Hard Times Ahead

It's hard not to panic. Since I retired, ten months ago, my superannuation fund has fallen in value by 40%, the cost of living has gone up by 5%, and 'the economy' has become the number one item on the evening news night after night.

Of course, as my financial adviser keeps reminding me, the stock market goes up and down all the time. When it's low, the worst thing you can do is sell (unless you think it's going to go a lot lower.) The trouble is, traders seem to be selling as fast as they can punch the 'sell' buttons on their terminals – selling banks and buying commodities, then selling commodities and buying banks, then selling banks again, with the net value of the market dropping just a little more with each trade.

Economists don't have a clue. If there is one thing the past year has shown us, it is that current economic theory is a pile of horse's dung. Economists are idiots, devising ever more subtle formulae to estimate the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. And it is economists who came up with the brilliant risk management formulae – all that fun with Monte Carlo simulations they all had! - that proved that black really is just another way of describing white and that lending money to people who can't afford to pay it back is just fine, no problem at all.

Bankers are also idiots. Faced with complex formulae they can't begin to understand, they have staked the fortunes of the world on their trust of economists, and have turned investors' money into so much toxic debt that their very institutions are at risk – and, if this goes on much longer, probably capitalism itself. Not that that will stop them taking their huge salaries, bonuses, and, when they've finally killed the golden goose, their pay-offs. Which means investors in banks must be idiots too for letting idiots like that handle their investment.

Governments, of course, are idiots. For years they have deregulated financial markets, they have created 'business environments' in which capital can flow more easily, where risky investment can be freely exercised, all in the name of helping 'the market ' create wealth. The fact is that most politicians are just loud-mouthed arseholes off the street – or the idiot sons of rich families – and they have even less understanding of how market economies work than the bankers or the economists. Yet, they've listened to their economic advisors and the industry lobbyists and to every other bullshit merchant who'd like the government to help them get rich, and they've set up a legal framework that allows – nay, encourages! - the kind of idiotic speculation the banks have been blindly indulging in for so long. Now these same governments are busy splashing around trillions of dollars of our money, shoring up the very system that has so patently let us down. And when they've shovelled enough of our money into the holes, so that the world's wealth is no longer running through them like fantasies through an economist's head, when we've reached a point where enough businesses have failed and enough people are out of work and enough mortgages have been foreclosed and enough pensioners have died of hypothermia for want of a few bucks for the fuel bill, what then? Won't all that money simply mean money is worth less? Will we be looking at ten, fifteen, twenty-percent inflation, just when everyone is so poor that it will really, really hurt? Won't these same heroic governments who are keeping idiot bank CEO's in their multimillion-dollar jobs today be saying they have to cut education, healthcare, pensions, and the minimum wage tomorrow because, gee, we spent all your money saving the banks?

Well, I'm thinking of buying a goat and a few chickens, planting a vegetable patch and setting up some solar panels – before I'm too poor to do any of this.

Has John McCain Stopped Abusing His Wife?

Here's something very, very strange. Over on the Huffington Post is a piece about a Baptist Minister, Marty Parrish, who stood up at a 'town hall' meeting and asked McCain whether he had actually called his wife a 'c**t' as alleged in Cliff Schecter's book, The Real McCain. Schecter alleges that in 1992, McCain angrily called his wife a "trollop" and a "c**t" in front of aides and reporters. The quote from Schecter's book, which is to be released next month, can be seen on The Raw Story e-zine and goes like this:

Three reporters from Arizona, on the condition of anonymity, also let me in on another incident involving McCain's intemperateness. In his 1992 Senate bid, McCain was joined on the campaign trail by his wife, Cindy, as well as campaign aide Doug Cole and consultant Wes Gullett. At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain's hair and said, "You're getting a little thin up there." McCain's face reddened, and he responded, "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt." McCain's excuse was that it had been a long day. If elected president of the United States, McCain would have many long days.

In the book, Schecter is making the case that McCain has a really, really bad temper - an anger management problem, you might say - and that voters would be unwise to put such an unstable personality into the Oval Office.

