ET or BS

In another bizarre piece, appropriately headed "ET or BS", Fox News linked to a Denver Post story about some grainy footage of "aliens" peering out of a Denver window.

The frame, above, was apparently extracted from a 3 minute video, taken after a guy installed surveillance cameras because he thought someone was spying on his teenage daughters.

I've told you "Stargate" is a documentary. And Cheyenne Mountain is in Colorado.

Homeless

There was an Associated Press piece today on the Fox News website that I thought I'd share with you.

Apparently, a homeless woman was arrested in Japan today after living undetected in a man's closet for the last year. She was caught after he became suspicious that food was disappearing, and set up comeras to relay images to his mobile phone.

Police found the 58-year-old woman hiding in the top compartment of the man's closet and arrested her for trespassing, police spokesman Hiroki Itakura from southern Kasuya town said Friday.

The resident of the home installed security cameras that transmitted images to his mobile phone and one of the cameras captured someone moving inside his home after he had left. He called police believing it was a burglar, but when they arrived they found the door locked and all windows closed.

"We searched the house ... checking everywhere someone could possibly hide," Itakura said. "When we slid open the shelf closet, there she was, nervously curled up on her side."
The woman told police she had no place to live and first sneaked into the man's house about a year ago when he left it unlocked.

She had moved a mattress into the small closet space and even took showers, Itakura said, calling the woman "neat and clean."

This raises two important issues.

First, someone else was living in his house and he didn't notice? I think I'd notice. Wouldn't you?

Adn second... this guy had room in his closet? Seriously? What's his secret? It wouldn't matter how many closets I installed here, they'd be full in a week.

Illusion

I was (metaphorically) thumbing through Scientific American online today, and came across a great piece on illusion. GO HERE.

The pic above is an example. Square A and Square B are actually the same shade of gray. No. I didn't believe it either, so I copied the pic into photoshop, cut out a piece of B, and watched amazed as it disappeared when I moved it over A.

The point of the article? Nothing is real. What we see and feel of our outside world is only an immaginary construction by our brain of what it thinks the outside world is like...

...which all comes back to a point I've made time and time again here... beware of what you see. Beware of what others see, and try to push on you as "truth". It's all just made up.

Patches

Ideology Drives An Awful Wrong (Or Two)

In what can only be described as a stunning, sickening decision, a court in Melbourne last Friday granted a twelve year old girl permission to begin hormone treatment prior to a sex change operation.

Lawyers for the girl's mother successfully argused that the girl, at twelve years of age, had a full understanding that she was actually a man trapped in a girl's body. Those lawyers were paid for by the Victorian Government, heavily supported by ideological special interests.

Are they mad?

Look, as far as I'm concerned, once you're 18, do whatever you like with your body. It's none of my business. Change it from female to male. Change it back again. Even change it into an elephant for all I care. It's your body and you're an adult, making your own decisions.

But is a twelve year old really equiped to make this decision?

The story's here.

Which brings me to the other furore involving a twelve year old this week... a photographic exhibit at an art gallery in Sydney featuring photographs of nude male and female 12 year olds.

Furtunately, the police reacted swiftly, impounded the offending "art works", and are pressing child pornography charges against the gallery and the "artist".

Let's leave the issue of what the children's parents were thinking when they granted permission. This is bigger than that.

What's amazing about this is that the art elite are incensed. They believe "art" is somehow "pure", and "artists" are above the law.

I'm sorry. There's something not right about taking full frontal photographs of a naked 12 year old girl or boy, even in the name of "art".

It's stunning that the "art community" doesn't get it. Their warriors, some of them curators at the biggest publicly owned art galleries in the country, bombarded the media in defence of the artists right to express his creativity. Somehow, they thought it was ok.

Really... they just don't get it. What's the difference between their "artist" taking pictures of naked children and selling them for tens of thousands of dollars in the name of "art", and some low life taking pictures of naked children and posting them on the internet? As far as I'm concerned, there is no difference.

And I'm sorry, even if I buy the "art" line... I don't care how pure the art is... some sick bastard is going to look at that "art" and get his jollies. You might not be a paedophile, but you're certainly feeding them.

