The ABC has, maybe, accidentally published some anti-vaxxer material, however the US internet based new source The Huffington Post is full of it. I have never ben a fan of it, always finding it a bit two much of the soft-left types.

But they do manage to exceed themselves with this piece: don’t take vaccines but rather take homeopathic remedies. Idiots.

HT: PZ Myers

The World’s Best Optical Illusion.

Touring bassist with Danish band Junior Senior at the Roskilde Festival 2005.

I am at the moment considering how to update, improve and focus this blog. At the moment I am looking at other technology and themes and expect to be able to put something in place soon.

The Government in Victoria has promulgated new water targets for Victorians of 155 litres per day.

I had no idea how much water this involves, but since I have made absolutely no effort to save water in any way I was interested to see how my water usage comes out. When I received my bill it turns out that I use 98 litres a day.

This is probably because I have no garden as I live in an apartment. I can now feel vindicated in my belief that I do not have to save water because in fact all the water is being used to water suburban gardens. This would tend to indicate that the solution is for the subsidies for water tanks to be hiked up even higher (although they are not very effective when it is not raining).

The interesting politics around the program is that a program like Target 155 is an imperfect substitute for other policy instruments, such as higher prices, enforced limits or shipping an iceberg from Antarctica. The problem with all those later programs is that they are things that the Government does to us. Target 155 is something we do for ourselves. This has the twin benefit of savings the government from having to make unpopular decisions, and make the ordinary citizen want to be a part of the program.

When waking this morning I turned on the radio to my favourite station, the ABC’s NewsRadio. The first two news reports I heard were about a small riot in a prison in Tunis and a Person getting sick on a cruise ship needing to be helicoptered to Tasmania.

Why these news reports? It is like they pick completely random events to report on. We hear no news reports about Tunis at any other time, and the events on cruise ships are not constant reporting items. But of course we know why these are reported – Fires! Prison riots! Medical Emergencies! Plane Crashes! Murder!

The “news” as we know it, is almost the opposite, not News but rather a random collection of factoids.

I can only endorse the recent proposal by Chris Dillow in the UK:

The BBC is “incredibly stupid” to devote so much resources to news-gathering. It should instead close down its radio and TV news operations for the UK, confining news to its website. I say this for six reasons:

1. TV especially is not the right medium for news. Stories are rarely illuminated by egomaniacs waving their arms. News is better suited to the web, which has the virtues of immediacy and flexibility; if pictures or sounds improve a story, the web can carry them, and if not, it can bin them. The web also better allows reporters to explain what’s going on, as Mark Easton’s and Robert Peston’s blogs demonstrate.

2. Reducing expensive news-gathering would release resources for better programming. News could be replaced by quality documentaries; an understanding of the Israeli-Gaza conflict would surely be better promoted by historical documentaries than necessarily partial reports of who’s lobbing bombs at whom.

For Australia this could be a useful proposal, the ABC could close down its large and expensive news operations, stop reporting on prison riots in Tunis and spend the money on useful and meaningful programming for Australia.

I once considered buying a Thomas Friedman book “The Lexus and the Olive Tree”, at one point when I was interested in reading more on globalisation and trade. It had just come out and I did look at it a few times in the book store, but it just struck me as well, a little unserious.

Matt Taibbi reviews Thomas Friedman’s new book:

Like George W. Bush with his Bushisms, Friedman came up with lines so hilarious you couldn’t make them up even if you were trying—and when you tried to actually picture the “illustrative” figures of speech he offered to explain himself, what you often ended up with was pure physical comedy of the Buster Keaton/Three Stooges school, with whole nations and peoples slipping and falling on the misplaced banana peels of his literary endeavors.
Remember Friedman’s take on Bush’s Iraq policy? “It’s OK to throw out your steering wheel,” he wrote, “as long as you remember you’re driving without one.” Picture that for a minute. Or how about Friedman’s analysis of America’s foreign policy outlook last May:
The first rule of holes is when you’re in one, stop digging.When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels.”
First of all, how can any single person be in three holes at once? Secondly, what the fuck is he talking about? If you’re supposed to stop digging when you’re in one hole, why should you dig more in three? How does that even begin to make sense? It’s stuff like this that makes me wonder if the editors over at the New York Times editorial page spend their afternoons dropping acid or drinking rubbing alcohol. Sending a line like that into print is the journalism equivalent of a security guard at a nuke plant waving a pair of mullahs in explosive vests through the front gate. It should never, ever happen.
Even better was this gem from one of Friedman’s latest columns: “The fighting, death and destruction in Gaza is painful to watch. But it’s all too familiar. It’s the latest version of the longest-running play in the modern Middle East, which, if I were to give it a title, would be called: “Who owns this hotel? Can the Jews have a room? And shouldn’t we blow up the bar and replace it with a mosque?” There are many serious questions one could ask about this passage, but the one that leaped out at me was this: In the “title” of that long-running play, is it supposed to be the same person asking all three of those questions? If so, does that person suffer from multiple personality disorder? Because in the first question, he is a neutral/ignorant observer of the Mideast drama; in the second he sympathizes with the Jews; in the third he’s a radical Muslim. Moreover, after you blow up the bar and replace it with a mosque, is the surrounding hotel still there? Why would anyone build a mosque in a half-blown-up hotel? Perhaps Friedman should have written the passage like this: “It’s the latest version of the longest-running play in the modern Middle East, which, if I were to give it a title, would be called: “Who owns this hotel? And why did a person suffering from multiple personality disorder build a mosque inside it after blowing up the bar and asking if there was a room for the Jews? Why? Because his editor’s been drinking rubbing alcohol!”

