Caesar meets his end

There is an Australian election coming up on the 21st of August, which is exactly four weeks away. I am considering becoming involved in some way. You see, I’m not very happy with the way the world is, nor am I happy with the direction in which it is going. I would like to make some kind of contribution towards changing that direction for the better, and in many ways that is at the heart of the dilemma I’ve been facing since retiring from speed skating; how would I best accomplish this?

Regular readers of my website will know that this is something that I think about often. In fact, my whole stint in New York, doing the MA at Columbia University was pretty much undertaken with the intent to contribute to my “quest for world peace”. Of course, it isn’t ALL about world peace. It is also about long-term sustainability, reduction of poverty, and some kind of application of social justice. These are all lofty and difficult goals to achieve, and nobody seems to write a how-to manual for people such as myself who are out there to accomplish these things. I’m not even sure that there exists anyone in the world who would even be able to write that manual, or even a single chapter of it. The goals themselves seem to change over time, as we slowly understand ourselves better, and readers of the various philosophical rants that I often go off on know that I spend a lot of time simply grappling with the definitions and parameters of the problems I face. It’s just something that well-meaning people seem to muddle through all their lives, and if they’re lucky, they can affect a small, positive change on some small part of the world.

Being a statesman seems like an obvious choice for the career of someone who wants to change the world for the better. Although any recent observations of current politicians might make you think twice about that. It certainly makes me think twice. Being a statesman these days seems more like the cross between a sick joke and an elaborate board game, than a job. Perhaps part of the reason I perceive things in this way is because I don’t ordinarily think of jobs as things in which people’s lives are adversely affected. Obviously, sometimes there are unintended consequences, but that is very different. In politics, it is well known that one will often take actions which will intentionally violate Pareto optimality – in laymans terms, the job will sometimes necessarily involve screwing people over, and this is accepted.

Take for example the recent replacement of the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd with Julia Gillard. Rudd was not doing a bad job, but he made a small political misstep with regards to the mining industry. The mining industry, being very wealthy and (therefore, in the age of capitalism) powerful, began a smear campaign against the Labor government. I found out about this when I got a letter from Rio Tinto to shareholders which contained information which wasn’t technically untrue, but which I knew to be a misrepresentation of the facts. Of course, not everyone is as well-informed as I am about the misbehaviours of corporate PR campaigns, so this smear campaign began to undermine the legitimacy of the government. The higher-ups in the party (apparently, there are people higher up than the Prime minister) decided to sacrifice Rudd and replace him with a new PM, his deputy Gillard and change their policy with regard to the mining tax. Poor Kevin Rudd, fluent speaker of Mandarin, signer of the Kyoto Protocol, and sayer of the world “Sorry” to our indigenous population was a pawn in this game, and the controversy surrounding this abrupt replacement has probably done our international reputation no favours.

What’s the take-home lesson here? It is dangerous to be Prime Minister of Australia? The mining industry in Australia is far too politically powerful? Perhaps, but the real point I was trying to make is that politics is a dirty business, and that single politicians are often not particularly powerful. Why would I want to get into politics then? Well, I once had a conversation with a fellow by the name of Gareth [Gareth] Evans at the UN while attending a conference and was basically asking him this question. His response was simply that if people like me didn’t get into politics, then less-competent, less-qualified, and likely less-well-intentioned people would. The name of Steve Fielding immediately came to mind.

Steve Fielding, to put it briefly, is the bane of the Australian political scene. He is the perfect example of the damage that can be inflicted when an idiotic, ignorant, unintelligent, yet well-meaning person gets into a position of power. He is an Australian senator for a party called Family First, which is a front for a Christian, Evangelical, Pentecostalist political party. He is incapable of answering a question directly (a plus in the world of politics, I’m told) and he believes the world is less than 5000 years old. I have no doubt at all that he has good intentions, however he is the worst kind of ignoramus in that he understands nothing, yet believes that he understands everything. The problem is that for the last six years, he has held the deciding vote in the Australian Senate.

During this time, while John Howard’s Liberal (in Australia, that means “Conservative”) government were in power, he helped pass Voluntary Student Unionism, a bill which effectively killed any feeling of a shared community in Australian Universities. More recently, when Labor came to power under Kevin Rudd, he held up the Emissions Trading Scheme bill for long enough for the Liberals to implode and destroy any chance of it being passed. He doesn’t believe in climate change – not just the bit about it being man-made, but he doesn’t believe it at all. He even went on a “fact finding mission” to the US to learn about climate change – by going to a conference of climate change skeptics, run by the heartland institute, a libertarian think tank (I use the word “think” very loosely here) which is funded by oil companies. It is difficult for me to communicate just how idiotic this guy is. (For Americans who are reading this, just imagine if Sarah Palin had been elected to the Senate and held the crucial 60th filibuster-breaking vote.)

Why do I bring up the example of Steve Fielding? (it ain’t good for my blood pressure you know) Because I imagine that, had I been in the position that he had been in, I would have made better decisions and Australia would be a better place – simple. Sometimes one person really can make a big difference. It’s not only the decisions that they make, but how they carry themselves. These people get a lot of media exposure, and if kids watch these idiots running the country (into the ground) then they’re not going to want a part of it, and we’ll end up with even more drop-kicks in Australian Politics.

Yet I still have doubts. Would I be a good statesman? It seems that nearly everything I’ve done in my life up to this point has been geared in some way towards being able to answer “yes” to that question. I have an unusually diverse set of talents and have invested considerable time in developing them. My list of electives at Columbia speak as much – Contemporary Diplomacy, Game Theory, Economics of Information and Uncertainty, Human Rights and Development Policy, Introduction to International Development, Human Ecology and Sustainable Development. But not everything can be learned from books – I’ve volunteered with UNICEF, and with Amnesty International both in the US and Australia. I helped found the youth network in Australia, I was president of the Melbourne Uni group, I conceived of and ran a series of very large-scale comedy nights. Obviously doing all of that wasn’t enough pressure so I became a professional athlete for a while and tried to qualify for the Olympics, and failed. I’ve lived in four different cities, on four different continents, half of which didn’t have English as an official language. None of this is standard “work experience”, but I believe that it is the kind of “life experience” that many career politicians lack.

It’s strange; I seem to have become something that I always sort of avoided. When I was young, someone told me that to really make it in life, you need to be a good “people-person”. When I was young, I was also exposed to all manner of incompetent money-hungry types with more dollars than sense who would boast that they “got things done”. I think I wanted to avoid these labels because I felt, mostly because of the people who I associated with these labels, that they had to be good people-people or get-things-done because it was their way of compensating for not actually being good at anything (which was largely true in those early examples). I have since learned however, that those labels are often associated with me, which scares me.