If this is true, I'd be just as worried about what it says about McCain's attitude to women as I would be about his twitchy finger on the nuclear button. Women who wear makeup are 'trollops' it seems. His own wife is a 'c**t' in his eyes, it seems. (Does that go for Palin, too?) Sounds more like the Taliban than an American politician.

If you're of the Chistian loony persuasion yourself, you might like to wonder what the wedding vows mean to a man who would humiliate his wife in public like that (love? honour? cherish?) or how much charity there is in a man who is well-known for this kind of vitriolic, bullying outburst against subordinates. And, of course, there is the question: if he's like this in public, what's he like in private?

According to Parrish, it is such questions about McCain's mental stability and character that prompted him to stand up and ask the question that no newspaper or TV channel dare ask. I'm sure the McCain publicity machine (as vicious and cynical a group of people as I have ever come across) will paint this gutsy Baptist Minister as a deranged trouble-maker. For all I know, he is. But why is nobody else asking the question? What has happened to the American media during this campaign?

On Crap

I'm a bit of a linguist, you know. Alright, I never learned to speak more than a few words of French and German and I have an awful lot of bother with all that grammar stuff, but when it comes to idle and largely uninformed speculation about words, I can't be beaten!

Take the word 'crap'.

Now, obviously, this is a very recent word, being derived from the famous Thomas Crapper, inventor of the flush toilet.

WRONG! The word is very old indeed and, in fact, has Latin roots (crappa, meaning chaff). In Old English, crappe was chaff and other rubbish trodden underfoot in a barn and eventually, in the Middle Ages, crap became a generic term for things discarded. And then it went out of use – in England. Fortunately for Hollywood, although the Brits had stopped using the word by 1600, the founders of what became the Good Ol' U.S. of A. kept it going. In fact, it became so popular over there that approximately 15% of all American writing these days is the word 'crap' or one of its derivatives.

On the Web, of course, 95% of everything your read is crap, as are most statistics, economic theories, conservative policies, and reality TV shows. Only the world's great religious texts, however, are 100% pure crap.

(The picture above is of Lauren Conrad, reality TV personality, who just announced a three-book deal with Harper. Now that makes me feel really crap.)

A Pig With Lipstick On

Maybe I shouldn't get so upset about American politics. I mean, I'm living in Australia. It's not my problem, right?

Wrong. The half-wit they have as President at the moment has led the whole world into recession after screwing up the USA's economy about as badly as is humanly possible. He has stalled and delayed everyone's attempts to tackle climate change, leaving us teetering on the edge of irreversible climate damage. And he has dragged the West into an inexcusable invasion of Iraq, killing tens of thousands, ramping up global terrorism, and encouraging countries like Iran and North Korea to push ahead with nuclear deterrence.

Of course, the half-wit is on his way out. Praise be to the twenty-second amendment!

Yet look at who is lining up to replace him: John McCain and Sarah Palin. McCain might not be quite as loony, or as stupid as Bush but he's still loony and stupid and has been a firm supporter of Bush for many years as he climbed the slippery pole to political power. As for Sarah Palin, she seems to be even more loony and even more stupid than Bush himself. Her political views are to the right of Genghis Khan's. Her personal morality is suspect to say the least. (Did she fake a pregnancy - i.e. lie to everybody who voted for her - to cover her teenage daughter's indiscretions?) And there is a distinct possibility that she has committed a gross abuse of power by allegedly pressuring Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan to fire her sister's husband before sacking him when he wouldn't. (I suppose Monegan is lucky she didn't shoot him. She loves firing guns and killing things. She thinks it's fun.)

These people are not just ignorant (did you know that Palin has never travelled outside the USA except to visit US troops in Kuwait?) , they are not just religious bigots (do you know that McCain is a Baptist? that Palin wants Creationism taught in schools as if it was science?), they are not just cruel and uncaring (do you know Palin does not support abortion for any reason whatsoever?) they are not just cynical (look at all that deliberate misunderstanding of Obama's 'pig with lipstick' comment), they are completely and utterly sordid in the way they clamour for and abuse political power.

Yet there is a good chance the American people will elect them, a good chance this pair of sordid, stupid, uncaring, unpleasant, ignorant bigots will be running the USA in a few months.

How low can a country sink?

Is Sarah Palin a Liar?

