Unix and the Asus EeePC

Almost 25 years ago, I got my first experience of using an Apple Macintosh computer. Until that point, I had used various other machines, each with its different operating system. My favourite, at the time, was Unix, with which I had become quite proficient. Yet the moment I saw the Mac, I realised that command-line operating systems were dead and buried. The new windows-based operating systems were a quantum leap forward and there would be no going back.

How wrong I was! Even as Xerox, Sun and Apple tried to drag us into the future, IBM and Microsoft threw out a massively heavy anchor – the IBM PC, running DOS – that held the world back for 15 years while Microsoft slowly, painfully, caught up to where the great pioneering companies had long since been. Eventually, Microsoft Windows became a very good, windows-based operating system with high levels of usability.

In the years since I first saw the Mac, I have used only MacOS and (from Windows 3.1 onwards) Microsoft Windows. I've also used 'palmtop' or hand-held computers for writing with (as I have mentioned before). These each had their quirky little operating systems but I never did much with them so there wasn't much to learn, or complain about. The last of these, my HP Jornada 720 is a Windows CE machine – close enough to desktop versions of Windows that it was easy to use. I've been looking for a replacement for it for a couple of years now and there just isn't one. So when I saw the Asus EeePC advertised, I realised this was about as close as it was going to get and grabbed one. (Well, Wifie bought it for me as a present, actually, knowing how keen I was.)

The Eee is a little miracle – a fully-fledged laptop that is just a little bigger than a DVD box (that's it on the left as I was showing it off to some friends). It's twice the size of my beloved Jornada but packs in so much more – for so much less money - that I was willing to give it a go. The operating system on the Eee is Unix (although you can install Windows XP if you want to) but not the Unix I used to use 25 years ago. This is a modern Unix with a proper, windows-based graphical user interface (GUI). The machine has all the networking capabilities you'd expect in a modern laptop (including Wi-Fi) as well as three USB2.0 ports. All it lacks is optical media (DVD/CD reader) and the kind of fat memory we feel we need these days. For my purposes it is ideal. I only want it for writing on. What's more, it comes with the Open Office.org applications pre-installed – and they are the ones I use all the time now anyway (as I have also mentioned before).

Let me say right now that the Eee is exactly right for my purposes. The only drawback is that it has Unix installed. What I've discovered since using the Eee is that Unix with a GUI is still the same old Unix it always was but with a prettier face. Unix, it seems, is not a patch on Windows XP. It is not a patch on MacOS X either. It looks superficially similar, it has windows, it has pointers, it has Help, and so on but it's usability is awful. When things go wrong, one discovers the Help is badly-written, minimal and obscure. The way things are done is hopelessly complicated – 'user hostile' is the phrase that springs to mind.

I'm an extremely experienced computer user, one-time programmer and one-time Unix user, yet I have been completely unable to solve trivial problems on the Eee – like loading and installing a new printer driver. (I won't bore you with this but it is so fabulously complicated that I have had to spend two days trawling through online tutorials and user-group forums just to get to grips with what I need to do. I haven't tried to do it yet – I'm saving that for when I have most of a day to spare!) I also haven't yet managed to get my Eee to network with my Windows desktop (partly because of the added complication of my crappy Telstra wireless broadband modem but also because the copious and well-written Windows XP help files assume you're connecting to another Windows machine, while the minimal, useless Unix help files assume nothing will go wrong with the simple wizard process that a child could follow without instructions.) I've spent about a day in the online forums on this issue too – enough to convince myself I will never solve it and I'd better call in a network guru.

Part of the problem with Unix today seems to be the plethora of slightly different versions that exist. If your printer company, for an example close to my heart, only produces a driver for one Unix version, you can't install it in another. Well, actually, you can but first you have to translate it using another piece of software. But then you discover this piece of software is written for yet another slightly different version of Unix than the one you have and you'll need to download and install a sizeable software environment all of its own just to make it work (which some experts in the online forums say you should really avoid doing if you can help it – which you can't).

Another part of the problem is usability. Usability is a deep and fundamental property of a system. It isn't a gloss you add to the surface. Apple has always understood this. Microsoft has gradually come to understand this. The Unix community just hasn't got a clue! However good the GUI on a Unix implementation, it will never have the usability of MacOS or Windows if the underlying user tasks are not themselves usable, or if the user support infrastructure (labels, layout, instructions and help) is not fully cognizant of the users, their mental models of the system, their tasks and their task knowledge, or if the underlying file systems and command structures are not fully consistent with the user's task model.

Finally, and this is also a usability issue, part of the problem is the shallowness of the GUI. It is assumed in the Unix world that, as soon as something goes wrong, or as soon as something complicated needs to be done, the user will abandon the GUI in favour of a command-line interpreter! I have only had my Eee a few weeks but I now have on my wall a summary of the Unix command shell syntax and a table of Unix commands. All you Unix evangelists out there, please take note. People will keep buying Windows (and MacOS) in preference to using Unix for free as long as Unix feels like a horrible, unfriendly kludge instead of a well-organised, intuitive appliance.

To be fair to Unix, its main audience comprises techies and nerds. You only have to look at the Unix online forums to see this – all those propeller-heads gabbling away to one another in impenetrable jargon. These are people who like to live with their heads under the bonnet. They are actually happy to see inside the machine and fiddle with the cogs and levers. But if Unix is ever going to make it into the real world, where people don't have the time or inclination to type hieroglyphs into 1970's-style 'Teletype windows' – a world where most people find even the complexities of Windows XP seriously challenging and completely irrelevant to what they need to achieve – then Unix is going to have to clean up its act.

This is obviously not impossible. The Macintosh itself is now a Unix machine but still (almost) as usable as it has ever been. So why isn't the Asus Eee?

One of the sad things about the Eee's usability failures is that it is a fantastically popular machine. Its price-performance level has made it a truly desirable little computer and it is selling like hotcakes. Which means that hundreds of thousands of people – eventually millions – will be getting their first exposure to Unix through the Eee and, I confidently predict, they will not be enjoying the experience. In fact, it will probably drive them quickly back into the arms of Microsoft. Soon, someone will have a machine out at the same price-performance point but running Windows out of the box and it will grab Asus' market away from them in a flash. I also predict that Asus will soon drop Unix altogether as a the OS for the Eee and will only sell it with Windows installed.

