Just Out

New Model: PGK-QE-KW1, "Windy".

Note: This model supercedes model PGK-QE-PPMcG1, which has been discontinued.

(Hat tip to The Unknown Googler)

A Dried Out Leaf (V)

Seam Carving

This morning's drawing exercise was another one of those "expand your comfort zone" exercises. The result was a drawing of yet another leaf (a different one this time - I'm considering the possibility of embedding the last leaf in epoxy resin, to make a cute little paperweight for sale with the ink drawing of it that's already on offer. If only I had the skills, and the time, to craft a matching set of steak knives). This morning's drawing is on Conte crayon on cartridge paper, initialled and dated by yours truly and definitely not for sale. It has a crap half and a not so crap half.

So let's file that one away in the manila folder of "Drawings - Exercise" for now and take a look at that noxious little genie I mentioned in the first post in this series - his name is "seam carving". You can check him out in this YouTube clip. What seam-carving promises is "content-aware image resizing". I find the results a bit of an eyesore.

(Note: although the link points to a video plugging commercial software for seam-carving, there are open-source packages out there as well).

Seam-carving is a way of taking "unimportant" detail - typically background detail - out of an image as it is resized, without altering the "content". That is whatever a web-page designer decided is important in the picture. It's a "solution" to the "problem" that arises when a computer user resizes a browser window and the the text adjusts to the new window dimensions, but the images just sit there, obstinately refusing to shift from their current 500x375 pixel resolution.

Here's that leaf again (the hilariously over-priced one), in a new visual context that I'll be using to illustrate what happens to an image when it's seam-carved for resizing. In this image the leaf is placed at the centre, on what appears (thanks to the perspective of the chequerboard) to be a flat, horizontal surface. Behind it, I've implied a vertical surface, or just open space.



Let's set some conditions for how the image is to be resized, if it is stretched in any direction - horizontally, vertically or a combination of both. They are:

The leaf is to remain at the visual centre of the image;
It is to stay the same size throughout the transformation.

Now let's look at what happens, under those conditions, when we reduce first the height of the image, then its width, then reduce both to smallest size we are prepared to accept.


Minimum Image Height


Minimum Image Width

Minimimum Image Area

I hope it's obvious from examining and comparing these three images that the alterations to the background we've made to keep the leaf centred at the same size have altered our perception of the leaf - particularly in the last image, where the leaf appears to have grown a lot larger. To watch the process happening dynamically (in the YouTube video) is, for me, quite unsettling and a little fatiguing.

I'll leave this topic here for now and come back to it either in a new post or an update. Now that I've hit the topic of "seam-carving" we're starting to get to the meat of this series.

A Dried Out Leaf (IV)

(With Defi)

First up, here's a little affront to your visual perception:



There's not much to say about the production of that one - I GIMPed it out quickly this morning, as a sop to the left side of my brain - the half that went into a screaming hissy-fit yesterday morning because "I can't do that stuff and it's not fair - you're giving all your time to right half ..." etc, etc, etc. That moment was a long time coming but it was inevitable - I shouldn't have been so dismissive of the frequent remarks in the teach yourself drawing book that sometimes the process would be emotionally disturbing. One thing I'm sure of, after yesterday's experience - at $100 (or 100 francs) a two minute drawing by Picasso was dirt cheap.

There is quite a bit to say about what the image does to your visual perceptions - and how that's achieved - but I'm setting that aside for later. There's at least one more illustration to produce first. For now I'll content myself with stating, quite emphatically, that the one thing the image is not is an optical illusion. Quite the reverse - it combines three standard techniques for producing the impression of depth in a two dimensional image to produce a result that is quite simply, irreconcilable as a whole image. You'll see what I mean if you sit and look at it and let it jangle your brain for a bit. Don't spent too long - it's very discordant and might upset you. Seriously. It's complete visual nonsense, so there's no point working yourself into a tizzy trying to make sense of it.

Today's teach yourself drawing exercise is to flog off the original drawing for the princely sum of $200 (AU). I have several good reasons for doing this. At the more respectable end of the list - the justification and rationalisation end - getting rid of the original is a good way to detach from it (it's only a piece of paper with ink and pencil markings on it), so I can concentrate on its uses - partly play, and partly to illustrate and drive home the occasional point about visual perception and the veracity, authority or integrity of images. Not as a souvenir of a fraught day where I got far too upset over the fact that I'd just botched a drawing of a leaf, then came home after a visit to my one and only friendly ex-wife (as in, I only have one ex-wife, we're still friendly, and she's a very unique individual) to knock off the drawing in a few minutes.

Why $200? Well, it's a nice round figure but it comprises 3 components - eight hours work at or around the minimum wage ($132.00), Workcover compensation for the self-inflicted emotional trauma and, finally, postage and handling (all up, the other $70). What you get - in the unlikely event that you take up the offer, is an A4 sheet of graphic artist's tracing paper, with the drawing rendered in ink and pencil. And that's it, so we'll move on to the less respectable end of my list of reasons - sheer emotional and financial desparation, of which I've had a gutful.

Buy the Drawing

I'm quite sure at this stage, that I've delivered a second affront to a few readers - those of you who're scrolling down the post to hit the comments link so that you can denounce this as nothing more than on-line begging - a blatant bleg. Don't waste your time - comments is gone. You might, however, be interested in the alternative, which I'll describe later.

Defi

Begging my arse. It's an open, and honest free market transaction. The merchandise, as described, exists. It will be despatched to the first purchaser to stump up the $200 through that PayPal button that's been sitting idle over on the left-hand side of the page. If anybody does buy the drawing, I'm not interested in their motivations for doing so. I don't expect them to be to interested, respectful, or sympathetic to my motivations for selling. You want the drawing - it's yours, for $200, take it or leave it. You'll get more for your money than Helga got for the $4000 she spent ordering a Hewlett-Packard computer, from a "reputable" major retailer (the story's probably hit the business news by now, but I haven't been tracking it). The day after she ordered the computer, the company went into receivership. As an unsecured creditor, the most she can realistically expect out of the transaction is a dividend of 10 cents in the dollar - $3600 down the tubes in 24 hours. That's reputable Australian business practice.