The ideological left is screaming. "Censorship", they cry. Yes. It bloody well is... because you start drawing that blurry line between "art" and child pornography, and you're on a very slippery slope.

*SIGH*

Is the world going mad?

Human Global Warming Now Apparently Effecting Jupiter

Jupiter's Three Red Spots Credit NASA, ESA, M. Wong, I. de Pater (UC Berkeley), et al.

This picture, taken by the Hubble Telescope, was published on the NASA website a week or so back, along with the following description;

Explanation: For about 300 years Jupiter's banded atmosphere has shown a remarkable feature to telescopic viewers, a large swirling storm system known as The Great Red Spot. In 2006, another red storm system appeared, actually seen to form as smaller whitish oval-shaped storms merged and then developed the curious reddish hue.

Now, Jupiter has a third red spot, again produced from a smaller whitish storm. All three are seen in this image made from data recorded on May 9 and 10 with the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. The spots extend above the surrounding clouds and their red color may be due to deeper material dredged up by the storms and exposed to ultraviolet light, but the exact chemical process is still unknown.

For scale, the Great Red Spot has almost twice the diameter of planet Earth, making both new spots less than one Earth-diameter across. The newest red spot is on the far left (west), along the same band of clouds as the Great Red Spot and is drifting toward it. If the motion continues, the new spot will encounter the much larger storm system in August.

Jupiter's recent outbreak of red spots is likely related to large scale climate change as the gas giant planet is getting warmer near the equator.

Of course, Al Gore has already issued a statement blaming the increaseing storm activity on Jupiter on Global Warming, and the UN International Committe on Climate Change has recommended further drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. Bureaucrats are already drawing up appropriate protocols, and climatologists have again altered their modelling to accomodate these new Jovian variables.

Do I need to say any more?

Chester At War

It's official. In response to repeated incursions into my privacy and sleep, Chester formally declared war today on his two neighbours.

This is a real David and Goliath struggle, because on one side, the neighbour is a BP service station and convenience store, and on the other side, it's a construction compound operated by one of the largest builders in the country.

"You live where?" I hear you ask.

It's kind of a long story. When Dr J bought her townhouse twelve years ago, it backed onto a mechanic's workshop. About 6 years ago (before I met her), BP acquired said workshop and built a mega "BP Connect" centre there. At the time, Dr J was distracted by other things and didn't pay attention to the Notice of Proposed Development stuffed into her mailbox.

So now, right over the back wall, we have a 24 hour petrol station lit up so brightly you could, I'm sure, see it from space. Compounding the problem, the actual convenience store closes at 10pm "for security reasons", and customers pay for their fuel at an outside "pay point", which, of course, means that at all hours, said customers shout something like "pump number 4 mate, and can you get me a pack of Benson & Hedges Extra Mild, a carton o' milk and a sausage roll with sauce" through glass about a foot thick.

A few weeks ago, another Notice of Proposed Development l0bbed into the mailbox. BP has decided it wants the site seen from other planets and not just low earth orbit, so it needs more illuminated signage.

Not on your bloody life, and the first shots in the war were officially fired in response to this callous provocation.

Before that, we've had border skirmishes but nothing you'd call real war. We regularly complain about deliveries at 11pm, or 5am on Sundays. They've pretty much ignored the complaints. We regularly complain about the shouting customers. They ignore us.

I even regularly poke my head over the back fence and shout something pithy and eloquent at roudy customers at 3am... usually something like "hey dickhead... shut the fuck up". This generally doesn't work because as anyone living in Sydney will know, those who are awake at 3am have most likelybeen clubbing since about 9pm, and are therefore too pissed to respond with anything more intelligent than "fuck off".

So in response to the Notice of Proposed Development, the Bear penned a nuclear tipped strategic missile and aimed it right at the local town council. The weapon went through BPs application with surgical precision, citing case law and slamming the applicant's callous disregard for human life (aka, my life). It also contained lots of big words and a few important sounding expressions like "amenity of the adjoining property", and "failure to organise their business activity to ensure minimal impact".

