Today’s Crikey asks a rather rude question:
An Australian citizen currently languishes in jail in a foreign country, having been seized from an aircraft on the basis of an arrest warrant issued in a third country. The crime alleged to have been committed by the man relates only to the fact that he has repeatedly expressed views deemed unacceptable by that country.
Yet to date no one, not even the usual conservative suspects, has spoken out about the treatment of Frederick Toben, arrested at Heathrow while en route from the US to Dubai on a German warrant for Holocaust denial. Toben’s only supporters have been the appalling David Irving and the grotesque Lady Michele Renouf, a sort of Mitford-style far-right socialite.
Continue reading ‘Defending the odious’
Spring must be the season when people turn their minds to starting blogs, or at least spring 2005 was when some excellent people did. It’s the three year blogiversary for both Pavlov’s Cat and Hoyden About Town. Warm salutations and felicitations to both!
Pavlov’s Cat also has some interesting reflections on being a sociable blogger, and how addictive it can be. It’s well worth remembering that there is stuff to do other than correct people who are wrong on the internets. Continue reading ‘Happy blogiversary, Pavlov’s Cat and Hoyden About Town!’
Here’s something a bit fun. Google - to celebrate its tenth birthday - has reactivated one of its oldest stored databases. If you go to this page, you can do Google searches 2001 style.
Here’s what I came up for with the search string “Sarah Palin”:
Your search - “sarah palin” - did not match any documents.
Kevin Rudd shares the front page with an accountant and an academic engineer of the same name.
Well, it may have been a miserable week on the ground, particularly if you’re trying to borrow money or are close to collecting your super pay out, but it’s been a great couple of weeks for being out of the Earth’s atmosphere.
It’s like the heady days of the Space Race in China at the moment. They’re having parades for the astronauts (I refuse to use the abomination “taikonaut”) who successfully completed China’s third crewed space mission, and the first space walk. From a western perspective, this isn’t all that impressive - they purchased a lot of the technology straight from the Russian space program, who’ve been doing this since 1965 (the first American spacewalk followed a couple of months later). But even re-implementing known space technology is pretty damn difficult. The bigger question is what the Chinese are likely to try in the future. Beating NASA back to the moon is a distinct possibility.
Meanwhile, perhaps the most scientifically important achievement of NASA crewed space program, the Hubble Space Telescope, has had the world’s most fortuitously timed fault. A final shuttle mission to service the Hubble was due to launch a couple of weeks from now. However, one of the Hubble’s systems responsible for transmitting scientific data back to Earth failed. There’s a backup component, but, unsurprisingly, NASA wants to replace the system, so they’re modifying the mission to include the replacement. On the downside, it’s also pushed the mission back to February next year. But better a failure now, when it can be fixed, than one later, when the shuttle won’t be available to fix it.
Continue reading ‘Snow on Mars, and Chinese walks in space’
If this is true, we’re in even deeper climate trouble than we thought:
The first evidence that millions of tons of a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed has been discovered by scientists.
The Independent has been passed details of preliminary findings suggesting that massive deposits of sub-sea methane are bubbling to the surface as the Arctic region becomes warmer and its ice retreats.
As the Wikipedia explains, there is a lot of methane locked up as frozen methane clathrate under the arctic ocean. Methane is a short-lived, but very potent greenhouse gas. If the clathrates are warmed up enough, they will release that methane, and possibly quite quickly. The upshot? Global warming going a lot faster and further than the IPCC models.
This is far scarier than a little trouble with the LIBOR…
Working on the picture being worth a thousand words concept, Pundit Kitchen (from the ICHC team) encourages reader submissions. It does tend to lean leftish, which doesn’t bother me, but if it bothers you then leave a link to contrarian PolMacros in comments. Here follows an assortment (image heavy, so unfriendly to dial-up (sorry):
see Sarah Palin pictures
see Sarah Palin pictures
Continue reading ‘The latest US talking points in LOLspeak’
Hot on the heels of lexicographer Erin McKean’s advice that if it feels wordish, use it, here comes some more legitimation for linguistic innovation. The well known author and linguist, David Crystal, has published a new book on sms-speak - Txtng: The Gr8 Db8.
In a fascinating piece in The Guardian, Crystal rebuts claims that texting is some sort of linguistic vandalism. Abbreviations and rebuses and other linguistic forms have a history as old as the written language, he argues. What’s distinctive about texting is the combination of linguistic features:
Some of its juxtapositions create forms which have little precedent, apart from in puzzles. All conceivable types of feature can be juxtaposed - sequences of shortened and full words (hldmecls “hold me close”), logograms and shortened words (2bctnd “to be continued”), logograms and nonstandard spellings (cu2nite) and so on. There are no less than four processes combined in iowan2bwu “I only want to be with you” - full word + an initialism + a shortened word + two logograms + an initialism + a logogram. And some messages contain unusual processes: in iohis4u “I only have eyes for you”, we see the addition of a plural ending to a logogram. One characteristic runs through all these examples: the letters, symbols and words are run together, without spaces. This is certainly unusual in the history of special writing systems. But few texts string together long sequences of puzzling graphic units.