Barak Obama is right to say that it is wrong to politicise his opponents' family problems. That kind of politics is about as low as it gets. However, I think he's missing the bigger picture here. Sarah Palin's 17-year-old, unmarried daughter is five months pregnant and that's a shame and, frankly, who cares? She's probably a very screwed up young woman - what with a mother who is in politics and who has such nasty, Christian conservative opinions. It should, of course, be a lesson to Sarah Palin that her approach to reducing the number of teenage pregnancies - encouraging abstinence, not teaching children about sex, and keeping contraceptives away from them - just doesn't work. However, we'll let that one pass too.

The real issues is whether Palin pretended to be pregnant with what may or may not be her fourth child, to disguise the fact that it was actually her daughter's baby. This piece of information is one that is of crucial importance to the American voters. If her last pregnancy was a fake, then Sarah Palin is a liar and a deceitful person. She is someone who believes that fraud is acceptable. She is someone who believes that to avoid embarrassing herself and her family, she is justified in deceiving her constituents.

Politicians who preach honesty and integrity deserve to be dragged through the streets and pelted with rotten fruit - or the tabloid press equivalent - if they don't hold themselves to the same standards they want to impose on everyone else.

With any luck, running as John McCain's VP will sink her career and also McCain's.

McCain Makes A Hideous Mistake

I've mentioned before what an idiot presidential wannabe John McCain is. Well this week he rose to new heights of folly by choosing Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running-mate.

What makes a man - even a man who can't think straight - choose a woman who is known as 'the barracuda' to help him run the country? Why, when America is reeling from the right wing fundamentalism of George Bush Jr., would he think that picking a tough-minded, right-wing ideologue would help him win the hearts and minds of the voters. This woman has a lifetime membership of the National Rifle Association for Heaven's sake! She likes shooting things - living things! She thinks it's fun to kill animals! (Not foetuses though - she's a rabid anti-abortionist, of course. But I imagine she approves of the death penalty so she won't mind killing grown-ups. She definitely thinks the Bush Administration is being to soft on polar bears by declaring them a protected species and would prefer the great hairy things not to be around eating fish and hanging out while her friends the oil companies ravage Alaska.)

Let's face it, McCain is no spring chicken. If anyone is dumb enough to vote for McCain, this woman could become President!

Can I make a plea to all my American readers: for your own sakes, don't vote McCain. Now that he has this Palin creature gnashing and slavering at his heels, his presidency could turn into something even worse than Bush's. And if you don't believe me, talk to anyone who was alive in the UK during the reign of Margaret Thatcher. It was a dark, dark time and I still shudder at the memory of it. Thatcher was a vicious thug in a skirt, a monster that wore lipstick. She crushed civil liberties wherever she found them. She trampled on democratic rights. She terrorised and politicised the civil service. She took the country to war. She was the worst Prime Minister ever to blight the British Isles.


















Don't, please don't, put a woman like that in a position where she might become President of the USA. You will regret it.

Telstra Wastes Another Day of My Life

I see that Comcast, over in the States, has just put a cap on its broadband packages of 250 Gb/mo. SprintWireless, however, still has its service uncapped for $50/mo. This puts into grim perspective the awful day I had yesterday but to appreciate it, you'll need a bit of background.

I'm a Telstra NextG wireless broadband customer - by necessity - there are no other broadband suppliers in my area at all. Since the NextG service stared, 2 years or so ago, Testra has insisted that each customer has a separate account, a separate modem, and fixed the technology so that you could not use a router. This made the service hugely expensive. For a 1Gb/mo. download limit, Wifie and I paid $80 each (yes, each, plus $250 each for our modems). Then, a couple of weeks ago, Telstra announced that it would actually supply a router with the service so families could have a single account and share it - welcome to the 21st Century, Telstra!

Since Wifie and I also have a Telstra NextG mobile phone and a Telstra land-line (don't get me started on that!!) - as I said, Telstra is our only supplier out here - we decided that, with the router now available, we could bundle our services and save money. In fact, since we only needed one NextG broadband account, we could now get the absolute top-of-the-range package which has a 3Gb/mo download limit and costs a mere $109/mo.. So we ordered the router and set up the bundle. Rather than wire the house for ethernet, I also bought a wireless PCI card for my desktop machine (Wifie is a Mac user so already has bluetooth and WiFi as standard.)