Australian House of Representatives

It costs 500 Australian dollars and 50 signatures from voters in your electorate to run for the lower house in Australia as an independent. The lower house, or “house of representatives” is where government is formed, and MPs are elected based on geographical electorates. My electorate is “Melbourne” and the incumbent, Lindsay Tanner, of whom I’m a fan, is leaving politics, and thus leaving the race for Melbourne wide open. Curiously, this still won’t be an important seat in the election as far as I’m concerned because the battle will be between Labor and the Greens, and I don’t mind either. The real goal in this election is to ensure that the Liberals (conservatives, remember) don’t get elected.

Not all of my friends are left-leaning politically, and I sympathize. However, allow me to defend my current dislike for Tony Abbott’s Liberal Party. I receive regular emails from the Libs, because I once signed up for the Melbourne University Liberal Club as a joke. As it was, it was a pretty terrible joke, with members beginning sentences with “I don’t want to sound racist but…” During most of their time in opposition, the Liberals were lead by a guy named Malcom Turnbull, who, while I often disagreed with him, seemed a fairly respectable guy. However, recently the Liberal party leadership imploded and Turnbull was ousted. The matter over which the party divided was the Emissions Trading Scheme which I mentioned above. Basically, half of the party believed in climate change, and the other half did not. Abbott was on the side of the half that did not. He is either ignorant of the well-established science, which leads me to question his ability to listen to experts and come to good decisions, or he is aware of the truth yet pretends for whatever reason (although I’m just going throw it out there that oil company funding might have something to do with it), in which case I would question his ability to be a good person (although, to be honest, I’d already made up my mind about this aspect of Abbott).

p.s. if you’re still skeptical about climate change, please read these before bombarding me with nonsense.

Australian Senate

What else? There’s the Senate. Running for the Senate costs 1000 Australian dollars (edit: also requires 50 signatures of electors) and, by my calculations, is even more difficult to get into. Senate ballot papers are notoriously complex things and a very small percentage of people (of which I am numbered) bother to number all their senators below the lines, most people opting to simply write a “1” next to a political party above the line. In order for me to have any chance in the Senate, I would have to strike some kind of preference exchange “deal” with at least a few better-known candidates or parties. As an independent, I’m simply not politically “famous” enough for anyone to want to give their preferences to me.

Don’t get me wrong, I harbour no expectation of actually getting into either the Senate or the House of Representatives. At least not this time. But it might be fun and somewhat educational to have a “trial run” at it this time around. And to all my friends who have emailed me saying “I’d vote for you”, thank you for the support, it means a lot to me. Who knows, maybe somewhere down the line I’ll find some kind of “career” that allows me to work towards my life goals, yet still allows me to avoid the mudslinging that is modern politics. You see, I think that’s one of the major obstacles that I would encounter – I’m just not that great at being nasty to people, I have this tendency to take responsibility for my own actions, and even to say sorry. If the current crop of politicians is anything to go by, I wouldn’t stand a chance.

But the world is what we make of it; Gandhi said “you must be the change you want to see in the world” so maybe I should just try being an honest and honourable politician? Now that would be something.

What do people think?

Parliament House

p.s. if anyone has any other serious career suggestions for me, please let me know

The Infamous Hand of God

I’m just going to warn everyone now, this is going to be one of my least-coherent rants to date.

It is sometimes said that I have a “soft spot” for sport, and this is largely true. Why is this the case? I’m certainly not the typical “jock” and I’m not the sort of person who will go out of his way to watch every minute of every stage of the Tour de France, like some of my more enthusiastic friends might. I will, however, go out of my way to watch events from the Olympic games, and other important once-every-four-years sporting competitions like the World Cup. I think the real reason for my soft spot, is that I like seeing people who are very, very good at what they do, do it. It is certainly a welcome break from everyday happenings in the news, which are mostly the result of very wicked people who are very bad at what they do, making the worst of a terrible situation.

But that is for another post. The FIFA World Cup is an interesting beast and one that I have watched fairly closely since 1998. Some call it the most important sporting competition in the world and I am reluctantly inclined to agree. This might seem a strange thing to say, especially from a person who once tried to qualify for the Olympic Games, another competition which may, with good cause, lay claim to the title of “world’s most important sporting competition”. It’s certainly something to think about, and I’m sure many people would disagree, but if alien being were observing us from above and they wanted to get a good idea of what humanity was about, I wouldn’t tell them to watch the UN in session, or a music festival, or the Olympics, because none of those things will really give them a very broad sweep of the human condition, though the Olympics come close. The world cup, on the other hand, probably will. The next closest thing perhaps is total war, but that is a (thankfully) rare occurrence.

But what of the competition itself?

For this year’s world cup, I’ve managed to watch a little bit of almost every match. I’ve watched at least half of the matches in their entirety. This is no small feat in Hong Kong (that’s where I am at the moment). By some quirk of corrupt decision making, free-to-air television has managed to have the rights to only 3 matches of the entire competition while cable TV has the rights to all of the matches. I have thus been forced to watch most of the matches on (quite possibly illegal) streaming sites on the internet. The obvious downer to this is that the resolution isn’t so good, and there is a bit of a delay of 10-20 seconds, which is really annoying when you’re chatting to someone on the internet who is getting live without a significant delay and they say “oohhh!” before anything really happens on your screen. One of the pluses though, is that a popular telecast to stream is Australia’s SBS coverage, which I find to generally be very good as well as being in a comforting and familiar accent. I have a feeling that when I watch the upcoming semifinals on local TV, I will probably turn the sound off and, instead, listen to the sound from the stream because local commentators are generally clueless, talk a lot of smack¹, and have grating voices.

