Month: June 2008

Wacko

When you continue to make comments like “Only God who appointed me will remove me” you really start to look crazy (well, more crazy than previously).

You also make your retirement plans to the country villa seem a little non-viable, as people start to think that the only way they’re going to be able to effect democratic change is via some democratic high velocity lead into your anti-democratic brain case.

Now I’m not usually one to condone any form for capital punishment, but perhaps we can make an exception or two, and perhaps the UN should be following through on it’s promise to intervene when a country’s government shows flagrant, ongoing, and intentional disdain for the wellbeing of it’s own citizens. (and the same goes for Burma as well).

mugabe.jpg

Bastards

Well it turns out that what we all suspected is in fact true: Bad boys get more girls. Rather amusing really given that at the pub on friday I got to watch one such individual involved in discussion of this very topic with a bunch of girls who were all vehemently denying that they were looking for a bad boys to give them hot lovin’ and then discard them like a used and crumpled tissue (well perhaps I’m embellishing a little on that last description).

ANZAC Perspectives

One of the interesting things I noticed this year in relation to ANZAC day was the changing national cultural attitude to the Gallipoli landings.

Everywhere there seemed to be an increased focus on the experiences of the Turkish forces who were at Gallipoli. Turkish veterans were involved in the dawn services and the marches in the cities. The usual ANZAC day evening barrage of documentaries contained a number of shows that either directly dealt with, or included aspects of the Turkish perspective and history of things, and the focus seemed to be on soldiers from two sides who developed a respect and admiration for each other. They made light of the individual personal perspectives of the Turkish soldiers and officers, and highlighted the fact that in addition to the well known tales of heroism and bravery by the Australian and New Zealand forces, the Turks had also performed remarkably both at an individual and unit level, in a setting of being under strength and poorly equipped, in a war they had little personal interest in.

Earth Hour

Recently some group of nitwits cam up with a plan to have an “Earth Hour” where people would turn off lights and appliances for an hour to ostensibly save some carbon and highlight the problem of global warming.

In the leadup to it I maintained my standard skepticism for these kind of populist stunts (Does anyone other than Bob Geldof actually believe that Live Aid, Live 8 or any other similar things made a shred of difference in terms of concrete benefits for their purported beneficiaries, or effected any form of long term societal change in relation to the causes they aimed to highlight?).

The day after the event (which had been surrounded by the usual healthy pile of celebrities and media organisations passing around large helpings of feel-good back-patting self congratulations) I sat around work and had to put up with hearing person after person go on and on about how they had gone home, turned off the lights, and lit up a bunch of candles for the evening, completely missing the irony that the reason that we don’t all use candles all the time is that electric lights are more convenient, more energy efficient, and almost certainly involve the production of less greenhouse gas / carbon in their manufacture and running.

So all these people who were walking around feeling all warm and self important for doing their part in saving the world had not only missed the point, they had almost certainly done the exact opposite to their stated aim.

May the universe save us from our own stupid selves and our perpensity for populist group driven idiocy.

Two thumbs up for thumbs

Charlotte is continuing to discover new tricks, like holding her own head up and looking round, smiling (intermittently (and no longer always associated with an impending fart)) and sucking her thumb when a dummy is not available.

She also seems quite chuffed with herself in relation to this last one, although it only works when she’s quite awake, so when she wakes in the middle of the night and wants a dummy she kind of forgets that she has a take everywhere option available close at hand (so to speak).

Mooney

Here are a bunch of space and moon related stories I have seen and liked recently.

First is the suggestion that following the collision between earth and another protoplanet that resulted in the formation of our moon, there may have actually been multiple moons around earth for up to 100 million years.

Next is the story that NASA have managed to recover data from a science mission on the Columbia Space shuttle (which crashed in 1993). A hard disc containing the data from the experiment was found and most of the data was eventually able to be recovered. If it weren’t in somewhat bad taste it’d make a good advertising camapaign for the hardware manufacturer (“Our disks are built so tough they even survive re-entry”).

Next is a story about a NASA mission to send a manned crew to land on a nearby asteriod. Is anyone else thinking Armageddon?

And finally a little closer the the ground, Microsoft has released a kind of inverted google earth. Their program called Worldwide telescope looks at the skies and uses images from a number of different space and ground based telescopes to allow you to zoom in and out to see all manner of celestial objects from the comfort of your home computer. Normally I don’t plug Microsoft programs, but apparently this one is pretty good and quite innovative.