Went to Middle Head yesterday to watch the start of the Sydney-Gold Coast yacht race, drawn by the fact that there were boats, and that the wind was from the southwest, and since the boats were heading north, the start would be with spinnakers billowing.
No disappointments there. It was a beautiful day, the boats charged on out of the Heads, Middle Head is pretty interesting from an 'old forts and stuff' point of view, and it has a great view.
Photographs were taken, of course, and are zooomr'd here.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Started writing this on the 21st of May...
and forgot to post it.
"Wow. I have been living in Australia for the past two years and 10 days. Isn't that exciting?
Of course, that's not including 10 days in Cambodia, two days in LA, and 4 days plus 3 weeks in Ottawa. I would be more accurate to claim that I moved here two years and 10 days ago. Where does the time go?
I suppose it gets all used up running around getting used to a different place. It's not so different from home (home #1, I guess) but there are enough little things that take a bit of adjustment. It's not like changing from CNN to Al Jazeera in Arabic; more like CNN when there is a bit of a delay between the image and the audio. Not incomprehensible, it just occasionally gives a bit of pause for interpretation.
It also gets used up just living. I know I am not a wonderful shining example of keeping in touch with all the folks in the old country. Heck, I'm not even that good at keeping up with people in the new country. I suppose we get properly wrapped up in the effort of going flat out tending to the transplant procedure that other parts of the metaphorical garden of life are neglected.
Hopefully no one calls the weed spraying service to tidy up... worse yet, the paving people. Anyway, pulling back from the brink of a well-beaten metaphor...
What do you suppose is a better indication of 'successful adjustment to a new environment'? Would it be the adoption of a routine from which deviation is notable - that is, a normal routine in a brave new world? Or is it living a series of discontinuous episodic experiences, dipping in and out of elements of the new reality without adopting any sort of rythm outside the syncopated vignettes?
I daresay tonight's McGlutton meal was seasoned with some sort of interesting herbs, to come up with warbling like that last paragraph.
Anyway. Happy anniversary to me and to Simmo."
And that's what I was going to write.
"Wow. I have been living in Australia for the past two years and 10 days. Isn't that exciting?
Of course, that's not including 10 days in Cambodia, two days in LA, and 4 days plus 3 weeks in Ottawa. I would be more accurate to claim that I moved here two years and 10 days ago. Where does the time go?
I suppose it gets all used up running around getting used to a different place. It's not so different from home (home #1, I guess) but there are enough little things that take a bit of adjustment. It's not like changing from CNN to Al Jazeera in Arabic; more like CNN when there is a bit of a delay between the image and the audio. Not incomprehensible, it just occasionally gives a bit of pause for interpretation.
It also gets used up just living. I know I am not a wonderful shining example of keeping in touch with all the folks in the old country. Heck, I'm not even that good at keeping up with people in the new country. I suppose we get properly wrapped up in the effort of going flat out tending to the transplant procedure that other parts of the metaphorical garden of life are neglected.
Hopefully no one calls the weed spraying service to tidy up... worse yet, the paving people. Anyway, pulling back from the brink of a well-beaten metaphor...
What do you suppose is a better indication of 'successful adjustment to a new environment'? Would it be the adoption of a routine from which deviation is notable - that is, a normal routine in a brave new world? Or is it living a series of discontinuous episodic experiences, dipping in and out of elements of the new reality without adopting any sort of rythm outside the syncopated vignettes?
I daresay tonight's McGlutton meal was seasoned with some sort of interesting herbs, to come up with warbling like that last paragraph.
Anyway. Happy anniversary to me and to Simmo."
And that's what I was going to write.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
The great global warming swindle
Martin Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" is on the ABC as I type. Cool... Aunty's living on the edge. This is the film that was released at the same time as the 4th asessment report of the IPCC, in February this year, and was shown on the BBC.
The big deal about this is two parts: First, Durkin's flying in the face of received wisdom around the human effect on climate change - specifically global warming - by arguing that, essentially, nah, human's haven't got much to do with it at all. The second thing is that the argument isn't terribly well supported, and may even have (shock, horror) some conveniently 'rearranged' or 'innovatively presented' data.