For me, the world cup REALLY started when Australia played Germany. Whenever the socceroos play, one of the greatest flaws in the game is revealed – the “art” of diving. Diving is against the rules, although you’ll hear a lot of people, including FIFA president Sep Blatter, tell you that it is part of the game. It shouldn’t be part of the game. This is similar to idiots who say that having a lot of long-term unemployed people in society is ok because that’s just the way it is. The trouble with diving is that, if successful, it can be hugely beneficial for your team. The trouble with the socceroos, is that they don’t dive much; not compared with other major teams in the competition. This makes them a better team in terms of their ability to follow the rules, however they are punished for their troubles by having lots of free kicks and the occasional penalty given against them. These can have a huge impact on the outcome of the game, for example in the last world cup they were tied at 0-0 when a questionable penalty was awarded to Italy which gave them a lead in the 94th minute. Italy then went on to lift the world cup. Of course, the Germans aren’t exactly the worst culprits in the diving stakes either. When the scoreline read 4-0 at full time, most people wrote it off as a lopsided pairing. Of course, anyone knows anything about how good Australia really are, and anyone who actually watched the game knows that the real reason for the scoreline was, firstly, because Tim Cahill was sent off, and secondly because Germany actually played very well. The scoreline would eventually come back to haunt us because we drew even on points with Ghana at the end of the group stage, but lost out on goal difference, and so missed out on advancing to the round of 16.

On the subject of questionable refereeing, this world cup has once again brought to light just how bad it can really be. Obviously, as a supporter of Australia, I disagree with the harshness of the penalties (red cards) handed out to Cahill and Kewell in the first two games of the group stage. Red cards are especially damaging because, not only does the team have to play a man down for the rest of the game, but the player to whom the card was given must also sit out the next game. Those are two of our most significant players and I have little doubt in my mind that the result of the matches would have been quite different had different coloured cards been handed out. Nowhere was refereeing error more apparent than in the round of 16 game between Germany and England. The score was 2-1 to Germany, and England had scored just minutes before when Frank Lampard struck the crossbar with such force that the ball bounced inside the line. That was a goal. Not only would 2-2 have changed the tone and momentum of the match, having a very obvious goal denied would have significantly impacted on team morale of the English. The scoreline eventually read 4-1.² All manner of unusual arguments have been forwarded against introducing technology to assist the refs, but it’s mostly rubbish. It may be human to make mistakes, but it is also well within the human condition to want to correct them.

The makeup of the final four is not what anyone would have predicted. The first “surprise” although it shouldn’t have been if anyone watched them play, was the neither France nor Italy made it into the final 16. Perhaps France is like the Star Trek movies, only doing well on every alternate incarnation. Recall that in 2002, France also failed to make it out of the group stage after winning in style over Brazil in 1998. New to the stage is Uruguay. Uruguay isn’t really “new” as it has won two world cups including the first ever one in Uruguay in 1930, and then again in 1950 against Brazil in the Rio’s Maracaña stadium (I’m surprised they made it out alive). The new Uruguayan side is a talented one, to be sure, but the manner in which they reached the final four has made them unpopular. While playing Ghana in a close and exciting game, their star striker Suarez used his hands to keep a goal out. He was given a red card and Ghana were awarded a penalty, but they failed to convert and it went into a penalty shootout, which Ghana lost quite badly. Without Suarez in the side for the semifinal match with the Netherlands, I suspect that this is the end of the Uruguayan’s world cup campaign.

That the Netherlands is in the final four is also a bit surprising. On paper, it perhaps shouldn’t be – they’ve won all of their last 13 consecutive games. However, their play has been uninspiring to say the least. Arjen Robben is the only player on their team with any real creative capacity, and he’s been scoring most of their goals. The team overall however has shown to be a sound unit, and a disciplined one. They certainly earned their place in the final having had to come through Brazil to get here. On that note… when they went 1-0 in the first half of their game against Brazil, they stayed calm and kept plugging away, but when Brazil went down 2-1 later in the same game, it fell apart at the seams. The Brazil-Netherlands game highlighted the fact that, as important as individual skill is, this is still a team sport. Every single one of the players on the Brazilian team have exceptional ball skills, but they’re just not so great at working as a team. Former captain-turned-coach, Dunga, had his work cut out for him, and is, in the author’s opinion, copping an unfair amount of the blame for the loss.

On the subject of coaching… coaching a national team in the era of modern football would be among one of the most difficult coaching challenges in all of sport. It would be extremely frustrating because you get a bunch of players with proven talent and ability, but who aren’t used to playing with each other, and you’ve somehow got to manufacture a good team out of them. Take England for example, who in 2002, and 2006 had the best midfield in the world… correction – they have a group of midfield players the sum of whose talents is greater than the sum of any other national side’s midfield. Yet, England have consistently sucked at recent world cups. Brazil is the classic example. If you simply measured the raw footballing talent of the individuals of a team, then Brazil should win every world cup, but that clearly doesn’t happen. An interesting debate that has arisen is one surrounding various different styles of coaching.

Diego Maradona, pictured above, has become coach of Argentina, which has been doing quite well until they were crushed by Germany 4-0 recently. He has endured sharp criticism because his coaching involves a lot less “technical” coaching, and a lot of the “psychological”… and it shows. He is often seen hugging players, and it is said that he gives stirring pep-talks before matches, and during half-time breaks. I don’t think this criticism is fair. In a world cup, when you’ve got talented players who are very experienced, but not necessarily with each other, it is important to “let them play” and not to try and force a particular style on them that they may be unfamiliar with. Brazil’s Dunga tried this, and got away with it briefly. It is also very underappreciated by members of the general public how significant the psychological aspect of the game really is. Especially in football, where team cohesion and momentum can make or break a game.

A few days ago, I said that whoever wins the game between Germany and Argentina would go on to win the tournament. I still believe this, and not just because Germany beat a pretty decent side 4-0. Argentina’s defense wasn’t great, but they’re not a bad side either. They did beat a pretty decent Mexican side 3-1, and the difference could have easily been much greater. Germany will face Spain in their semifinal. Span were the side that I tipped to win the tournament before it began. However, Spain have struggled, first losing out to Switzerland and really only making by the skin of their teeth for the rest of their matches. For such an incredibly talented team, they sure don’t score a lot of goals, which is why I think that Germany will make minced meat out of them in their semifinal match tomorrow. Close as the game might be, when it comes to taking advantage of opportunities to score, the Germans have a definite edge. I was quite worried that a German side without Michael Ballack might struggle, especially at a time when many young players are just moving into the ranks of the senior side, but as it happens, those youngsters can play just fine without Ballack. And with a prolific scorer in Miroslav Klose (now there’s a German name if ever I knew one) who has just surpassed Pele and is one short of the all-time record for goals in a world cup, the Germans are as dangerous as they’ve ever been.