Still got some abuse to vent? Well, here's the deal - the replacement for the comments facility I mentioned earlier. Use the "Flame Gummo" button - for a mere $5.00 donation via PayPal, you can vent your spleen, your gall bladder and your flatus-bloated bowels in an e-mail to me. I'm not kidding.

Flame Gummo

Now that's really affronted you, hasn't it? I can hear the huffing and puffing already - what have we come to, when someone is prepared to cop online abuse for $5.00 a throw. What sort of debased individual would demean himself that way?

Still not prepared to part with your money? Well, that leaves two last options.

If you're really so sickened by this post as you profess, put your vote where your mouth is. It won't cost you a cent. In the coming election, cast your vote so that it ends up - via whatever circuitous perambulation through our system of preference allocation suits you - so that it ends up with the ALP.

I'm not entirely rapt with Kevin Rudd either, but I'll still be casting my vote for the ALP. Because I want to live in a civil society again - I'm bloody desperate to live in a civil society again. Because I'm sick of the Liberal Party's Theatre of Cruelty - the ongoing soap opera of Work for the Dole (with the new spin off show, Welfare to Work) the big spectacles like Tampa and the Northern Territory intervention, the little kitchen-sink dramas like Federal Police raids on the homes of Australian Muslims that turn up nothing, the trashing of Mamdouh Habib's reputation, the Haneef Affair. This is a government that has repeatedly, and routinely, victimised private citizens for no better purpose than to give all you nice people out there someone you can despise.

As Ziggy Stellenstaub, my head-care specialist, said at our last get-together, if the Liberal Party win this one, they'll believe they can get away with anything. As someone who can confidently expect to be on the debasing and demeaning end of whatever "anything" succeeds Welfare to Work, whose next change of residence if something isn't done about providing affordable rental accomodation is going to be from an almost, but not quite affordable suburban house to the street, with all the asset losses that entails, I've got a very strong vested interest in seeing that "anything" forestalled.

Don't think much of that option either? Well, you can always don the mantle of sanctimonious hypocrite and denounce me in whatever public forum - be it a blog or a newspaper column - you can use. Just don't come around here expecting to kick Trotsky unless you're prepared to pay for the privilege. Your bigotted, "one-dream-fits-all and if it doesn't we'll bloody well make you fit it", idea of what this country should be doesn't interest me. It never really did.

A Dried Out Leaf (III)

Nailed the twisted little sucker! Now maybe I can move onto some more interesting stuff (in both the drawing, and the writing).

Harry Nails It.

It being his own metatarsus:

Howard closes in on the riff-raff.

Everything that's wrong with, and wrong about, conservative commentary on this election and the conservative attitude generally in just seven words.

There's more too, but nothing that you couldn't find elsewhere, no less ill-considered, and no less shitty-livered.

Thanks for the "Cheerful Friday thought" Harry - it's brightened my day up a lot. Which it needed.

A Dried Out Leaf (II)

I recently heard, or read, an amusing little anecdote about Picasso. I've forgotten where.

Picasso was asked - no doubt by somebody equally famous - for a drawing. He took a table napkin, drew on it for a couple of minutes, handed the napkin over and asked for a hundred dollars. Or francs maybe.

"A hundred dollars for that? But it only took you two minutes to draw!" was the aghast response.

"Plus fifty years of learning how to do it."

Today's teach myself how to draw exercise was to render the pencil sketch of the leaf in ink. It didn't work out very well as you'll see from the scan of the result: 13 pen strokes on a carefully drawn grid before I decided that I'd botched the job and gave up.

The exercise wasn't an attempt to outdo Picasso: my aim was to attack a problem that's stuffed up other drawings I've produced: the problem of hand tremor. You can see the effect of hand tremor in the image below, a detail of a panel from a new comic strip I've started working on. And stopped again, for this week at least.

Despite a generous application of blurring (using the GIMP's Gaussian blur feature) the lines of the Parliament House flag-pole are noticeably wobbly. That's because they were traced slowly, giving the Trotsky nervous system too much time to fret about the fact that I was working with real, indelible ink on an expensive piece of quality tracing paper (well, more expensive than the crap, picked it up cheap at the newsagent, paper I usually use for drawings that are going to end up digitised).

Three simple mistakes killed today's drawing.

First up, I left the diagonal in the 6x6 grid of rectangles I drew as a guide for the copying. The diagonal was only there as a guide in the grid construction. But, because I neglected to erase it, as soon as I started drawing strokes that crossed it, it became attractive as an additional guide. The inevitable result - confusion, and misplaced strokes.

Second, I bottled out. Instead of pushing through that "OMG I'm actually going to use 110 gsm cartridge this time" barrier, I went the cheap crappy paper option.

I've forgotten the third. Whatever it was, it seems to have been fixed by taping the pencil drawing on a clean kitchen chopping board, and then over that a sheet of that tracing paper, so that I can work on a firm surface that I can tilt to any angle. That's a gunna do solution until I've got budget for a drawing board.

And with those mistakes identified and out of the way, what did I get right?

Well, first up, taking it slowly, visualising each stroke - even practising it in the air above the paper - before actually touching pen to paper worked well. That technique is a keeper.

Bizarre as it sounds, consciously putting white space between strokes works better - at this stage at least - than trying to connect them. The aim was to get used to drawing ink strokes quickly and cleanly - worrying about whether they connect just gets in the way.

Third, I stopped when as soon as it became obvious that it wasn't working. I'll tackle the job again later, under better conditions. There's a whole can of worms hidden in the previous sentence but I'm not going to open it today. Let's just say that some days, and for some purposes, it makes a lot more sense not to get back on the bicycle straight away. You need to take a little time to rub your sore bum first.

A Dried Out Leaf

Partly it's the season and partly it's the prospect that the Howard years really are ending on November the 24th that has me in a good mood today. The seasonal part is that whole

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyn in swich licour
Of which virtu engendered is the flour;

thing. I don't think my attitude to the election needs much explanation - once again, we've been given the chance to get rid of Australia's worst Prime Minister this century - probably the worst since Federation, for the meiosis challenged - and this time it looks like the electorate is finally going to take the opportunity.