Boom. Round one to The Bear, and a shocked council planning inspector was forced to come to my back yard and actually look at the devastation first hand. Now irrevocably drawn into the conflict, he responded the way only bureaucrats can... with a letter back to BP.

Round two happens on Tuesday when I meet with BP's lawyers. They expressed "shock, distress and surprise" at the war declaration. They wish to sue for peace, but they'd better come prepared to meet our terms.

Across the street, the guerilla war's been raging for years.

The construction compound was created to build a new underground tollway, and while the land's zoned residential, they have planning exemption to use it for what can only be described as "neighbourhood destroying activity".

The compound created two problems. The first, during the day, is the incessant "beep beep beep" as assorted bobcats, back hoes and dump trucks flit around the site. It's an extremely annoying distraction, but there's not much I can do about it.

The second is far more important. They sometimes do it at night, and unlike the BP station, which is on the other side of the house to my bedroom, the compound is right at the bedroom window.

This week, they escalated, turning the occasional incursion into full blown war games. I say "games" because that's clearly what's happening. The workers on the site have obviously been briefed about the grumpy neighbour with the sharp and offensive tongue, and so they sneak onto the site at 4.30 am, do some beep beep beeping, and then bolt as soon as they see my flowing white bathrobe appear at my front door. One brazen truck driver actually turned towards me and gave me the finger this week as he gunned his giant two megawatt diesel motor.

Fortunately, they're nearly finished, though their "decomissioning" process involves lots of jack hammers, after which, they'll sell the site to a property developer who, I'm sure, will deliver another year of hell.

After that, if the world if still here, it should be quiet.

Familiar, Comfortable World

Over at my other blog, Chester Writes A Book, I wrote a piece a few days ago about the need to create a comfortable, familiar, consistent and contiguous world in which to set my story.

What I didn't realise was how important that idea is to my other great creative endeavour, Wroof! (Or maybe deep down I did but just hadn't been bothered to do anything about it.)

Wroof! is an internet Content Manager. A what? Ok. It's a way to make a website look like a magazine or on-line newspaper... sort of a bit like Blogger only a)it works, and b)it does way more.

Wroof! has been 95% finished for a very long time, but it's now so big and so complicated that each time I try to smooth out the edges so that anyone other than me can use it, I break a bit.

Last week, for instance, I broke the shopping cart, which was bad because customers could order something and pay for it, and instead of ending up back at a web page that says something like "thanks for ordering", they got an error message that went something like "No $to parameter in line 47 of mailer.php". Bad.

What I realised, though, after my CWAB piece over the weekend was that this philosophy probably more applies to Wroof! than it does to some as yet unwritten book. I realised I need to make the whole Wroof! environment familiar, consistent and contiguous so that navigating your way around its control panel (blogger calls it a dashboard, which I rather like), needs to be comfortable and intuitive.

It's something Microsoft has known for a very long time (though they seem to have forgotten with Vista and Office 2007) and it's something I bleat on about whenever I look over what other people do, but applying that to something I've done... it just didn't occur to me.

The best part is that once I started going through Wroof! screen by screen to make everything look familiar and comfortable, the whole process of finishing the bloody thing got easier. I shelved plans to rewrite it from scratch with a better design, because I realised that, other than a few bugs that I've been fixing along the way, what I have actually works. The reason I didn't think it did had more to do with the look and feel of the thing than the actual functionality.

It's a very big leap forward.

AGW Skeptics Gaining Momentum

I know. I sort of promised that I wouldn't rant about global warming any more because it's getting boring. What I really meant is that I was getting boring, because the Global Warming debate is really hotting up.

For years, the champions of Anthropomorphic Global Warming (AGW), that is, the "Humans-Did-It-Evil-CO2-Emissions" crowd, have had ascendency. It's an easy sell for the media... doom and gloom, and apparently, you're responsible. Politicians have staked their careers, not to mention the future of nations on adopting it as Dogma too.