Addendum: It has taken me so long to write this, that the Netherlands-Uruguay game has not only started, but is almost over. As of the 84th minute, the score is 3-1 in favour of the Netherlands (who are playing the best that they’ve played all tournament). A Dutch-German final should be interesting.

beyone petroleum... but not bullshit

It’s that time of the year again, and I am once again in a reflective mood about the state of the world in which we live. That state, to put it mildly, is “not good”. We are rapidly headed towards a nasty collision with mother nature and the worst part about it, is that we’re really not doing much to stop ourselves. The problems we face are very large and multi-faceted, and it will take all of our human ingenuity (and then some) to fix these problems, however I foresee disaster not so much because I think we lack the ability to solve these problems (although that is a distinct and rather scary possibility) but because, even before we get to that, we will probably manage to stop ourselves from making a good attempt at it.

Take for example the incident in the Gulf of Mexico involving BP. There are many layers of badness here. First of all, at the most basic level, there is a lot of crude oil spilling into the ocean. More than has ever been spilled before and it will have profound effects on the ecosystems of the gulf. The other, in many ways more disturbing, thing about this incident is that almost every day, it is revealed that there was some kind of systematic cover-up. Sometimes we hear about regulators not being tough on BP, other times we hear about corners being cut by BP, and sometimes we even hear of very unusual things like the chemicals that are being pumped into the stream to “break it up into smaller particles” which serves to do nothing other than mask the true size of the spill. However, one of the worst things that I have heard recently, is when people stick up for the bad guys.

There seems to be an interesting sub-group of the human population who are either deluded from reading too much Ayn Rand and learning all their econ from Mises.org (or worse, Rush Limbaugh) who seem to feel that it is their duty to stand up for the “underdog”. In this case, the underdog is poor BP which is taking a hammering in the media at the moment. I hear cries of “what do you know about drilling for oil”, and “leave them alone, and let them clean it up” etc. One of the most unfortunate side-effects of the morally reprehensible PR campaigns of tobacco companies, who for a long time published fake scientific papers which basically said that smoking isn’t such a bad thing, is that it has become acceptable, even normal, for large corporations (who have the kind of money you need to make talented people lie like that) to stage expensive publicity campaigns to cover up their mistakes. This has a follow-on effect of making people believe the lies, and perpetuate them. The liars are always easy to spot, for the same reason that dumb high-schoolers who cheat on their homework are easy to spot – because they say the same thing, often not even bothering to change the wording. The number of times I’ve had the same fake climate science papers cited by climate change deniers is kind of amazing.

I find it incredible that human civilization, and all it’s wonderful achievements in science, technology, invention and so on can’t seem to get over this hurdle. At school (at least in Australia) we are taught “media analysis”, the object of which is the better equip us to separate the stuff from the fluff. When you watch Fox News for example, it’s mostly fluff and a quick analysis of the language used, without even checking their “facts” (which are mostly made-up), can usually reveal the true nature of the “news” being reported. Unfortunately, I have a suspicion that not everybody who is taught this at school actually learns it, or retains the ability. Even if they did, what match is an increasingly poorly-funded education system against an obscenely well-funded publicity machine with the backing of a large multinational corporation? I’ve thought about the strategy of giving proper scientists PR departments. Of course, that is a battle that nobody can win – an oil company who wants to deny climate change will ALWAYS have more money than the combined R&D spending of the entire planet.

I used to think that the truth would always win out because, well… it was the truth. Now I’m not so sure. In economic terms, it should be much easier to pay someone to publicize the truth than to publicize a lie. How much less expensive should it be? Well, it comes down to how much our society values the truth compared to how much our society values money – and now we start to see some of the problem. In an ideal world, you shouldn’t be able to pay someone to lie… but we all know that everyone has a price. I would like to think that my price would be more than the anyone could pay, and this may be true in monetary terms… but not all payment has to take the form of money. A death threat, for example; not to myself, but to someone very close, would conceivably force me to lie in a meaningful way. Corporations have been known to do this from time to time. Is it legal? It is if you don’t get caught; you would be surprised the number and types of things that can be bought if you have enough money and a bit of imagination.

That is, of course, only half of the problem. People are much more receptive to some things than others. If two people of equal standing were to present you the following conflicting “facts” – on the one hand, you have potentially catastrophic climate change where the solution involves developing whole new industries, and making drastic lifestyle changes, while on the other hand, you’re told that everything is going to be ok… I know what I would *rather* believe. Now add the fact that scientists, for some inexplicable reason, are not held in very high standing in the public eye, at least not next to smooth-talking celebrity talk show hosts. Yes Houston, we have a problem.

For a long time in my life, I only ever considered the problem of world peace on my long-term agenda (you can tell that I’m not a very ambitious person). World peace is one of those problems for which a “technical” solution doesn’t exist. That means, in my mind, that no amount of science or technology is going to achieve world peace, but the solution instead involves, in the immediate sphere, a lot of compromise, negotiation, and tit-for-tat, while in the long term, it will require an evolution of the way that a lot of people think. I have come to the conclusion that climate change is similar.

True, there are technological advances that can potentially solve the problem overnight. But those solutions are a long way into the future, and in many ways that would be “cheating”. Why? Because current technology is able to solve our problem (yes, I’m quite serious here) but it will take a lot of negotiation, and compromise to make that happen. Climate change is not a problem for which no technical solution exists, but the “best” solution is the non-technical one. Though it is likely that this crisis will end, or drastically reduce our large and complex civilization, it also has the potential to make us take the next step in our evolution, and that is to learn how to get along on a global scale. Climate change could be just the kick in the ass that we all need.

It is sometimes said that uniting against a common enemy can bring people closer together. I think that’s a bit childish. What if that common enemy is all of humanity itself? We are our own worst enemy. What would aliens think if they happened on our planet? They probably wouldn’t want anything to do with us, they’d probably leave, thinking “oh well, in a few hundred years they would have wiped themselves out and we can have this planet”. History constantly repeats itself, yet we never seem to learn anything from it. Is it because we’re too lazy to study history? I don’t think so. I think it has a lot more to do with the fact that we’re all fed a lot of bad information, and we have an overinflated sense of self-importance. I’ve been in a slightly cynical and somewhat philosophical move lately and if you were to ask me what my message to the people of the earth would be if I was some kind of all-powerful being who was somehow in a position to deliver a message to the people of earth that they would listen to, it would be “get over yourselves”.

While it is unlikely that people who happen on this website are the despicable types I mention above who whore out their consciences and voices to the highest bidder in defence of the misdeeds of corporations; if you are one of them, and have read this far, I encourage you to post a comment; because you have a lot to answer for. C’mon, bring it… my pugnacious streak is in need of some attention.

And to the rest (because those I mention above are generally beyond help) I leave you with two instructive footnotes. One of my favourite Carl Sagan quotes – pale blue dot, and one of my favourite speeches, JFK’s “peace speech“.