There's one other major contributor to my good mood - I've found a new skill to learn. This time it's drawing. Looking back now, I realise that I was doomed to start teaching myself - or re-teaching myself - how to draw from the very first time I used The GIMP to doctor a photograph. Another major steps along the road to this new perdition was producing that first picture of The Indefatigable Wingnut (Episode 6 currently in production).

So now, every day starts with me running up the blinds in my study/den/home office and sitting down at the desk for a drawimg warm up. Today's warm up was drawing a dried out leaf I found in the back yard - the one in the picture (my HP OfficeJet LX lost a lot of the pencilled shading, so I've colorised it to bring out some of the contrast that was lost).

Drawing the leaf was a two stage process (just in case anyone's thinking of trying it at home). The first stage was to draw the leaf with the desk set up so that I couldn't see the drawing paper (a portable file holder works quite well for this if you're using A4 paper). The second was to draw it with the paper visible, but with my attention on the leaf, not the drawing. The only times I look at the drawing are when I've lost my way a bit, and need to reposition the pencil.

One interesting side effect of this new avocation is that I'm looking at the world around me with a new set of interests. A similar thing happened in my shutterbugging days - I would spend a lot of time thinking about how ordinary everyday scenes would look through a camera viewfinder and a lot more alert to the part light and shade play in our visual perception of our everyday world.

A second interesting side effect is that when I'm writing things in my head, they're more likely to be about the imaged world - the world as depicted in photographs, drawings and paintings - and how that imaged world can be manipulated. One form of digital image manipulation I serendipitously discovered yesterday gives me the willies - it's a dangerous little genie indeed and one day I'd like to thoroughly anethematise the idiots who decided to open its bottle.

But not today. I'd rather sit and look at the original drawing behind that scan and mentally rehearse the process of converting it to a line drawing in ink. I reckon the first stage will be to copy it with a 2H pencil to reduce it to a set of pen strokes that can be produced quickly and smoothly, with neither hand tremor or smudging from supporting the pen on the paper. Then a couple of rehearsals on scrap paper before I tackle it on 110 gsm cartridge.

To finish, I'll just throw out a couple of quick remarks that would otherwise nag at me, demanding to be written about, so that I can keep my head clear for what's important to me right now.

First, at the end of the nineteenth century, the French Third Republic was riven by The Dreyfus Affair. it divided the nation into two bitterly opposed factions - Dreyfussards and anti-Dreyfussards. According to the Wikipedia article cited (which prima facie is not to be trusted):

... The right-wing Vichy Regime was composed to some extent of old anti-Dreyfusards and their descendants. The Vichy Regime would later deport Dreyfus' grand-daughter to her death at Nazi extermination camps.

Any historians out there looking for a topic for a blog post? A quick compare and contrast might while away an otherwise boring afternoon.

I'll conclude this not so quick remark by noting that since the turn of the century this government has managed to produce quite a few scandals of its own: the Tampa incident, the Habib case, the cases of Cornelia Rau and Vivian Solon, the Haneef Affair and Kevin Andrew's stupid remarks on Sudanese immigrants. Any would-be Zolas out there? Hello?

That wasn't so quick, really, was it? Let's see if I can get number two out of the way with a little more dispatch.

It's pretty bloody ludicrous when a soi-dissant iconoclast derides an artist for producing works with obvious iconoclastic intent as his (said blogger's) Lameass of the Month. Still, the blog's name is apt.

Yep, that did it. Just the right balance of pith and vinegar.

This Friday at LP

So now you know.

A Week with Wingnut

Monday Morning: Some diarist, eh? Two days into this silly venture and I've already missed a day.

So, what happened yesterday? Nothing much. A bit more sketching and scanning, ant then a lot of time out in the afternoon to put together a picture of the giant helium balloon I expect the ALP to enter in this year's inaugural Sydney Christmas (and not Thanksgiving) Parade. If the reports that the election will be Saturday November 24th are right and the polls hold up, it might turn out to be a thanksgiving parade anyway.

My Week with Wingnut

Saturday Morning: Check comments at Larvatus Prodeo and learn that "Doink!" - the sound of a wingerang bouncing off Wingnut's head - was once used by Mad Magazine's Don Martin. Oops! What the hell - I'll go ahead with the next episode, more or less as I planned it on Thursday, taking up a suggestion of Zeppo Bakunin's. Time to start drawing up the storyboard.

Instead of starting on the storyboard, I make the mistake of checking out some of the latest links to LP and discover a blog post by a strident fallacist on LP's most recent Flying Monkey incident. Like any fallacist argument, the post is riddled with fallacious reasoning - according to the post author's own taxonomy of fallacies, it's a pretty good example of browbeating. The taxonomy itself proves to be unreliable - it includes, for example, "Moral Equivalence" with this definition:

The advocate seeks to draw false moral comparisons between two phenomena which are not morally equivalent.

Ethics 101: ethics isn't about phenomena but human actions, choices and decisions. If for example, you want to argue that it's wrong to kill Tom, Dick or Harry but OK to kill Ahmed, you have to mount a pretty good case to show that Ahmed is so very different from Tom, Dick and Harry as to justify your position.

I put off the storyboard work to knock out a quick drawing of an arse-clown:



There, that's one distraction out of the way.

Postscript: no Theo, you don't have my permission to use the picture of the arse-clown in future.

Word of the Day - Salinisation

The process whereby soluble salts accumulate within the soil.

That's just one of several definitions of the word I found with a simple Google search. Surprising really because, according to one well-known authority, the word either doesn't exist or it should be spelt salinization - I'm not sure which:

So, we could smile to read contestant Snezana declare that "Salinisation (sic) of land is one of the major environemtal (sic) crises facing Australia", and Kirra warn that "the biggest problem in our enviroment (sic) today is our lack of water".

At worst we'd have wondered how badly we teach English as Angelique demanded help for an "environmnet" in danger, and Natalia wept for an "enviornment (sic) that sustains us". (Andrew Bolt in The Hun)

And you might wonder whether it's really so much worse than when young Andrew was at school and somehow omitted to learn that salinisation is both a bona fide word in English and, in Australian usage, spelt pretty much as it appears in Snezana's declaration. At least, I think that's the case.