Crystal also points out that only a minority of text messages are actually written in text speak. But most of all, in a similar spirit to McKean, he finds the linguistic challenges of text message composition, well, fun:
Continue reading ‘David Crystal: Txtng: The Gr8 Db8‘
As noted, the Victorian abortion law reform bill has sailed through the (lower) house, and Archbishop Dennis Hart is throwing a massive tanty about it:
CATHOLIC hospitals might close their maternity and emergency departments if a proposed new abortion law is passed in Victoria next month, Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart has warned….”Catholic hospitals cannot be part of any abortion. That has to be respected in the community. Even providing a referral is a co-operation in evil, and that impacts very strongly on us as Catholics,” he said.
Lauredhel has summed up the Bishop’s position quite succinctly: he’s prepared to let women die for his anti-abortion beliefs. Charming, and, as she says, all the more reason for the bill to be passed.
What I’d like to know is what the actual medical practice in Catholic hospitals around Australia. Does the Archbishop’s hardline position (which, as I understand it, is in line with the Catholic Church’s official position) actually get followed in Australian hospitals?
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences is not a journal I’d imagine too many of you read on a regular basis - I certainly don’t. But their recent special issue is on a topic of rather broader interest than usual - geoengineering.
Perhaps the most accessible read might be the introductory overview, which notes some interesting historical precedents for the idea - and, incidentally, sheds light on the Russian perspective on the prospects of a warmer globe:
Continue reading ‘Geoengineering from the Royal Society’
Take note owners of Loy Yang, Munmorah et al. Greenpeace activists admitted causing £30,000 damage to the chimney of coal fired plant in protest at plans to construct another one but were acquitted by a jury on the grounds that “they were legally justified because they were trying to prevent climate change causing greater damage to property around the world“. The decision has reverberated around the world, particularly down here. Continue reading ‘Climate Change and Electoral Politics - Local Edition …?’
This is a very belated, ambitious response to the Future of Media 08 summit which I attended on behalf of LP.
We need facts.
They underpin all the modern abstract systems we’ve come to know, love and get angry with from time to time. So when facts collapse, we need publics more than at any other time to gather around, examine what went wrong and piece things and institutions together again. In this sense, the rise of projects reattaching facts to theory in recent decades probably corresponds to the decline of the liberal model of Journalism whereby the facts (’just the facts’) are disseminated. Continue reading ‘Reassembling Journalism and Objectivity’
As Kim mentioned the other day, the Future of Journalism roadshow is coming to Brisbane on Saturday, and I’m speaking on a panel at 2pm called “Bloggers: amateur netizens or professionals of the future?”… Full details of the program are here if you’d like to attend. Starting points (at this stage, anyway) for my contribution are over the fold. They’re very rough notes, pasted in with just a bit of an edit from an email thread with my co-panelists, so I’d be really grateful for input.
Continue reading ‘The future of journalism in Brisbane’
The start-up of the Large Hadron Collider has been widely reported in the media; for an explanation, you could do worse then this introduction and this quite good interview with Paul Davies on Lateline last night.
If you remember your high-school physics (and that’s basically all I remember…), you might recall protons, neutrons, and electrons, the components of atoms. The Large Hadron Collider takes protons, uses enormous magnets to accelerate protons two within a hair’s breadth of the speed of light, and smash them into each other, and watch what comes out (there are four different detector experiments).
As discussed by Paul Davies, the first major goal of the LHC experiments is to observe the Higgs boson, a particle that is fundamental to what’s called the “Standard Model” of particle physics. Apparently, the existence of this particle is key to the model’s explanation of how mass works; without it, the Standard Model falls down. As Davies explains, in some ways it would be much more exciting if the Higgs Boson wasn’t observed, because it would mean that the Standard Model is wrong; the theoretical physicists would have to come up with something else.
Continue reading ‘Quickie science’
The future of quality journalism
There’s a bit of an irony in the fact that News Ltd columnist Malcolm Colless chooses to take a swipe today at demands that Mike Carlton be reinstated as a columnist in the Sydney Morning Herald because of his popularity with readers. [Carlton, as folks may recall, refused to file his copy because of a journos’ strike at Fairfax.] The irony in question lies in the fact that Colless’ own usually impenetrable stream of consciousness efforts are no doubt read by very few, so incomprehensible most of his musings are. Possibly that extends to sub-editors. Surely “rebirthing” is a crime against the English language?
But there’s something more at stake here. Colless’ mind dumps very often give readers an insight into what passes for thought among the managerial minds of the press. Perhaps precisely because no one is reading his stuff, he’s departed from the News Limited correct line and failed to decry the Fairfax cost-cutting as a threat to the quality of journalism. What you can make of this tangled paragraph is probably up to you:
But, unwittingly, with his union bashing schtick, Colless has actually exposed a fault line that bedevils and cripples the quality of the quality journalism debate. Continue reading ‘The future of quality journalism’