Sadly, there is more and more evidence that we humans don't have much to do with it. There's an excellent website, www.climatedebatedaily.com, that has two columns... one on the left for the AGW Champions, and the other on the right for the AGW Skeptics. What's becoming more and more clear is that world climate is influenced by two core factors. The first is sunspot activity, as mentioned in my last posting on this issue, and the second is variations in our orbit around the sun. I add a third, which is geothermal forces, though I suspect these are linked to orbital position.

Many of the scientists who have been shouting unheard for years are now finding listeners. They argue that rather than catastrophic global warming, the earth's headed for a rapid transition to a new Ice Age. We're talking rapid, imminent transition... that is, within our lifetimes.

For example, each previous Ice Age was preceeded by thirty or so years of increasing temperatures, rapid retreat of glaciers and melting of ice caps, followed by a few years of climate instability. And then whammo, the Ice caps started reforming, and just kept growing.

Some parts of the Ice Caps have, according to some of the data, begun to reform.

Do I believe we're headed for an imminent Ice Age? I don't know, but the scientific evidence is compelling, in that there is a direct straight line correlation between our orbital position and global climate, going back more than a million years.

I'm not going to say much more on this issue... but please stay informed by going to sites like ClimateDebateDaily. (Who am I kidding... I can't stay silent, but I will be less frequent.)

Changes Afoot

I know I've been slack lately, not just in updating my own blog, but also in visiting blogger friends. You already know what sort of month I had in April, but this trend's been apparent for a lot longer than a month so I'm not sure the dramas of the last 30 days are the real reason. Instead, I'd rather admit that I've been distracted in ways only someone with ADD will understand.


And besides, I've written just about all I can about bloody global warming and it's probably getting boring. I mean, how often will my readers be bothered with my sanctimonious tirades.

Therefore, I'm making changes. Chester's going to share his pontifications a little less often. Exactly why I'm cutting back brings me to the focus of my ADD. I know. That's an oxymoron. Focus and ADD can't go together... except that, bizarrely, they somehow do.

You see, I've decided to write a book. A novel.

There's been an idea running around in my head for years. I even wrote a chapter a very long time ago, but that draft is sitting deep in landfill somewhere making a very nice home for worms. Over the last few months, the idea's been bubbling back to the surface, distracting me from just about everything.

So the other change is that, I'm going to share the process with you in a new blog... Chester Writes A Book. Don't worry. I'm not going to spoil the plot, or reveal any part of the story. All I'll tell you is that it's actually two books, the first set in World War II, and the second more or less now. It's nothing high brow or noble. Rather, it's a rollicking adventure story unlikely to win any literary awards, but if I'm any good, it will be a page turner. Either that, or it will be what most who set out to write a great novel end up producing... which is a badly written, rambling and predictable story full of cliches, bad grammar and awful prose. Time will tell.

Whether the new blog's interesting enough to read, only you can decide. That's not the point. What I need is a way to focus, and setting down progress in a blog will both organise my thoughts and motivate me to get the book written.

Which isn't to say this blog's dead. Far from it. I'll still update, but posts will perhaps come a little less often while I focus my limited creativity on something more useful.

I invite you to join me on my new journey.

Understatement (Again)

A front page story on the Sydney Morning Herald's website this morning tells of a 93 year old woman found dead on her couch. Apparently, she'd been dead for months, while others continued to live there.

Police, who had been called to the house by a neighbour to do a welfare check, also found a dead dog in another room.

Dallas police spokeswoman Janice Crowther said months have passed since anyone apparently last saw the elderly woman. Electricity was still on at the home and the lawn and exterior were well-kept, but police described the interior as "messy".

"Messy"? So leaving dead people and animals lying around the house is "messy"?

That's an interesting redefinition, and makes me feel a whole lot better about my study.

Another Nail or Two

I watched a few grinding minutes of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" the other day, not by choice, but because Dr J wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

It didn't surprise me that this film was made by a politician... you know the joke... how do you tell if a politician is lying? His lips are moving. So it was for An Inconvenient Truth. In one staggering scene, Gore stands before a world audience and shows a Powerpoint slide proclaiming that not a single scientist now doubts "humans-did-it" global warming. Seriously? Not one? People, he won a fecken Nobel Prize for this bullshit.

