flickering through
The barn, dives up again into the dizzy blue.

I lie, not thinking, in the cool, soft grass,
Afraid of where a thought might take me -
This grasshopper with plated face
Unfolds his legs and finds himself in space.

Self under self, a pile of selves I stand
Threaded on time, and with metaphysic hand
Lift the farm like a lid and see
Farm within farm, and in the centre, me.

"Ying Tong", a play about the "Goon Show", coming to Brisbane

2007-08-11T01:08:00.000+10:00

Ying Tong: A Walk With The Goons starts in Brisbane in a couple of weeks. A loving tribute can be fantastic or the absolute worst - worse than a normal bad play, because it also drags something good down with it. Anyway, I plan to see it: Link.

Herman Hesse: Joseph Knecht on cheerful serenity

2007-08-10T23:40:00.000+10:00

Here's a nice passage from The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse. The book is fairly dense reading -- I've been reading it for yonks now! -- but it's a wonderful, mind-boggling, and unique experience. This is from Richard and Clara Winston's translation.

A bit of background: The Castalians are an order of scholars who live a kind of monastic life, sealed off from the outside world, and studying aesthetic things like music, poetry, and logic. Joseph is the head scholar of the Glass Bead Game, the most purely aesthetic academic pursuit of all. He's about to quit and go live in the outside world; but here he's telling his friend, who is from the outside world, why he thinks Castalian life is more than just lazy escapism.

I would like to say something more to you about cheerful serenity, the serenity of the stars and of the mind, and about our Castalian kind of serenity also. You are averse to serenity, presumably because you have had to walk the ways of sadness, and now all brightness and good cheer, especially our Castalian kind, strikes you as shallow and childish, and cowardly to boot, a flight from the terrors and abysses of reality into a clear, well-ordered world of mere forms and formulas, mere abstractions and refinements. But, my dear devotee of sadness, even though this may well be a flight, though there may be no lack of cowardly, timorous Castalians playing with mere formulas, even if the majority among us were in fact of this sort - all this would not lessen the value and splendour of genuine serenity, the serenity of the sky and the mind. Granted there are those among us who are too easily satisfied, who enjoy a sham serenity; but in contrast to them we also have men and generations of men whose serenity is not playful shallowness, but earnest depth.
...
Such cheerfulness is neither frivolity nor complacency; it is supreme insight and love, affirmation of all reality, alertness on the brink of all depths and abysses; it is a virtue of saints and of knights; it is indestructible and only increases with age and nearness to death. It is the secret of beauty and the real substance of all art. The poet who praises the splendours and terrors of life in the dance-measures of his verse, the musician who sounds them in a pure, eternal present - these are bringers of light, increasers of joy and brightness on earth, even if they lead us first through tears and stress. perhaps the poet whose verses gladden us was a sad solitary, and the musician a melancholic dreamer; but even so their work shares in the cheerful serenity of the gods and the stars. What they give us is no longer their darkness, their suffering or fears, but a drop of pure light, eternal cheerfulness.

Even though whole peoples and languages have attempted to fathom the depths of the universe in myths, cosmogonies, and religions, their supreme, their ultimate attainment has been this cheerfulness. You recall the ancient Hindus ... A people of suffering, of brooding, of penance and asceticism; but the great ultimate achievements of their thought were bright and cheerful; the smiles of the ascetics and the Buddhas are cheerful; the figures in their profound, enigmatic mythologies are cheerful. The world these myths represent begins divinely, blissfully, radiantly, with a springtime loveliness: the golden age. Then it sickens and degenerates more and more; it grows coarse and subsides into misery; and at the end of four ages, each lower than the others, it is ripe for annihilation. Therefore it is trampled underfoot by a laughing, dancing Siva - but it does not end with that. It begins anew with the smile of dreaming Vishnu whose hands playfully fashion a young, new, beautiful, shining world.

It is wonderful - how these Indians, with an insight and capacity for suffering scarcely equaled by any other people, looked with horror and shame upon the cruel game of world history, the eternally revolving wheel of avidity and suffering; they saw and understood the fragility of created being, the avidity and diabolism of man, and at the same time his deep yearning for purity and harmony; and they devised these glorious parables for the beauty and tragedy of the creation: mighty Siva who dances the completed world into ruins, and smiling Vishnu who lies slumbering and playfully makes a new world arise out of his golden dreams of gods.

Various eggheads on the origins of language

2007-08-10T23:13:00.000+10:00

Link: Edmund Blair Bolles's blog summarises the answers a bunch of scholars gave to the question:

If we shipwrecked a boatload of babies on the Galapagos Islands—assuming they had all the food, water, and shelter they needed to survive—would they produce language in any form when they grew up? And if it did, how many individuals would you need for it to take off, what form might it take, and how would it change over the generations?

The question, and the answers, come from a new book about the origins of language. There's nothing approaching a consensus amongst the answers. It's interesting stuff, and Bolles's comments are excellent as well. Highly recommended reading.

Via Cognitive Daily.

The Onion: Activision Reports Sluggish Sales For 'Sousaphone Hero'

2007-08-01T22:20:00.000+10:00

This Onion article made me laugh out loud repeatedly. Link. Excerpt:

"And if you like multiplayer gaming, you're in luck," Hendleman continued. "In Sousaphone Hero's cooperative marching-band mode, as many as 135 of your friends can play simultaneously."

Hendleman also emphasized the "fun" rewards players receive as they become more proficient. If they hit enough correct notes in a row, the on-screen crowd yells "huzzah" and "bully," and the sousaphone controller's spit valve will "drain." Flubbing notes, however, makes the controller "fill" with spit, preventing further play and causing the crowd to throw rotten eggs at the hapless on-screen sousaphonist. If characters earn enough bonus points in career mode, they can spend their Liberty-head nickels on a red, green, or blue "sock" for their sousaphone's bell, or an invigorating chunk of peanut brittle.

Response to Sousaphone Hero on video-gaming message boards has been tepid at best.

"That controller is like 100 pounds even though its [sic] only plastic," wrote mastagamer457, a moderator on one Sousaphone Hero message thread. "I think I screwed up my shoulder pretty bad."

"I played the career mode for three hours and kept feeling like I was playing the same annoying circus tune over and over," kiLLlah_steVe of Columbus, OH wrote. "On one song, you're forced to play the same two notes back and forth for 96 measures."

Others have complained that the third valve is used only at the expert level, that even proficient players only score a maximum of 60 points per song, and that the "oompah" meter stays the same shade of gray even if every note is hit. Some also reported that, if not cleaned regularly, the plastic mouthpiece gets crusty.

Professional sousaphone player Eric Winkler of New Orleans called the game "laughably amateurish" and "nothing like" the actual sousaphone-playing experience. "The fingering's completely different, for starters," he said.

Noel Pearson: White guilt, victimhood and the quest for a radical centre

2007-07-18T00:04:00.000+10:00

I missed this at the time, but Noel Pearson's talk on Big Ideas from a few weeks ago was brilliant; probably the fairest and least despair-inspiring analysis of Indigenous issues I've heard: Link. I recommend it strongly.

Jo Chandler in Mutitjulu

2007-06-30T10:09:00.000+10:00

The Age's feature this morning about the intervention in Mutitjulu is well worth reading: link.

Interesting Times by George Packer

2007-06-29T23:18:00.000+10:00

The excellent journalist George Packer (author of the excellent book about the Iraq war, The Assassin's Gate) has a blog: Link. There's lots to see there.

David Byrne on bicycle commuting

2007-06-26T22:50:00.000+10:00

I enjoyed this David Byrne blog post: link. Excerpt:

I have been riding a bicycle in New York City for almost 30 years! For transport, not for sport. At first there were only a few of us. Loners, losers, maniacs and nerds. Some of the members of Talking Heads used to make fun of me and say I was going to turn into Pee Wee Herman — and they weren’t talking about his extensive porno collection. But we knew some pleasures of which other New Yorkers seemed completely ignorant. Pleasures available to all. An exhilarating feeling as the air rushes past and we dodge taxis and New York pedestrians, who still insist on playing in the traffic. A feeling of flying through and around the inevitably stalled traffic. One has to stay alert — if your attention wavers, you’re done for. Who needs coffee? Or a morning at the gym? A ride across town gets the adrenalin going as one heads to work or to the studio in the morning. By the time one arrives for a meeting one is fully awake — blood pumping, on alert — having often just had 3 near-death experiences. In the hot New York summers, yes, one can tend to “glisten” when one arrives at an appointment, which is not always appreciated, so I had a shower installed in my office. But, if one pedals at a relaxed pace and stays away from the snarled traffic as much as possible (cars and trucks raise the surrounding temperature) one can arrive more or less dry, but with a healthy glow.

A note on the Indigenous intervention

2007-06-26T21:49:00.000+10:00

I wrote about the government's Northern Territory intervention the other day with an optimism that I didn't know I was capable of. Days have passed, and so has my initial state of shock that a government was actually doing something about the crisis up North. It's stopped feeling like news again, and started feeling like every other political hot topic -- a debate where everyone being quoted on the news seems to be missing the point.

Some parts of the strategy are heavy-handed and stupid. Why on Earth would they send the army in? Although much of the work they do overseas is humanitarian, the symbolism is bad; probably bad enough to taint and doom the entire strategy. And there's a nastiness to the idea of instigating compulsory medical checks for kids, as if to say kids aren't getting medical help because of parental laziness (when lack of access is surely at least as big a cause).