Jente and Josh

Photographs are very powerful things. I am only really just starting to appreciate that. One thing you can always do is just take a lot of photos randomly, and hope for the best. With digital photography, this strategy is much less expensive than it used to be, but even so, when reviewing the photos, you still need to know what you’re looking for. For the purposes of this discussion, we shall refer to that extra little bit as the “magic”. The photo above of Jente and Josh was taken at a small Christmas celebration with the Aussies in Holland. There was something about that party, it wasn’t raucous or anything (although there were raucous moments), but it was quite subdued in mood (and lighting). I really wanted to try to capture that in my photographs and this photograph seemed to capture it best. This might sound strange, but you just sort of have to “feel” the moment.

Everyone probably knows what I mean if I talk about the mood in a room changing when someone walks in or out. The same can sometimes be said of individuals smiling, or when a decisive moment is reached in a game of poker. This “mood” is often reflected in people’s faces and expressions, which in turn contribute to the mood itself (there are probably differential equations describing this). Thing about a photograph, is that at any one time it only captures a very small part of the room. Moreover, it’s capture is limited to things that can only be perceived with your eyes. So the photographer’s challenge (as I see it) is to somehow capture a very complex emotion, which is the sum of events leading up to a point as well as the product of multiple things, perceived through multiple senses, and to capture it in a two dimensional visual representation.

I tried a lot of different things that night; taking pictures of ornaments, taking very wide-angle shots with a lot of dead space, taking very close-crop face-shots. All in an effort to convey this mood of contentment, yet with a nagging sense of loneliness. I already knew that I was going to make all my photos black and white, or at least desaturate them considerably. It was not the right kind of mood for colour photographs. Feeling moods and emotions is one thing, and it is very important for a photographer to be able to do that, as well as sensing the emotions of others. But capturing it in such a way that similar emotions are triggered in the viewer of your photographs is extremely difficult. There is no formula for doing it, you just have to feel the magic.

Silver medal

This might sound strange, but I’m not a huge fan of sports photography. I find it a bit boring. You see, if you’re a sports photographer for a newspaper, there are certain kinds of shots that they are after, and they are mostly boring. In speed skating, where a perfect race looks almost identical to a not-so-great race, the photographer’s task is challenging. If I were a sports photographer for a newspaper, I would probably be fired very quickly because I would submit lots of non-standard photos, such as the one above. Without context… it still works. You’ve got a girl who looks a little disappointed. Notice the flag, indicating that she was probably a medalist… obviously not a gold medalist. If this accompanied a newspaper article, you would know that her name is Jenny Wolf, the current world record holder, who has held that record for a few years now, who is the leader in standings for this event at world cups, and who was heavy favourite for the gold medal. Now the photo makes even more sense. She has that distant look in her eyes, that “what if” look. I’m sure she was happy with her silver medal but I’d bet a lot of money that at the moment when this photo was taken, she was thinking more about the gold medal that she didn’t get, than the silver that she did. With a photograph, you’re not just trying to tell a story with the image, but you’re also trying to convey emotions.

Obvious emotional moments

Sport photography shouldn’t be boring, because there’s something about sport that brings out a very complex range of emotions in people, and not just the athletes. Sometimes, you’re lucky and you get moments like the one above, which happen during the course a sporting event. Moments where the emotion and the context are (literally) screamingly obvious.

a less-obvious moment

And at other times… between the hurly-burly of the action. Maybe it’s when someone is getting ready on the start line and has some kind of strange ritual, or perhaps it’s the moment when they recognize someone in the crowd, but these moments are much more interesting, because they remind us that athletes are also human. This is one of my favourite photos from the 2010 winter Olympics because it captures the moment when Annette realized that her olympic dream (at least in the 500m) was over. She did bounce back later and get a silver medal in the 1000m (missing gold by only 0.02 of a second!)

Eric Heiden

The portrait is easily one of the most challenging types of photos to take. It is relatively easy to teach someone how to take a technically-sound photograph, but teaching someone how to take a good portrait is difficult. Why? Because being a good portrait photographer depends a lot less on your technical skills with a camera, but much more on you ability to connect with and interact with people. Most people freak out in front of a camera, and even if they don’t, their behaviour changes noticeably when they’ve got a large camera pointed at them. As if that wasn’t bad enough, you’re trying to distill the very essence of a person in a photograph, and sometimes (often) you will hardly know the person you are photographing. Of course, it helps to remember that the person you are photographing is themselves, so you can hardly capture a photograph that doesn’t communicate *some* of their essence.

The first step is to get the subject relaxed. The best way to do this is to talk to them. This accomplishes two things – firstly, it relaxes them so they are more “themselves” and less “them reacting strangely to a camera”; secondly, it gives you the opportunity to try to get to know them a bit better. The ideal portrait photograph is one where a close friend of the subject looks at the photo and say “that is SOOOO [insert subject's name here]“. The above photo is one that I took of Eric Heiden (who I encourage everyone to look up if you don’t already know who he is). Eric is such a chilled-out, down to earth guy that I didn’t realize who he was when he came to sit with us for lunch. I eventually realized and was somewhat awestruck by how totally cool and accessible this guy was considering he is the greatest speed skater ever to have lived. I wanted to capture his very relaxed nature, which was difficult because the room where we ate our lunch was also next to the warm up/down bikes at the Utah Olympic Oval, so the background was always very cluttered and busy. I employed a very simple trick which was to shoot from a lower angle so that only the upper part of the wall and the ceiling would be in the background of the shot. He now uses this photo as his profile pic on facebook.

The real key to finding the magic has nothing to do with lenses, sensors, focal lengths and whatnot. That’s like saying that the key to good poetry is all about good punctuation and vocabulary. Obviously you will need to learn about all those technical aspects in order to take technically sound photographs. But really good photographs, the ones that reach out of their two-dimensional confines and speak to our hearts, rely on… well… our hearts. You need to have an open heart, and connect with the subject matter, be it a landscape, a flower, or another person; and you have to have to the courage to let your heart speak through your photos. It’s about noticing the small details, the quiet moments, and being able to hear the whispers in the crowd, but it’s also about seeing the bigger picture at the same time, giving context. It should be like poetry, or music, always speaking to our hearts and always finding something new, something different… and occasionally something beautiful.

