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Writing in Salon, Gary Kamiya describes the near hysteria to which “movement conservatives” are reduced in confronting a likely Obama victory:
…typical of the Limbaugh-inflected (or infected) movement as a whole is the apocalyptic attitude of right-wing columnist Mark Steyn, who thundered that an Obama victory “would be a ‘point of no return,’ the most explicit repudiation of the animating principles of America.”
The ludicrous hyperbole of such Jeremiads is self-refuting. Americans are desperate to fix their economy, end a ruinous, endless war and restore a sense of common purpose to civic life. As they face these challenging real-world goals, the abstract buzzwords trotted out by the right ring hollow.
Of course, Obama hasn’t won the election yet, and it’s vaguely possible that he may not, though highly unlikely if the polls are taken into account.
Kamiya’s analysis of the internal contradictions of the American right is sharp, and it’s certainly true that the movement conservatives’ dogmatic bag of tricks isn’t holding up too well in confrontation with reality. (And there’s some amusement to be gained from observing the cognitive dissonance in the right wing blogosphere.) But I wonder whether the implication - drawn by some - that an Obama victory would represent an epochal end to the culture wars craziness is overstated.
Obama’s election would, more than almost any other Democratic candidate, represent the long-overdue crushing of the barely-disguised racist “Southern Strategy” pursued by the GOP since the time of Richard Nixon. In doing so it would also represent the effective end of the Christian Right as a driving force in US governmental politics.
Continue reading ‘Exit Nixonland, stage left?’
Well, you’ve got to hand it to the PR firm that did Better Place’s publicity. Not only did they get their client on the Today Show, the story went global in the New York Times. And, on the face of it, their project sounds great. There are four big problems with the electric car: even the best batteries give a relatively short maximum range, they take a long time to recharge, there’s no infrastructure for recharging on the go, and the batteries are expensive. Better Place hopes to overcome these problems with a three-pronged (if you’ll pardon the pun) approach; a network of “recharge points” where you can plug your electric car in and recharge while parked, battery swapover stations that allow you to physically swap batteries in a couple of minutes if you’re on a trip and don’t have time for a recharge, and the financial machinery so that you pay for the service, rather than buying batteries outright.
The plan is plausible enough at the technical level. The Nissan-Renault alliance is planning to have full-electric vehicles available by around 2011 or so; reports vary on the range of the vehicles, but something around 160 kilometres is plausible. A number of battery manufacturers are building factories to churn the requisite lithium-ion cells out, and the projected battery durability is good enough to make the things practical. And recharge stations and battery swapover points are pretty simple exercises. So, in the longer term, I reckon this company is on to something along the lines of the right concept. Battery tech is already good enough to provide plausible city cars, and it improves every year. We already know of a number of ways to generate zero-emission electricity. And the battery leasing model takes a lot of the risk out of an electric car for the purchaser.
In the short term, however, there are very good reasons to be skeptical of large-scale electric vehicle rollout schemes; and lots of reasons to expect the companies involved to have their hand out to government.
Continue reading ‘I’ll believe it when I see the charging posts…’
I sometimes think that if it weren’t for the Senate Estimates Committees we would hardly know anything about our government at all in this country that didn’t come from a press release or a well-timed leak, given that Question Time has largely become a farce. I imagine that the senior public servants and Government Ministers who get grilled don’t enjoy them much though.
The Senators are currently uncovering undisclosed, or at least unpublicised, aspects to many government programs. Of course, the heady whiff of grandstanding is undeniable, but that doesn’t mean that the questions asked are necessarily discredited entirely because they are informed by a partisan agenda. The scrutiny also offers the chance to show how certain plans may be unbalanced in the composition of their beneficiaries or unreliable in delivering the promised benefits at all.
One plan which appears to be unbalanced in its beneficiaries is the Murray-Darling re-adjustment plan: all the money to go to irrigators, none to the towns affected by the flight of farming families?