But there's bull on the other side too. The criticism of the strategy as too paternalistic seems ridiculous to me. What could be more paternalistic than the current system?

The status quo is dozens of towns with no real economy, crippled by poor health, social problems, crime, massive unemployment, often unrepresentative local governments that are corrupt or inept or both. And they're held perpetually, unnaturally in this state by a government that simply sends in cash, a few services, and cops.

I find it hard to disagree with some of Howard's comments: the system has failed, there's been too much talk, there's an emergency, there's a need to act. But, just like he did with education, he makes valid criticisms -- and then uses that as license to act like a dick and push other agendas.

I hope that some good may come of it.

The majority of the news media, of course, is unable and unwilling to give the story the analysis it needs. This morning on NewsRadio, Marius Benson was interviewing political correspondent Michael Brissenden, who had a really good go at breaking the issue down. Less than a minute into Brissenden's analysis, Benson steered the conversation back to useless punditry with a series of inane questions (I paraphrase to the best of my memory): "Okay, enough about whether this is the best way to deal with the emergency, and whether indeed it is an emergency -- is Howard doing this to play to the electorate? Isn't this a risky political move? Can they win votes with Indigenous issues?"

The most irrelevant questions of all. They might as well have been talking about TomKat.

The Onion Radio News: Awkward Tension Mistaken For Sexual Tension

2007-06-25T07:55:00.000+10:00

Link.

Why a carbon tax is better than carbon trading

2007-06-24T23:52:00.000+10:00

Two ways of reducing carbon emissions are carbon taxes (where companies are charged a certain amount per unit of carbon emitted) and capping-and-trading carbon (where the government decides how much carbon emission would be acceptable, and then gives out permits for emitting carbon, and allows companies to trade these credits). The Economist has a good article arguing that taxes are the better way to go. That says a lot, coming from an economist. I'd thought that carbon trading sounded neat, but this article convinced me otherwise. Link.

Three key points that made me change my mind:

1. Carbon trading makes the cost of carbon emissions volatile, which makes the entire market more volatile. If companies are trading a limited number of carbon credits, the price of carbon emissions will fluctuate, like anything traded on a market. And when the price of carbon emissions goes up and down, so will the price of almost everything - from food to manufactured goods to construction. As well as being a pain, that volatility could be very bad for the economy.

2. Carbon taxes encourage innovation more than carbon trading. If the cost of emitting carbon can fluctuate, it is very hard for companies to know whether reducing their emissions will be worth the cost of making the change. What's worse, a major innovation that reduces carbon emissions could drive the price of a carbon credit down. By contrast, if every company has to pay a dollar per unit of carbon emitted, it means that companies will know exactly how much money they will save by reducing their carbon emissions. "It'll cost a million bucks to reduce our emissions by two million bucks worth - so we know it's worth it".

3. Carbon taxes cost companies more; carbon trading costs everyone more. With a carbon tax, the government gets more revenue. That means they can either reduce other taxes, or pass more money on to the people most hurt by global warming and the higher cost of carbon pollution - for example, low people who are hit by higher prices, or farmers ruined by climate change. In a carbon trading system, the higher cost of pollution is still passed on to the consumer - but all the money is going from company to company.

Daniel Everett's challenge to Universal Grammar

2007-06-24T23:19:00.000+10:00

I recommend this article at Edge to anyone interested in linguistics or psychology: link.

Here's my mangling and oversimplification of it: Noam Chomsky's 'Universal Grammar' theory of language says that the differences between different language are superficial; they all follow the same rules, and the differences in syntax and grammar are just the effect of the same rules operating on different, culturally transmitted parameters. Though these parameters are culturally transmitted, they're not a reflection of cultural values; the differences in syntax between languages are arbitrary.

One of the universal features that are supposed to be found in all languages is recursion: the ability to change "he said 'hello'" to "he said she said he said 'hello'".

Daniel Everett is a linguistics field researcher who says the language of the Amazonian Pirahãs tribe doesn't have recursion -- and that the lack of recursion is a reflection of the Pirahãs' cultural values. He also says that 'Universal Grammar' theory has not been tested properly, and even that many of its claims are untestable. If Everett turned out to be right, it would challenge the way linguistics has been studied for decades; it would also have implications for the relationship between environment and thought. Not surprisingly, his research is very controversial.

In the article I've linked to, Everett explains his research, tells his interesting personal story, and describes the culture of the Pirahãs, who sound like an amazing bunch. It's followed by rebuttals by other linguists, including Stephen Pinker. I'm a Pinker fan, but I don't think he properly addresses what Everett says here. I'd be interested to know what other folks think.

(Btw, it's been years since I learnt about this stuff - please let me know if my summary muddled it up too much!)

Via Kottke.

Brisbane News you can use

2007-06-24T21:41:00.000+10:00

The cover of the current Brisbane News has the inane headline to end all inane headlines:

PAWS FOR EFFECT: Pampered pets have never had it so good. With more bling than a pre-prison Paris Hilton, life is just purrfect.

They started with a tired cliche of a non-story, and then crammed the word 'bling', a reference to Paris Hilton, and two cat puns into a single headline! ~~Piss paw.~~

This American Life (the TV show) online

2007-06-23T12:20:00.000+10:00

Link.

Basketball with Prince and the Revolution

2007-06-23T01:30:00.000+10:00

This sketch from Dave Chapelle's Show is genius.

Something/Anything?

2007-06-22T11:09:00.000+10:00

I've been obsessed lately with Todd Rundgren's 1972 album Something/Anything?. Rundgren produced and played all the instruments on almost every track, and it has the same kind of homely cosiness of an early Paul McCartney album. It's sprawling (25 tracks) and covers almost every genre of lovable pop, rock, and soul. In terms of exuberance, variety, and sheer quality of songwriting, it's in league with the Beatles' Revolver.

I'd recommend it to any fans of The Beatles, XTC, Shuggie Otis, Supertramp, Steely Dan, Dexy's Midnight Runners, or Split Enz. If you'd like a taste, and you have iTunes, I'd recommend the following tracks, all of them masterpieces:

Couldn't I Just Tell You?
Hello, It's Me
It Takes Two To Tango
Song Of The Viking
I Saw The Light
The Night The Carousel Burnt Down
Saving Grace

More info at Allmusic: link.

Intervention in Indigenous communities

2007-06-22T00:49:00.000+10:00

The federal government -- any government -- is finally treating the situation in third-world northern Australia as what it is: an emergency. Link. The government plans to:

take over about 60 Indigenous communities through five-year leases
ban alcohol sales widely for six months
restrict half of welfare payments to food and essentials
put in compulsory medical assessments for all NT Indigenous children under 16
link welfare payments to school attendance
increase police numbers

Sure, it seems pretty disingenuous that the government is justifying the moves in terms of fighting child sexual abuse (the measures also include, strangely, a ban on x-rated pornography). But on the other hand, Howard knows the Australian public, and knows that it's the best -- maybe the only -- way to sell this strategy. If the content of the nightly news is any guide, the public is obsessed with child sex and bored by the thought of whole parts of the country descending into medical disaster and social chaos.

Jacques de Vaucanson's digesting duck and 'le Bec de la Mort'

2007-06-20T18:34:00.000+10:00

Jacques de Vaucanson was an 18th century French designer of automata (machines that run themselves). He made a bunch of beautiful, bizarre, intricate machines that looked like people and played musical instruments. He also designed the precurser to the Jacquard loom, which was an important ancestor of the modern computer (at least, that's what was argued very convincingly in this book). And, his crowning achievement: the paddling, stretching, eating duck pictured above.

It was made by a watchmaker, and it was mindbogglingly intricate: every bump and curve and every motion was modelled exhaustively on a real duck: there were hundreds of moving parts, including 400 moving parts in each wing. Its feathers were made of gilded copper, and parted so that you could see through the glass beneath and into the duck's innards (link).

The crowning glory was its digestive system. You could feed it pieces of corn and grain, which it would swallow in the cute way ducks do, then hesitate for a bit, and then back one out. It had a little rubber digestive canal that could supposedly process the food by dissolving it with chemicals. It couldn't really do that, though. From the Critical Inquiry journal (link):

Vaucanson said these processes were "copied from Nature," the food digested "as in real Animals, by Dissolution. . . . But this," he added, "I shall...shew...[on] another Occasion"

By claiming that his Duck digested by dissolution, Vaucanson entered a debate among physiologists over whether digestion was a chemical or a mechanical process.

Unfortunately his postponement of further explanations to "another occasion" aroused suspicions. Already in 1755 a critic accused the Duck of being "nothing more than a coffee-grinder".

Then in 1783, a close observer of the Duck's swallowing mechanism uncovered an even greater deceit: the food did not continue down the neck and into the stomach but rather stayed at the base of the mouth tube.

Reasoning that digesting the food by dissolution would take longer than the brief pause the Duck took between swallowing and expulsion, this observer concluded that the grain input and excrement output were entirely unrelated and that the tail end of the Duck must be loaded before each act with fake excrement.

Yes, Vaucanson was trying to pull the ol' pack-the-rubber-rectum-with-fake-excrement trick.

But all this didn't really detract from the general wonderfulness of the duck. One of the things that blows my mind is that this was all done without electricity and without fuel; the whole thing was powered by weights. Imagine what could be done without electricity or fuel today, if you were to add two-and-a-half centuries of knowledge...