Frankly, Unix deserves this treatment. It is still a very long way from being a mass-market product.

If You Can't Fight...

One of the things I really like about Australia is that people wear hats here. I like hats. I suit them. Wifie looks good in hats too. I don't know if I'd love her quite so much if she didn't – or vice versa.

When I lived in the UK, I used to wear hats from time to time. People I passed in the street there used to think I was a pretentious git. Now I wear hats as often a I can and the only people who think I'm a pretentious git are the people who know me.

Actually, I do believe the Brits really, secretly want to wear hats but they're too inhibited. I know this not only because of the shouts of “Tosser!” I'd get as I walked about in my glorious headwear (don't let anyone ever try to kid you that the British are a well-mannered people) but because of the number of people who would sidle up to me on railway station platforms, look nervously around to make sure no-one was listening and say things like, “I like your hat. Where did you get it?” Of course, once they had the name of the shop, they'd have to move away shouting, “Bloody freak!” just so no-one suspected.

I suppose, to be fair, it isn't enlightenment, or a natural sense of style that makes Australians wear hats. It's the sun. You get a lot of it here and it's as vicious as a theatre critic at a kiddies' Christmas concert. But, hey, who cares what it is? I'm just making the most of it.

Living the dream.

(PS The title is from the old saying, 'If you can't fight, wear a big hat.')

Pentagon Wastes Fortune Establishing The Bleedin' Obvious

Surprise, surprise! There was no link between the former government of Iraq and Al Qaeda. The Pentagon has just released a report after studying 600,000 official Iraqi documents and thousands of hours of interrogations of Saddam Hussein's co-workers that concludes the Iraqis really weren't collaborating with Al Qaeda after all.

Instead of spending millions and millions of dollars on this, the US government could simply have asked any intelligent person anywhere in the world and got the same answer for free. So, it turns out that Bush, Cheney and all their cronies were lying. Well that's shocking. Who would ever have guessed? And they seem like such upright, honest people.

Just one thing though. If we didn't all get together and bomb the crap out of Iraq, invade it and then occupy it for five years because they were planning terrorist attrocities against us with their Al Qaeda friends, just why did we do it?

In Memory of Yuli

Today, I buried my cat, Yuli.

Wifie and I took him to the vet this morning because he had been unwell and he had quite suddenly gone deaf. Suspecting an infection that had spread to his ears, we were stunned to find he was dying of a particularly aggressive form of bone cancer. The cancer – which was quite clear in the X-rays, was eating away at his jaw, was constricting his throat, and was probably inside his cranium.

We agreed with the vet that euthanasia was a better option than letting the poor little guy choke to death, or starve to death. So we petted him talked to him and cried while the vet gave him a sedative and then a lethal injection.

Cats tread very lightly on the Earth. All that Yuli left behind were a few plates and a bowl and a brush for his fur. That and a grieving surrogate mother who had cared for him and loved him, enjoyed his company, and marvelled at his quirky personality for seventeen-and-a-half years.

And me, of course. In my gruff, masculine way, I'd grumbled about him and pretended not to like him as much as I really did. But I'll miss him. I already miss him.

So we cracked a bottle of champagne and had a wake for our lost friend. We buried him in one of his favourite places and we toasted him and reminded each other of all the good things and all the bad things about him. And we laughed and cried and remembered him.

Mike Huckabee is too stupid to be president

Presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee is an idiot. He has publicly stated that he does not believe in evolution. This is like stating you do not believe the world is round or that the Sun shines because of nuclear fusion. We have just as much evidence for these things as we have for evolution but, somehow, an idiot like Huckabee can believe in fusion, or electricity, or gas chromatography, or a million other things for which there is massive evidence, but he can't believe in evolution!

Of course, a belief in evolution sits uncomfortably with a literal interpretation of the Bible, so, if you're an idiot, you have to reject the vast amount of evidence that exists, the overwhelming logic of the arguments that tie it all into the theory, the vastly interconnected evidence and theory that ties evolution into the rest of biology, chemistry and physics – that is, all the other things you're happy to believe in. The stupidity of a position like this is just unbelievable.

It's no wonder that the man is also stupid enough to believe he could do a good job of running America. Unfortunately, the sad fact is that he's an idiot and he can't.

Buy Northern Lights and Upset the Vatican!

What idiots Catholics must be. I'm one of those people who never pay much attention to what new, blockbuster films are being released and I very rarely read a best-selling novel. Yet when the Vatican newspaper l'Osservatore Romano starts trying to suppress a book - and the film of the book - it really gets my attention.

The film is The Golden Compass (staring the strangely attractive Nicole Kidman) and it is based on a book by Philip Pullman called Northern Lights. The Vatican says the book is anti-religious (Big deal. So what?) and shows just how terrible it is to be without 'God'. To quote from l'Osservatore Romano, Pullman's writing apparently shows that "when man tries to eliminate God from his horizon, everything is reduced, made sad, cold and inhumane." Of course, if this is really what Pullman is trying to show, then he is simply wrong. All magical beings, including 'God', have been long since eliminated from my horizon and it has only made life more deep, cheerful, happy and humane. The idea that it could be otherwise seems nonsensical. Surely living in this real world of wonder and beauty has to be a richer and more rewarding experience than living in a bizarre fantasy world of gods and devils? What is wrong with these people?

On the other hand, it is possible that Pullman didn't havethat in mind at all. Perhaps he just wanted to write a good yarn – although it sounds like he did have a bit of a dig at the Church, God bless him – and he does belong to the British Humanist Association. (The cringing, wimps who made the film, apparently removed all references to the Church so that they wouldn't get into trouble with these fanatical nutcases. Serves them right, doesn't it, that they got their wrists slapped by Il Papa anyway!)

