Thank You NASA

Just congratulations and thank you to NASA for continuing to inspire the world. Their Phoenix spacecraft touched down in the Martian arctic last night (zulu) after a damned-near perfect flight and descent. The ship has travelled 422 million miles and was right on target! The pictures are starting to come in now but it's the science I'm waiting for.

Part of Phoenix's brief is to drill into the Martian permafrost and study the ice below the surface. There are lots of reasons for this. Partly it's to see what resources might be available to later crewed missions, partly it's to look for signs of ancient life, and partly it's just plain old curiosity. This is the first time we've been so far north on Mars (68 degrees) - talk about terra incognita!

So, thanks guys. Outstanding work! And I hope the rest of the mission goes as smoothly.

Thou Shalt Not Suffer A Herbalist To Live

Does US Presidential candidate John McCain believe in witches, I wonder?

I ask because on Tuesday night, local time, a mob rampaged around a district in Kenya with a list of suspected witches burning down their houses. They burnt 30 houses in all, killing 11 women in total, most of them between 70 and 90 years old. And it got me thinking.

It's always shocking to me when people let their fantastic beliefs get so out of hand that they start killing people. It must have been even more shocking when Christians were doing the same thing some years ago in Europe and the US. (The last execution of a witch that I know of in Europe was in 1738 when two German women were executed. However, the last bit of witch-hunting I know of in the West was December 1999, when a student in Oklahoma, USA was suspended from school accused of casting spells. Of course, it still goes on in Africa and the Middle East – but then, what doesn't?)

So back to my question. If John McCain is elected president, can we expect a more vigorous clamp-down on witchcraft in the home of the brave? I ask because John McCain – one of the saner Republican politicians as far as I can tell - is a Baptist.

This means, for instance, that he believes, “The Scriptures, consisting of the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments, are the infallible Word of God. They were written by holy people of God inspired by the Holy Spirit and have supreme authority in all matters of faith and conduct.” (This quotation is from the Baptist credo as approved by their 1979 Assembly, amended to gender inclusive language following 2002 and 2003 Assemblies.) And therefore, this means he must follow the injunction in Exodus 22:18, namely, 'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.'

I've mentioned some of the more ludicrous passages from the Bible before, so I won't dwell on how screwed up you'd have to be to believe this nonsense. Let me instead use their creation myth as an example. Since McCain believes that Genesis is “the infallible Word of God”, he therefore, I suppose, believes what Creationists believe – that the world was made by a magical being sometime around six thousand years ago. Human beings were made then, along with all the animals, all the plants, our planet, in fact, everything. Fair enough. Lots of loonies believe such things. However, consider this, McCain is also an advocate of reducing carbon emissions to help mitigate human-induced climate change. How does he square this with the fact that most of the evidence for climate change depends very heavily on the assumption that the Earth is rather more than 6,000 years old? I can't imagine. Even the last ice-age – something extremely recent in geological terms – ended 13,000 years ago. For Pete's sake, the original settlement of his own continent happened more than seven thousand years before McCain believes the world was created!

So, if a man like this, steeped in magical fantasies, who regularly talks to invisible beings (I don't know if they talk back to him), who can think ten contradictory things before breakfast, were to become head of state of the United States of America, might he not feel it is his duty to persecute witches? It seems quite plausible that a man with such beliefs might do any crazy thing.

Incidentally, there is an interesting article by Alexei Kondratiev on the Proteus Library site suggesting Exodus 22:18 was mistranslated and that it is 'herbalists' not witches who are the bad guys that God wants us to persecute. Wow, I think if I was an American herbalist, I would definitely vote for the other guy!

What is going on at Blogger?

I'm getting pretty fed up with Blogger. It has been nothing but trouble in the past week or so.

One of the big problems is in the page layout code. I can't change the layout on my pages and I can't add new page elements. Irritatingly, the error message is simply 'errors on page'! Not exactly user friendy! Blogger's 'Help Centre' is a morass. There is almost no chance of finding a fix there. I found two other people who had reported an identical error - but that was back in 2007 and no-one had posted a fix. Someone who had posted a similar error got a reply saying stop using Internet Explorer and change to Firefox. So I tried this and, with Firefox I couldn't even log on to my blog admin page. This time the error message was an alphanumeric string of about ten random characters! Gee, thanks, Blogger.

The other big problem is that AdSense - Google's advert placement scheme - keeps telling me it can't 'crawl' my blog pages because it has been denied access. This means no revenue! The AdSense help pages explain how to adjust my settings to make it work - but only for a hosted domain of my own, not for Blogger or any other hosted blog site. Wonderful!