Yesterday was the day when all the equipment arrived and we could plug it all together. (I won't dwell on Telstra's cock-up with the parcel delivery, or the online parts shop I first ordered the Wi-Fi card from which lied about the part's availability.)

It took seven hours work yesterday and another hour this morning to get it working. Now that may just be because we're both stupid (which we're not) or because we have non-standard equipment (which we don't) or because the network we were building is vastly complicated (which it isn't) or because I didn't have the necessary 25 years in the IT business needed to sort out the problems (oh, hang on a minute, I do have 25 years in the IT business).

The real reasons it took so long were:

1. The Telstra router came with no instructions beyond saying you should follow the instructions in the software wizard on the accompanying CD. The wizard, of course, helps you cater with the simplest possible case then dumps you. Naturally, it has no trouble-shooting guidance for when things go wrong.
2. Telstra's phone support covers only one computer attached to the router. To anyone except a marketing executive, this might seem ridiculous as the only point of having a router is to make a network consisting of multiple computers. Still, I suppose it saves Telstra money, so that's OK.
   
3. The Telstra software was (as always) poorly designed and completely unhelpful. Still, it has nice graphics and zoomy logo things. As I ran through the set-up sequences over and over again, I couldn't help thinking that you can never have enough of seeing a company that is currently shafting you, advertise itself and its products over and over and over again, at the expense of your time and frayed nerves.
   
4. The Telstra business systems that should have made all this easy, were a mess. (I spoke to four different branches of their software support group before I got the one that knew anything about doing an installation on a Macintosh - and I only got to them because I shouted at the poor guy in the third group and got him to take ownership of the problem of routing me to the right support group. Then it turned out that the sales group which set up our username and password had stuffed up and I had to be guided through a little secret technical magic to reprogram the router!)
5. The fifth problem wasn't Telstra at all - which was a refreshing change. The software that came with my Chinese PCI card didn't work properly and came with no instructions whatsoever. Like all driver software, it is designed for propeller-headed geeks with nothing better to do than to learn hexadecimal codes and stick their noses close to hot chips. I tried the Wi-Fi card in three different PCI slots, reinstalling the driver each time I moved it, before I found one that it liked. Since I did most of this sitting on the floor, I had the additional joy of having my 4 month-old puppy, Bertie, slobbering excitedly in my ear and attempting to jump into the innards of my computer.
   

But that's all behind us now. The router works, our two computers are talking wirelessly to the Internet and all's well with the world.

Except that all we get for all this effort and stress is a low-speed broadband service with a 3Gb download limit. Gee, thanks, Telstra.

When is Comcast coming to Australia?

We don't play cricket with Zimbabwe because...?

Never mind that they throw dissidents in prison. Never mind that they routinely use torture and execution. Never mind the corruption, the oppression, the people who were thrown out of their homes to make way for Olympic venues. Let the games begin!

Of course we all know that China is a dictatorship. We all know that human rights there are allowed or disallowed at the whim of the ruling politicians. We all know that the oppressive regime in China sees the 2008 Olympic Games as a massive propaganda exercise to to give itself credibility and respect in the world's eyes and to bolster its progressive image at home.

But we will suspend our revulsion because sport is such a great way of bringing people together. It breaks down national boundaries, it does away with prejudice and it helps us join hands in peaceful pursuits. Whatever the cost of our tolerance is to oppressed people in China, whatever the value of our support is to the ruling party there (and the value in dollars alone is just staggering), we know in our hearts that engaging China in such global events will, in the long-run help to bring them into the fold, to integrate them with their neighbours (oops, almost mentioned Tibet) and to hasten the rise of democratic institutions in the biggest dictatorship the world has ever known.

After all, it worked so well with Hitler and the Third Reich back in 1936.

Atheists of the World, Unite!

Hey! Guess what I've found. An Atheist Blogroll.