I had a listen to a podcast from Aunty yesterday - the Science Show (it's like Quirks and Quarks, but seems a little more serious) and it covered off the whys and whatfors around the argy-bargy about the show. It seems that the interpretation of the data that Durkin is working with is dodgey, and indeed, one of the scientists interviewed noted that the clip utilised actually presented the diametric opposite of his position.
Right now it's the argument that the sun is the arbiter of changes in climate, and some fellow in the UK just related how he won money betting against the Met Office using his own sun-watching technique.
Sunspots are intimately linked to temperature changes - it's not greenhouse gases after all. Cool. I can lust after my 370kW 7-litre Holden HSV sedan again.
Now they are putting up charts correlating sunspot activity and temperature, but I am not terribly sure about how the data was charted (I spend many of my days putting numbers into PowerPoint decks, and it's not hard to present perfectly accurate charts, which can be read any number of ways.).
Now we're getting to the question of why, in the face of this data showing that human generation of CO2 is irrelevant to climate change, are we bombarded by the media with stories of doom and gloom? It seems to be related to the energy crisis of the 70s and the British miner's strike which convinced Margaret Thatcher that nuclear was the way to achieve energy continuity (so she wouldn't have to rely on miners or Arabs...) and it was HER! She told the scientists they could have money to prove human-produced CO2-induced climate change in order to support nuclear from the environmental side, rather than just the economic rationalist side.
I see. Now it is the Left and the Communists/Marxists/Socialists/anti-capitalists/anti-globalisationists who didn't have anything to wring their hands over after the fall of the Berlin Wall and of Communism. So, rather than get a real job, they started adopting greeny stuff.
Oh, now it is the money... US spending went from $170 million to over $2 billion. Righty-oh.
Heh heh, that was brilliant: they talk about climate models while the screen shows Star Wars fans dressed up and wandering around under a model of the Space Shuttle. Beautiful. Now it's climate model bashing time. "The appearance of rigorous science." I suppose the fact that any prognosis is based on assumptions... oh, hang on, it's the media's fault again, blaming 'every storm or hurricane on global warming.'
Okay, so it's normal climactic patterns of warming and cooling, nothing to do with humans.
Wow, this guy's hitting all the buttons he can find: political lefties and right wingers, capitalist greed, bad science, hysterical media reporting. Very impressive.
This is starting to remind me of 'Where the bleep are we' or whatever it was called... 'what the bleep do we know' - that infuriatingly superficial, inane, tiresome, ingenuous waste of time warbling on about how quantum mechanics lets ordinary humans do really amazing feats of time/space manipulation. The current show does the same trick of leaping from expert to expert, argument to argument, without really fleshing out what the argument is, nor with backing up the claims with data.
Wow... they just said that challenging the 'global warming business (religion)' has invited death threats.
And now the global warming brigade is killing poor people in the Third World (sorry about the worn out shorthand for the world's poorest) by hamstringing development.
Alright, that's enough of the blow by blow report. Just as well: it's over.
There's something underlying this whole 'dialogue,' and many other ideologically grounded arguments for that matter, and it frustrates me. I really, really get tired of people jumping up and down saying 'you're wrong because you believe something different from what I do! Therefore you are motivated by malevolent and malicious intent, so I must take battle unto thee and unleash all the rhetorical weapons at my disposal, including but not limited to deriding your capacity for reason, misrepresenting others views, concealing information that doesn't help my side, and essentially jumping up and down like a child.
My last question is, then, why, if one's argument is so convincing that one is willing, indeed compelled, to attempt to convince a wide audience of it, would one present it by omitting bits and bobs that might call into question what I am saying.
If you have a compelling argument, share it. If your argument falters, acknowledge it, accept that maybe something else is more compelling, and get over it. Deep belief in something doesn't make it so... and it is okay if a belief is challenged.
Incidentally, why don't we make the argument to reduce emissions based on how they smell? The emissions may or may not warm or cool the planet, but they smell bad. So let's get rid of them for the olfactory concern.
The big deal about this is two parts: First, Durkin's flying in the face of received wisdom around the human effect on climate change - specifically global warming - by arguing that, essentially, nah, human's haven't got much to do with it at all. The second thing is that the argument isn't terribly well supported, and may even have (shock, horror) some conveniently 'rearranged' or 'innovatively presented' data.