Of course, the truly stupid thing about the Vatican's rantings is that if The Golden Compass and Northern Lights really do paint such a bleak and terrible picture of what it is like to be without a god (on your horizon) wouldn't that make them great adverts for the Church? Wouldn't that make people want to give up their life of sense and sanity and start eating pretend flesh and drinking pretend blood like the Pope does? Yet the Catholic League in the USA is trying to organise a boycott of the film saying its purpose is "to bash Christianity and promote atheism.”
If only I thought that was the film's purpose! Then I'd rush out and see it. As it is, not even Nicole Kidman and what I imagine are great special effects will get me into a cinema these days. I might, however, buy the book. Pullman's membership of the National Secular Society being something of a recommendation. Sadly, Northern Lights is a fantasy and I don't really like fantasies unless they are allegorical or extremely entertaining. However, since Northern Lights appears to be both, maybe I will.

Which raises another issue. Why is the Vatican getting so flagellatory about a fantasy? Isn't the point of a thing declaring itself to be a fantasy to say ' Don't believe me. I'm not true.'? But then, the guys at the Vatican are used to reading fantasy and treating it as gospel. Maybe they just can't tell the difference anymore. Or maybe, since the film grossed US$26 million in its first weekend, they are getting nervous about competing products?

Sterilising My Drinking Water The Easy Way

One of the many things about living out here in the bush with which I am unfamiliar, is the way water is collected and treated. My new house has three separate water collection systems. One is a ginormous plastic tank which collects the run-off from the house and shed roofs. The next is a small pond (or 'dam' as we call them here) that collects water that runs off the ground. The third is a pair of large plastic tanks which constitute a waste treatment plant for sewerage and other domestic waste water. The waste water plant generates relatively clean water which it then pumps out into a garden sprinkling system. The dam water is untreated and also has a pump, which we can use as required for garden watering or whatever. Water from the ginormous plastic tank that catches rainwater from the roofs, is pumped up to the house to provide our domestic supply.

The dam water and the treated waste water don't bother me. We only use them on the garden (or will, once we have a garden). It's this rainwater/drinking water system that bothers me. This water comes off the roofs straight into the tank where it sits for very long periods before being pumped into the house. The tank is closed (apart from two fat overflow pipes with a mesh over their ends) but the water that flows into it comes from the roofs and gutters. Apart from whatever airborne dust, smoke, pollen, and other organic matter landing on the roofs, there must inevitably be bird droppings and dead insects falling onto them all the time. Surely this means the water can't be quite sterile and must have quite a lot of stuff living in it?

It's not such a big deal because Wifie and I never drink unfiltered tap water anyway and any other water we consume in our food is always put through some kind of cooking process that would sterilise it. Yet it is just a little bit unsettling that the water we consume has been used to wash a roof with and has then sat in a big tank in the hot sun for weeks or months before we get round to pumping it into the house! Also, the fact that more and more people around the world are drinking re-cycled rainwater from just this kind of system and no-one is jumping up and down and saying what a health hazard it is, is actually quite reassuring.

Yet I have been wondering what to do to remove any risk whatsoever. And I think I have the answer: make rainwater tanks out of clear plastic.

I came across this idea in August 2000 when New Scientist reported on an Oxfam meeting that discussed the use of solar disinfection to combat a shortage of chemical disinfectants in Assam, India. (Issue 2253, New Scientist magazine, 26 August 2000, page 14. You may need a New Scientist subscription to read this online. Otherwise, your library probably has it.) A team of Swiss researchers in Duebendorf has show that filling a plastic bottle with water and leaving it in the sun can effectively disinfect it in as little as one hour. Martin Wegelin, who headed the Swiss research team, says that if you paint half the plastic bottle black and stand it on corrugated iron, it will heat up much faster and cut the time needed for thorough disinfection. The combination of heat (the water temperature goes above 50 degrees C) and ultraviolet radiation kills most micro-organisms, including 99.9 per cent of Escherichia coli, Vibrio cholerae (which causes cholera), and the parasite Cryptosporidium (which causes severe diarrhoea). This last is particularly interesting to me since I remember an outbreak of Cryptosporidium and that other popular faeces-borne parasite Giardia intestinalis that hit the water treatment plants in Sydney one year when I was living there and meant that we all had to boil our tap-water before using it for several weeks until they got the outbreak under control.

So, if it works for a couple of litres in an old Coke bottle, maybe it also works for five thousand litres in a clear plastic rainwater tank. If no-one has done the science yet, remember you heard it here first and don't forget to add my name to the patent, please.

Change Of Life

So, here I am in my new home in the country – or the bush, as we learn to call it here. My life is in flux. For the first time, Wifie and I have moved away from the cities we have always been forced to live near and have taken up residence far, far from the madding crowd. So far, in fact, that we don't have mains water, or sewerage, or even a telephone line. The postie drops our mail half a kilometre away at the bottom of our 'drive' (a dirt track that is all but impassable in the wet). If it wasn't for that lonely pair of wires bringing electricity up here, we might be living a very much more primitive life. The nearest shop is twelve kilometres away, the nearest small town, twenty.

We live at the top of a thousand-metre-high hill and the forested valleys and hills of Queensland's Granite Belt sweep away below me in all directions (see above). Forty-six acres of those forests and hills belong to Wifie and me. It doesn't sound like a lot but, in several exploratory walks, we have not yet found all the boundaries and we still make amazing discoveries whenever we go wandering – granite bluffs, huge meadows, boulders as big houses, gorgeous, exotic plants (including three species of wild orchid so far) and beautiful forest glades. It is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen – and I live there! The more gaudy bird-life includes crimson rosellas, king parrots, yellow-tailed black cockatoos, and eastern rosellas, and there are often wallabies in the 'garden' as well as feral pigs (not yet seen bet heard snuffling and grunting in the dark), lizards and snakes (including a gorgeous red-bellied black snake we found near the house the other day - see below). We've seen wild cats, a fox, rabbits and, in early Spring, the roads are full of long-necked turtles crossing at their leisure. The air is full of the sound of cicadas chirruping and, in the evenings, the frogs join in the song.