Read the whole thing, but you should start with his review of Friedman’s previous book.

Hat tip to Lawyers Guns and Money

You often read about how people change there live after having some form of near death experience, or life threatening event. You could imagine the following individual moving th Cuba to live on the beach the rest of his life.

My local supermarket has established a self check-out system for purchases. It was obvious that they were up to something as the whole supermarket was being uprooted and redesigned. And there was a problem to fix, the peak hour lines were absolutely ridiculous and the space for queuing was completely inadequate.

In the end what emerged was rows of new self-service check-out counters where you can scan your own basket full of products and then pay yourself; one or two staff members with “information” sashes would be hovering around.

Still, forcing the costs onto your customers by having to do your own check-out seems like a pretty stingy was of solving the problem, and in my mind I was implacably opposed.

But having now experienced the service I am very pleased with it. Not that I have done any self-service checking out! But lots other people have and the express check out (express staff operated check-out) line is really short, even during peak times.

And so in the end the solution is actually quite a useful one, it allows for self-selection. People choose which line they wish to go to, and they get through faster than they previously would, but no one is forced to use out check-out method they didn’t want.

If you are interested in what it would be like to ram one tourist boat into another then this video should sate your curiosity:

I do like Germany, although I often find it hard to figure out exactly what it is I like. But when I see a factory like this one I understand.

This ad was shown on the Gruen Transfer last week, as an ad that won the 2007 best ad competition.

It is a good ad, well, maybe not a good ad (given that is about selling product and I have no idea how successful it was at that), but it is a good short film, and I was trying to think why that is.

There is the obvious connect between the ape and it animal spirit and the drum (the drummer in The Muppets wasn’t called Animal for nothing), but I think it is more than that. It is the sense of purposeful and meditative concentration on the ape’s face, the singular focus on the task and the obvious, primal, satisfaction that the ape achieve. I think we would all pay a lot of money for that sense of satisfaction.

The ABC’s new political television show The Hollowmen is not a bad show, but there are some unrealistic parts to it. For example this scene from last weeks episode, do you see the problem?

The public servants are using a Mac.

there is no way stingy government departments would fork out the money for a Mac. They would give you some dodgy Windows computer, because “that’s the policy”.

On a related issue, this was in the credits, it was the “thanks to section”:

Angkor Wat?

The Language Log has more mistranslations, this time of food items.

My favourite:

Phil’s strength assists the flavour of sauced justice

The following video has been floating around the intertubes for some time now (probably years) but I have only come across it recently and so would like to add my name to the list of millions around the world who have shared the video.

As Ezra Klein at The American Prospect states when he posted it “This isn’t like the other videos I post. If you haven’t seen it, watch it. If you have seen it, watch it again. Its good for the soul.”

As an aside, I agree with Ezra that it is good for the soul, which is a little confusing since there is no such thing as a “soul” (I think we need to come up with a new word for that thing we mean when we talk about our experience of joy, of self-worth and our interactions with our fellow human beings).

The New York Times has an article that discusses the phenomena of the video.

This article provides an interesting analysis of the cost of SMS messages. While it is US based it equally applies to Australia.

Given the low cost of data transmission, the cost of SMS messages should be vanishingly small, yet the telco’s charge rates that are millions of times higher than comparable services. An SMS message costs 20 cents for a quarter of a kilobyte, yet you can get gigabytes of wireless internet data for tens of dollars (the gigabyte is a million times the size of a kilobyte).