There is a great deal of concern from Liberal Senators about the economic stimulus package and the unrestricted bank deposits guarantee, and through the committees we discover that there was no formal modelling of the stimulus package, and that there may have not been full consultation with all the regulatory bodies before the plan was announced.
Finally, the plan which appears to not only be unbalanced in its proposed beneficiaries but also questionable about offering benefits at all, while penalising broad swathes of the population at the same time: the Government’s proposed internet filtering plan. Continue reading ‘Scrutiny in the Senate: water, markets and censorship’
When I first discovered FiveThirtyEight.Com (courtesy of Down and Out of Sài Gòn on one of the American election threads here at LP, if I recall correctly), I thought of Nate Silver as America’s Possum. Coincidentally, there’s a profile of Silver published in New York magazine which makes some very similar points about the emergence of a statistician doing psephological wonkery as an avocation into a major source of expertise and information on elections as an article sounding that theme from Monash University Journalism Professor Chris Nash in the new edition of the Pacific Journalism Review.
Just think what elections would be like without Possums and Silvers! If all we had to rely on for psephological goodness was the dead tree media…
Tony Jones asked Will Hutton last night whether the interbank credit market was “run by cowboys or run by reputable people?” But between these two moral poles is enormous material and cultural complexity:
If a bank wants to borrow money, a broker needs quickly to find someone prepared to lend at an attractive rate; if a bank wants to lend, he – it’s a predominantly male profession – needs to find a borrower ready to pay a good rate. So a broker needs continuously to know who wants to borrow, who is prepared to lend, and on what terms. As one of them said to me, a broker might ‘speak to his big clients … have conversations with them maybe twenty-five times a day, which is twenty-five times as often as they speak to their wives’.
A broker needs to pass information to his clients as well as to receive it: that’s a major part of what they want from him, and a good reason to use the voicebox rather than the screen.
Continue reading ‘Unlocking the metaphor of frozen interbank lending’
The media reports aren’t particularly informative, but the Australian Transport Safety Bureau’s news release contains a fairly good explanation of why a Qantas Airbus A330 airliner suddenly decided to dive a couple of hundred meters (not thousands of metres as some of the more colourful passenger interviews state).
All Airbus airliners since the A320, and the more recent of Boeing’s aircraft models, are “fly-by-wire” craft. That is, there is no direct mechanical or hydraulic connection between the control stick, and the aircraft’s control surfaces, at all. So, even when the plane is not on autopilot, there is a computer system that translates the pilot’s commands on the controls into movement of the various movable bits on the wings and tail. This is by no means a new thing - the A320 first went in to service in 1988, and the F-16 fighter had such a system way back in 1979. Obviously, to get regulatory approval for such systems, the manufacturers had to demonstrate that the systems wouldn’t malfunction and cause the plane to dive into the ground. So all flight control systems implement multiple, redundant control computers, wiring, and whatnot, and the software is developed to the very highest standards, with highly rigorous testing and using the most advanced software engineering techniques to ensure reliability. This isn’t just marketing guff, either; I’m no expert in aviation, but I am a published academic in the area of software reliablility. And so, I’ve read one or two technical papers that came out of Airbus work. They do some very clever stuff (as, I’m sure, do Boeing).
One of the basic tenets of designing reliable systems is redundancy; the aircraft should be able to survive the failure of any single component, and critical components often have triple or quadruple redundancy. And so it is the case with the A320’s flight control system. The first relevant bit was the “angle of attack” sensors on the plane’s exterior, of which there were three. These measure the angle at which the plane is pointing. These are fed into three Air Data Inertial Reference Unit (ADIRU) units, which translate the raw readings of the sensors into processed data, which is then fed to the three, redundant flight computers which end up controlling the aircraft.
Continue reading ‘The Qantas nosedive - what happened’
The three science-related Nobel science prizes have been awarded, and it seems like as good as time as any to look at what humanity can accomplish with effort and a bit of luck along the way.
Continue reading ‘Nobel Prize roundup’
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?
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