Cool, eh? Now I can support a poor, oppressed minority - people who are not insane - by adding the blogroll to my blog. You'll find it down at the bottom on the left. To quote the blogroll's organiser;

The Atheist blogroll is a community building service provided free of charge to Atheist bloggers from around the world. If you would like to join, visit Mojoey at Deep Thoughts for more information.

At the time of writing, the atheist blogroll is a fairly new idea but has already accumulated about 750 names. The curious thing to me is that it has any names at all. Being an atheist is just being a normal, sane person. So why would anyone want to declare their normality? Well, because the crazy people number in the hundreds of millions - possibly billions - they're highly organised, extremely wealthy, vociferous, influential and powerful. (Scary, huh?) When one finds a few brave souls willing to stand up to all this organised madness and say, 'Yo! I at least am not one of the fruit-loop majority,' one just feels the need to offer them one's solidarity.

So, all you atheist bloggers out there, I want to see your names down on this blogroll. Your fellow sane people need your support - and, let's face it, come the next Inquisition, you might need theirs.

Snow!

It's snowing!

Big white flakes of wonderful snow are drifting down out of the sky. It is something I haven't seen for twelve years, not since I lived in Switzerland.

Snow isn't completely unknown in Australia - they even have skiing here on the high ground around Canberra - but it's quite rare in Queensland. In fact, it's only because I live at 1,000 metres in the most southerly part of this enormous state that there is any chance of it at all. Even then, snow is a moderately rare phenomenon and can't be relied on most years.

Yet here it is, drifting down among the gum trees, settling on the backs of disgruntled lorikeets and cockatoos, falling on my little cactus garden. It's a miracle. No, a blessing. A kindness. Yet another way to experience the beauty of this amazing place in which I live.

I suppose I ought to stop gushing and get back to work but Oh Lord! it was wonderful.

Can You Drown In Yoghurt?

You could knock me over with a keyboard! I made it to two hundred blog postings! And you, my probably first-time visitor, are looking at number two hundred. So, as I always do in my 200^th blog posting, I'll take the opportunity to reflect on blogging and the nature of life in the tag clouds.

I started this, you may recall, because I wanted my voice to be out there with the tens of millions of others who take part in this pandemonium we call the blogsphere. I'd read a lot of stuff and wise old heads at the time said give it a couple of years – about 200 posts – to gather a reasonable-sized readership. Well, here I am and where are you?

Actually, I'm not complaining. I get about 5 unique visits a day to Waving Not Drowning. That's 150 unique visitors per month, mostly from Australia and the USA but also the UK, Canada and India, as well as places I didn't expect, like Greece, Poland, Moldova, Romania and the Philippines. As far as I can tell, about a third of my visitors each month are regulars and two thirds are drop-ins. It's not roaring success by any means but it's a great feeling to think there are people all over the world who click by to read what I have to say about life. It's an even better feeling to know that there are some who keep coming back for more. (Thank you, all of you – especially those of you who have been interested enough to leave comments.)

It's also a source of guilt. In the past six months I've been letting the blogging slip. I post once or twice a week now (not quite the two or three times of my first year) but there have been weeks on end recently when I didn't post at all. All I can say is I had a lot of stuff to do and a big change of lifestyle to get used to but I'm getting back into the swing of it and I hope to do better in the coming months. When I was posting at a rate of 15 to 20 posts a month, I was getting 50 to 100 visitors every day. This was quite exciting but it's hard work finding something different and worth saying every other day. I don't really see the point in just blathering. If I haven't got something interesting to write about, I'd rather keep my fingers to myself.

In the course of my 200 postings on Waving Not Drowning, other blogs of mine have come and gone. I've had music blogs and writing blogs and user interface design blogs but I've hardly used them and have shut them all down except the UI design one (which I haven't posted to in ages.) I have, however, just started up a new blog about writing (which you might care to go and look at) and it seems to be more successful than the others. (More successful than this one, too, according to Google and Technorati – both of which rate it as twice as popular and 'authoritative', even though it gets only two thirds the traffic – go figure.)

In all I'm getting 350 visits per month for my three blogs (about 11 per day). It may seem unambitious of me, in a world where popular blogs get thousands of visits per day, but I'm very happy with what I've got. Fewer might make me wonder what the point of it all was but many more and I would start feeling pressured. I can easily imagine 11 people stopping by the house each day for a chat. I'd be hiding behind the sofa if there were a thousand queueing up the drive. I'm also pretty pleased with the standard of the comments I get. I've had a few excellent arguments over the years.