I've had good service from Blogger for almost two years now and I'm reluctant to switch - but this is becoming so frustrating that I may have to. Other people I know seem to prefer Wordpress - and perhaps I can see why now.

There's More To Life Than You Can Imagine

David Attenborough is someone I admire immensely. I saw an episode of his latest series Life in Cold Blood the other day and I was impressed all over again by the incredible complexity, diversity and beauty of Life. It's enough to make you feel sorry for those poor people who believe in gods.

There was a frog in the episode. The male, who looks about a quarter of the size of the female, is too small to get his arms around his mate's body, so he can't hang on while they have sex. So the little guy exudes glue from his belly and sticks himself to the female's back! What's more, these frogs live in a hostile, arid environment and they need to be underground sheltering from the heat rather than frolicking on the surface like moonstruck calves. So the female frog digs a burrow, with her prospective mate still glued to her back, and they mate underground.

Now this isn't the weirdest thing in Nature. Not by a long chalk. But who could have imagined such a way of life? Not us, for sure. Our imaginations are just not that good. Which is why I feel sorry for the poor god worshippers. Since none of their beliefs about the universe are real, they are limited to what people can imagine. Worse, they are limited to what people once imagined at the time their sacred texts were written, and are now fixed (barring a little embellishment by theologians from time to time). Of course, the old fantasists certainly had their moments – the world on the back of a turtle, twenty-seven virgins for every martyr, the creation of the world happening just a few thousand years ago – but mostly it is all stultifyingly dull and simplistic. Childish, actually.

When you compare these ancient yarns with what Nature shows us, there really is no comparison. Consider the fractal beauty of a tree, the bizarre but elegant 'standard model' of quantum mechanics, the existence of shrimps that pick up grains of sand and drop them into holes in their heads to use as ballast, the grand, swirling ballet of stars, dust and gasses in a galaxy, the deep mystery of electromagnetic fields, the way the brain uses cilia in a spiral cochlear to sense different frequencies of sound, the many kinds of blood chemistry that exist for the transport of oxygen around so many different kinds of bodies, the existence of quarks, the sheer number of things – atoms, stars, brain cells, species of nematode worm – and the incredible sizes of things – the distance from here to the Oort cloud, the spacing of molecules in a quartz crystal, the 'walls' of galaxies that span the universe, the nano-fibres on a butterfly's wing that give it such iridescent colours.

It is all so breathtaking and astonishing and none of it, none of it at all, was dreamed of by the people who fantasised about gods instead of looking with open minds and receptive hearts at what is really out there in the world.

And the little guys in the picture above are pine processionary caterpillars - 16 of them - photographed by me this morning. They walk around in nose-to-tail processions like this at this time of year, looking for a good place to pupate. Now which religious text ever imagined anything like that!

So now I'm a writer. Maybe.

Thing is, I write all the time. I write this stuff. I write stories. I write books. Trouble is, I'm a disillusioned, cynical writer who feels that getting anything published is such a lottery that it isn't worth even trying. I don't buy lottery tickets, or scratchies, or raffle tickets, and I don't submit my writing to publishers for the same reason - the odds are too long.

So how come I'm here at a 'writer's retreat' on beautiful Bribie Island off the Queensland coast? Well, it's a long story - which I won't bore you with - but, basically, I won the lottery (a writing competition) and the prize was this.

And for the first time in my life I have spoken to a publisher, a very charming lady called Bernadette Foley at Orbit (the speculative fiction bit of Hatchette Livre in Australia). Not only did I speak to her but we spoke about my latest manuscript - a novel called Time and Tyde - which she'd read! What's more, she had read it carefully and said such flattering things about it that she's achieved the unthinkable and given me hope. Of course, I may live to curse her for toying with my emotions like this, but right now I'm thinking 'Well, maybe I should give this publication thing another go.'

And what does that mean in practical terms? Have I rushed out and stuffed a dozen envelopes with short stories and novels and cast them on the winds of chance? Not a bit of it. What I've actually done is to start another blog (how many is that now?) This one, called 'Graham Storrs' (that's me, by the way) is intended to chart my progress as I try to get Time and Tyde published and to talk about my other literary endeavours.

It seems us writers need to market ourselves. Our names must become a brand. Our work must generate 'buzz'. So I thought I'd start with a bit of a blog, just to get the ball rolling. Later - probably if the book is published - I might start a whole website. But let's not go mad, eh?

So, if you'd like to follow the ups and downs of my budding literary career, you might like to click your way across to Graham Storrs: The Blog and scratch your itch. And, for the dedicated reader of Waving Not Drowning (that's this blog for those who don't read banners) don't worry. All the juicy stuff in my life will still be here.

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...