As I said before, it is difficult to describe. I spend a lot of time looking at the work of other photographers (and not just internet porn) for inspiration. Whenever I look at a photo I ask myself “what was the photographer thinking?”, “why did she make the photo like this?”, and I often ask the same questions of my own photos. It is important to allow yourself to “feel” the emotion of the image; try to be the image, and feel what it feels. Maybe it’s crying out in pain, frying some greasy bacon for breakfast, or maybe it’s giving you the cold shoulder, then try to communicate that. Also, keep it simple. It’s just a photograph. You look at it. That’s all. And practice, this is perhaps the most important thing.

Maybe none of what I just said makes any sense at all. That is probably part of the reason that people consider me a better photographer than a writer. But many have asked me about photography, and when I point them to the article about photo gear, and the two preceding articles – “The Truth Behind the Shutter” and “More Truth Behind the Shutter“, I am told that I haven’t said enough. Now I’ll probably be told that what I’ve said makes no sense… oh well. I guess it goes to show that you can’t learn how to be a good photographer just from reading. Good luck!

File exchange on a distributed network

Torrents are wonderful things. For those who are unfamiliar (and it is entirely possible to be unfamiliar yet still be a regular user), torrents are a system by which files are shared over a network of computers. If the Internet is the era-defining black swan of our generation, then torrents are the cargo trucks on our superhighway. They are the natural evolution of the solution to the problem of moving files from place to place.

First, a bit of context and technical background. Back in the good old days when the Internet was just starting up and a gigabyte was considered huge for a hard disk, bandwidth was very limited. Most people connected via modems using telephone lines with carrier signals that sounded like faxes. To send large files from computer to computer was difficult, HTTP (or hyper text transfer protocol) was limited in this capacity and FTP (file transfer protocol) was clumsy and often required the swapping of passwords and connections between trusted computers. This basically meant that you had to “know” in some sense, the person with whom you exchanged files, or else download files over slow and unreliable connections.

Then came P2P, or peer-to-peer networks. You’ve probably heard of Napster, which was one of the first widely-used P2P networks. The nature of P2P is exactly what it sounds like. In the case of Napster, the tracking of clients was still centralized, but once a request for a file and a computer with that file had been identified, then these two computers would be able to connect to each other and the file transfer could take place. Although Napster was eventually shut down, it paved the way for other P2P systems such as gnutella, which are decentralized and allow downloading of a single file from multiple hosts who also have that file, further speeding up the spread of data.

Then came bit torrent. In a technical sense, the whole mechanism for how torrents works fascinates me. With something like the gnutella network, you can download a file from as many different computers as have the file, which is great, and can be very fast although… think about what happens when a file first hits the net.

One person has the file, great. Lets say you’ve got a network of 10 computers who all want the file. The other nine start downloading the file from this one dude so the this one guy’s network connection gets maxed out until everyone else has the file. We can make this interesting and say that it takes one hour to transfer this file from one computer to another (to define our bandwidth), and so it will take nine hours (because the first computer’s bandwidth is split into nine) to transfer this file from one computer to the other nine simultaneously. You could be very clever about it, and transfer it to three computers first (taking three hours) then having those four computers with a complete copy of the file transfer it on to the remaining six (taking one and a half hours) for a total of four and a half hours. Actually, given the above constraints, the quickest way of doing it is for the first host to simply download to one other host (one hour) then for those two to download to one each (one more hour) then for those four to download to the remaining six (one and a half hours) for a total of three and a half hours.

As you can see, the main difficulty is that a computer needs a complete copy of the file before it can begin to give it away to another computer. In the case of very large files, this can become problematic, especially if the network has a lot of computers and connections between any two are not always reliable. This is where torrenting comes in. In a torrent, a file is split into many different, very small pieces, and “seeded” to the “swarm”. The real kicker with a torrent is that a computer may begin to upload different pieces of a file to other computers before it has completely downloaded the original file. It seems like a very small adjustment to the original parameters, but the implications are mind-boggling. Reconsider our original situation.

The original file host splits the file into nine pieces and distributes a different piece each to the other nine computers (taking only an hour). Each of the nine computers sends their “ninth” to the eight other computers in the network (taking possibly a little less than an hour) and we’re done. But it gets better – because you don’t have to wait until you have the full copy of a file before you can send bits of it onwards, consider what happens when the pieces are smaller. Say the original host splits the file into thirty six pieces and distributes the first nine to the nine other computers during the first fifteen minutes, in the next fifteen minutes, the next nine pieces are distributed from the original host AND all of the first nine pieces are distributed among the nine. So, fifteen minutes after the first hour (the time it takes for the host to fully upload all the pieces of the original file). It is easy to see that, the smaller the pieces you split the file into, the shorter the amount of time after the initial download it takes before all the computers in the network have their own complete copy of the file. Another beautiful thing about this system is that once a few full downloads have been completed, especially on very large networks, computers can drop out and come back with minimal disruption to the whole deal whereas before, the dropping out of a computer with the complete file would slow things down considerably.

There’s something nice about the way this all works. You could, in theory, have a very large network in which no one computer has the complete file yet still be able to complete the download from the fragments.

Now most bit torrent programs keep a record of your upload/download ratio, and some people won’t let you download from them unless your ratio is above a certain number. I was thinking about this the other day, and came to the conclusion that these demands were, in theory, mathematically unreasonable to ask of anyone. In the above example, the original host would have uploaded one complete file and downloaded none, while the other nine would have downloaded one complete file and uploaded a ninth of one. Of course, they uploaded that ninth eight times giving a total of eight uploads between the nine of them and nine downloads of course. The ratio for the downloaders is and the total “global” (for a very small globe of ten computers) ratio is therefore one-to-one.

This is, of course, an average. As the number of computers (let’s call it n) approaches infinity, the ratio for the downloading computers approaches . But in the real world, these aren’t closed systems, some people stay on the network and continue to seed packets to computers with incomplete files, while others bugger off as soon as their download is complete. If we assume that everyone eventually has complete copies of the files being distributed (which is one of the only reasonable assumptions we can make here) then the global ratio has to be 1:1. If you’re one of the system admins out there who leaves their computers on the network all the time and basically seeds files forever, you’re going to have a huge upload-to-download ratio. If you then insist that anyone who downloads from you has a ratio of at least one-to-one, then you create a small problem – where is everyone else going to get the high ratio from? If the global average is one, then, given that these large superseeders exist, getting a ratio of one would depend on there being many people out there with very low ratios indeed, which is probably not what these sysadmins are trying to promote with these ratio restrictions.