So here's to the next 200 posts, to the many great bloggers who have inspired me to join in, and to all my readers, without whom I would be talking to myself (you don't think I'd shut up, do you?)

Oh yes, and the title of this post. One of the many interesting stats I get from Google Analytics to help me interpret traffic to my blogs, is a list of the Google queries that have led people to come here. And, yes, one of them was, 'Can you drown in yoghurt?' I certainly hope my blog helped with that.

The Saddest Olympic Games Yet

Don't you think it's sad that the Chinese feel they have to take dog off the menu in Beijing during the Olympics? I mean, for heaven's sake, this is your country, people. If squeamish American tourists don't like what you eat, tell them to stay at home and eat Macdonalds.

Sadder by far, however, is the fact that so many people will be going to China to watch a bunch of people throwing things and jumping things and running round and round. It will inject plenty of money into the Chinese economy of course (maybe the organisers will celebrate afterwards with a nice dog dinner) but of all the things to spend your money, time and energies on, trailing out to Beijing to watch sports seems like just about the most futile I can imagine. (All the people trailing out to Sydney for World Youth Day has it beat but WYD is so exceptionally stupid it isn't a fair comparison.)

Even sadder than all this, however, is the fact that, while the Chinese want to avoid offending Westerners by keeping dogs off our dinner plates, they don't seem to feel the need to release political prisoners, to stop torturing people, to leave Tibet alone, or to allow free and fair elections - even for the two weeks while we're in town. They obviously understand that such things don't offend us anywhere near as much as fried pets.

Peaking into the Future

If you want to know why petrol costs so much these days, you need look no further than the phenomenon of 'Peak Oil'. This refers to the point in time when we are extracting the maximum amount of oil per day from the world's reserves. And that point in time appears to be with us. In 2005 we reached a rate of extraction of 74 million barrels a day and we have stayed there ever since. Oil fields are running dry and new discoveries are not keeping pace. Soon, the rate of extraction will start to fall. In anticipation of how valuable that will make oil, the price has begun to rise. It will go on rising as the oil runs out and demand stays more-or-less level. (Demand is already well above the extraction rate at 88 million barrels a day - the difference being met by liquified natural gas - until we hit 'peak gas' too. It has been increasing exponentially until now but rising prices are likely to counteract that trend.)

Since agriculture depends heavily on oil and gas to fuel equipment and to produce fertilizers, we are almost certainly approaching 'peak wheat' - the point where we just can't afford (or even find) the energy to grow more food. It is no coincidence that there is a world food shortage happening just after we hit 'peak oil'. The price of oil is part of the cause but the frantic (and half-arsed) attempts by the US government and others to reduce oil imports by turning farmland all over the world from food production to the production of biofuels is the rest.

And there is little anybody can do about it. Your vote counts for nothing when every candidate on offer supports stupid, ill-conceived, industry-pandering plans that amount to 'business as usual'. Your personal efforts to reduce your oil consuption will come to nothing if you must commute to work because of the way cities are laid out (everything in the middle and all the affordable housing way, way out on the fringes) and you can't switch to public transport because there isn't any, and using a hybrid car is actually no more fuel efficient on average than using a deisel car. Your personal efforts to reduce energy consumption in your home might be worthwhile, if you don't mind spending a lot of money on it, but this only helps the oil crisis if your local power station is oil-fired.

In the end, it is down to our politicians to force industry to make the changes we desperately need. And they are either too stupid (such changes would require them actually understanding the science and economics involved) too greedy (most politicians are in the pay of big business one way or another and they all want those chairmanships and consultancies when their political career is over) or too selfish (they would rather hang on to power than do anything good or worthwhile that might make them unpopular) to do what must be done.

Perhaps what has really happened is that we have reached 'peak intelligence' - the point at which the society we have made has become too complicated and difficult for our limited little brains to manage. It certainly looks that way.