I have said before... beware anyone who uses lies, deception and untruth to try to control your life, and I don't care how worthy the cause. When truth is sacrificed, the end does not justify the means because you just never know which truth is next.

Which leads me to a few more nails in the coffin of this global warming myth...

The first is HERE. It's a story about Sunspots, and how they effect Global Climate. Apparently, according to the story, the more sunspots, the less cloud and rain. And at the moment, there are no sunspots, which explains the really shitty weather we've been having here in Sydney.

Astronaut and geophysicist Phil Chapman was the first Australian to become an astronaut with NASA. His observations show that the world cooled quickly between January last year and January this year, by about 0.7C. This, he says, correlates to a drop in sunspot activity to zero.

According to Chapman, "this is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record, and it puts us back to where we were in 1930."

He goes on to say that "if the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over". He even suggested that if sunspots don't fire up soon, we might be headed for another Ice Age.

And here's more...

I was trawling about the web the other day and came across a paper written in 1999, that looked at rises in sub sea floor temperature off the US coast. The researchers were trying to extrapolate that the increase in temperature deep in the mud of the sea floor was a result of an increase in water temperature at the sea floor, and, like all scientists who care about their research grants these days, they were trying to pin those increases on global warming. What they actually found was an increase in mud temperature of between 6 and 10 degrees over the last 150 years, far beyond anything that could be explained by increases in sea temperature. They also found that the geothermal gradient, which is the increase in temperature as you drill down into the earth, had not changed. (If the temperature increase was coming from the water, the gradient would have decreased.)

Sadly, they didn't reach the conclusion that maybe the Earth might be heating up from the inside, but if they had stopped to think about it for a bit, that makes perfect sense because many geologists believe the molten core of the earth is sustained by a low level nuclear reaction caused by radioactive material under pressure.

Temperatures go up. They go down. Sea levels rise and fall. Ice Ages come and go. It happens. Get over it. Forces way more powerful than mankind are at work here, forces so great it's near impossible for us mere mortals to comprehend.

Sunspots, fluctuations in the brightness of the Sun, and geothermal activity are the core drivers of climate on Earth.

Yet Governments around the world are committed to spending trillions "fighting climate change", as though bureaucrats might be able to regulate the climate to stay the same. Here, we even have a "Climate Change Fund" splashing money around on "measures to protect us from inevitable warming", all overseen by the "Minister for Climate Change".

One day, soon I hope, we'll look back on this arrogant buffonnery for the silliness it is because much as we might like to think otherwise, whatever humans do to our climate is insignificant by comparison to those forces of nature.

An April To Forget

Whew! Can anything else go wrong? I suspect not!

And before I go on, let me include a spoiler right here in case you're unduly concerned for my wellbeing. Everything's fine. Ok? Just fine.

So let me tell you why everything needs to be bloody fine, because this April has been one I'd rather forget.

First, I rolled over on my ankle. Sprained it and got to limp around for a few days eliciting some small degree of sympathy from those who crossed my path. As sprains go, it was pretty bad, but nothing compared to the time I did the same ankle on a cobblestoned street in Istanbul.

The ankle took about four days to shrink to tennis ball size, and as long as I didn't try running or skate boarding, I was fine.

And then, a week later, I rolled on it again. Crack. Down I went, leaving a near perfect face print in the mud. That snapping sound was so loud that a dozen or so people in the dog park came running over, certain I'd broken something. I was sure I'd broken something too, and it took all musterable strength to load Zac back into the car and drive the few blocks to home.

I cried. Really. I know it's not a manly thing to do, but the pain was pretty fierce, though I do suspect the tears were, in part, out of frustration for having done something that stupid again.

Dr J and I talked about rushing off to hospital but with the state of the public health system in Sydney, we decided that sitting in Emergency for 12 to 14 hours just for the privilege of being seen by an overworked, tired first year intern probably wasn't a productive use of time. It's just lucky I had a hidden stash of Panadeine Forte to get me through the night.

The next day, the ankle was grapefruit sized, but I could walk on it so I figured it probably wasn't broken after all. It still warranted a trip to the local GP though and that's where the real problems started.