The clever among you may have already spotted a way out – continuous growth. If the network constantly expands, then it is possible for everyone to eventually have access to file hosts who stipulate a ratio greater than or equal to one. At the moment, this seems plausible, but obviously there are eventual limits to the size of the network. Eventually, users will probably be forced to set up “sockpuppets”¹ in order to increase the users’ ratios, which is counter-productive because the whole idea of coming up with the system was to more-efficiently use system resources.

I guess this rant probably wasn’t what you were expecting. I suspect that most were expecting some kind of philosophical rambling about intellectual property and copyright and the evils of the RIAA. Instead, you got a technical description of how torrents work which you may or (more likely) may not be interested in. Oh well. Access to information and the rules regarding intellectual property are thing that I care deeply about, so I’m sure I will eventually go on a very long rant about it… maybe next time.

Poker - is not at all about luck

“The man who said I would rather be lucky than good saw deeply into the world”

The line is the first uttered in Woody Allen’s film “Match Point” which, while a great film, is not a good first-date movie (a quick perusal of the synopsis of the plot will reveal why). It deals with the unsettling truth that a great deal of what happens in our lives comes down to nothing more than pure chance. Fortunately for me, since I am rather well-endowed (with luck at least) I do not suffer the common narrative fallacy where most people ascribe where they are in life to some combination of their hard work, learned knowledge, or talent. Obviously these are all important things, but luck, which in many cases would be the most important of all, often doesn’t even warrant a mention, or at most is only a footnote.

It has occasionally been hypothesized that I have what is called “Impostor Syndrome“. In a nutshell, it is a condition where a person has trouble internalizing their own achievements and ascribes their social/professional/academic standing to having fooled everyone around them into believing that they are in fact, better than they really are. While it is generally true that my own assessment of my abilities falls well short of where most seem to place me, and while it is also generally true that I feel like I’m an impostor who is continually being given opportunities which ought to be reserved for those with greater potential, I don’t believe that I have impostor syndrome. I merely have a more accurate view on the narrative which has governed my life, and led to where I am now. A view more accurate relative to the general population, especially with regards to luck.

You see, while most people believe that they got to where they are because they were talented, and worked hard, and were determined etc. I know that I got to where I am by a combination of those things and a very, very, very generous dose of luck. Almost every single significant event or achievement of my life, those turning points where I truly felt a different person afterwards, were the direct result of very large doses of luck. Luckily for me, a few of them were obvious enough that I was able to easily see the role that luck played. An obvious example is my crash in a formula ford racing car at Calder park raceway. Long story short: I lost control at the end of the main straight at 240km/h, spun out of control, and hit a concrete wall at about 170. I woke up in an ambulance with no recollection of what happened, a few scratches, (one of which needed stitches and passed perilously close to my Achillies tendon) and a fracture in my shoulder that was small enough that I didn’t notice it until weeks later. The car was obliterated. No amount of skill can control an open wheeler spinning at those speeds. If I had impacted the wall at even a slightly different angle, I would be dead.

At a brunch recently I learned that in the British military when two officers are competing for promotion, in cases where both the candidates are extremely closely matched on all regular criteria, they look back over the candidates history and choose the one who is “luckier”.¹ This got me thinking (and is actually the real reason I wrote this article) and I think I know the reason for this. If one thinks for a moment about the stereotype of a British army officer (think of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Modern Major General) one can’t help but imagine a person with an inflated sense of entitlement. Daddy owns a lot of land, therefore I should be an officer etc. The infamous “charge of the light brigade” lay bare the very worst shortcomings of this brand of thinking and I believe the use of the “luck measure” may be an attempt at eradicating it.

Say you have two cows. One of them is promoted to public office by way of competitive written examination. The other is promoted to public office by way of a lottery. The cow that took the exam is going to (rightly) believe that he deserves to be there and that it is his right. The cow that took the lottery, on the other hand, will have no such illusions. He will enter the job with a mentality similar to that of a person starting a business with a large loan, while the other cow will be starting with a sum of money that was given to him as a prize. Two distinctly different mindsets which would result in, presumably, slightly different results.

Perhaps this is where I get the feeling that I’m always living on “borrowed time”. Samurai used to enter battle with the mindset that they had already died. Strange as that may sound, the idea is actually very similar – you have nothing to lose. Curiously, if you are afraid of dying, you are more likely to die than if you fight with the kind of reckless abandon that a person who already believes their time is up would. So in fact maybe I am an impostor, but so is everybody else – I’m just much more acutely aware of it than others.

What does this all mean? I don’t know. It would be silly to suggest that everything happens because of luck. But it would be even sillier to suggest that everything happens for a reason. We really must learn to embrace randomness a little more. If we don’t, we risk being ambushed by it, but if we do, we can prepare ourselves for it. When I say “prepare ourselves for randomness”, what I’m really saying is to accept that luck plays a huge role in your life, don’t beat up on yourself too much when things don’t go right, and also be prepared to seize opportunities when they do come along.

There’s a great line from a film called “Good Will Hunting”, the screenplay of which won an Oscar. “I mean, you’re sittin’ on a winnin’ lottery ticket. And you’re too much of a pussy to cash it in, and that’s bullshit”. It describes the situation the lead character, Will Hunting, a genius mathematician, is in when his best friend confronts him and challenges him to recognize his abilities and use them. Meanwhile, he is facing a similar situation with a girl where he is afraid to confront the fact that he has feelings for her. The film is great, although the line bothers me slightly in that the kind of luck I’m talking about isn’t like a lottery ticket in that lotteries are fundamentally zero-sum and very predictable kinds of luck. For any given lottery, you can make a reasonable guess at the upper-bound for the prize because it will always be lower than the total taken from tickets sold.

Even though the kind of luck I’m talking about is fundamentally impossible to predict, it can still be harnessed. If I roll a fair die, I’m going to get a six about one sixth of the time. In other words, the chances that I won’t get a six will be five sixths. If I have ten dice, then the chances that I won’t get a six will be five sixths to the power of 10. As I keep adding dice, it quickly becomes almost impossible not to get a six. Where am I going with this? The real reason that I like living in big cities. The scope of human interaction is so much larger in a big city, and the rate at which “stuff happens” is just so much greater, that the chances that an unbelievable opportunity will come up, while still quite slim, are much greater than if you lived in a small town in rural Holland (just to throw an example out there).

And that, your honor, is why I want to move back to New York – to get lucky.

view from above

“I might’ve lived my life in a dream, but I swear this is real”
~ R.E.M. (from Leaving New York)

New York is a very special place. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out, but it also has a very special personal significance to me. There are a handful of events in my life which really shaped me as a person. These are events which, had they not happened, I would be a significantly different person today. Many of those events are described on this website such as the one time I went for a swim and almost didn’t come back, while others are not, either because I haven’t got around to it yet, or because the content is not suitable for public viewing (wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more). While I will make no attempt to describe it in detail here, the year-and-a-bit that I spent living in New York is one of those life-shaping events.

