I was listening to background briefing on ABC tonight and heard some interesting factiods.
Iran’s population has increased from 25 million to 60 million since the Islamic revolution in 1979.
60% of the population is under 30 years of age.
50% of that age group are unemployed.
Says some interesting things about the likely long term stability of the current religious establishment there.
Month: October 2008
Mobile Elements
Charlotte is about to start crawling and the family are having to get prepared.
Jack is getting practice at scooting away and hiding on the top of his scratching post, and Simone and I are investing in cupboard locks and gates to put in the various doorways around the house.
At the moment Charlotte can get up on all fours and move her knees forward as if to crawl, but hasn’t figured out how to coordinate in the hands yet.
Next thing I know I’ll be dropping her off to her high school ball…
Relative impossibility
I have recently taken to listening to podcasts via my ipod on the drive to and from work (depending on whether there is anything actually worth listening to on the radio).
This evening on my way back from the Gym I was listening to a podcast that I quite like called Futures in Biotech, and they had a physicist as the quest and he raised quite a cool concept.
He described there being three classes of Impossibility
- Things currently impossible, but probably achievable in decades to centuries, with the examples of molecular teleportation, invisibility, antimatter drives, ray gun, Starships, and telepathy (via technology).
- The currently impossible, but probably achievable in centuries to millenia, with the perceivable limitation being mainly due to the exorbitant energies required (and he was talking about projects requiring percentages of the energy output of a star) such as wormhole travel.
- Those things that are truely impossible due to them requiring violations of universal laws, such as precognition (seeing the future).
Overall I like the idea, mainly I think because of the number of really cool things that fall into the “Possible provided enough money/energy” basket. Be honest. Who wouldn’t want an invisibility cloak…
Sit-rep
Today Simone got official confirmation that next year she would be at the Princess Alexandra hospital for the first six months and at Greenslopes hospital for the second six months.
As for me, I will be at the QE2 Hospital.
Overall this means we will be back on the south side, and looking to blow some of Charlotte’s inheritence on reacquainting ourselves with our favorite restaurants and hang outs around town, should any of you out there wish to join us.
Also, there will be the possibility of an Australia day BBQ, work schedules permitting. More plans closer to the time.
Ouch..
Somehow I managed to completely miss today’s share market plunge until quite late this evening.
ASX down (another) 8%.
Dow at 8.5k
And the aussie dollar having lost 40% of it’s value against the green back in the last month.
What comes to mind is the old Toyota ads, with liberal quanitites of “Bugger”. All quite highly worrying really. Inflation seems stable, and interest rates are on the way down, but still quite unsettling (and I’m in the enviable position of having pretty minimal exposure to the share market at present…).
Functional decline
This week Simone and Charlotte are in Brisbane seeing Simone’s parents and brother and sister in law.
As such Jack and I are reverting to the bachelor lifestyle (when I actually make it home from work with enough time to do anything other than just have dinner and go to bed).
Part of that has involved going out and renting DVDs, a thing which I don’t seem to have had time to do in ages, and since I’m on my own I’m getting some that Simone would not normally want to watch (namely 300 and (strangely) Evan Almighty).
Having watched 300 I was somewhat disappointed. I suppose that so many people had raved about it that perhaps I went into it with expectations. Anyhow, it was pretty to watch, but I already knew the basis of the story (from greek history/mythology), and so there wasn’t much surprise, and I found the voice over really irritating.
Anyway, as a result I suppose that I will no longer be able to perform certain household tasks. Ah well..
Excerpt
While I was in NZ on holidays recently I found a Top Gear book, and one particular bit particularly amused me:
The default supercar for the post-war European male is, was, and probably always will be, the Porsche 911. Although finely honed and all too ordinary today, it was a unique proposition a few years back, both in terms of its looks and its handling. Or rather, the lack thereof. Porsche ran a sort of accidental eugenics programme for the best part of thirty years, by producing a car that appealed to one of society’s least likeable types, and then promptly wrapping him around a tree.