It had been two years since I'd seen my doctor. She'd actually wondered if I'd perhaps died or moved away. Whatever. All that meant was that while my ankle was rather large and warranted immediate X-Rays, she was more concerned about my off the cuff "short of breath with chest pains" answer to her otherwise innocent "how have you been feeling?" question.

We'll get back to those chest pains later. In the mean time, the X-Rays were fine, but she was concerned I'd snapped a tendon so she ordered an MRI and casually declared that my snow boarding and mountain climbing careers were over. I'm picking up the MRI results on Monday, and I'll let you know. It's probably academic. "If you were an elite athlete, then we might consider surgery. You're not, so we won't." Thanks doc, for reminding me once again of my athletic inadequacy.

As it turned out, the MRI and the appointment with the cardiologist were on the same day. I've been seeing the heart guy for 20+ years to keep an eye on a dicky aortic valve, and the last time I saw him, he basically said "Go away. I don't want to see you for another 5 years." If that hadn't been good news, I suppose I might have taken it a little personally.

That he remembered me was nice, and that he remembered that I was seeing him two years too soon was nice too, I think. He was unamused that my heart appeared to have deteriorated, which didn't make my day. He ordered an echo cardiogram, basically an ultrasound of the heart valve, where the main thing they look for is the speed at which the blood is squirted out of the left ventrical. This, I'm told, is important because in a stunning design flaw, if the blood comes out of the heart too fast, it misses the little inlet arteries that actually take it into the heart muscle, which makes the heart want to beat harder, which means the jet of blood is moving faster, which means even less of it gets into the heart. Eventually, the hearts just throws itself over on its side and says "screw this, I'm outa here", and you die.

Which is not to say I died, or even came close to dying, mainly because the ultrasound showed the jet at about half the speed it would have needed to be for me to be dead (though, come to think of it, if I was dead, then presumeably, there would be no speed at all).

The raw number was 38. Don't worry about what 38 means. Just know that in the last fifteen years, it's deteriorated by just 8. In normal people, it would have deteriorated by about 30 in the same timeframe. Hooyah! Score 1 for Chester.

That didn't deter the cardiologist though. "Chest pains and shortness of breath. Damn. I was sure the valve would explain that... I think we'd better do an angiogram next week."

Oh. Ok then. Next week it is.

So it's Thursday. I'm scheduled for a day in hospital next week with a potentially clapped out heart, and I get a phone call from my bro'.

"Mate, I just got a cryptic call from Dad's travel agent. He's been taken off the cruise ship and rushed to hospital in China with internal bleeding. I don't even know where in China."

There's nothing like a crisis to focus someone with ADD. I guess the imperative speeds up one part of the brain so it matches the speed of the other part, and we ADD people become super efficient. It took ten minutes to track Dad down to a little hospital in Tianjin, and another ten to get enough of the story from his travel insurance company to know that he was being looked after. Unfortunately, dear Mother hadn't signed the release forms before they left, so the good people at the insurance company couldn't actually talk to me about what was wrong with Dad, they could just tell me where he was.

Think it can't get much worse? You're wrong.

On Sunday night, I felt a familiar twinge behind my right ear. I won't go into the graphic details... suffice to say that every six months, I get swelling inside my ear and it's excruciatingly painful. I knew that within 36 hours, I would be in agony, and doped to the gills on the aforementioned Panadeine Forte, unable to sleep and barely able to function at all.

Thirty six hours would make it Tuesday... the very day I'm scheduled for the angiogram.

So there I was, off my face on very nice drugs, and about to have a test that's supposed to tell me how my heart's going, and whether I'm going to need heart surgery. I still can't walk properly, Dad's bleeding to death in a foreign hospital where no-one speaks English, and my ear is agonising. Really agonising. Think of how it would feel to have someone drive a really big flat blade screwdriver into your ear drum and twist. That's not it. It's worse than that.