The ground immediately around the house has been cleared but nothing has been done with it so Wifie and I spend our time making plans for a garden. We've already planted a few fruit trees and we've put in some of the prettier native shrubs (grevilleas, bottle-brushes, banksias) but there is lots to do. Even this 'garden' is huge and we have to adjust to the idea that 'gardening' here will involve earth-movers and lorry-loads of materials. Our days of picking up a bag of gravel or mulch from the garden centre are over. Such things now need to be ordered by the cubic metre, delivered in trucks and spread by bobcat. Even the 'ordinary' garden tools are different now. Strimmers, mowers, weed-sprays and so on, that used to be adequate for a suburban home, we are replacing with heavyweight industrial equivalents. And, for the first time in my life, I own a chain saw and an axe. I got them so I could cut up wood for the wood-burning stove but now I see many other uses. A recent storm, which brought a small tree down across the drive a couple of weeks ago made me realise that a chain saw is an essential part of my new life. Without the means of clearing a fallen tree off your drive, you could be stranded up here!

And at night, when the skies are clear and the Moon is new, the Milky Way is a river of light that runs from horizon to horizon, turgid with stars - more stars than I have seen in my life before, more stars than I even knew were there. It is breathtaking. Astonishing. The glory of the Universe revealed just for the effort of lifting up your eyes! I watch satellites amble past, meteorites zip by, and whole galazies - the Large and Small Megallenic clouds - hanging like misty islands above me. And if you think I'm waxing a bit poetical here, all I can say is, you should see it and then we'll see who's totally blown away.

It's exciting, scary, humbling, and uplifting. It's a wonderful adventure and a dream come true. I am an immensely lucky person.

Machiavelli, The Prince And I

Well, that's another one off my list of Books I Really Ought To Read. I finally got round to finishing The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli. And it wasn't at all what I expected.

For a start, Machiavelli himself seems so paltry. I imagined he would be a man of soaring vision, a man with a deep and convoluted mind, a rich and interesting character. Don't ask me why. What I discovered was a dry, rather dull pedant. In fact, an academic.

I've worked a lot with academics. I had six years studying at uni, three years post-doc research and nine years of collaborative industrial-academic research. So I know of what I speak. There is a type among academics – a very common type, I'm afraid. Intelligent, yet boring, this type will study even the most profound and exciting subjects like a caterpillar chewing at a leaf. They will consume what matter there is, digest it thoroughly, and produce neatly-packaged analyses that, while they contain the essence of what is to be learned, have robbed the subject of all colour and interest.

Essentially a historian rather than a scientist or philosopher, his 'big idea' seems to have been to dump all the quasi-religious, moralistic nonsense about how a leader gets his authority, or how he should operate and instead to look at what really goes on in the world of power-politics. The flat tone of the writing in The Prince is therefore matched by the flat moral tone of the ideas. Machiavelli sensibly concludes that the human race isn't particularly pleasant but from this he seems to deduce that doing unto others before they do unto you is a reasonable foundation for a personal ethic. Which may explain the basis of his analysis of the best ways to get and maintain power, which takes the success of the enterprise as the main criterion for judging the actors in it. It's not exactly that the ends justify the means, more that, since getting and keeping power is all that people strive for, any means to those particular ends are alright by Niccolò.

And why does that seem so academic? Because you see academics all the time who don't seem to connect at all with the real world of human emotion. For them, the world is a puzzle to be solved, a fact is a fact, the rules that govern the world are to be found and written down. Mostly, this is harmless. They get their kicks from solving hard puzzles – they get their kudos from solving harder puzzles than their peers, or solving them first. They like to believe that morality and ethics are irrelevant to their endeavour – primarily because they don't have the emotional maturity to deal with the complexities of real life. So they do their work for tobacco companies and religious think tanks, repressive regimes and greedy capitalists just as happily as they would for medical charities and universities in pluralist democracies. And this is what Machiavelli seems to have been like.

Ironically, I've sometimes heard Machiavelli referred to as a realist.

Now I don't know much about the art of war, nor about statecraft, and especially about the acquisition and exercise of power but I do know there was some pretty dodgy reasoning in The Prince. I suspect that, had anyone taken it to heart, it wouldn't have been a great success for them (although possibly it was better than anything else available at the time). I also don't know why Lorenzo de Medici, to whom the work was dedicated, didn't accept it wholeheartedly and rush off to unify Italy as Machiavelli wanted him to (perhaps, if he read it, he used the book to help him become Pope – which he achieved about a decade after the book was written).

The thing is this; if you'd just dreamed up a sure-fire scheme to allow someone to gain great power and then hold it, regardless of who got hurt, would you rush out to put it in the hands of a Medici?

Do Not Use A. F. Palmer For Your Removal

I recently moved house. I bitterly regret that I used the dreadful removalist A. F. Palmer. I have lots of experience moving house, including two international moves and one interstate move and I've used many different removalists but the worst by far was A. F. Palmer.

Astonishingly, A. F. Palmer failed to deliver a single item of my belongings to my new home! They almost made it once but - in a series of clownish errors of judgement that would have been funny if it wasn't so awful - they had to turn around and take everything away again. Thanks to the disgraceful lack of care, professionalism and service shown by A. F. Palmer, my wife and I ended up staying in a motel rather than sleeping in our new house. In fact, we spent a week in that motel - at our own expense - before we got the abysmal A. F. Palmer to deliver our furninture into a storage facility 20km from the new house. For which kindness, the money-grubbing A. F. Palmer charged us a further $1,200!! Then I hired a van (again at our expense) and my wife and I (retirees, you may recall) moved the contents of our home ourselves in a series of a dozen separate trips which took us another week to accomplish. During this enormous effort, we discovered that almost every stick of furniture we own - new stuff as well as cherished and well-cared-for old items - had been scratched, dented, broken or parts of it lost by that pathetic excuse for a removalist, A. F. Palmer.

Meanwhile, not a word of apology from the useless A. F. Palmer. Not a hint from them that they felt the slightest guilt or shame at what they had put us through. They took their money and ran like the scumbags they are.

Now that this terrible experience is behind us, I just feel it is my duty to tell everyone who might be considering a move; do not use A. F. Palmer. Tell your friends and relatives. Make sure everyone knows. Avoid A. F. Palmer like the plague. They showed no respect for my home or my property. They behaved in a completely unprofessional manner from beginning to end. And when things started to go wrong, A. F. Palmer became uncooperative, unhelpful, and even made things worse though their complete lack of care and judgement. A. F. Palmer battered my furniture, failed to deliver it and charged me more money for the privilige of getting it out of their hands so we could finish the job we paid them to do!