But I could be wrong about that - if so, I'm not the only one. All these people seem to be labouring under the same misapprehension. Someone ought to write to them and tell them, don't you think?

Another Fine Moment From Mr 38 Percent

Gary Ramage of The Australian* took the original photo - I doctored it a bit. I doubt that this little gesture from John Howard to his opposite number is going to go over too well with the 48% of voters who prefer Rudd as Prime Minister. It might swing a few of the 14% of voters who are undecided against Howard too. Sometimes it's surprisingly painful what a momentary lapse into infantile self-indulgence will cost you.

(via The Ostrahyun)

Oops!

Posting's been a little light on around here recently, hasn't it? That's because - partly thanks to some misguided encouragement in the comments on this post - I got sucked into mucking around with computer graphics big time. If you haven't checked them out already, you can see the results here, here, and here.

There's a fourth episode of The Indefatigable Wingnut in production - the first three frames of the comic have passed the Zeppo Bakunin chuckle test with flying colours but, nonetheless, I find myself in a bit of an embarassing bind.

All the action takes place in a so far nameless city - which might not be such a big problem. But not having a name for the arch villain of the piece is starting to bug me. Here's what he looks like:



Any suggestions?

Mad Monk Sighted at APEC

Sidekick Needed, Female or Adolescent Preferred

When a gigantic cone of light pierces the night, etching an eerie wingnut symbol against the night fog, somebody's got to answer the call. Here he is.

Rasputin Sighted Again!

Rasputin at a recent meeting with the Australian which never actually occurred and even if it did occur nothing much was discussed and the Prime Minister meets with lots of people, so there's nothing special in him meeting Rasputin, assuming that he did, which of course, he didn't.

Not a Photoshop

And nobody's claiming that it's art, either.

Still Life with Fugitive Banana

(Image produced with the GIMP).

More Elusive Than Elvis

Until now.

Sick, Twisted Puppy

By Request

A US Percy class nuclear submarine during an emergency surfacing drill. The distinctive bulge of the boat's Global Location And Navigation System is clearly visible at the bow.

Friday Dog-Blogging

Lesser Known Dog Breeds

Serengeti Giraffe Hound

Like its distant cousins, the greyhound, the pharaoh hound and the ibizan hound, the Serengeti Giraffe Hound is a gaze hound, bred for the sport coursing small game. The breed was established by the Rev James Huffington, an Anglican missionary to Africa in the mid nineteenth century and keen follower of the sport of coursing (he was, in his university days, a devoted beagler).

The Giraffe Hound's intended prey were marmosets, lemurs, and other arboreal creatures in cautious enough to descend to ground level. According to Huffington (whose testimony is generally considered unreliable) his dogs eventually excelled in the sport of hunting down and retrieving such game. To what end is not clear. Others are more skeptical of the breed's suitability for any purpose.

The Giraffe Hound is strictly an outdoor dog, and therefore unsuitable for anyone living in a flat or small unit. Despite the breed's appalling reputation for health problems - chiefly hip dysplasia and hypertension - it nonetheless enjoys some favour with those who hate cats and possums.

The Micro-Miniature Poodle (Nanoodle)

This controversial, recently recognised, breed has replaced the chihuahua as the smallest of the dog breeds. At less than 1mm in length from head to anus the Micro-Miniature Poodle (or Nanoodle) is barely visible to the naked eye.

The illustration is a scanning electron micrograph of a nanoodle sitting on a wooden porch.

New from TBP

Features:

• Special Rapid Application & Quick Drying Formulation!
• Sun-Proof and Weatherproof!
• Long Lasting Fly Repellant and Anti-Bacterial action!
• TBP's exclusive Odor-Gard deodorant action!

Friday Dog-Blogging

Another great moment from the career of Gympie Flyer,
Australian Racing Legend.

Albion Park, 1983 - despite a leg injury Gympie Flyer held the lead right from the start and finished first.

Believe It or Not

It must be a slow news day. According to the front page of today's Age, a man claiming membership of a non-existent group of disadvantaged Australians was awarded $525,000 compensation for events that couldn't possibly have happened but even if they did happen it was all intended for his own good and it's only by today's standards that anybody did anything wrong so any alleged harm he might have suffered was completely unintentional.

(Cross-posted at Larvatus Prodeo)

The Very Proper Gander

(A timely tale for a nation of hysterics)

Not so long ago there was a very fine gander. He was strong and smooth and beautiful and he spent most of his time singing to his wife and children. One day somebody who saw him strutting up and down in his yard and singing remarked , 'There is a very proper gander.' An old hen overheard this and told her husband about it that night in the roost. 'They said something about propaganda' she said. 'I have always suspected that' said the rooster, and he went around the barnyard next day telling everybody that the very fine gander was a dangerous bird, more than likely a hawk in gander's clothing. A small brown hen remembered a time when at a great distance she had seen the gander talking with some hawks in the forest. 'They were up to no good' she said. A duck remembered that the gander once told him that he did not believe in anything. 'He said to hell with the flag, too,' said the duck. A guinea hen recalled that she had once seen somebody who looked very much like the gander throw something that loked a great deal like a bomb. Finally, everybody snatched up sticks and stones and descended on the gander's house. He was strutting in his front yard, singing to his children and wife. 'There he is!' everybody cried. 'Hawk-lover! Unbeliever! Flag-hater! Bomb-thrower!' So they set upon him and drove him out of the country.

Moral: Anybody who you or your wife thinks is going to overthrow the government by violence must be driven out of the country.

James Thurber, Fables for Our Time and Illustrated Poems.

And to hell with the flag, too.

Breakfast Time for Kev

Word of the Day - Hubris

The picture says it all, really.

Saturday Dog-Blogging

Celebrating Gympie Flyer, an Australian Racing Legend.

A dog with more heart than Phar Lap.

Southport 1982 - Gympie Flyer coming home at full pelt.