This was not fun people. I didn't want to tell the family about the angiogram because no-one needed the additional worry, and I was reasonably sure it would be fine. Unfortunately, this meant bro' kept calling to co-ordinate Dad's evacuation from Beijing (he moved to a shiny new hospital there on that same day). Seriously, if I'd been able to take the phone into the operating room, it wouldn't have stopped ringing.

So here's the wash up...

Dad's problem ws a bleeding ulcer... bad, but not nearly as serious as first thought. He and Mum are due home today thanks to the very fine work of his insurance company.

The ankle's only a bit swollen now. I'll pick up the MRI results on Monday, and I suspect there's not much I can do about it other than being more careful. I have cancelled the Extreme Adventure Sports Vacation scheduled for August, and have promised to go somewhere a little quieter.

The ear has a way of fixing itself that I won't describe in case you're eating.

And the heart? Perfect. To use the cardiologist's own words... "surprised as I am to have to say it, especially given your self confessed poor diet of deep fried take-away, and your flagrant disregard of your cholesterol levels, your heart is more like the heart of a 30 year old than a fifty year old."

So that's been my April.

I do suspect things will improve... the sun came out for the first time in 17 days and the superstitious remnant left in my more evolved brain thinks this might be a sign.

Neanderthal Speak

There was a curious piece this week on one of the many on-line news sites I waste time with.

Apparently, according to the story, research anthropologists at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton reconstructed a Neanderthal voice box to find out what they would have sounded like.

Ok. Um. So they got a research grant to listen to Neanderthals. Hmmm.

Here's the really curious bit... apparently, they discovered that the shape of a Neanderthal larynx meant that they would have had trouble with "e"s, so "beat" would have sounded more like "bit".

So... um... they think a Neanderthal sounds a bit like a Kiwi? Yeah. I can see that.
The article also describes Neanderthals as "a dead-end offshoot of the human line". So... um... someone sounding like a New Zealander is a dead end offshoot. Yeah. I can see that too.

Perhaps they could have saved all that research money and just had a holiday in Willingtin.

Freedom Of Thought

There's a new movie opening this week across the USA that stirs up some very important soup.

Ben Stein's "Expelled" is a doco about the politics of science, and the lack of freedom of academic thought. Specifically, Ben's got himself in a lather over the Darwinism v Intelligent Design debate, a real with-us-or-agin-us stoush where "mainstream science" accepts one view as fact and villifies anyone who promotes or even contemplates the other.

If you haven't been following it, Darwinism states that life evolved by trial and error. Who or what we are is the product of a series of accidents, starting from the very moment life appeared on earth. Intelligent Design proponents believe there's a greater hand in there somewhere. They don't dispute evolution per se, they simply say "maybe the evolution is the result of some intervention somewhere".

Intelligent Designists point to the one question Darwinists can't answer, which is "how was life created?"

Now I don't want to get bogged down here in any creationism v evolution debate. Intelligent Designists don't believe the world was created in 6 days, after which God went off for a beer. All they say is "maybe there was a Hand of God in the evolution of life somewhere".

I don't mind that view. I really have no opinion one way or another, and if they're right, they certainly answer a few hitherto unanswerable questions without challenging a core, scientifically provable fact, which is that life has built within it, a magnificent self replicating, self programming structure called DNA with which it can change (or be changed?) to suit whatever is happening to it.

What does concern me is that, once again, one view, in this case Darwinism, is accepted as unimpeachable truth such that anyone holding an opposing or questioning view is labelled a heretic and figutatively burned at the stake. Don't take this the wrong way. Darwin was a brilliant thinker, and he's on my hero list because he observed and spoke out against the mainstream.

However, what the mainstream Darwinists are now doing to their Intelligent Design colleagues would make Darwin spin in his proverbial grave.

There is a saying in science... "first they ridicule you, then they revile you... and then they adopt your ideas as though they are their own."

Science has no room for dogma. Webster defines this as "A doctrinal notion asserted without regard to evidence or truth; an arbitrary dictum". Yet isn't this what we now see in mainstream academia?

Ask yourself... is "Humans-Did-It Climate Change" provable science or politically motivated dogma?

Is "High Cholesterol Is Bad For You" the mantra of a vested interest, or is it also just more dogma?

