If it doesn’t fit elsewhere, it goes here.
It appears that the majority of my fellow Australians care little for truth and justice, and more about the dollars in their hip pockets. I’m shocked at the extent of the Coalition’s victory. This isn’t the Australia I grew up in.
Judging by this image, somebody out there is at least as angry as I am about the election result (I dare say a lot angrier than I). Thanks to RA for sending me photo.
Just finished watching The President Versus David Hicks on SBS. It was a very interesting documentary. David Hicks’ letters to his parents provided remarkable insight into his mentality on the way to his being captured by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan and handed over to the US. Hicks’ father, Terry, aided by his son’s numerous letters, traced David’s footsteps from Pakistan across the border into northern Afghanistan. This must have been very scary, as people are still often killed in roadside ambushes. It became clear, from his letters, that David had been deluded into believing the Taliban’s extreme interpretation of Islam. But it was never clear that Hicks ever participated in terrorism of any kind (unless one holds that the mere belief in an extreme interpretation of the Qur’an, or any religious text for that matter, is a form of terrorism). The laws and legal terms invented by the US government to subvert the Geneva Convention and the US’s own laws is laughable. Criminals should be punished, but they must first be found guilty by a court of law, where evidence gained under stress and duress (otherwise known as torture) is not admissable.
The USA is now headed by a President who was not democratically elected. The USA has passed laws such as the USA-PATRIOT act, which undermine the freedoms upon which it was founded. It now seems that due legal process is a thing of the past in that country. It isn’t entirely clear whether or not US courts have jurisdiction over the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay or not. But common sense (which seems to often be lacking within the legal system), would say that US courts have jurisdiction over any person on a naval base belonging to the US. Certainly, the idea that there exists a black hole where the US government can do whatever it wants to anybody is both scary and sickening. Anyway, all this reminds me of Benjamin Franklin’s memorable quote:
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
On Saturday evening, I watched about half of Herbie Rides Again. I’d quite forgotten how deliciously corny that series of movies is. My favourite line comes just after Herbie drives off a wharf into the ocean, and begins motoring for the shore. A shark (surprise, surprise), begins to follow Herbie, and Nicole (Stefanie Powers) says
That’s ridiculous. Why would a shark be following a Volkswagen?
Classic.
Nigel and I finished watching the Star Wars trilogy today. After all this time, it still has to be one of my favourite movies (taken as one) of all. It’s your classic story of good versus evil, but as far as those kinds of stories goes, Star Wars does it best.
It’s official: Karen has been awarded a Ph.D! We went and checked at the thesis office on Tuesday after lunch, and it turns out the personal copy of her thesis and the award letter had been sitting there since the 9th of September! So she’d been Dr. K for two weeks without even knowing it. Anyway, this was, of course, great news. Last night we went to Thai on High in Highgate Hill (my favourite Thai restaurant) to celebrate.
I purchased a copy of the Outfoxed DVD today, which I think I mentioned in one of my previous posts. It should arrive shortly, I hope. Coincidentally, last night Dateline ran a story about this documentary. I saw the rerun today at 1pm (I’ve been a bit under the weather for the last couple of days, which is why I was watching TV in the middle of a weekday). The documentary has become far more popular than the maker thought it would be. Shameless advertisement: if you want the DVD, you can buy it at the Outfoxed website, or you can get it for free when you make a donation to the AlterNet Fight Fox Campaign. For those of you who don’t know, AlterNet is mounting a legal challenge to the "Fair and Balanced" trademark used by Fox to promote their news channel on the grounds that it is misleading, deceptive and notoriously mis-descriptive
. In an unrelated case, a U.S. District Judge has already stated that Fox’s right to the trademark is not very strong, and that if it were challenged, it might well be revoked. So these AlterNet guys decided to launch a challenge. Good on them! But I fear they have a mountain to climb, especially when justice or the foiling of justice is, these days, really just a question of how deep your pockets are. Rupert’s are very deep.
I’m very happy with my Fedora Core 2 installation. Very nice. I’ve also finally got around to using apt-get and yum (but mainly apt-get) to keep my packages up to date and to install new software. I was previously doing most things by hand, or not bothering to upgrade at all. With apt-get everything is so much easier. I know many you are saying "well dah", but I’m just slow on the uptake, alright. I’ve switched to using Firefox (0.9.3, and yes, I know 1.0PR is available) as a web browser. It’s okay, but I’m positive it’s quite a bit slower than Galeon was. I’m having a bit of difficulty installing extensions, even as root. After clicking on an extension package, the package seems to download, but nothing happens. No dialog box. Nothing. What am I doing wrong? The geekiness quota has definitely been reached for this post. Moving right along, then…
My brother seems to be going on a major DVD splurge lately. I mentioned he recently bought a whole of DVDs at the Sunday market in Rocklea. Well today he bought two "classic" movies for Mum, and he bought the Star Wars Trilogy Boxed Set for himself. I’m not complaining, since I love Star Wars. He also mentioned that he gets to buy any THQ published game for an enormous discount. So no doubt he’ll be buying a few more Playstation games in the near future. So I guess he gets to choose from titles like Bob the BuilderTM: Can we fix it?, Britney’s Dance Beat (RA would like that one :), Full Spectrum Warrior (for the PC) and Summoner 2 among others. So where are my bonuses and in kind payments? Oh, that’s right, I don’t have a job yet. I’ll be needing one of those fairly soon.