Nobody ever should use A. F. Palmer for a removal. A. F. Palmer is by far the worst removalist I have ever had the bad luck to encounter.

A Trades Union For Bloggers

I like trades unions. I think they are the best thing since sliced bread. The demise of the unions since the late nineteen seventies is one of the tragedies of our age – and something we will all live to regret. I've been in several trades unions in my time. I even sat on a picket line during a strike back in 1976 – it was boring as hell but I'm glad I did it. So you'd think I might be in favour of the current push to form a trades union for bloggers. After all, I'm a blogger aren't I?

But I'm not.

The thing is, unions exist to protect the interests of working people. Ordinary people like you and me don't have much clout when it comes to negotiation with our employers. In fact, employers can roll right over the interests of their employees if they feel like it and the current employer-biased legislation we all live under (of which Australia's IR laws are a typical example) grants employers legal support for the exercise of their already-one-sided power when it comes to negotiating employment contracts, removing and restricting benefits, and terminating employment. It is only by organising, by acting together, that working people have a power that is even vaguely comparable to that of their employers. It is only through collective bargaining and collective action that working people can possibly hope to get fair treatment from employers and from conservative governments.

That's why the trades unions exist. They are simply groups of working people, acting together to give themselves some say in the conditions under which they work.

So a trades union for bloggers doesn't even make any sense to me. Bloggers don't work for anyone. They don't negotiate their work contracts because they don't have any. They're not paid, they don't have conditions of employment, they don't have 'benefits' to win or protect and they can't be sacked. So what's it all about? Says Gerry Colby, president of the U.S.A.'s National Writers Union, “Bloggers are on our radar screen right now for approaching and recruiting into the union. We're trying to develop strategies to reach bloggers and encourage them to join."
The NWU has done a lot over the years to help freelance journalists. Journalism is one of those areas of employment which uses a lot of freelance labour and where employers were quick to understand the value of having a low-cost, vulnerable and dependent pool of casual labour. Many other employers have caught on and there is a big push on to reduce permanent staff and replace them with casual labour. My own area – information technology – has created a large body of freelance 'contractors' who live by taking individual, short-term contracts with employers, often through intermediary employment agencies (which take a big slice of the money they earn). The movement to casualise labour is so extensive that governments have had to change the tax laws to prevent these casual professionals from benefiting – at the taxman's cost – by running their own companies and taking the tax breaks. These days, for casual labour, there are almost no tax breaks at all and operating your own company to sell your own labour no longer offsets the financial disadvantages of casual labour in any way.

In this climate of throwing people out of full-time employment and then taxing them as if they were employed full-time, freelancers need the protection that only organisation in trades unions can offer – to set standard contracts, to help negotiate, to provide standard benefits (like healthcare, in those countries like the US where the state doesn't provide it) and to defend people against unfair dismissal, discrimination, harassment, and so on.

Now, some bloggers are essentially freelance journalists. It's a tiny, tiny minority but they are, of course, vocal. There may be only a few hundred of them worldwide, possibly a couple of thousand, but for these guys, membership of the NWU or a local equivalent would make sense. They're trying to sell their services as freelance writers and they should try to get the same union support. For the rest of us – the other 55 million – the idea of a union of bloggers, or of bloggers joining a union, is just nonsense. A bloggers' mutual support society or shopping club - so we can get 10% off our motor insurance or whatever - might make some sense, but not a bloggers' trades union.

Has The World Gone Mad?

It's been a strange week.

In the southern Iraqi town of Basra, fierce giant badgers are roaming the docks. The locals believe they were introduced by the British Army to spread panic but local experts say the animals are indigenous – just not often seen in the city. Giant, killer badgers are odd enough but what is much, much more disturbing is that people could think for a moment that the Brits set them loose on the town. What possible chance do the invading armies have of winning the 'hearts and minds' of the Iraqis if the conquered have such a complete and utter misconception of who their conquerors are?

Meanwhile, a 45-year-old man in Sydney has been on a rampage in a restored tank. He drove his tank at dead of night through several Sydney suburbs apparently targeting mobile phone towers. He managed to take out six mobile phone tower sheds and an electricity sub-station (easily confused with a mobile phone tower in the dark) before his tank stalled as he tried to demolish a seventh. Apart from trying to keep people out of his way, there wasn't much the police could do about it except watch. Now, I hate mobile phone operators as much as the next guy, but to spend all that time and money on buying and restoring a tank just so you can have a little rampage and knock down a few towers seems just a little over the top. Surely it would have been easier to start a socialist party, sweep the country in a landslide election and nationalise them all without compensation? Far less bother and so much more satisfying.

And then there was the guy in China who got married this week. The bride a normal-sized Chinese woman, 1.68m tall. He is the world's tallest man, Bao Xishun, who is 2.36m tall. It seems he's a really nice guy under all that enormousness but was driven to advertise for a wife – probably for all the obvious reasons. Curiously, he only got 20 replies. Now, if it had been the West, they'd have built a 'reality' TV show around it and had thousands of female contestants being slowly and tediously eliminated for months before finally picking some completely unsuitable extravert with outsize breasts to appear in the season finale on Mr. Bao's arm. As it was, there was a quiet courtship and the bride seems like a very nice person. Bao is famous not only for his record-breaking length but also for saving two sick dolphins by using his very long arms to pull plastic rubbish from their stomachs. But the really odd thing is, he's Chinese. Aren't those guys suppose to be small?

Finally (Ha! Finally! I didn't mention the mystery philanthropist in Japan who has left at least $40,000, in envelopes each containing $100, in public toilets around the country. Nor the fact that a member of the pop-group Queen has just finished writing up a PhD thesis he started in 1971 and which was rudely interrupted in 1974 when he took 33 years out to become a worldwide global mega rock guitar hero.) Finally, I should mention that Dr. Mohammed Haneef has at last been charged with 'recklessly providing resources to a terrorist organisation.' Dr. Haneef has been infamously held without charge in Australia for 13 days while being questioned by the police about alleged involvement with a UK terrorist group responsible for recent botched car bomb attacks. The strange thing is that, after all that questioning by Australian and British anti-terrorist police, the charge is that Dr. Haneef 'recklessly' (not intentionally) gave a phone SIM card to the terrorists. Stranger still, this kind of recklessness, under the new anti-terrorism laws (America's finest export to the world) could cost him a further 25 years in gaol. Of course, in law, 'reckless' implies that Dr. Haneef didn't care if the terrorists blew people up. That is, that he was indifferent to the consequences of what he did. The common usage of the word to mean something like 'foolishly unthinking' isn't what he has been charged with. It is quite possible, the charge says, that he could clearly foresee what would be done with the SIM card but he just didn't care. Which is a pretty strange thing to charge him with in itself, don't you think? The anti-terrorist laws have the concept of conspiracy to commit a terrorist offence. So why not use that? Presumably because there is no evidence for it – only evidence of the doctor's indifference.