Giving 'Em the Wrong End of the Stick

Nothing sets the blogosphere on fire like a good rant - like this splendid example of the genre from pommygranate.

Moved by recent events in Burnley, Lancs*, where Matthew Carter, a binman, has been forbidden to wear a St George Cross over his dreadlocks, pommygranate takes the angry stick to anyone who might approve of the ban:

I despise you for dreaming up and enforcing rules such as these. Rules that make people shake with anger and seek solace in the arms of truly unsavoury folk.

I despise you for making this man feel guilty about taking pride in his own country. (original emphasis)

The rant's being quoted, and linked, by such luminaries of the right as Bernard Slattery, who says:

This letter should be so widely read that whole floors of federal, state and local government offices are squirming with terminal embarrassment.

Rolling on the floor laughing their arses off is more likely, unless there's actually a secret Federal State or even local council Department of the Old Dart somewhere, that's actually been running the UK for years. A hidden politically correct leftist enclave of the bureaucracy, paying back the Mother Country for Gallipoli, Singapore and other assorted past wrongs, by making life for the English as silly as possible. And there's poor old Gordon Brown thinking he's running the country.

Elsewhere Harry Clarke's giving good rant on the Haneef farce:

The press and the infantile, leftwing blogosphere are having a field day making conjectures that foster views of the innocence or guilt of Mohammed Haneef...

Australia is fast becoming a nation of hysterics who rant over perceived injustices and perceived moves toward totalitarianism even when faced with a possible investigation of a threat of terrorism to our citizens. To the know-all peanuts who pursue this line: Let the AFP and the courts do their job. Have a non-adolescent level of patience and keep a sense of proportion.

Denigrating the AFP, indulging in conspiracy theories and, most importantly, trivialising the pursuit of terrorist saboteurs in Western democracies is irresponsible behaviour. (original emphasis)

Well, I have to agree with Harry on that first point - maybe we are becoming a nation of hysterics. The evidence of pommygranate's post and Harry's post certainly support that view. Read them and you might find yourself in hysterics too.

* - an English town not far from Manchester but the best part of 13,000 miles from Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra or any of Australia's provincial cities - such as Perth.

Movie Classics

A still from the long forgotten Australian silent film The Cabinet of John Winston Howard.

Serving Suggestion

What about me?

... It isn't fair
I've had enough, now I want my share
Can't you see, I wanna live
But you just take more than you give

Haneef admits it: "I was arrested"

Q38. Do you recall me saying that. That you were under arrest.

A. Yes you arrested me um, but I didn't know that, ah then you, you said that I have been ah involved in terrorist activities. But I deny that I have been involved in any...

Q39. Okay. Do you agree that I told you at that time that you were under arrest for providing material support to terrorist organisation.

A. Well I haven't, I, I haven't provided...

Q40. Okay. I understand that but I'm saying to you, do you agree that that's what I said to you.

A. Well I, I've submitted to you for whatever reasons, you have ah taken um top clear myself from whatever charges I am being put on.

Q41. Okay. I'm just asking you whether, do you recall me saying that you were under arrest.

A. Yes.

More here (PDF).

Phil Ruddock is spitting chips that this damning admission was leaked to The Oz.

Egging Brendan

Defence Minister Brendan Nelson, might find himself with a few things to explain about his handling of the Education portfolio, back in the day:

THE long-held secret of which nine Australian Research Council grants were vetoed by former education minister Brendan Nelson may soon be out, with the affected researchers to be asked whether they want the details made public.

...

Dr Nelson vetoed three projects in 2004 and seven in 2005 (one of which had been rejected in 2004, suggesting there were nine academics involved). These Discovery projects - believed to be in the social sciences and humanities - had been approved by ARC peer review.
(National Rupert Daily)

Any embarassment that might cause our Brendan, will come on top of being made a liar by Kevin Andrews' decision that Doctor Muhammed Haneef - reckless supplier of mobile phone facilities to family members who later turned out to be terrorists - will go into immigration detention if he ever takes advantage of his grant of bail. Last Thursday, The Times of India reported:

Refusing to go into merits or otherwise of the case of Haneef, who has been detained for the last nine days, or divulge details of the investigation, Nelson said there was "no intention to detain him (Haneef) beyond a period that is considered by the judge as appropriate."

The report, ironically, is headlined "Haneef case: India promises Australia all help". Pity it looks as if the promise was obtained under false pretences, making it completely void. But what do integrity and good diplomatic relations matter when you've got an election to win.

(Cross Posted at Larvatus Prodeo)

Go Ahead, Be Stupid - It's Your Democratic Right!

CHRIS UHLMANN: On a personal level, were you expecting to see some signs of a turnaround in the polls by now?

TONY ABBOTT: I think it would be fair to say that you always tend to expect that good government will get a political pay-off, and so far that isn't happening. But I remain reasonably optimistic.

I mean obviously Chris, the public have a right to vote for whomsoever they wish, and they have a right - if they wish - to replace a good government with an inept Opposition. I mean, they have that right.

But nevertheless I guess I have always been pretty confident in the basic good sense of the Australian people. So we'll just keep going forward up to the election and hopefully beyond and see what happens.

(AM, 16 July 2007. My emphasis.)

Cross-posted at Larvatus Prodeo

Guns Don't Kill People - Doctors Kill People!

According to a comment at Club Troppo, doctors are a bigger threat to community safety than guns. And this, being the internet, the commenter, Phil, had the links to prove it.

First there was this report in The National Rupert Daily, "Hospital Bungles are Killing Scores":

AUSTRALIA'S first national report into serious mistakes in public hospitals has found at least 130 avoidable instances in which patients died or were put at serious risk.

Operations or investigations on the wrong patient, or the wrong body part, accounted for the biggest share of the mistakes, at 41 per cent of the 130 "sentinel events" recorded in 2004-05.

...

Stephen Bolsin, associate professor of patient safety at Victoria's Geelong Hospital, said there was no evidence hospital safety had improved since a landmark 1995 report showed that up to 8per cent of hospital patients would be the victim of a preventable mistake - and 10 per cent of these would cause permanent disability or death.

"Safety breaches in Australian healthcare are killing more people than breast cancer or road accidents," Associate Professor Bolsin said.