As a sad little postscript, Goethe saw the duck and some of Vaucanson's other creations in a private collection decades after Vaucanson died, and wrote in his diary: "They were in the most deplorable condition. The duck was like a skeleton and had digestive problems." (link)

I feel really sad for that mechanical duck. The reach of human empathy can be astonishing.

The digesting duck featured in a chapter I read today of Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon. It's one of the best books I've ever read. I'm putting an excerpt from it here.

Just to set the scene: It's some time in the 1760's. A French chef is telling the story of his downfall from great Parisien chef to exile. At this point in the story, he has been approached by a detective. The detective explains that Vaucanson was experimenting with adding a sex drive to the digesting duck. And it seems that, in the detective's words, "the final superaddition of erotick Machinary may have somehow nudg'd the Duck across some Threshold of self-Intricacy, setting off this Explosion of Change, from Inertia toward Independence, and Power."

And now the mechanical duck has escaped from Vaucanson's workshop, and there are fears the duck will run amuck. The detective is trying to capture the duck. The detective goes on [for maximum effect, read aloud with a silly French accent]:

"'Twas his own Hubris,— the old mad Philosopher story, we all know, meddl'd where he shouldn't have, till laws of the Unforeseen engag'd,— now the Duck is a Fugitive, flying where it wishes,— often indeed visiting the Academy of Sciences, where they have learn'd that the greater its speed, the less visible it grows, until at around a Thousand Toises per Minute, it vanishes entirely,— but one of the many newly-acquir'd Powers, bringing added Urgency to finding it as quickly as possible, before this 'Morphoses carries it beyond out Control. Which is precisely where you may do us a Service, Sir."

"But my gifts . . . scarcely lie in this direction."

"Recollect, cher Maître, as I do with senses even today a-tremble, your Canard au Pamplemousse Flambé. It is unique in Civilization. Not to mention the sublime Canard avec Aubergines en Casserole... mmhhnnhh! I embrace them! The immortal Fantaisie des Canettes..."— and much more, including Dishes I'd all but forgotten. I should have stood unmov'd, but I'd gone a-blush. "Oh, those old Canards," I murmur'd.

"You see, when one looks in the files of the Ministries, and of other Detectives, for that matter, invariably, under the Heading, 'Duck,' the two Humans whose Names most often appear, are Vaucanson and yourself. Again and again. Can there be a Connection?— the Atomaton apparently believes so, having somehow, quite recently, become aware of you. Since then, its Resentment on behalf of all Ducks,— and not only those you personally may have cook'd,— has grown alarmingly. Without doubt, it is forming a Plan, whose details you may not wish to know."

"But this is dangerous! What if its Brain be affected by now? And if it be blaming me for Wrongs I never knew I was committing?"

"Ah! it might seek you out, mightn't it,— and, in the Monomania of its Assault, grow careless enough to allow my Agents at last to apprehend it. That would be the Plan, anyhow. Agreed, you mus consider how best to defend yourself,— wear clothing it cannot bite through, leather, or what's even more secure, chain-mail,— its Beak being of the finest Swedish Steel, did I mention that, yes quite able, when the Duck, in its homicidal Frenzy, it flying at high speed, to penetrate all known Fortification, solid walls being as paper to this Juggernaut.... One may cower within, but one cannot avoid,— le Bec de la Mort, the...'Beak of Death.' "

"Wait, wait," trying not to upset him further, "reprising this,— you wish me to act as a sort of ... Decoy? to attract the personal Vengeance of a powerfus and murderous Automaton...Bon...For this, I might require a small fee, in advance?"

"Of course. Here is your small Fee,— you see this Pistol? I will not fire it into your head, eh?"

"Only a thought.—"

Sad, longing exam working sheet

2007-06-20T18:25:00.000+10:00

Maths lecturer and all-round nut Mary posted this great 'found document' on her blog: Link. I think that student summed it up for everyone.

Christopher Hitchens on "the systematic, massified cretinization of the major media"

2007-06-13T01:27:00.000+10:00

In the years-long, unwelcome, uninterrupted bog of Paris Hilton press coverage, this is the first thing I've read that was worth reading: Link.

Amazing new feature in Google Maps

2007-05-30T23:09:00.000+10:00

Click anywhere on a street in a major US city, and a photograph pops up of a view from the middle of the road where you clicked. You can click and drag the photo to look around 360 degrees. Unbelievable.

Here's St Mark's Place in Brooklyn: Link.

Industrial design for the very poor

2007-05-30T22:26:00.000+10:00

The New York Times has a story about a wonderful exhibition of inventions for the third-world. The products are so simple and so useful; it's really inspiring.

Link to story, video.

Garrett Keizer on global warming

2007-05-30T21:44:00.000+10:00

I'll be back to regular updates soon. The current Harpers has an article by Garrett Keizer about global warming which has all the rhetorical power and humour of a George Bernard Shaw essay - and with the same kind of likeable naivety. Excerpt:

It is not enough to acknowledge that global warming exists; we also need to ask what global warming means. Surely one thing it means is that a culture that has as its highest aim the avoidance of anything remotely resembling physical work must change its life. If you want an inconvenient truth; there it is: that the very notion of convenience upon which our civilization rests is a lie that is killing us. And if you want to see how quickly green can turn yellow; make mention of that abundant; renewable fuel source whose chief emission is human sweat.

But that is only half a meaning; less than half. We're told that "the science is all in on global warming" and that it's just about unanimous. I believe it. We owe a debt to Al Gore that most people now believe it. But the science has also been in, and in for a while, and is every bit as unanimous in concluding that we are members of a single species, descendants of common ancestors -- family in every conceivable sense of the word. How can we imagine that we will address one overwhelming consensus of scientific opinion without having acted fully on the other? The question is not sentimental. If one can be forgiven for applying base political considerations to such a sublimely moral issue: you do not repair the climate of an entire planet without staggering sacrifices, and people will not elect to make staggering sacrifices unless the burden is shared with something like parity.

To put that as succinctly as possible, the days of paradise for a few are drawing to a close. The game of finding someone else in some convenient misery to fight our wars, pull our rickshaws, and serve as the offset for our every filthy indulgence is just about up. It is either Earth for all of us or hell for most of us. Those are the terms, those have always been the terms, and any approach to climate change that begins on those terms can count me as a loyal partisan. Otherwise, don't expect me to get overly excited as to which side of a golf-course heart attack shows the affluent, the educated, the suburban, and the wired a world much hotter than the one they were banking on.

Too far? Probably. But it's refreshing to hear some outright class hostility.

Carl Sagan's 'Cosmos' online

2007-05-25T21:08:00.001+10:00

I've been enjoying the amazing late-70's series Cosmos, which is available online here. I recommend it. More information about there series here.

The Creation museum

2007-05-25T20:59:00.000+10:00

The New York Times has an article about a new natural history museum in Kentucky for creationists. It sounds like a must-see destination: acres of meticulous reconstructions of what you get when you start with the premise of Genesis being the literal truth -- and then rationally and logically slot all new empirical evidence into that model. So there's kids with dinosaurs, and fossils from the Flood. Link. Excerpt:

It is a measure of the museum’s daring that dinosaurs and fossils — once considered major challenges to belief in the Bible’s creation story — are here so central, appearing not as tests of faith, as one religious authority once surmised, but as creatures no different from the giraffes and cats that still walk the earth. Fossils, the museum teaches, are no older than Noah’s flood; in fact dinosaurs were on the ark.
So dinosaur skeletons and brightly colored mineral crystals and images of the Grand Canyon are here, as are life-size dioramas showing paleontologists digging in mock earth, Moses and Paul teaching their doctrines, Martin Luther chastising the church to return to Scripture, Adam and Eve guiltily standing near skinned animals, covering their nakedness, and a supposedly full-size reproduction of a section of Noah’s ark.
There are 52 videos in the museum, one showing how the transformations wrought by the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980 reveal how plausible it is that the waters of Noah’s flood could have carved out the Grand Canyon within days. There is a special-effects theater complete with vibrating seats meant to evoke the flood, and a planetarium paying tribute to God’s glory while exploring the nature of galaxies.

And on an odder note:

Start accepting evolution or an ancient Earth, and the result is like the giant wrecking ball, labeled “Millions of Years,” that is shown smashing the ground at the foundation of a church, the cracks reaching across the gallery to a model of a home in which videos demonstrate the imminence of moral dissolution. A teenager is shown sitting at a computer; he is, we are told, looking at pornography.

The Onion: Blues Singer's Woman Permitted To Tell Her Side

2007-05-11T21:50:00.000+10:00

Link.

'Words' video

2007-05-11T00:40:00.000+10:00

It's the incredible, the incomparable, the inimitable, the ... the Kate Miller-Heidke, with the first single from her first album available at last: Link. It's great to see the new single highlighting the looney side of Kate's persona, something that's prominent onstage but hasn't been represented as much in her recorded stuff. Can't wait for the album.

Incidentally, let it be known that The Saints are re-forming and playing in Brisbane this July! The Saints! And Kate will be playing there too. Tickets go on sale May 19. Link.

Yahya Jammeh's miracle cure

2007-05-04T23:29:00.000+10:00

The President of the Gambia, Yahya Jammeh, claims to have discovered a cure for AIDS. It's a secret mixture of seven herbs. The Economist reports that Gambian television has been repeatedly playing footage of the president applying the herbal mixture to patients' heads while reciting verses from the Koran.