None of this is new, of course. Medicine use to think washing hands before surgery was quackery. Physicists used to think matter was made up of solid stuff. And Astronomers used to think the Sun revolved around the Earth

I don't care what the issue is. No Thought Police State is acceptable under any circumstance. Scientists must be free to follow the evidence, and not the money, fashion or vested interest.

To watch the trailer, click HERE to go to the Expelled website.

Signture Stuff

Is your signature unique? No... I', not talking about that particular quirk of personality that you've somehow set to define you (mine's cartoon socks... doesn't matter how important the business meeting, just look at my socks).

I'm talking about your actual signature. The one on the back of your credit cards. The one on your loan documents, driver's licence and passport. I'll bet you though it was yours. I'll bet you thought no-one else could have exactly your signature.

My signature's pretty flamboyant. It's got long sweeping strokes, stylised letters and curvy bits that make it look more like a logo than a way to pay for something. It truly is unique... or at least I thought so... until yesterday.

We were at the Sydney Bridal Expo and a customer handed me his credit card. I turned it over and... knock me down with a feather... it was MY signature on the back of his card. Seriously.

I did a real double take. For a second or two, my brain actually tried to remember how I eneded up with my credit card between my fingers. "What slight of hand is this?" I thought.

I looked at the customer and said something like "Mate, you really have to see something". Out came my card and we held the two side by side. The signatures were identical. Different names. Even a different letter starting the first name. But absolutely identical signatures.

Now I'm depressed.

Us v Them

I was looking for a picture of a FedEx box this morning, and as is usual in any search, I found myself just a few curious clicks away from another web gem.

It's called GoogleFight, and all it does is measure the number of results in one search against the results of another.

Here's where I ended up...

And other great fights are just a few clicks away, like this one...

...or this one... You can even make your own. Allah v Jesus. Rugby Wallabies v Rugby All Blacks. Macdonalds v Burger King. Coke v Pepsi. Sydney v Melbourne. Reebok v Ferragamo. Chester The Bear v King Kong. Whatever. It's minutes of fun for the whole family.

Seriously... people (like me) need to get out more.

Moon Walk

56%

Just for fun, and to take my mind of the pain of a severely twisted ankle, I spent a few minutes taking the Moon Survival Challenge this morning.

The basic premise is that my little space ship has crashed on the moon, about 200 miles from base camp. I've been able to scratch around in the wreckage and salvage a few tings that might help me survive.

The challenge is to arrange the list of those items in order from most important to least important. The test then compares your score to NASA's score.

As you can see, I only scored 56%... an "F".

I won't spoil it for you. Take the test, then go to comments to read my lame excuse for failing so dismally.

Night? What Night?

A couple of posts ago, I wrote a piece of how misguided Earth Hour is. I haven't changed my mind about that, but several readers availed themselves of the opportunity blogs deliver to point out that for them, the real driver behind Earth Hour is not the fight against Global Warming, but something called "Light Pollution".

LP (as those in the know like to call it) is the excess light thrown up by human activity. It floods the night sky right across the industrialised world, playing havoc with ecosystems and consuming huge resources. It can be as basic and personal as your neighbour's garden light shining into your bedroom, or as complex as the permanent glow over night time America and Europe.

Either way, it wastes enormous resources, and however you look at it, that's a bad thing.

I actually wish that's what Earth Hour was about, because I'd support it 100% if it was. Sadly though, the vast majority of people who will be participating in Earth Hour are blissfully unaware of LP, and will remain so when they switch their lights back on 61 minutes after they switch them off.

It's not their fault. If Earth Hour really is about Light Pollution, then those behind it have done an appalling job at getting the message out there. People will switch out their lights thinking they're somehow making a contribution to reducing carbon emissions. Blame the organisers, or, more probably, the media for dumbing down an important message.

I do thank my contributors, though, for giving Light Pollution a little oxygen in my blog. They have suitably educated me to an environmental issue that's worth the effort. We waste an enormous amount of energy indiscriminately spraying light out into the night, and in the process, irreparably interfere with the natural order of things.

Fetch