Beachcombing With Kurt

I was talking to Wifie the other day and I pointed out that the length that hair grows to on different parts of your body is a function of the speed at which it grows and how long (on average) each hair lasts before it falls out. She looked at me in surprise and asked, 'How do you know that?' I just shrugged, and said, 'I dunno. How do I know most things I know?' Meaning, I just pick these things up, mostly from things I have read.

I am, in fact, a vast repository of arcane knowledge. For example, I know that the centre of our galaxy is in the direction of the constellation Saggitarius, that the wavelength of green light is about 500 to 550 nanometres, that the average length of a marriage in the West these days is under ten years, that Groucho Marx once said, 'I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception.', that Karl Marx is buried in Highgate Cemetery, London, and so on and so on. I have no idea where most of it came from. I read a lot of stuff.

However, I noticed myself learning a piece of trivia today. I'm reading A Man Without A Country by Kurt Vonnegut and he mentioned in passing that Marco Polo brought back pasta (to Italy) from the Chinese. This struck me as such a singular fact that I know I will remember it. And this must be how I have learnt so much of what I know – by picking up interesting tidbits from novels, histories, biographies, science books, magazines, even TV shows and films. For example, I'm also reading Master and Man, a collection of short stories by Leo Tolstoy (and, yes, I often have two or three books on the go at once) and I'm discovering all kinds of interesting background about 19th Century Russian society, the care of horses, cobbling, how to navigate a horse-drawn sled in a snow-storm at night, and so on. Some will stick. Some will not. It's hard to tell, at this point, whether I will have retained anything from the experience in a year's time.

But the pasta-from-China thing will stay with me. I'm sure of that. As will the terrible sense of sadness that A Man Without A Country communicates. It's awful to think that Vonnegut was so disillusioned at the end of his life and so ashamed of what his country had become. It makes me want to have been able to comfort him – with something like, 'Don't worry about it. Nothing we become will even remember what America was in a million years' time,' or 'So what? We were just monkeys, playing a bit too roughly maybe. None of it really mattered.' You never know, it might have helped.

Anyway, I plan to keep A Man Without A Country handy and hope that, as I re-read it over the years, something more substantial than facts about pasta will stick to my neurons.

The Most Popular Posting On Earth

Is popularity among your goals, plans and hopes? Well, here is the blog posting that is going to make me famous, the one all my friends will be blogging about in their own relatively unpopular blogs. And I don't need to waste your time dealing with boring topics like sport, Iraq, jobs, work, careers or Microsoft. I don't even need to post a photo. All I need to do is write a couple of empty paragraphs that contain the top 100 most popular tags from Technorati's current listing (each shown in green bold text here). What fun! What entretenimiento! (which is entertainment in Spanish by the way, no need for your school or college Greek on my Weblog!)

Of course the easiest way to be popular on the Web is to talk either about movies, TV and celebrities, or about technology and the Internet. Articles about art and photography, religion and philosophy, science and politics all have their place but if you really want to score big, just mention Apple, Google, MySpace, podcasts, or Linux, or regurgitate any item of tech news you can find about events involving them. The blogsphere clearly devours a daily smorgasbord of culture, current affairs, fashion, style, shopping, music, photos, videos, reviews and sports but it is computers and the Internet that really click a blogger's links.

Perhaps someone should make a movie of the life of a blog reader. He (of course it's a he) would be at home, pursuing his tech hobbies, taking an online quiz perhaps, but plagued by dreams of the supernatural. Concerned about his health and wellness, his diary, or journal if you will, shows an increasing obsession with parties and nightlife, pets and animals as he slips into a personal hell of random romance and relationships. He tries travel, shooting terabytes of video, writing awful love poetry and worse software in exotic places. He neglects his business in the automotive industry, spurns his family and starts work as a survey design specialist for a media and marketing company that gets bought up by YouTube. Yet miscellaneous (misc.) thoughts, like pictures from his favourite multiplayer games, return to haunt him. The mysterious word 'moblog' runs in his head like música in a Spanish film (or la musique in a French one). In the closing scenes, he is saved by writing 'My Life in Food' and other funny books ('Allgemein Noticias' being his most popular and the best example of his quirky, multilingual 'humor'.)

There now, that should do it. I can hardly wait for my readership to go through the roof!

Relatively Simple Book On Relativity

It bothers me sometimes that I don't have a really good grasp of relativity. So much so that I was driven recently to read Simply Einstein: Relativity Demystified by Richard Wolfson. I've got to say it was probably the clearest exposition of special relativity I have ever read but was a real let-down when it came to general relativity.

Interestingly, it was one of those attempts to present the argument for relativity rather than just to blast away at the reader with maths. As such, it was almost just what I wanted. I tend to believe that when somebody tries to explain something and what they're telling me sounds confused or dogmatic, it is usually because they don't really understand their subject well enough to explain it. If I'm right, Wolfson certainly has a good grasp on special relativity since he was as clear as could be. If I have one criticism, it is that he tended to repeat himself an awful lot in his attempt to keep his audience with him. However, having done such a sterling job on special relativity, his treatment of general relativity was pretty sketchy. He seems to think that he can't present the reasoning behind general relativity the way he can with special relativity. Maybe it's true. Maybe there's so much else you need to know to get through the arguments that he knew he couldn't get it all into a slim paperback but, honestly, I'd have been happy to go through it all even if the book had been ten times as thick.