ScienceDaily reports that Jammeh's only giving treatment to people if they give up their conventional antiretroviral treatment.

He also says he's found cures for asthma and diabetes. The New York Times website has an article with a picture of the treatment taking place: Link.

The Gambian Daily Observer is one of the papers indexed on Google News. When I was finding out about this story, I clicked through to their coverage of the story, and became very confused. They provide a somewhat different angle from the other sources. It's the last one shown (click for a bigger image):

The Gambian Daily Observer's story:

Another plus for Jammeh on HIV, Asthma cure
Written by Alhagie Jobe

President Yahya Jammeh, the Gambian leader continues to recieve more felicitations at State House in Banjul for the timely cure of HIV/AIDS, Asthma and Diabetes cure.

In a letter to the Gambian leader, Alhagie Abdou FM Badjie, Governor of Western Region said “I am pleased to write and felicitate you on behalf of the people of the Western Region on the timely cure of HIV/AIDS, asthma and diabetes.
Sir, these diseases have posed a big threat to mankind. Your resolve to help humanity has necessitated to the discovery of the cure to these pandemic, HIV/AIDS, asthma and diabetes amongst others. It is with deep sense of pride that the people of Western Region associate themselves to you for the breakthrough in the cure of these pandemic diseases.

Sir, there is no iota of doubt that you have the herbal formula to cure these diseases and may “Allah subhana watallah” continue to crown this with great protection and success.

Please Sir, permit me to congratulate you and assure you of the benevolent prayers of the entire people of Western Region and myself for God’s richest love, guidance and long life. May these herbal formula be crown with success forever in the favour of humanity. Please accept your Excellency the assurance of my highest consideration and esteem”.

Additonally, Malaim Biyai, President of the Association D’aide Au People Gambienne, APRC Youth Wing, Paris Branch in France congratulated President Jammeh on the celebration of the Gambia’s 42nd Independence anniversary.

In a letter to President Jammeh, Mr Biyai said “On behalf of the executive and members of our above named association in Paris we have the greatest honour to congratulate you Sir, and The government and people of The Gambia on the great occasion of The Gambia’s 42 Independence anniversary.
The Gambia is proud to have a wide and great leader like your Excellency Sir while it celebrate its 42nd anniversary of independence. So much has been achieved especially during the last decade when you became our President.

We extend great thanks to you Sir and pray that Almighty Allah continue to bless you and give you another mandate while The Gambia celebrates more anniversary which means more development for The Gambia”.

Hopefully the Gambian Daily Observer is as much of a joke amongst the Gambian public as Pravda was in the USSR. I think people tend to be less susceptible to propaganda than they're given credit for.

On a sort of related matter, there are new developments in the horrific story of the foreign medics facing death by firing squad on bogus accusations of spreading AIDS in Libya. The five Bulgarian medics are now under trial for slander for claiming they were pressured into their confessions! And their Bulgarian lawyers have been refused visas to get into Libya! Too awful for words.

The daft and inspiring urge to invent

2007-05-01T23:03:00.000+10:00

This brilliant, surreal documentary from the 1970's, Gizmo, is by turns hilarious and hypnotic, and kind of makes me feel upbeat about the human race: Link. I think you'll really enjoy it.

Via Boing-Boing.

The Onion kills off Herbert Kornfield

2007-05-01T20:33:00.000+10:00

In a strange crossover between their fake-news and fake-editorial content, The Onion has killed off their gangsta-office worker, Herbert Kornfield: Link.

In Herbert's last column he hinted at his inevitable death - just like Biggie Smalls did: Link.

Hundreds of thousands march for secularism in Turkey

2007-04-30T23:34:00.000+10:00

Something that would be inconceivable in most parts of the world: Link.

For more evidence that the looneys in the Islamic world don't speak for everyone, have a look at this amazing article from the Atlantic about being gay in Saudi Arabia: Link. It gives a rare peek into the double life that everyone has to live in places like Saudi Arabia; scary and conservative in public, normal in private.

Firefox extension for YouTube

2007-04-29T12:43:00.000+10:00

If you spend a lot of time on YouTube, this will improve things greatly for you.

1. Install Greasemonkey, which is an extension that lets you get little scripts that modify individual webpages.

2. Install the YouTube Googler script. Now instead of YouTube videos playing in that little screen within the page, they take up most of the screen, like in Google Video. Luxury.

These screenshots are from the YouTube Googler page. Before:
After:

Akiyoshi's illusion page

2007-04-27T20:12:00.000+10:00

Akiyoshi's optical illusions are mesmerising. Link. Here are two examples (click them for bigger, more nauseating versions):
My head hurts. I think Akiyoshi just blew my mind.

The Onion News Network

2007-04-27T08:12:00.000+10:00

The Onion has been running a video news program for a few weeks now: Link. I think it's funny - though, given The Onion's writing style, the real funniness doesn't always hit you until after you've watched it.

Condoleezza Rice To Voyage East

Meanwhile, Onion Radio News is still going, and still funny:

Bomb-Sniffing Dog Gets 6-Cent Treat For Saving Los Angeles

Area Eccentric Leaves Behind Estate Worth 20 Million Golf Balls

Spelling-Bee Winner Fails To Spell Way Out Of Schoolyard Beating

My current top 13

2007-04-26T22:50:00.000+10:00

1. "The Queen of Eyes" by The Soft Boys from Underwater Moonlight
The Soft Boys' Underwater Moonlight is shaping up to be my favourite album of the year so far. It's one of those rare albums where a few songs leap out at you on first listen, and then as you keep listening to it you gradually grow to love other songs, then other songs in turn, until almost every song on the album has been your favourite at some point, and the song that finally ends up being your favourite is one you didn't notice at all the first time you heard it. "The Queen of Eyes" is that song. Musically, it's somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Byrds at their best, the La's at their best, and the Stone Roses at their best. And the lyrics, which are a blend of the bittersweet and the absurd, remind me of the Beatles. And it clocks in at the ideal length of two minutes. Bliss.

Have I built it up enough?

2. "Body and Soul" by William Onyeabor from Booniay!!: A Compilation Of West African Funk
Who could have guessed that one of the dancingest, dirtiest psychedelic funksoul jams of the 70's would come from Nigeria? (In retrospect, it seems obvious.) This song is ludicrously funky, and strongly recommended if you're having a party anytime soon.

There seem to be only two songs by William Onyeabor in circulation (the other one, "You'd Better Change Your Mind", is on the compilation Love's A Real Thing), and they both seem to suggest that he was a unique, brilliant musician. I couldn't find anything out about him.

3. "Champs" by Wire from Pink Flag
Elemental.

4. "In My Arms Again" by Shoes from Present Tense
Gorgeous power-pop. The whole album's so solid, it's hard to pick a single track.

5. "Minsato Le, Mi Dayihome" by Orchestra Poly from World Psychedelic Classics, Vol. 3: Love's A Real Thing
Strange timing, funky drumming, fat bass, excitable raspy singer, and exotic-sounding guitar. Get it before it's sampled!

6 & 7. "Cacada" and "Calice" by Chico Buarque from Beleza Tropical Brazil Classics 1
I love his voice and and I love his disposition.

8. "So Quero Um Xodo" by Gilberto Gil from Beleza Tropical Brazil Classics 1
I never heard a Gilberto Gil song I didn't like.

9. "The Helicopter Spies" by Swell Maps from Jane From Occupied Europe
Terrific din.

10. "Honeytrop" by the High Llamas from Can Cladders
Meticulous and jarring.

11. "No Cars Go" by Arcade Fire from Neon Bible
The new Arcade Fire album reminds me of Electric Light Orchestra: ecclecticism, excess, and eagerness to please.

12. "Chelsea Girl" by Simple Minds from Life In A Day
Laddish Roxy Music.

13. "I'm Crying" by The Animals from The Singles Plus
Swinging.

Goat story

2007-04-24T23:44:00.000+10:00

The BBC News website ran a story in February last year with the classic headline, "Sudan man forced to 'marry' goat". The Guardian reports that 14 months on, the goat story still frequently tops the list of most popular stories on the BBC website.

The Onion had a good story on a similar theme a couple of weeks ago: "'Most E-Mailed' List Tearing New York Times' Newsroom Apart". Extract:

Executive editor Bill Keller said he believes that the Most E-Mailed list is causing "troubling" changes in the Times' editorial focus, as reporters increasingly neglect less attractive assignments.

"I've always encouraged our journalists to follow their instincts," Keller said. "But now I'm considering a more hands-on approach, especially since I've received no fewer than four 800-word pieces on 'man dates' in the past week alone."

According to Times insiders, nearly two dozen staffers, including four Pulitzer Prize winners and Baghdad correspondent John Burns, have requested transfers to the Times' Home & Garden and Travel desks.

Nagourney, currently stuck covering Barack Obama's presidential campaign in Minnesota, said he's been trying to make his stories more e-mail-friendly. But so far, success has eluded him.

"I thought my Elizabeth Edwards breast cancer article the other week had a great chance, as it was at the intersection of politics, health, death, and family—and had the word 'breast' in the headline—but it didn't even make the top 10," Nagourney said. "Whatever."