A New Look For WND

What do you think? I haven't personalised it much yet but I like the look. The columns are a little wider than the old layout, all the navigation and fun stuff is now on the left (the jukebox is still at the bottom though) and I've rearranged the order of things. You will also notice the absence of ads. What the heck. They were making more money for Google than for me and only cluttered up the place.

(Anyone who has had any experience with Adsense (Google's ad placement service) will also know what fun it is trying to keep scumbag advertisers off your pages. Every time I mention 'evolution' or 'god' in a blog, the ads are taken over by loony religious organisations with more money than they should have, trying to sell their insane ideas to a readership I'm sure would only find their rantings embarrassing. To stop them you have to create lists of advertisers that you want to block. Very tedious. It's far better that they just have no opportunity at all.)

I'd like to replace the background graphic (one day when I feel up to working out how to do it) with something a bit more meaningful but it will do for now, I think.

For those among my regular readers who hate change and can't stand surprises (you know who you are) I can only offer my sincerest apologies and hope that you will take this opportunity to flame me in the Comments section.

Magical Thinking

An uncharacteristically brief posting from me today I'm afraid, but I wanted to tell everyone about a great article I just read. It is called Magical Thinking and it is by Matthew Hutson. (Actually, the wrap-up on the last page is a bit lame but the rest is excellent.)

One of the pleasing things about modern psychology is that it seems to have taken on board the task of explaining superstitious and religious thinking. It's about time! Hutson's article does an excellent job of summarising current thinking on the subject.

Sadly, he offers no cure :-(

As Cute As Three Roos

Getting a new puppy is not unlike having a baby. Our new puppy (pictured below) arrived on Thursday, age: 8 weeks, weight: almost nothing, sex: male, breed: Airedale, name: to be decided - but probably 'Bertie'. It was a difficult labour.

We set off on the Wednesday and drove to Brisbane, stopping first at Warwick and then Toowong to buy a bed, cushion, bowls, chews, toys, food, harness, lead, etc., etc., etc.. We stayed overnight with Daughter at her new house. Since we'd left our Brisbane street map at home and were too cheap to fork out $25 for a new one, we wandered around the northern Brisbane suburbs, lost, for the first part of the evening. Then, in desperation, we used our 3G phone to call up maps and directions over the Internet. These were tiny to the point of farce but they were all we had and, I confess, they got us there in the end.

On Thursday morning we headed off to Chermside Shopping World (or somesuch name) to see what folks in the big city can buy these days and to wait for puppy's plane to get in. It's a mall about the size of a small town but our 3G maps led us off into strange and unwanted places where we spent the morning wandering and cursing. Finally, when the cursing had clearly failed, we decided we'd buy a map and hang the expense. Fortunately, when Wifie told The Nice Man In The Garage our predicament, he pointed out that we were just a couple of kilometers away from our goal on the road we'd just turned off.

It was at the mall that we got a call from Melbourne to say that the people dispatching the puppy by air freight had missed the planned flight and had booked him onto a later one. This was a catastrophe since the delay meant we would be picking up the dog in the north of Brisbane in the late afternoon and would have to cross the whole city in the rush-hour to get onto our southbound road home. And so it was. Puppy arrived on time in a gigantic, lime-green box and we cooed and fussed the dazed-looking creature for a while and then set off. (I'll skip the part about driving around the airport for the un-signposted freight depot and Wifie having to run into the domestic terminal to ask someone.)

It took us over two hours to cross Brisbane and get onto our homeward-bound motorway and then another three to get home from there (including a wayside stop to eat a Macdonald's cardboardburger as quickly as we could.) During this time, puppy sat on Wifie's lap. And that's not all he did. We had a large blanket with us and a towel and Puppy managed to drench both of them and Wifie's skirt. And I mean drench. I've never seen any animal urinate so much since I saw an elephant let rip once in a zoo when I was a child. I've also never eaten a cardboardburger in a Macdonald's with a woman whose skirt was quite so urine-soaked as Wifie's was that night.

But we made it home and that, as any parent knows, is when the real labour starts. It was soon obvious that puppy was completely feral. He may never have seen the inside of a house before and possibly not another human being apart from the one who lifted him out of his pen with a pair of tongs and dropped him into that lime-green box he arrived in. He has no conception of bladder or bowel control. His only mode of interaction is to bite whatever comes within reach. His metabolism turns the shoes, rugs, magazines and fingers he chews into urine and faeces at a rate that defies the laws of thermodynamics.