I set myself a bedtime deadline of 10pm tonight. I’ve already overshot that by one and half hours. If I’m feeling very ill tomorrow, I can’t blame anyone but me. I hate that. ;-)
This weekend I played around with a program called Cinelerra, a non-linear video editor for linux. It’s pretty cool. I’m trying to put together a shortened version of the video footage from my family’s New Zealand holiday earlier this year. It might take a while, because there’s five hours’ worth of footage to edit. Hopefully I’ll end up with something around one hour long. So far I’ve just been practicing on low resolution clips. The results are promising. Cinelerra is great, although I have to say it’s probably the most unstable linux application I’ve ever used. But whenever it crashes, you just restart it and continue from where you left off because it does automatic saves every time you do something.
I handed Jaga my analysis chapter, minus one of the sections. I’m fairly happy with my progress. Hope Jaga is happy with the content!
Spent much of the weekend with K, who is back from overseas. Still no word about her Ph.D. How long can it take for the university to write a letter (a form letter, no doubt) and send it? Anyway, today we went to the Dutch festival in Richlands, where I tried raw herring and poffertjes. I think I like poffertjes better than raw herring :).
Nigel bought a bunch of DVDs from the Brisbane market at Rocklea, including Vanilla Sky and The Bruce Willis Collection. I think the only film in The Bruce Willis Collection that is half decent is Pulp Fiction, and Nigel and I watched that tonight. There was less jumping back and forth in the timeline than I remember. Samuel L. Jackson’s character is cool, but Harvey Keitel’s character is the personification of cool.
Slowly but steadily making progress on the thesis. I’m still writing the analysis chapter, but hey, I always expected this to be the chapter that takes the longest (except for the literature survey, maybe). The analysis has proven to be very helpful. The mathematical model for the ants protocol has suggested some improvements I can make that I would never have discovered if I’d just done a regular experiment with the prototype.
We hired a bunch of movies over the weekend. The pick of them was The Pianist. I can’t remember any other movie where the four of us (Mum, Dad, Nigel and I) watched a movie in absolute silence, transfixed to the television screen. As Dad commented after the film was over, the same sort of thing has been done before, but not as well. It really was a great film, and deserved the awards it received.
K is in Singapore, a little bit under the weather. Jaga should be back in Australia by now. I hope I have a thesis chapter to show her soon!
A lovely postcard arrived for me from the UK today. The photos on the front show various sections of Westminster Abbey. It looks awesome. I’ve been there, but I think the last time was when I was eleven, so I can’t remember it. The photos on the front make me want to go back. I’m not religious in the least, but I have a thing for old churches and cathedrals and so on. I just like their architecture and the atmosphere within them. Some of them make you feel very small (a design feature, I’m sure :). Anyway, sounds like K is having a great time. It’s not every day you get to walk over the memorial stones of your favourite authors and preeminent physicists!
Since seeing The Corporation, I’ve read a few reviews to see what other people have to say about the film. The response is overwhelmingly positive; in fact I struggled to find a single negative review (they do exist if you look hard, see below), except, perhaps, this one, but then Mr Roy is notorious for bashing almost everything (Whining, not dining, indeed). But many reviews I’ve read complain that, although the documentary is, by and large, very good, it still contains a bias toward the left, whereby interviewees such as Noam Chomski and Michael Moore get a greater share of the screen time, and the people on the other side of the fence like Michael Walker and Milton Friedman only get a bit part. It’s true. But unlike some other recent docos, at least it had the courage to let the proponents of the opposing view put forward their side of the case, and the actual interviewing appeared to be non-inflammatory (compare Michael Moore’s interview of Charlton Heston in Bowling for Columbine, for example). In fact, the interviewers were mainly conspicuously kept out of site for most of the film. There was no stunt pulling, which seems to be a staple of Moore’s films. In rating a documentary, one has to compare it with the other fare on offer, and the documentaries that has preceded it. I ask you to name a single political documentary that does not have an angle or slant. I cannot think of one. Furthermore, from the outset, even before stepping into the cinema, the viewer understands the purpose of the film is to show that corporations are out to get power and money (the subtitle of the book it is based upon is The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power), and I believe it achieves its goal. If there was a shortcoming of the documentary, it was not its bias toward the left thinkers, it was its failure to properly suggest an alternative to the corporation. They advocated smaller, grass-roots type organisations, but it’s not clear how this model could achieve economies of scale (how does the local co-op build a large passenger jet at all, let alone build it as cheaply as a large corporation like Boeing?). Further investigation of these sorts of questions would have been welcomed, but the movie was already long enough. Perhaps they can do a sequel, and maybe even a sequel to the sequel. You know, Star Wars style: The Corporations Strike Back followed by Return of the Hippies.
Anyway, I suggest most reviewers (the ones with left-liberal tendencies, at least) included the mandatory it’s a bit biased
line not because they thought this bias hurt the documentary, but because they want to make sure they’re not thrown into the same category as the raving leftist kooks. A case of the left bashing the left to ensure disassociation.