As I write, the top stories on the websites of the esteemed Fairfax papers include:

Man cuts off penis in restaurant
Limit loo paper says singer
Woman's naked dip causes sensation in Italy
Bigger vocabulary helps describe a larger figure
Bollywood newlyweds go bananas

In short: Sex and poo move mouses. But really it's more of a measure of the punchiness of the headlines than whether people are actually interested by the stories. In the print edition, a lot of these are probably stories that you'd glance at for less than a second, ascertain that the loo paper headline refers to a joke Sheryl Crow made, and move onto something more interesting. Right? Or am I completely naive?

Dangerous and exploitative reporting on suicide

2007-04-23T23:30:00.000+10:00

Consider the way the media has handled the apparent double-suicide in Melbourne. Now consider this report from the American Association of Suicidology says:

Research finds an increase in suicide by readers or viewers when: ...
A particular [suicide] death is reported at length or in many stories
The story of an individual death by suicide is placed on the front page or at the beginning of a broadcast
The headlines about specific suicide deaths are dramatic

It goes on:

Exposure to suicide method through media reports can encourage vulnerable individuals to imitate it. Clinicians believe the danger is even greater if there is a detailed description of the method. Research indicates that detailed descriptions or pictures of the location or site of a suicide encourage imitation.

Presenting suicide as the inexplicable act of an otherwise healthy or high-achieving person may encourage identification with the victim.

The same report says that in the mid-80's, it was common for the Viennese media to extensively and dramatically report on the suicides of individuals who threw themselves on the train tracks. Then:

In 1987, a campaign alerted reporters to the possible negative effects of such reporting, and suggested alternate strategies for coverage. In the first six months after the campaign began, subway suicides and non-fatal attempts dropped by more than eighty percent.

The dangers of dramatic coverage of suicides is common knowledge, and anyone in the media is already aware of it. But the warnings above read like a checklist of things the Aussie media has done today. There are responsible ways of reporting suicides (see the recommendations in the report), and the press tend to be fairly sensitive - until when they get into a feeding frenzy.

And all this is not to mention the further unnecessary trauma that kind of coverage causes the families and friends of the ones who've died.

Sorry to get all preachy, but I really think it's rotten.

Some pictures from "My name's not important"

2007-04-23T20:57:00.000+10:00

O_____, who often comments on Brlogsbane, has his own blog titled My name's not important. It's mainly populated with dozens of original photos of great artworks around Europe. Here are a few (these are thumbnails; click for bigger ones):

Paul Cezanne, Uncle Dominique The Lawyer [1866]

Antoon Kruysen, Degel [1917]

Pierre Bonnard, In a Boat [~1907]

Detail of Vincent Van Gogh, The Harvesters [1888]

Unknown artist, Winged Victory of Samothrace [2nd or 3rd century BCE]

How embarrassing!

2007-04-23T20:33:00.000+10:00

From Harper's Index:

Percentage of Pakistanis and Indonesians who say that attacks on civilians are sometimes justified to defend Islam: 8
Percentage of Americans who say that attacks on civilians are sometimes justified: 24

Fast food: avertising photos and real photos

2007-04-20T11:06:00.000+10:00

What a great idea: Link.

Via kottke.org.

That's entertainment

2007-04-19T14:37:00.000+10:00

And so the media gleefully enters its third day of morbid, sensational, and gratuitous coverage of the tragedy at Virginia, upsetting everyone, playing into the hands of the culprit, and making him a celebrity in the process.

With coverage ranging from the stupid to the unbelievably stupid, the automatic news-aggregator at Google News has wisely reclassified the story:

Thanks Lyn for pointing out the story in the Toowoomba Chronicle.

Flickr photoset of Brazilian graffiti

2007-04-17T07:16:00.000+10:00

Link. Some of this graffiti is real pretty; look at these ones:

Bruce Lee in 'Game of Death'

2007-04-17T00:04:00.000+10:00

Neatorama has an amazing post reprinted from Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader. It's about the bodgy way the film studio Golden Harvest finished making Game of Death, the movie Bruce Lee died halfway through filming. Extract:

How do you make a movie using a dead actor? Golden Harvest tackled the problem in a number of different ways:

Lee’s double was filmed in wide angle shots, from behind, or in the dark whenever possible.
Reaction shots of the real Bruce Lee, recycled from his earlier films, were spliced into the scenes with Lee’s double.
In one scene they literally cut out a still photograph of Bruce Lee’s head and pasted it on the screen over the double’s head.
In scenes where the double does show his face, he wears a large pair of dark sunglasses and sometimes even a fake moustache and beard. In other scenes he wears a motorcycle helmet with the darkened visor pulled down.
The plot was written to explain the character’s changed appearance: Early in the film a gangster tried to kill Billy Lo by shooting him in the face. Lo survives, but undergoes plastic surgery to repair the damage, and emerges from the hospital literally a new man.

Had Golden Harvest left it at that, Game of Death would hardly be worth anyone’s while. But they didn’t. When Billy Lo gets shot and is rushed to the hospital, he decides to fake his own death and even arranges his funeral, so that his assailants won’t know he’s still alive and coming after them. Golden Harvest added this element to the plot to give them an excuse to incorporate footage of Bruce Lee’s actual funeral, including close-up shots of the open casket as mourners file past. For a brief moment the camera even peeks inside the coffin, showing Lee’s embalmed face - probably the only time in history that a movie star’s cadaver appears in his own feature film.

As if all that isn't hard enough to believe, I also have to come to terms with the fact that I watched the whole movie and didn't even notice anything unusual!

Political commentary and reality

2007-04-15T14:49:00.000+10:00

Quote:

The real import of Kevin Rudd's Long Tan march from initial defiance to retreat and ultimately to public embarrassment is that it has opened up the so-far unassailable Opposition Leader to serious government attack on three fronts.

As a result of the "Sunlies'' fiasco, Rudd is now vulnerable on three counts: judgement, honesty and hypocrisy.

So says poor Glenn Milne in today's Telegraph.

Here's my prediction: As hilarious as the story is, it won't make a difference. The most dramatic effect it will have will be on the polls, wherein respondents don't take the question of who they'll vote for as seriously as they do in a real election.

What a strange, sorry state of affairs: The hacks paid as 'political analysts' think purely in terms of superficial games and four-day scandals, while the masses seem to be taking more notice of actual policies and their effect on reality. When will come the public backlash against the persistent discussion of politics in terms of what everything will mean for the other team's tactics? I suspect it's already happening, but the media heavies haven't responded yet.

Initial conditions and the popularity of artists

2007-04-15T14:31:00.000+10:00

The New York Times has an article about the "rich get richer" effect on the popularity of artists: Link. This is something that's been written about a lot (eg, see Paul Ormerod's Butterfly Economics), but this is an entertaining introduction. It seems to go a long way to explaining why XTC weren't huge, or why anyone has even heard of Animal Collective, let alone bought their records.

Extract:

The reason is that when people tend to like what other people like, differences in popularity are subject to what is called “cumulative advantage,” or the “rich get richer” effect. This means that if one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still. As a result, even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors — a phenomenon that is similar in some ways to the famous “butterfly effect” from chaos theory. Thus, if history were to be somehow rerun many times, seemingly identical universes with the same set of competitors and the same overall market tastes would quickly generate different winners: Madonna would have been popular in this world, but in some other version of history, she would be a nobody, and someone we have never heard of would be in her place.
Because it’s not possible in the real world to test theories about events that never happened, most of what we know about cumulative advantage has been worked out using mathematical models and computer simulations — an approach that is often criticized for glossing over the richness of real human behavior. Fortunately, the explosive growth of the Internet has made it possible to study human activity in a controlled manner for thousands or even millions of people at the same time. Recently, my collaborators, Matthew Salganik and Peter Dodds, and I conducted just such a Web-based experiment. In our study, published last year in Science, more than 14,000 participants registered at our Web site, Music Lab (www.musiclab.columbia.edu), and were asked to listen to, rate and, if they chose, download songs by bands they had never heard of. Some of the participants saw only the names of the songs and bands, while others also saw how many times the songs had been downloaded by previous participants. This second group — in what we called the “social influence” condition — was further split into eight parallel “worlds” such that participants could see the prior downloads of people only in their own world. We didn’t manipulate any of these rankings — all the artists in all the worlds started out identically, with zero downloads — but because the different worlds were kept separate, they subsequently evolved independently of one another.
This setup let us test the possibility of prediction in two very direct ways. First, if people know what they like regardless of what they think other people like, the most successful songs should draw about the same amount of the total market share in both the independent and social-influence conditions — that is, hits shouldn’t be any bigger just because the people downloading them know what other people downloaded. And second, the very same songs — the “best” ones — should become hits in all social-influence worlds.
What we found, however, was exactly the opposite. In all the social-influence worlds, the most popular songs were much more popular (and the least popular songs were less popular) than in the independent condition. At the same time, however, the particular songs that became hits were different in different worlds, just as cumulative-advantage theory would predict. Introducing social influence into human decision making, in other words, didn’t just make the hits bigger; it also made them more unpredictable.
So does a listener’s own independent reaction to a song count for anything? In fact, intrinsic “quality,” which we measured in terms of a song’s popularity in the independent condition, did help to explain success in the social-influence condition. When we added up downloads across all eight social-influence worlds, “good” songs had higher market share, on average, than “bad” ones. But the impact of a listener’s own reactions is easily overwhelmed by his or her reactions to others. The song “Lockdown,” by 52metro, for example, ranked 26th out of 48 in quality; yet it was the No. 1 song in one social-influence world, and 40th in another. Overall, a song in the Top 5 in terms of quality had only a 50 percent chance of finishing in the Top 5 of success.
In our artificial market, therefore, social influence played as large a role in determining the market share of successful songs as differences in quality. It’s a simple result to state, but it has a surprisingly deep consequence. Because the long-run success of a song depends so sensitively on the decisions of a few early-arriving individuals, whose choices are subsequently amplified and eventually locked in by the cumulative-advantage process, and because the particular individuals who play this important role are chosen randomly and may make different decisions from one moment to the next, the resulting unpredictably is inherent to the nature of the market. It cannot be eliminated either by accumulating more information — about people or songs — or by developing fancier prediction algorithms, any more than you can repeatedly roll sixes no matter how carefully you try to throw the die.