The telco’s are truly ripping off consumers, the more interesting question though is – why are they getting away with it? I think the answer is that consumers do not think in kilobytes and gigabytes. They do not compare the technological capabilities of the alternate communication methods, but rather they consider the personal benefit they receive from the technology. The SMS is personally useful, so consumer are willing to pay for it. Who cares about some esoteric techie’s analysis of bandwidth?

And this all makes economic sense (that’s the difference between economics and engineering). The big elephant in the room is, however, why doesn’t competition drive down the cost? Why doesn’t some telco attract new customers by introducing low cost SMS?

Because they all know what a golden egg laying goose it is and none want to kill it off. It is a kind of zero sum game, you could start offering low cost SMS but the other firms could instantly match it, and they would all be instantly worse off.

As Adam Smith said:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is im-possible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.

But you do not need to even meet together to arrive at an understanding. You do not need to discuss or debate, but if everyone in the industry knows what is happening, the outcome can still be as bad.

The ACCC goes after collusion cases, but it has to prove actually documented agreements to fix prices. But in this case, it is unlikely that any such documentation exists. But still surely there is a case for regulation?

Photo

The next episode of In Our Time will be on Lysenkoism – a very interesting period of Soviet history where ideology ruled over science. It is probably a defining aspect of Ideology that where the ideology conflicts with facts/science/reason it the ideology that triumphs. Wikipedia summaries Lysenkoism as:

…a term given to the repressive political and social campaigns undertaken in science and agriculture by the powerful Stalinist director of the Soviet Lenin All-Union Institute of Agricultural Sciences, Trofim Denisovich Lysenko and his followers, which began in the late 1920s and formally ended in 1964…Soviet mass-media presented Lysenko as a genius who had developed a new, revolutionary agricultural technique. During this period, Soviet propaganda often focused upon inspirational stories of peasants who, through their own canny ability and intelligence, came up with solutions to practical problems. Lysenko’s widespread popularity provided him a platform to denounce theoretical genetics and to promote his own agricultural practices. He was, in turn, supported by the Soviet propaganda machine, which overstated his successes and omitted mention of his failures.

Between 1934 and 1940, under Lysenko’s admonitions and with Stalin’s blessings, many geneticists were executed or sent to labor camps. In 1948, genetics was officially declared “a bourgeois pseudoscience”; all geneticists were fired from work (some were also arrested), and all genetic research was discontinued. Nikita Khrushchev, who fancied himself as an expert in agricultural science, also valued Lysenko as a great scientist, and the taboo on genetics continued (but all geneticists were released or rehabilitated posthumously). Only in the middle of the 1960s was it waived.

One interesting aspect is that Lysenko was a proponent of Lamarckism, an earlier (pre-darwinian) view of evolution that the acquired traits of an animal are passed on to offspring (so a giraffe stretches its neck to reach leaves and thus has offspring with longer necks, and the blacksmith has children with bigger muscles). You can see why a scientist holding this view would appeal to the Communist elite, by molding the modern Soviet Citizen into a model communist this trait can be passed onto children and the whole world made anew.

Should be a good program, and if you subscribe now, the podcast should turn up in your podcatcher (in my case iTunes) by early Thursday evening).

In the budget ruminations of the Age, there was this article:

They might have promised us the world but, divined through the 32 glossy pages of the Working Families Support Package, the working family encompasses anyone who has ever been a member of a family in which someone, at some time, happened to work.

It is, in a nutshell, a meaningless phrase turned into an economic shibboleth, which might account for why Rudd and Swan have recently been backpedalling from anything but the fuzziest feel-good definition of Australis familias.

It just struck me as confusing, and I realised that I didn?t really understand what ?shibboleth? means, particularly in this instance. People I spoke to today also didn?t know the meaning, although one person pointed out that it was an old Hebrew word used to identify members of the tribe (apparently non-members couldn?t pronounce it properly). Still that does not explain this particular usage.

Wikipedia gives a modern usage (based on this older meaning):

Today, in the English language, a shibboleth has also a wider meaning, referring to any “in-crowd” word or phrase that can be used to distinguish members of a group from outsiders – even when not used by a hostile other group. The word is also sometimes used in a broader sense to mean jargon, the proper use of which identifies speakers as members of a particular group or subculture

Thus it is an “in” word, the knowledge of which identifies you as a member of a group. An economic shibboleth? Maybe The Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU)? But I don’t think Working Families is a shibboleth. Economist and economic commentators have not used it, it is Kevin Rudd and his colleagues who have repeated it constantly. I think we need to call Language Log in on this one.