"But it doesn't get anything like the attention ... there's no evidence things have changed over the past 10 years."

I don't know the death rate from breast cancer, but it seems to me that Professor Bolkin is indulging in hyperbole when he says that the Australian healthcare system kills more people than road accidents. A quick check of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau's Road Deaths Australia: 2006 Statistical Summary reveals this fact:

In 2006, there were 1,601 persons killed in 1,456 road crashes. Comparing the number killed with the previous year, this was a 1.6% decrease (1,627 persons killed in 1,472 crashes).

So the comparative scores are: road traffic deaths - 1,601, patients killed or put at serious risk by the health system - 130. If Associate Professor Bolsin's claim is correct we still have around 1,500 iatrogenic deaths to account for.

Phil's other link is to this page at the Sporting Shooters' Association of Australia web-site, titled "Doctors: A Health Issue". Here you'll find plenty of reports and links on the health risks of health care.

There are plenty of adjectives to describe this sort of reporting. "Honest" and "truthful" aren't among them.

(Cross posted at Larvatus Prodeo)

More Discredited Documentary Links than You Can Possibly Stomach

Via the Oz Politics Blog Feed, and other sources, here's a quick round up of the responses from bloggers who're having a bit of trouble with getting their heads around the idea that Martin Durkin's mockumentary The Great Global Warming Swindle was just that - a swindle:

At The Daily Telegraph, Tim Blair reminds us that it's not just cold today in Wagga-Wagga, it's been a cold month across the whole of Australia:

Not that June should be presented as evidence that global warming isn't happening, or that we're causing it. Relying on such a tiny sample would be unscientific and wrong, even if it involves an entire freakin' continent's weather patterns throughout the course of a whole month, for Christ's sake.

No such foolishness will be indulged in here.

Sadly, those who believe in global warming - and who would compel us also to believe - aren't similarly constrained...

The rest of the column, predictably, is exactly the sort of foolishness Tim says he'll avoid.

Pommygranate is incensed that the ABC put so much effort into subverting Durkin's documentary and goes the out-of-context quote to suggest that his displeasure is shared by Carl Wunsch, the scientist who accused Durkin of misrepresenting his opinion:

He was furious with the ABC's decision to run the program, saying

"Anybody who tells you they know what is going to happen 20 years from now, 100 years from now, is not a good scientist. The science can only say, at this stage, that there are certain possibilities that we are aware of."

Well, err, quite, Carl. But isn't this the precise point the program was making?

Here's what Wunsch actually said, according to the ABC:

"Anybody who tells you they know what is going to happen 20 years from now, 100 years from now, is not a good scientist," he said.

"The science can only say, at this stage, that there are certain possibilities that we are aware of."

"They are possibilities that we think society should take very seriously and try and decide how it is going to deal with them if they come out."

Mr Wunsch has also criticised media organisations including the ABC for broadcasting the documentary.

"TV companies around the world are treating it as though it were a science documentary. It's not," he said.

"It's a contentious political propaganda piece, it's not a science film at all, it's a political statement." (emphasis added)

Finally, Steven Lloyd is angry that Tony Jones dared to challenge Durkin's claim that it's the sun stupid:

Tony Jones spent a lot of time hammering the filmmaker over leaving out the last 20 years on what was otherwise a compelling graph correlating global temperatures with solar activity. The 20 years left off of the graph, diverged completely, making it look bad for the filmmaker that he left it off.

The thing is, even with the last 20 years added in, the graph was still compelling. You don’t disregard the first 80% of a graph which correlates to a high percentage, just because the last 20% didn’t. Tony Jones would have us think exactly that.

No, Kevin - in science, when you find new data that doesn't fit your theory (or in this case Dorkin's belief) you don't ignore the new data - you look for a better theory. At least that's the kind of science they were teaching when I went through secondary school and university - if there's another kind of science where you throw away awkward data, I haven't heard of it. Unless it's economics, maybe.

The solar activity theory doesn't fit the new data - it's a dead theory. It is no more. It has ceased to be.

Well, that's enough of that - I've wasted enough time on irrelevancies for today. And in the long run, the opinions of Tim Blair, PommyGranate and Steven Lloyd aren't going to have any influence. The way things are looking they'll all be voting "1 - Loser" at the coming election.

It's about time John Howard read the writing on the wall and made that visit to the Governor-General, don't you think? Sure, he'd go down in history as the Prime Minister who led the Liberal Party into oblivion but, as a Burkean Conservative, you'd expect him to look to the interests of the nation and exercise his sovereign conscience accordingly.

Update: in the most ineffectual response to date, Diogenes Lamp fisks today's Age Letters and reminds us that global warming is also currently occuring on Mars and other planets. This also gives him the opportunity for a completely gratuitous demonstration that he's not afraid to be politically incorrect.

The Picture from Newspoll

There's a lot of controversy in the blogosphere this morning over the latest Newspoll results, and what they mean and alleged attempts by The National Rupert to monster one or two bloggers.

We can expect that part of the debate to get rather heated over the rest of the day, and well into the weekend and this will inevitably distract a lot of people from the poll results themselves and what they actually mean. Still it's possible that there are a few readers out there who are level-headed enough to be interested in taking a look at the actual poll results and the data analysis, before they weigh into the debate.

Figure 1: Newspoll data as presented to Newspoll's haruspicers (source: six-month old goat).

Figure 2: Data analysis. Key:

1. Kevin Rudd's approval rating. Consistent with past Newspoll findings - and the findings of other polling organisations - this appears to be above that of John Howard.


2. John Howard's approval rating. Note that a large portion of John Howard's approval rating is in fact obscured by Kevin Rudd's approval rating.


3. Bob Brown's approval rating. This is clearly much smaller than either John Howard's or Kevin Rudd's.


4. The ALP's current primary vote.


5. The coalition's primary vote. Once again, the ALP's primary vote appears to be above the coalition's primary vote, obscuring the actual size of the latter.


6. Stuff that will have to be dissected away when the next Newspoll is conducted to get a clearer picture of the real situation.