Kurt Vonnegut and the meaning of life

2007-04-14T01:05:00.000+10:00

Kurt Vonnegut is my favourite author, and certainly my idol when it comes to unfulfilled dreams of creating great fiction, or any kind of art. I was quite upset by the news of his death yesterday, and I get the feeling a lot of people were: he's the kind of writer you feel you know personally. And love. It's been great to see how much media coverage it's been getting; hopefully it will lead to yet more people discovering him for themselves. It's the kind of writing that could change the world's temperament if enough people read it.

Here's an extract from Hocus Pocus, where the narrator Eugene reads a story in an old issue of a pornographic magazine called Black Garterbelt, which his friend sent him shortly before being killed by a sniper in Vietnam. "But did he send it to me for its pictures of women naked except for black garterbelts, or for a remarkable science fiction story in there, 'The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore'?" Kurt fans will recognise the signature style of Kilgore Trout:

It was about intelligent threads of energy trillions of light-years long. They wanted mortal, self-reproducing life forms to spread out through the Universe. So several of them, the Elders in the title, held a meeting by intersecting near a planet called Tralfamadore. The author never said why the Elders thought the spread of life was such a hot idea. I don't blame him. I can't think of any strong arguments in favor of it. To me, wanting every habitable planet to be inhabited is like wanting everybody to have athlete's foot.

The Elders agreed at the meeting that the only practical way for life to travel great distances through space was in the form of extremely small and durable plants and animals hitching rides on meteors that ricocheted off their planets.

But no germs tough enough to survive a trip like that had yet evolved anywhere. Life was too easy for them. They were a bunch of creampuffs. Any creature they infected, chemically speaking, was as challenging as so much chicken soup.

There were people on Earth at the time of the meeting, but they were just more hot slop for the germs to swim in. But they had extra-large brains, and some of them could talk. A few could even read and write! So the elders focused on them, and wondered if people's brains might not invent survival tests for germs which were truly horrible.

They saw in us a potential for chemical evils on a cosmic scale. Nor did we disappoint them.

What a story!

It so happened, according to this story, that the legend of Adam and Eve was being written down for the first time. A woman was doing it. Until then, that charming bunkum had been passed from generation to generation by word of mouth.

The Elders let her write down most of the origin myth just the way she had heard it, the way everybody told it, until she got very close to the end. Then they took control of her brain and had her write down something which had never been part of the myth before.

It was a speech by God to Adam and Eve, supposedly. This was it, and life would become pure hell for microorganisms soon afterward: 'Fill the Earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves on the Earth.'

Cough.

So the people on Earth thought they had instructions from the Creator of the Universe Himself to wreck the joint. But they were going at it too slowly to satisfy the Elders, so the Elders put it into the people's heads that they themselves were the life forms that were supposed to spread out through the Universe. This was a preposterous idea, of course. In the words of the nameless author: 'How could all that meat, needing so much food and water and oxygen, and with bowel movements so enormous, expect to survive a trip of any distance whatsoever through the limitless void of outer space? IT was a miracle that such ravenous and cumbersome giants could make a roundtrip for a 6-pack to the nearest grocery store.'

The Elders, incidentally, had given up on influencing the humanoids of Tralfamadore, who were right below where they were meeting. The Tralfamadorians had senses of humor and so knew themselves for the severely limited lunkers, not to say crazy lunkers, they really were. They were immune to the kilovolts of pride the Elders jazzed their brains with. They laughed right away when the idea popped up in their heads that they were the glory of the Universe, and that they were supposed to colonize other planets with their incomparable magnificence. They knew exactly how clumsy and dumb they were, even though they could talk and some of them could read and write and do math. One author wrote a series of side-splitting satires about Tralfamadorians arriving on other planets with the intention of spreading enlightenment.

But the people here on Earth, being humorless, found the same idea quite acceptable.

It appeared to the Elders that the people here would believe anything about themselves, no matter how preposterous, as long as it was flattering. To make sure of this, they performed an experiment. They put the idea into Earthlings' heads that the whole Universe had been created by one big male animal who looked just like them. He sat on a throne with a lot of less fancy thrones all around him. When people died they got to sit on those other thrones forever because they were such close relatives of the Creator.

The people down here just ate that up!

Another thing the Elders liked about Earthlings was that they feared and hated other Earthlings who did not look and talk exactly as they did. They made life a hell for each other as well as for what they called 'lower animals'. They actually thought of strangers as lower animals. So all the Elders had to do to ensure that germs were going to experience really hard times was to tell us how to make more effective weapons by studying Physics and Chemistry. The Elders lost no time in doing this.

They caused an apple to fall on the head of Isaac Newton.

They made young James Watt prick up his ears when his mother's teakettle sang.

The Elders made us think that the Creator on the big throne hated strangers as much as we did, and that we would be doing Him a big favor if we tried to exterminate them by any and all means possible.

That went over big down here.

So it wasn't long before we had made the deadliest poisons in the Universe, and were stinking up the air and water and topsoil. In the words of the author, and I wish I knew his name, 'Germs died by the trillions or failed to reproduce because they could no longer cut the mustard.'

But a few survived and even flourished, even though almost all other life forms on Earth perished. And when all other life forms vanished, and this planet became as sterile as the Moon, they hibernated as virtually indestructible spores, capable of waiting as long as necessary for the next lucky hit by a meteor. Thus, at last, did space travel become truly feasible.

If you stop to think about it, what the Elders did was based on a sort of trickle-down theory. Usually when people talk about the trickle-down theory, it has to do with economics. The richer people at the top of a society become, supposedly, the more wealth there is to trickle down to the people below. It never really works out that way, of course, because if there are 2 things people at the top can't stand, they have to be leakage and overflow.

But the Elders' scheme of having the misery of higher animals trickle down to microorganisms worked like a dream.

There was a lot more to the story than that. The author taught me a new term, which was 'Finale Rack.' This was apparently from the vocabulary of pyrotechnicians, specialists in loud and bright but otherwise harmless nighttime explosions for climaxes of patriotic holidays. A Finale Rack was a piece of milled lumber maybe 3 meters long and 20 centimeters wide and 5 centimeters thick, with all sorts of mortars and rocket launchers nailed to it, linked in series by a single fuse.

When it seemed that a fireworks show was over, that was when the Master Pyrotechnician lit the fuse of the Finale Rack.

That is how the author characterized World War II and the few years that followed it. He called it 'the Finale Rack of so-called Human Progress.'

If the author was right that the whole point of life on Earth was to make germs shape up so that they would be ready to ship out when the time came, then even the greatest human being in history, Shakespeare of Mozart of Lincoln or Voltaire or whoever, was nothing more than a Petri dish in the truly Grand Scheme of Things.

In the story, the Elders of Tralfamadore were indifferent, to say the least, to all the suffering going on. When 6,000 rebellious slaves were crucified on either side of the Appian Way back in good old 71 B.C., the elders would have been delighted if a crucified person had spit into the face of a Centurion, giving him pneumonia or TB.

If I had to guess when 'The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore; was written, I would have to say, 'A long, long time ago, after World War II but before the Korean War, which broke out in 1950, when I was 10.' There was no mention of Korea as part of the Finale Rack. There was a lot of talk about making the planet a paradise by killing all the bugs and germs, and generating electricity with atomic energy so cheaply that it wouldn't even be metered, and making it possible for everybody to have an automobile that would make him or her mightier than 200 horses and 3 times faster than a cheetah, and incinerating the other half of the planet in case people there got the idea that it was their sort of intelligence that was supposed to be exported to the rest of the Universe.

The story was very likely pirated from some other publication, so the omission of the author's name may have been intentional. What sort of writer, after all, would submit a work of fiction for possible publication in Black Garterbelt?

I did not realize at the time how much that story affected me. Reading it was simply a way of putting off for just a little while my looking for another job and another place to live at the age of 51, with 2 lunatics in tow. But down deep the story was beginning to work like a buffered analgesic. What a relief it was, somehow, to have someone else confirm what I had come to suspect toward the end of the Vietnam War, and particularly after I saw the head of a human being pillowed in the spilled guts of a water buffalo on the edge of a Cambodian village, that Humanity is going somewhere really nice was a myth for children under 6 years old, like the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus.

Cough.

I'll tell you one germ that's ready to take off for the belt of Orion or the handle on the Big Dipper or whatever right now, somewhere on Earth, and that's the gonorrhea I brought home from Tegucigalpa, Honduras, back in 1967. For a while there, it looked like I was going to have it for the rest of my life. By now it probably can east broken glass and razor blades.

The TB germs which make me cough so much now, though, are pussycats. There are several drugs on the market which they have never learned to handle. The most potent of these was ordered for me weeks ago, and should be arriving from Rochester any time. If any of my germs are thinking of themselves as space cadets, they can forget it. They aren't going anywhere but down the toilet.