The lack of maths was also a bit frustrating. Don't get me wrong, I'd rather hear arguments in words rather than symbols any day – and I must admit, my facility with maths is verging on pathetic – but there were points where I simply needed it. For example, Maxwell's equations are so important in the argument that I wish he'd put them in (instead of just talking about them for several pages) and I really would have liked to get into the geometry of spacetime, even if it is hard. But all is not lost. I have found I can supplement a well-argued book with articles from Wikipedia – which tend to be very short on explanation and quite heavy on maths. (Check out special relativity, general relativity and the Maxwell equations for example.)

I finished the book with the feeling that I hadn't actually learned anything new (well, maybe a couple of new insights or emphases). This, I suppose, reflects the fact that I've actually read lots of other layman-oriented material on the subject. At least it shows I've understood what I already think I know! It also shows, I suppose, that if I want to learn any more about it, I'm going to have to get into more heavyweight books. Wolfson suggests a few and, having established his credentials as a teacher with me, I'd probably accept his recommendations next time I feel the urge to dig deeper into this.

Meanwhile, if you are looking for a very easy-to-read exposition on what relativity is all about – even if you don't know anything about it and gave up maths as a lost cause years ago – Simply Einstein: Relativity Demystified by Richard Wolfson is the book for you. As for me, I could really do with knowing more about quantum mechanics...

Child Sex Abuse Online is Nothing New

It's interesting that the American military is asking the Australian government to 'waive its authority' in the case of one of their sailors charged with grooming an Australian child for sex over the internet, to send him home and let them deal with it. (Of course, they didn't send David Hicks home – or even charge him with anything for five years – but then, the Australian government didn't actually ask for him back.) And now the media is in a froth (again) over how paedophiles are stalking children in chat rooms, etc.. Apparently, the situation is so bad that the police only have to post a pretend profile of a 14 year-old girl, say, on MySpace (or wherever) and they are immediately bombarded with offers of offers of friendship by Strange Men. Like shooting fish in a barrel.

The pundits are out with their folk psychology suggesting how the feeling of anonymity the internet gives these men encourages them to pursue their child molestation fantasies past the point where they are normally able. They are alarmed that this predation and stalking of children is on the increase. They are shocked that paedophilia seems to be getting more popular as a mental disorder. The ones that make the news are just the tip of a large and growing iceberg. And so on.

But the whole internet stalking thing seems to require a simpler and less dramatic explanation.
Sociology is not for the faint-hearted. In fact any student of human nature is likely to learn lots of things they might have preferred not to know. For instance, I once learned that sexual abuse of girls by their fathers is far more common in situations where the children and adults have to share the same sleeping area. Thus, in the UK, this kind of incest was far more common in the heyday of the industrial revolution when squalid overcrowding was the norm in the big cities. Today, it is more common now in poor societies than in rich and in the poorest segments of rich societies than in the wealthiest. (No coincidence then that the Australian Federal Police and the Army are forming a task force as we speak to go up to the Northern Territory and quash alleged rampant child abuse in Aboriginal communities.) What can you conclude about this except that the amount of temptation and opportunity to commit incestuous child abuse is all that separates the perpetrators from the rest.

In fact, it seems to be the case for child sex abuse in general (typically, we're talking about adult males preying on under-age females here – although little boys also get their share of the unwanted attention). Which is probably why our societies just happen to be organised so as to keep men and girls apart – on the whole – and why it's in those areas of life where men and girls are brought together that the most sex abuse occurs (the home and schools).

So why is it a surprise that the internet – a great big place where adult males and children are all squished together in close proximity – is proving to be such a hotbed of child sex abuse? Suddenly, all these men – whom history has shown need only to get enough temptation to start yielding to it – are surrounded by the little cuties they are normally kept away from. Isn't it obvious that they are going to go on a feeding frenzy?

And there's only one tried and tested remedy for the situation. Do what we do out in the physical world and arrange things online so that the men and the girls (and the boys) are kept apart.

Intelligent Design Defeated By Intelligent Politicians

I see from The Register (and elsewhere) that the UK government has declared its intention to keep Creationism out of the classroom. Specifically, they concluded that “intelligent design” is a religion and should not be taught as science in British schools. To quote them:

The Government is aware that a number of concerns
have been raised in the media and elsewhere as to
whether creationism and intelligent design have a place
in science lessons. The Government is clear that
creationism and intelligent design are not part of the
science National Curriculum programmes of study and
should not be taught as science.

It is so rare that a government ever does anything so sensible and praiseworthy, that I'd like to take this opportunity to express my congratulations to the people who made this decision. 'Intelligent design' is a pernicious, fraudulent and disgraceful attempt to deceive people into accepting magic as legitimate science. It is extremely heartening to see that there are people in the British government who are clever enough and level-headed enough to reject it out of hand.
The decision comes in response to an online petition organised by James Rocks of the Science, Just Science campaign. From the bottom of my nouveau-Australian heart, I'd like to say, “Good on ya, Jim!”

Over in the USA, it's another story. The outcome of the battle there between good sense and religious mania is still moot and the cowardice and, sometimes, the insanity of American politicians has given succour to the forces of madness. The amazing fact is that the USA is a country where three of the Republican presidential candidates do not believe in evolution! (The mind boggles! Do they also think the Earth is flat and the Sun revolves around it? If not, why not?) Perhaps this seems just normal or even reasonable for an American (or maybe most Americans don't even care) but, from the outside looking in, American religiosity just looks crazy – like looking at ranting Muslim leaders condemning 'the great Satan', or the old Soviet regime's attempts to deny the evidence of genetics for ideological reasons. This kind of head-in-the-sand Christianity belongs to an ancient, unenlightened world and to see it flourishing in the USA is somewhat scary.

Yet I'd be happy to leave them to it (except that it will eventually bring down their economy – look at how research has been weakening under George Bush). However, the American churches are funding the lobby groups and the 'research institutes' that are distributing Creationist propaganda around the world. So it's not just their problem anymore. It's everybody's. Which means more governments ought to take a stand, like the UK has just done, and keep these crazy people out of our kids' heads.

War, What Is It Good For?

Today, I offer you a few quotes on the subject of war. Let's start with one of my favourite thinkers.