I had a listen to a podcast from Aunty yesterday - the Science Show (it's like Quirks and Quarks, but seems a little more serious) and it covered off the whys and whatfors around the argy-bargy about the show. It seems that the interpretation of the data that Durkin is working with is dodgey, and indeed, one of the scientists interviewed noted that the clip utilised actually presented the diametric opposite of his position.
Right now it's the argument that the sun is the arbiter of changes in climate, and some fellow in the UK just related how he won money betting against the Met Office using his own sun-watching technique.
Sunspots are intimately linked to temperature changes - it's not greenhouse gases after all. Cool. I can lust after my 370kW 7-litre Holden HSV sedan again.
Now they are putting up charts correlating sunspot activity and temperature, but I am not terribly sure about how the data was charted (I spend many of my days putting numbers into PowerPoint decks, and it's not hard to present perfectly accurate charts, which can be read any number of ways.).
Now we're getting to the question of why, in the face of this data showing that human generation of CO2 is irrelevant to climate change, are we bombarded by the media with stories of doom and gloom? It seems to be related to the energy crisis of the 70s and the British miner's strike which convinced Margaret Thatcher that nuclear was the way to achieve energy continuity (so she wouldn't have to rely on miners or Arabs...) and it was HER! She told the scientists they could have money to prove human-produced CO2-induced climate change in order to support nuclear from the environmental side, rather than just the economic rationalist side.
I see. Now it is the Left and the Communists/Marxists/Socialists/anti-capitalists/anti-globalisationists who didn't have anything to wring their hands over after the fall of the Berlin Wall and of Communism. So, rather than get a real job, they started adopting greeny stuff.
Oh, now it is the money... US spending went from $170 million to over $2 billion. Righty-oh.
Heh heh, that was brilliant: they talk about climate models while the screen shows Star Wars fans dressed up and wandering around under a model of the Space Shuttle. Beautiful. Now it's climate model bashing time. "The appearance of rigorous science." I suppose the fact that any prognosis is based on assumptions... oh, hang on, it's the media's fault again, blaming 'every storm or hurricane on global warming.'
Okay, so it's normal climactic patterns of warming and cooling, nothing to do with humans.
Wow, this guy's hitting all the buttons he can find: political lefties and right wingers, capitalist greed, bad science, hysterical media reporting. Very impressive.
This is starting to remind me of 'Where the bleep are we' or whatever it was called... 'what the bleep do we know' - that infuriatingly superficial, inane, tiresome, ingenuous waste of time warbling on about how quantum mechanics lets ordinary humans do really amazing feats of time/space manipulation. The current show does the same trick of leaping from expert to expert, argument to argument, without really fleshing out what the argument is, nor with backing up the claims with data.
Wow... they just said that challenging the 'global warming business (religion)' has invited death threats.
And now the global warming brigade is killing poor people in the Third World (sorry about the worn out shorthand for the world's poorest) by hamstringing development.
Alright, that's enough of the blow by blow report. Just as well: it's over.
There's something underlying this whole 'dialogue,' and many other ideologically grounded arguments for that matter, and it frustrates me. I really, really get tired of people jumping up and down saying 'you're wrong because you believe something different from what I do! Therefore you are motivated by malevolent and malicious intent, so I must take battle unto thee and unleash all the rhetorical weapons at my disposal, including but not limited to deriding your capacity for reason, misrepresenting others views, concealing information that doesn't help my side, and essentially jumping up and down like a child.
My last question is, then, why, if one's argument is so convincing that one is willing, indeed compelled, to attempt to convince a wide audience of it, would one present it by omitting bits and bobs that might call into question what I am saying.
If you have a compelling argument, share it. If your argument falters, acknowledge it, accept that maybe something else is more compelling, and get over it. Deep belief in something doesn't make it so... and it is okay if a belief is challenged.
Incidentally, why don't we make the argument to reduce emissions based on how they smell? The emissions may or may not warm or cool the planet, but they smell bad. So let's get rid of them for the olfactory concern.
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