Bon voyage!

Saxondale at Quicksilverscreen.com

2007-04-09T21:17:00.000+10:00

I just realised that at quicksilverscreen.com you can watch several episodes of the poetically scripted, wickedly funny sitcom Saxondale, which I've posted about before. I haven't seen these episodes yet, but they'll be a real treat if they're even half as good as the first one.

Philip Larkin, 'Toads' (1954)

2007-04-09T21:02:00.000+10:00

Phillip Larkin, Toads (1954)

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils with its sickening poison -
Just for paying a few bills!
That's out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losels, loblolly-men, louts -
They don't end as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines -
They seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets - and yet
No one actually starves.

Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that's the stuff
That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney
My way to getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.

I don't say, one bodies the other
One's spiritual truth;
But I do say it's hard to lose either,
When you have both.

Clip: "I stole Garry Shandling's furniture"

2007-04-09T00:35:00.000+10:00

In this scene from It's Garry Shandling's Show, Garry's home has been burgled, and he has to consider the possibility that the previous tenant -- Vanna White, the tile-spinner from Wheel Of Fortune -- was responsible.

The first 20 seconds of the video is silent, but then it's okay.

After two decades, It's Garry Shandling's Show is still funny and radical. Like a Kurt Vonnegut book, the show acknowledges that it's artificial, which frees it up to do all sorts of fun things that would otherwise be impossible. It also has this wonderful feel of a live show that doesn't exist in any other sitcom I've seen.

Taking a conventional sitcom and abandoning any pretense of reality is the opposite of the approach shows like The Office and Curb Your Enthusiasm have taken. It's a wonder more sitcoms haven't used the direct-address-to-the-studio-audience and explicitly-acknowledging-that-this-is-a-contrived-sitcom device, considering it worked so well here.

Unfortunately, It's Garry Shandling's Show is not available on DVD... except I found this guy who's selling a 5-DVD box set of it. I'm guessing it could just be ripped off of old videos, but I'm thinking it might be worth it.

David Henson McNab

2007-04-06T00:09:00.000+10:00

Excerpt from this article about David Henson McNab, who used to own and run a fishery in Honduras, and who has been in a United States federal prison since 2001:

In 1999, agents of the National Marine Fisheries Service, acting on a tip, seized one of McNab's shipments in Alabama. They found that about 4 percent of the lobsters were undersized, 7 percent were egg-bearing, and all were packaged in plastic bags rather than boxes. In consultation with the Honduran Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock, the federal agents determined that the shipment was in violation of Honduran (not American) law.

Presumably angling for a plea bargain, and wielding a U.S. statute that bars the importation of "any fish or wildlife taken, possessed, transported, or sold in violation" of foreign law, the feds threw the book at McNab. They charged him with smuggling and money laundering, the latter because he had received payment for the shipment.

Facing this draconian charge, McNab voluntarily submitted himself to U.S. legal proceedings. Because Honduras has no extradition for its citizens, McNab could have sat tight, out of reach of the American authorities. Instead, "he came here to clear the charges," says his attorney, Miguel Estrada of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. "He was a businessman. He said, 'You've got to be kidding.'"

It was no joke. At trial, he was found guilty and sentenced to more than eight years, plus forfeiture of nearly $1 million.

The conviction got the attention of higher-ups in the Honduran government, who were dumbfounded. They attested that the Honduran statute on whose basis McNab was convicted had, in fact, been repealed -- in 1995. They protested that authority to rule on Honduran law resided with the attorney general, not with the agriculture ministry bureaucrats who had incorrectly testified in McNab's case. In a November 2004 letter to President Bush requesting clemency for McNab, Ricardo Maduro, then the Honduran president, wrote: "Mr. McNab did not break any law of Honduras." Moreover, even if the law had been broken, the Honduran penalty would have been only a small fine.

Armed with those attestations, McNab appealed his conviction. And lost. In a 2-1 decision, a U.S. appeals court said that the trial court's reading of Honduran law was definitive for U.S. judicial purposes. He then appealed to the Supreme Court. It hears only a handful of the thousands of appeal petitions it receives every year, and McNab's was not among the lucky few.

"Look, you lost. You know what? You put your middle finger at the Catholic Church, and we just broke it, didn't we, pal?"

2007-04-05T23:43:00.000+10:00

The gentleman speaking on Jesus's behalf is Bill Donahue, and he's the president of a group called the Catholic League. The Christian he is bullying is a sculptor who made a Jesus out of chocolate. Crazy video. Link.

Beautiful dancing ferrofluid sculptures

2007-04-04T21:51:00.000+10:00

So you get some nano-scale magnets, and you suspend them in a fluid. What you get is this fluid that behaves in wonderful ways when you apply a magnetic field to it. It's called a ferrofluid.

Some Japanese artist-scientists have made this beautiful short film with ferrofluids interacting with electromagnetic sculptures, set to music. Isn't it great to be in the 21st century! It's available for download here: Link. Big file, but worth the wait.

You could run a betting pool on how long it will take ferrofluids to make it into a Tool film clip.

Mark your calendar: Transport at the Alley Bar

2007-04-04T21:23:00.000+10:00

From the Transport mailing list:

TRANSPORT FINAL SHOW AND GOING AWAY PARTY TIME

WHERE: The Alley Bar Milton

WHEN: Sunday April 15

FROM: 4 pm. Transport on about 8pm but come and have a drink about 4 or 5 pm.

COVER: $6 (there are 4 other bands, they start at 4)

There is also rumoured to be a bunch of record executive types flying up from Sydney to check the band out to see if they wanna sign us, so if you scream very loud we can fool them into liking us. It's a bit of a given that record company execs don't really listen to or look at the band, they just look at the audience reaction , it's kind of like of like what they would call a FOCUS GROUP. I've witnessed this first hand - to spot the exec, find the guy/girl looking sideways.

Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank

2007-04-04T20:46:00.000+10:00

The New Yorker has an interesting article about Paul Wolfowitz's time as president of the World Bank. Wolfowitz was one of the main architects of the Iraq war, and that legacy continues to hang over him at the World Bank. George Packer's excellent book about the Iraq war, The Assassin's Gate, gave the strong impression that Wolfowitz is a nice, genuine, idealistic guy whose major undoing was that he was willing to use any means -- including deception and fraternising with corrupt imbeciles like the Bush administration -- to achieve his dream of a free, peaceful Iraq.

This article gives a similar kind of impression. Wolfowitz has copped flak at the World Bank for his policy withholding funds from corrupt governments as a way of forcing them to clean up their act. It's an impossible moral dilemma: Is it right to prop up a corrupt, despotic regime in order to get funds to the people immediately? It's hairy, but I find I tend to agree with Wolfowitz on this one... If it were humanitarian aid, rather than money to stimulate an economy, it would be a different story (though there's a very fine line between the two, if any). Link.

Animal time

2007-04-04T00:08:00.000+10:00

There's an article in the New York Times about research into whether animals remember specific experiences in the past and whether they think about the future.

The answer so far: maybe. The most interesting thing for me is the ingenious experiments the researchers designed to test birds and monkeys for episodic memory or anticipation of future events.

The Sign of the Cross

2007-04-03T23:40:00.000+10:00

Before the Hays Code was brought in in 1934, movies were allowed to be sexy and violent. It can come as a surprise; if you look at at movies going back through the decades, starting from today, you can see them get progressively tamer the further you go back ... until you hit the pre-code era, and the party starts!

Greenbriar Picture Shows has a cool post about a recently a reissued Cecille B. Demille film, 1932's The Sign of The Cross. It's set in ancient Rome, with orgies, the Emperor Nero, and the torturing of Christians in the Collosseum. It seems it was more exploitative, violent, semipornographic, and all-out wild than any mainstream movies would be for decades. Awesome!

Here are some pictures showcasing the movie's group sex, lesbianism, violence, and defilement by beasts. Respectively.

Greenbriar's article, as always, is lively, funny, and full of obscure trivia. Excerpt:

This shot that looks like an Amazon cutting the head off a pygmy is actually --- an Amazon cutting the head off a pygmy. It’s just one of a myriad of delights in Nero’s coliseum --- we even get Charlie Gemora, dean of all screen gorilla impersonators (shown here), having his way with (another) nude captive. I always thought Charlie’s ape skin was the coolest in the business --- remember him in Bear Shooters, The Chimp, and Murders In The Rue Morgue? --- now this was some right casting, C.B. 1932 critics noted "the entrancingly sadistic passage limning the approach of a herd of hungry crocodiles waddling to an arena feast of edible, white-fleshed Christian girls." Wow! --- we could all take a lesson in hot prose from this guy! --- and yes, that croc scene’s a doozy, though the Motion Picture Herald suggests it was cut after initial New York screenings --- further evidence to my mind that what we’re now seeing is a version more intact than even the 1932 original. Reviewers assured us that audiences would love the film, "provided their sensibilities survive the odors of Lesbos and deSade." Sounds like a ringing endorsement to me!