I don't think there's really any more that needs to be said on the subject - now that you've seen the pictures for yourself, the situation ought to be very clear to everyone.

Good News, Bad News

This might be good news:

$3975.00The Cadaver Calculator - Find out how much your body is worth
But with the big global zombie apocalypse scare due before the next federal election, this is seriously bad:

50%

Ands a zombie apocalypse would pretty much wipe out the value of my one significant (but seriously illiquid) asset too. Complete bummer.

Exclusive: Government Reveals New Weapon in War on Bad Things

The Government's intervention in Northern Territory indigenous communities took a dramatic new turn today, when the previously secret Special Dominatrix Service (picture) arrived at Mutitjulu.

SDS commander Major Ilsa Vixen explained the Service's role in the intervention to a media conference: "There are some very bad, naughty boys and girls in this community and they deserve to be punished. Mainstream Australia wants to see them punished. We're here to make that happen."

Each member of the SDS will operate in a special, Australian developed, portable dungeon, equipped with an extensive range of whips, chains, paddles, clamps and stuff you really don't want to know about. The dungeons also have several strategically placed web-cams and broadband internet capabilities, via satellite.

For Major Vixen and the other members of the SDS, this is only the start of a long mission. "There are plenty of other people in this country who deserve to feel more pain," she remarked "Well now we're around to inflict that pain."

Decoupage

Societies which seem to us ferocious may turn out, when examined from another point of view, to have their humane and benevolent sides. Take the Plains Insdians of North America: they are doubly significant - first because some of them practised a moderated form of cannibalism, and second because they are one of the few primitive peoples who were endowed with an organized police force. This force, which also had to mete out justice, would never have imagined that the punishments accorded to the guilty could take the form of severing all social links. An Indian who broke the laws of his tribe would be sentenced to the destruction of all his belongings - his tent and his horses. But at the same time the police became indebted to him for the harm he had been made to suffer. This restitution put the criminal, once again, in debt to the group ... Not only are such customs more humane than our own, they are more coherent, even if we are to formulate the problem in terms of modern psychology. It would seem logical that in return for the 'infantilization' of the guilty man that is implied in the notion of punishment, we should acknowledge that he is entitled to gratification of some sort. If this is not done, the initial step loses its effectiveness and may even bring about results directly contrary to those hoped for in the first palce. The summit of absurdity in this context is to do as we do and treat the guilty simultaneously as children, in that they are meet for punishment, and as grown-ups, in that we refuse them all subsequent consolation. It is grotesque to believe that we have made a 'great spiritual advance' simply because, instead of eating our fellow human beings, we prefer to mutilate them, both physically and morally.

Claude Levi-Strauss, "A Little Glass of Rum" (Triste Tropiques, translated as A World on the Wane, 1961).

Now and again, things happen that remind me of that particular passage and I get to thinking about the way individuals and entire sections of the community are treated as children, yet expected to behave as adults. The obvious motivation for this post is the Howard government's current exercise in conspicuous punishment of aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory.

Now go read this post by David Coles at Club Troppo.

(Cross posted at Larvatus Prodeo)

Proctalgia, and Sundry other Pains

aerodontalgia - toothache caused by atmospheric decompression (for example in high altitude flying).
arthralgia - pain in one or more joints.
cardialgia - (1) heartburn; (2) pain in the heart.
causalgia - constant burning pain due to peripheral nerve damage.
cephalalgia - headache.
cephalgia - headache.
coxalgia - pain in the hip.
cranialgia - pain occurring within the skull; headache.
enteralgia - pain in the intestines.
erythromelalgia - hot skin rash with burning pain. Usually in the feet.
fibromyalgia - chronic widespread pain with tenderness and muscle stiffness.
gastralgia - pain in the stomach.
hypalgia - hypalgesia, i.e. diminished sensitivity to pain.
ischalgia - pain in the hip.
mastalgia - mastodynia, i.e. pain in the breast. Not often observed in men.
meralgia - pain in the thigh.
metatarsalgia - burning pain below and between the metatarsals where they join the toe bones.
myalgia - pain in one or more muscles.
nephralgia - pain in a kidney.
neuralgia - acute, paroxysmal pain along one or more undamaged nerves.
nostalgia - homesickness; sentimental yearning for the past.
odontalgia - toothache.
otalgia - earache.
polyarthralgia - pain in two or more joints.
polymyalgia - myalgia affecting several muscle groups.
proctalgia - sharp pain of the kind caused by blog posts like this.
psychalgia - mental distress.
veisalgia - sober medical term for a hangover.

Sources: Merriam-Webster OnLine, MedicineNet.com

Mr Burke's Unpleasant Surprise

Edmund Burke - the senior patron saint of Australian Liberalism (but not liberalism) - was first elected to Parliament as the Member for Wendover in 1765. By modern Australian standards he wouldn't be regarded as a democratically elected Member of Parliament - they did things very differently in 18th Century England. Wendover was the next best thing to a rotten borough - a pocket burrough, in the pocket of one Lord Verney, who condescended to accept Burke as his representative in Parliament.

In 1774 Lord Verney informed Burke that he couldn't stump up the readies to get Burke re-elected (in fact, Verney was so strapped for money that he sold the seat out from under Burke) so Burke quickly took himself off to Bristol where he contested a poll for the very first - and last - time in his parliamentary career. It was after winning this poll that he delivered his highly esteemed Speech to the Electors of Bristol where he thanked the electors for the favour that they had bestowed upon him, then went on to set them straight on the matter of "instructions" from electors to their Parliamentary representative:

Certainly, Gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a Representative, to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion high respect; their business unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and, above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But, his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgement, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you; to any man, or to any sett of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the Law and the Constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your Representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

That settled - to Mr Burke's satisfaction, if not the satisfaction of the electors - he took himself off to London as one of the two elected representatives of the freemen of Bristol. While there, he added several dilatory works to the Burke canon:

• Speech on Moving Resolutions for Conciliation with America, March 22, 1775


• Letter to the Sheriffs Of Bristol, on the Affairs of America, April 3, 1777


• Two Letters To Gentlemen Of Bristol, On The Bills Depending In Parliament Relative To The Trade Of Ireland, April 23 and May 2, 1778


• Speech on Presenting to the House Of Commons a Plan for the Better Security of the Independence of Parliament, and the Economical Reformation of the Civil And other Establishments, February 11, 1780

In September 1780 he returned to Bristol to stand for re-election and delivered two more speeches to the electors. In the first, the Speech at Bristol Previous to the Election, (September 6, 1780) he addressed sundry criticisms, from some of the electors, of his performance as their Representative. In the opening of his speech, Burke made his attitude to these criticisms plain:

If you call upon me, I shall solicit the favor of the city upon manly ground. I come before you with the plain confidence of an honest servant in the equity of a candid and discerning master. I come to claim your approbation, not to amuse you with vain apologies, or with professions still more vain and senseless. I have lived too long to be served by apologies, or to stand in need of them.