"He who joyfully marches to music rank and file, has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder." (Albert Einstein)

“What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Petrol is much more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict.” (Simone Weil)

“It is well that war is so terrible - otherwise we would grow too fond of it.” (General Robert E. Lee)

“I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it.” (Jack Handy)

“You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.” (Jeannette Rankin)

“Our first and most pressing problem is how to do away with warfare as a method of solving conflicts between national groups within a society who have different views about how the society is to run.” (Margaret Mead)

“I'm glad I didn't have to fight in any war. I'm glad I didn't have to pick up a gun. I'm glad I didn't get killed or kill somebody. I hope my kids enjoy the same lack of manhood.” (Tom Hanks)

“War is a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.” (Thomas Mann)

“War is delightful to those who have never experienced it.” (Erasmus)

“There never was a good war or a bad peace.” (Benjamin Franklin)

“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.” (Dwight Eisenhower)

Fun, eh? The penultimate word goes to Kevin Rudd. Why he took so many years to come to see what was blindingly obvious to many of us before the invasion of Iraq ever began, is between him and his political ambitions.

“[The war in Iraq] has been the greatest single misfire and miscalculation of Australia's national security interests since Vietnam.” (Kevin Rudd, leader of the Australian Labor Party)

And for the last word – and my all-time favourite war quote – let's go back to Albert Einstein:

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." (Albert Einstein)

Soul vs Brain

How long will it be before we believe that robots have souls?

I can understand where the idea of an immortal soul comes from. A human life is a very strange thing. Snuff it out and the pile of meat and bones it used to animate flops down, useless and empty. To anyone familiar with the sight of people dying - as I suppose ordinary folk were not so very long ago - it must seem as if a vital spark inhabits the body and, once it is gone, leaves behind a hulk, a mere shell. And if this animating spirit can inhabit a body to bring it life, why not suppose it can leave the body and go elsewhere after death?

Of course, there is a better explanation but one that is so much more complicated and difficult to grasp, that most people find it hard to believe. The idea that the brain is an information processing device running a series of programs than manage and control the body is just too hard for many people to accept - especially when you throw in the strange reflexivity of the device that gives us the impression of consciousness, self-awareness and free will. The brain is the most complicated mechanism that we know - orders of magnitude more complicated than we have ever built. It makes our cities and phone networks, supercomputers and the Internet look like child's-play. It works in ways we have only recently begun to understand and much of what it does is still a complete mystery.

Why is the brain-as-computing-device a better explanation for how a person can be alive and then dead than the soul-as-animating-spirit explanation? Simply because there is masses of evidence that a person's life depends on a functioning brain, the mechanisms by which the brain works all operate on the self-same principles as other biological, chemical and electrical systems (so our understanding of the brain ties in precisely with our understanding of chemistry, physics and biology and therefore all the evidence for those disciplines has to be heaped onto the balance in favour), the simulations of brain functions we have begun building in computer software and in electronic devices actually work to produce the results we would expect, and the brain explanation is detailed and accurate enough now for us to build useful devices which interface to the brain to provide sensory input (hearing and eyesight in particular), to allow mental control of other devices, and even to replace bits of damaged brain. The soul explanation, on the other habd, stands isolated and unconnected to anything else we know. It is simply magic, it doesn't help explain anything else, and it has no useful applications.

Yet people still prefer the simplistic, magical, soul explanation. And this in spite of a very common demonstration of how the brain explanation works, which most of us see every day. When we turn on a computer and run a piece of software, the machine becomes 'alive' in a very limited way. It responds, it behaves, it does things. Turn the computer off and it dies. Where did that life go? It was conjured up out of nothing - or so it seems - and then disappears into nowhere. The thing is, a computer is so obviously not alive that most people miss the analogy altogether. They just don't see themselves as the same type of thing at all, being unable to abstract away from the obvious differences to the core similarities.

But that may well change when we have humanoid robots - something which is not too many decades away now. Then the superficial similarities will be overwhelming and the machine will seem so much more alive than a car or a TV or a desktop computer. That's when I think people will begin to suppose robots have souls, that they are truly alive, and that they share with us our supposed divine nature. Perhaps, if the robots themselves are clever enough (but not too clever) they will come to share our simple-minded beliefs.

A New Climate For Australia

Tim Flannery, Professor of Earth Sciences at Macquarie University and Chair of the Copenhagen Climate Council, wrote the editorial in this week's New Scientist (16th June 2007) and I'd like to summarise what he said, just because if it is repeated often enough, our cloth-eared politicians might just hear it.

• Southern and eastern Australia has lost about 20% of its rainfall in the last 50 years.


• The decline in flow of Australian rivers in the same period is about 70% (no, that's not a typo)


• Flannery says we should stop talking about 'the drought' – the worst in a thousand years, some say – because it is a transient phenomenon. Instead, we should start talking about 'the new climate'.


• Although rainfall has increased in the sparsely-populated north-west, the likely cause is Asian haze shifting the monsoon. Politicians wanting to pipe this water south and east, or move people up to where the water is, are therefore gambling on Asia not cleaning up its air pollution.


• The only way for Australia to survive is for it to make far more efficient use of the little water it has left.


• The price of water needs to reflect its value in the new climate – so that industry and individuals do not squander it.


• Australia needs to shift to a new energy economy – and fast. That means shutting down the old water-guzzling, pollution spewing, coal-fired generators and finding clean alternatives.


• Australia needs a new and efficient irrigation system. Fixing up the existing one just isn't good enough.


• The cities need to catch their own water instead of relying on dams which can no longer do the job. Installing water tanks for every house is not only more economical than building new dams but with the river flows falling at three times the rate that rainfall is decreasing, catching and using rainwater in the cities is the only long-term solution.


• Recycling of water and building desalination plants are measures that should be put in place at once (Brisbane, for example, may have only 18 months before it runs dry).


• Finally, Australia should throw its voice and influence behind global efforts to cut carbon emissions. It should ratify the Kyoto treaty (and sod the USA). As one of the early casualties of global warming, instead of dragging its feet, Australia should be out in front, urging on global efforts to save us all from the even worse times that lie ahead.

I don't think Flannery could have put it any more clearly but, just in case you missed the message Australia: We're in trouble. We need to act fast. There's an election coming next year. Vote to save the country. Meanwhile, save water.