The years weren’t kind to Sign Of The Cross. Rigid Code enforcement from 1934 on meant re-issues had to be edited to conform with censorship edicts. Before the decade was out, Sign Of The Cross, still very much an audience favorite, was shorn of everything that made it so much fun to begin with. No crocs, nor beheadings --- lesbians out --- nix on milk bath nipple flashes. Might as well go see an Andy Hardy or stay home and play with the crystal set. By 1944, it got worse. DeMille modestly suggested that a revival of Sign Of The Cross might help bring down the Third Reich (comparisons between Nero and Hitler, you know), so Paramount gave him 125K to shoot a whole new prologue wherein bomber pilots flying over Rome reflect upon its decadent past, thus segueing into the old footage, now mutilated beyond the point of recognition, though exhibitors did report boffo attendance.

Link.

How to illustrate ethical consumerism

2007-04-03T23:20:00.000+10:00

From the main page Courier-Mail website:I wonder if a close-up of a big rack is their last resort for making a story interesting, or if it's the first thing they try.

Famous Balloon Movies

2007-04-03T21:32:00.000+10:00

Here's a gimmick that works better than it should: someone has inserted a balloon into iconic movie scenes.

North By Northwest is my favourite: Link.

And Casablanca is clever: Link.

Via Neatorama.

Some pictures by Matta

2007-03-30T23:19:00.000+10:00

Roberto Sebastian Antonio Matta Echaurren (usually just called 'Matta') was a Chilean surrealist painter who made some breathtaking art. You don't need any background information to appreciate the paintings - but if you find it useful, read the passage below. Otherwise, just skip to the pictures!

[Matta] presented the landscape as the signifier for human psychology. During the 1930s he developed his concept of "psychological morphology" and created his first "inscapes," which he thought of as landscapes of the inner mind. Futuristic in form, these inscapes often juxtaposed a barren vision of an indefinable landscape with abstract forms drawn from basic organic shapes and conceived as the aesthetic form of the artist's own psychological state. Similarly, Matta's psychological morphology represents his concept of an introspective mental state that draws its forms from organic materials such as clouds, rocks, water, microscopic organisms, and other natural substances. The Surrealists believed that organic forms were particularly successful in creating associations in the mind of a viewer, since they were part of the natural environment. By creating work steeped in vaguely recognizable forms, Matta hoped to catalyze visual associations with the workings of the viewer's own inner mind.
- from Basilio et al, Latin American and Caribbean Art: MoMA at El Museo

There's also a bio of him on the comprehensive website, www.matta-art.com. I recommend visiting that site if you like him. It also has hundreds of pictures. The pictures in this post are from that site, except where I've said otherwise.

It's worth noting that many of the paintings below are huge. Wake (1974-75) is 10 metres by 4 metres! Okay, enough of my yakkin': here's the pictures.

Dark Light, 1940

Rocks, 1940

Listen to Living, 1940 [from MoMA.org]

Endless Nudes, 1942

The Disasters of Mysticism, 1942

Science, Conscience, Et Patience Du Vitreur, 1944

A Grave Situation, 1946 [from Wikipedia]

How Ever, 1947

Wound Interrogation, 1948

Untitled, 1949

Les Roses Sont Belles, 1951

Let Any Flowers Bloom, 1952

Untitled, 1952

To Give Painless Light, 1955

Tierra Abierta, 1957

Etre Cibler Nous Monde, 1958

L'Etang De No, 1958

L'Interrompeur, 1958

To Give Painless Light, 1960

La Luz Del Proscrito, 1963-64

Les Puissances Du Desordre, 1964-65

Wake, 1974-75

Illumine Le Temps, 1975

La Coulee Automatique, 1976

Storming Water, 1996 [from Rogallery.com]

Chico Marx on piano

2007-03-25T22:08:00.000+10:00

Chico Marx on piano. Could anything be more charming?

Youtube has a compilation of four songs here: Link. Make sure you get to see his performance at about the halfway mark of 'Everyone Says I Love You', which turns my heart to butter.

Cool German French British-invasion band

2007-03-23T18:46:00.000+10:00

An amazing, rocking video of a curious 1960's band, Les 5 Gentlemen, can be seen here: Link.

Linked from Boing-Boing.

One of my favourite scenes from 'I'm Alan Partridge'

2007-03-22T23:38:00.000+10:00

The setup: Alan has been falsefully telling his Ukrainean girlfriend Sonia that he is close friends with U2's lead singer, Bono. When Sonia pressures him into taking her to Bono's house to meet Bono, Alan takes her to a historical castle, which is full of tourists, and tries to pass it off as Bono's private residence.

Link.

"He's got the biggest collection of hatchbacks in the country."

Three phenomenal albums I've been listening to

2007-03-22T22:20:00.000+10:00

The Pretty Things - Parachute

Parachute is the kind of album that, when you hear it for the first time, you can't believe you've never heard it before. This is the kind of thing that makes me regret my habit of over-using superlatives, because it is simply one of the most perfect albums I've heard. It came out in 1970, and has a lot in common with two other theatrical, jammy, ambitious masterpieces of that era, Abbey Road and Dark Side of The Moon. It's as good as either of them. It should need no introduction.

Recommended songs if you want a taste:
'Sickle Clowns' - I reckon if John Lennon and Pink Floyd collaborated in the early 70's, and it came off perfectly, it would sound something like this. Jazzy, rugged, and, for me, impossible not to dance to.
'In The Square' - beautiful harmonies, a perfect arrangement with harpsichords and guitars and distorted instruments and echoes, and dynamics

Emusic link.

The Monochrome Set - Eligible Bachelors

If you like catchy indie pop with brilliant lyrics, this is like all your birthdays come at once. It has a sound that would be familiar and welcome to fans of Belle and Sebastian and The Smiths -- though this album pre-dates both bands. The lyrics are what makes it though; they're smart, inventive, and funny. I want to learn them all to sing at family gatherings. 'On The 13th Day' kind of works like an extension of 'The 12 Days Of Christmas', with the singer listing all the outlandish gifts he got on the 13th day of Christmas:

On the 13th day my true love gave to me
Corrugated horse flesh candy in lime marmalade
Dolphin heads in aspic with a butterfly brocade

On the 13th day my true love gave to me
Lyre-birds in a stained glass cage, with lightning rods as plumes
Double-jointed black men playing leap-frog on the moon

'Fun For All The Family' is about Goya's embarrassingly unglamorous royal family portraits:

We were all so very concerned
To see the commoners never learned
That inter-breeding could be blamed
For the decline of the regal brain

Indeed the blood was truly blue
But thinner with time, alas, we knew
Now we are all a little insane
And life can never be the same

Mister Goya, we all declare
Was most unkind and very unfair
To paint us in the way he did
As if the royals had lost their lids

Damn it all, the family pets
Were made to look a safer bet
Because we give a regal hoot
Somebody always cocks a snoot

The whole album's a joy.

Recommended songs if you want a taste:
'I'll Scry Instead' - unremittingly clever song that takes the format of a two letters from the protagonist to two psychics. Excerpt:

Dear Miss Rosa Lee
Tell me my destiny
I enclose my vibes with a print of my palm
I’d like the full works, plus the box of assorted charms

Dear Rosa, don't stall
Look in your crystal ball
Please send the tea cup back, as it's part of a set
It's wrapped in cellophane, near the gris-gris and amulet

Up above, Venus is in my house
I'm in love with an Aquarius
In the sky, the moon is in perigee
I'd do better with a fortune cookie

'The Mating Game' - A pop song about sex, but deliberately about as sexy as Father Ted and Father Dougall's 'My Lovely Horse'. It's gross. It's catchy. Excerpt:

Kiss, lick, stroke, flick
Quiver, quiver, shake and shiver, baby, wow
Un-clasp, flop, gasp
Sopping, sopping, there's no stopping now

Blonde, brunette, or redhead
Black, yellow or white
They’re all the same
In the mating game
But I can' t complain now

Squeeze, suck, pinch, pluck
Wobble, wobble, grab and gobble, darling, moan
Un-zip, ooze, drip
Dippy, dippy, wet and slippy, groan

Emusic link.

Transport - The Inner Chimp

My brother is in Transport, but I'm not being biassed here: The Inner Chimp, Transport's first album, is fantastic. It's poppy, angry, eclectic, and heartfelt. It features lots of guitars and the most appealing formulation of Australian rapping I've heard anyone do. The lyrics are funny and smart (no examples here, because, unlike Eligible Bachelors, The Inner Chimp isn't on Leo's Lyrics Database!). I break out in a big grin when I hear songs like 'Upside Down', 'This Infidelity', or 'The People Have Spoken'; not just because they go off, or because they're infectious, or because they're furious -- but also because of the shock of recognition, of hearing a piece of Australian art that doesn't sell itself short, that actually captures something of the experience of being Australian, that has an Australian accent without being self-conscious about it, and that strives to do all that and still push the limits, to be expansive and ambitious. It doesn't sound like anything on the radio. Anything could happen.

I'll recommend some songs to yez when they become available. I think they're releasing it in... April?

Transport's website link.

Top 15 unintentionally funny comic book panels

2007-03-22T22:12:00.000+10:00

This has some classic double-entendres: Link. The vulgar Archie panel pictured really hit the spot.

Great article about tourism in central Australia

2007-03-11T19:45:00.000+10:00

Slate has a long, but fascinating (and educational) piece of travel writing about central Australia. I highly recommend it. Link.

Brook Benton performing "It's Just a Matter of Time"

2007-03-04T00:56:00.000+10:00

Superb: Link.

Note the ludicrously deep note at 0:32!

Colbert on the Anna Nicole coverage

2007-03-03T14:07:00.000+10:00

He's spot on. Link.