After our two-day, mapless trip to collect him, we were exhausted but after sleeping with a puppy lying on our heads (he likes to sleep that way) for two days, after running up and down the garden with him, cleaning up his endless torrent of excreta, letting him in and out and in and out, feeding him, pulling shoes and feet and furniture out of his jaws, retrieving his toys from underneath things (one fist-sized rubber blobby thing called a 'Kong' has disappeared completely - which is impossible) and looking around anxiously to check on what he's up to, like a pair of meerkats performing for a wildlife documentary, we're just beginning to realise what exhausted really is.

When I think of all the preparation and planning - thinking about names, wondering how we'll raise him, whether we'd be good 'parents', whether he'd like us, gazing misty-eyed at the pet sections in supermarkets, imagining the patter of tiny little paws, scanning the Web for guidance on how to raise a happy, fulfilled puppy - you'd think we'd have been ready. But, just like having a baby, the reality is a thousand times more overwhelming than you think it will be.

In those far-off days when we were contemplating 'starting a family', I remarked to Wifie and Daughter that having a dog on the property would probably mean that the local wildlife would start avoiding the place. This was a major 'con' as far as I could see because I like waking up to find a family of wallabies or kangaroos grazing in the garden, or seeing them come bounding over the bluff in the evening. The roos often come in threes - a male, female and youngster - and they are so cute you could just run out and hug them. It seemed to me, therefore, that to be worth having around, a dog would need to be at least as cute as three roos. A pretty tall order.

Yet, despite all the trouble he's been, despite the exhaustion and the sleeping with a creature that farts in your face all night, he is. Our puppy is definitely as cute as three roos.

So that's alright then.

Focus Fusion: Will It Save Us?

I've been reading a bit lately about focus fusion – a radically new approach to producing power from fusion reactions. The research is spearheaded by Eric J. Lerner and his company Lawrenceville Plasma Physics Inc. (LPP) and has been financed mostly by Government organisations like NASA and the Chilean Nuclear Energy Commission .

The basic principle is to use Dense Plasma Focus (DPF) to confine a proton-Boron mix (pB11) at extreme temperatures (a couple of million degrees) so that a fusion reaction can take place. The DPF technology has existed for decades but the theoretical work needed to enable a controlled fusion reaction has not existed until very recently. Now, LPP has received a USD600,000 grant from Swedish firm CMEF (the first part of ten million dollars if all goes well) to develop a proof-of-concept reactor.

Focus fusion has none of the major drawbacks the Tokomak programme has laboured under. It doesn't suffer the plasma stability problems Tokomaks do, it does not generate 'hard' radiation like Tokomaks, and it can feed electrons directly into the grid without the need to generate heat to drive turbines. It could potentially generate electricity at a hundredth of the cost of existing power generation techniques. It is also suitable for small-scale, distributed power production (a 5MWatt reactor could fit inside a garage). That means focus fusion reactors could power railway locomotives, lorries, ships and aircraft. What's more, electric cars would vastly outperform petrol (economically). If focus fusion works, we could easily be looking at a completely petrol and coal free world in just a few decades!

Obviously this would be a disaster for the Middle East and for the big petrol and coal companies (and, hopefully, the governments they prop up). It would probably also be a disaster for the major coal-exporting countries like Australia – which is a bit unfortunate since that's where I live. It would also mean the end of renewable energy technologies (I don't suppose anyone will be sad to see the end of wind farms!) and it would, at last, kill off nuclear power as a viable commercial concern.

All-in-all, it would be a miraculous technical breakthrough that would save us from global warming and make electricity virtually free for the whole world. It is estimated that there is enough boron in the world to keep us in power for a billion years and the only wast emission you get from focus fusion is Helium – an inert gas with no greenhouse effect.

Too good to be true? In a world already beset by food riots and the first petrol riots, a world that is just a few decades from a catastrophic climate change tipping point, where the first resource wars have already been fought, for all our sakes, let's hope not.

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.