Having taken a firm stand on his dignity, Burke then answered his critics, starting with "my neglect of a due attention to my constituents, the not paying more frequent visits here". This charge, he considered quite unreasonable:

... I admit, there is a decorum and propriety in a member of Parliament's paying a respectful court to his constituents. If I were conscious to myself that pleasure, or dissipation, or low, unworthy occupations had detained me from personal attendance on you, I would readily admit my fault, and quietly submit to the penalty. But, Gentlemen, I live at an hundred miles' distance from Bristol; and at the end of a session I come to my own house, fatigued in body and in mind, to a little repose, and to a very little attention to my family and my private concerns. A visit to Bristol is always a sort of canvass, else it will do more harm than good. To pass from the toils of a session to the toils of a canvass is the furthest thing in the world from repose. I could hardly serve you as I have done, and court you too ...

Three days later, Burke delivered the second of his 1780 speeches to the Electors of Bristol - and presumably his last speech to those august gentlement - the Speech at Bristol on Declining the Poll, (September 9, 1780). By then it had become clear to Burke - from his own polling - that he had no chance of winning. Nonetheless he managed to put a brave face on it:

...I have not canvassed the whole of this city in form, but I have taken such a view of it as satisfies my own mind that your choice will not ultimately fall upon me. Your city, Gentlemen, is in a state of miserable distraction, and I am resolved to withdraw whatever share my pretensions may have had in its unhappy divisions...

Burke clearly learnt a little about the role of a Parliamentarian as a representative of his constituents from his Bristol experience - when he returned to Parliamentary life, it was as Member for Malton, a pocket borough first of Lord Rockingham's, then of Lord Fitzwilliam's. Presumably their lordships' demands upon Mr Burke's sovereign conscience and his precious leisure time were less onerous than those of the Electors of Bristol.

Toe in the Water

Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim’s present.

O. Henry "The Gift of the Magi"

Like a tired actor who plays the same role over and over again, hamming it up each time, the leitmotif of the Left lacks a certain sparkle.

J. Albrechtsen "The Left Needs to get Real"

Forget the hashed simile. She was ransacking her brains for something clever to say.

Hiatus Time

A Short Post on Waking with a Hangover and the Sure and Certain Knowledge that You Made a Complete Ass of Yourself Last Night in Divers Ways

It's unpleasant.

"Swindle" - too Little, too Late?

David Tiley at Barista raises an interesting question in a post on The Great Global Warming Swindle:

I’ve been told by loyal ABC staff that “the debate is over” about Holocaust denial and no-one seriously supports it. So how do we decide when the climate debate is over? When I began to suggest that there is no trained consensus against Global Warming any more, I was told the Prime Minister didn’t believe in it.

Hmmm … that reflects his bob-each-way duplicity, in which he is dragged reluctantly to accept it but his government has actively funded anti GW programs for at least five years. He supports a Greenhouse Office, for crying out loud. (my emphasis)

One obvious thought that has a brief moment to cross your mind in the short pause between the two paragraphs is that John Howard is no climate scientist. It's unlikely that he believes that the Earth is flat, but if he did, his opinion wouldn't count for much if you were looking for a trained consensus on the shape of the Earth, its place in the solar system and all that jazz. So why should it matter to the ABC that the Prime Minister doesn't believe in global warming if his opinion is flat-out wrong?

From all the reading I've done on the subject, it appears that the debate over global warming in the scientific community is over - there's just too much evidence that global warming is happening and that the major cause is all the carbon dioxide we've put back into the atmosphere through a couple of centuries of burning fossil fuels while, at the same time, removing large parts of the ecosystem that take the stuff back out of the atmosphere. The existence of an Australian Greenhouse Office, the fact that John Howard finally shifted from "it ain't happening", via "we aren't going to stuff up the economy for a theory" to "clean coal and nuclear energy is the answer" are indications that the debate is over in politics.

The only place the debate does survive is in Newstralia, the parallel world inhabited by the punditariat of News Limited, News Limited bloggers and their fans in the blogosphere What are we hearing from that quarter?

Tim Blair is so burnt out on the subject global warming that he's writing complete nonsense, like this article in the Daily Terror (hat tip to John Surname at Grodscorp and this post, where Tim declares that he prefers the theory that global warming is caused by extra-terrestrials microwaving the Earth to anything Al Gore has to say on American politics. Does Tim actually believe that global warming is caused by a giant space alien who can balance a microwave oven on one hand and the Earth on another? Well, the theory gets us off the hook, so it must be worth taking a look at.

The prolific Andrew Bolt got a column and a later post out of the ABC's decision to screen The Great Global Warming Swindle before he got swept up by the deluge of bile that News pumped out on Therese Rein. His last post on Global Warming for the weekend was this weak effort - no new facts, no argument, just a quick snark at Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US Congress for flying to Europe to discuss, among other things, global warming.

Some debate, eh? Seems to me that it really is over and science won. It's not exactly a victory for the Left though - there are still a few Leftists around who think global warming is a vast, global conspiracy against the working class. Even Tim and Andrew will recognise that for a delusion - how can an anti-capitalist conspiracy be a conspiracy atgainst the working class at the same time.

Whoops - maybe I shouldn't have said that. The buggers might get together and come to some bi-partisan agreement on the subject. That could be a real bugger to deal with.