My first visit to New York occurred on March 20th 2007, during my 5-month odyssey through Latin America. I know what you’re thinking, “there may be many Spanish-speaking people in New York Daniel, but it is not in Latin America”. This is true. In the middle of this odyssey, I had a half-time break during which I traveled to New York among a few other US destinations. In fact, I came to New York via Boston on the chinatown bus – only $15. It dropped me off in the middle of a very dense chinatown where everyone was speaking cantonese, and all of the restaurant and shop signs were in chinese. For a moment, I felt like I back in Hong Kong.

I immediately warmed to the city. It was everything I imagined it to be, and more. It was surreal – I felt like I was walking around in a movie set. It really was a city that never slept, which suited a nocturnal being such as myself. The constant activity of the place was energizing, empowering even, I felt like I could do anything, anytime I wanted. And the food! Oh, the glorious food! On three consecutive nights, I dined at Per Se, Daniel, and Jean Georges (all of which are now 3-star Michelin restaurants) and during the day I just wrote down long lists of sights to see, and saw them. In fact, there was only one location on my list that I didn’t get around to – Columbia University. When I left, after four jam-packed days, I was exhausted but very satisfied. I wanted more, but I was also sad because my only real shot at living there had passed me by when Columbia rejected me for their PhD program in Sustainable Development.

Curiously enough, on May 4th that year, I learned that I was accepted to a masters degree at Columbia. I was ecstatic, moreso because I had actually visited New York and knew what the city was like. I returned on a warm August day under slightly unusual circumstances. I had just been to the world inline speed skating championships in Cali, Colombia and was not only very tanned, but very distraught because I had had the misfortune of having my laptop, camera, and ipod stolen from my (locked) hotel room. I arrived at 1am on a Monday morning, and by about 4pm, I had almost all of those items replaced, and then some. The feeling of being able to do anything, amplified by being at a university that I honestly never thought I was good enough to get into, was returning.

Leaving after that year was difficult. On the surface, the decision should have been an obvious one – I had been offered the opportunity to speed skate professionally, full-time, and train for a shot at the Olympic Games. But still, I hesitated, and it wasn’t until a few forceful “you must go” prods from my Columbia professors, did I really wake up and make the right decision. Before I left, I held a party in the form of a (surprisingly) well-attended karaoke night. That’s when I really realized how much I would miss the place. The city is amazing – I loved it even before I knew ANYONE there, but now I had made many friends, and friends who I may never see again owing to the transient nature of the place. It was never quite this bad with Melbourne, but that’s probably because, being Australian, there is always the (very likely correct) assumption that I will eventually return. With a place like New York (and the difficult visa requirements of the US), you just never know.

I’ve been back twice now, both times for brief visits. Leaving the city after these occasions was surprisingly the most difficult. Why? Perhaps it is because the brief nature of them, and the necessarily rushed efforts to see as many people as I possibly could in an impossibly short space of time reminded me of just how brief and fleeting life really is, and how important it is to really cherish every moment (trust me, when you’re sharing food with a gorgeous girl for what could only be two hours tops if you’re lucky, you learn to cherish every moment ). Perhaps it is the realization that you didn’t just make a bunch of new friends in the crazy city, but that you really meant something to them (or at least enough for them to appear ostensibly happy to see you).

Another thing that perhaps entices me to the city, is that it feels like “home”. A long time ago, at my first Amnesty International Australia Annual General Meeting (try saying that ten times in a hurry), I was sitting, chatting casually to the former president of AIA, Cathy Kingston, and she told me that I was a “misfit”, and that it was ok to be a misfit. (Incidentally, this is another one of those defining moments of my life). I had never felt that I really “fit in” anywhere. I never fit in in Hong Kong (where my relatives would constantly berate me for not knowing how to speak Chinese even though I did), and I didn’t really fit in in Australia either (although in several specific groups, namely MUMS and MUCAAS, I very nearly did). In New York I was probably the least-alone in my mis-fitted-ness, and that was probably a major contributing factor to why I felt so at home there.

I grew up in Hong Kong, a city of life which feels, in many ways, much like New York. But Hong Kong today is nothing like the Hong Kong I grew up in, and I’m not talking about all the new buildings. I’m not even talking about the switch in sovereignty from Britain to China. I’m referring to the fact that almost all of my friends from when I lived in Hong Kong have moved elsewhere, especially the ones whom I would consider close. Maybe I’m simply afraid that New York will become like another Hong Kong, another ghost town, because I recognize the transient nature of the populations in both cities. That transience, the way that the city seems to live and breathe and circulate with people as its nourishing blood, will always make it extremely difficult to leave.

Eyjafjallajokull - try saying that 10 times in a hurry

It has come to my attention that today is Earth Day… or perhaps it was yesterday, or the day before. In fact, it may have been the case that all three days were “Earth Days” which seems a little silly, or perhaps I got it wrong and it is actually Earth Week. When I first came to the realization that it was Earth Day, I felt a little bit bad for not knowing, and felt that I should have done something specifically on that day to show that I did in fact care for our pale blue dot. Then I had a realization – I already do. My life has more or less been pointed in the direction of saving the world for some time now, and unlike those sportspeople whose sole physical exertion takes place during competition or, at best, during the weeks leading up to it, I am (as my speed skating experience may indicate) putting in the hard yards in in a long-term kind of way.

I am currently in one of my favourite cities in the world – New York. I am told that this is one of the most energy-efficient cities on the planet. This may seem difficult to believe, especially if you’ve ever walked through times square at night and wondered about the kind of obscene energy bill that those few city blocks must incur. However, there is a wonderful side-effect that you get in cities that comes from increasing returns to scale. Because cities are so much more densely populated than rural areas, the ability for members of the population to share resources makes everything just a little more efficient. Actually, I suspect the largest contributor to NYC’s energy efficiency is the decreased transportation costs that come from the increased population density and public transportation system.

I was once told that there was an academic paper that showed that New York’s public transportation system consumed as much energy as the equivalent number of passengers would have expended, had they been in cars. This is almost a ridiculous assertion, and if I ever get a hold of the paper, I’m sure I’d have fun ripping it to shreds if someone hasn’t already done so. The most likely mistake is the common academic one of assuming linearity. Linearity is simple, and our minds are fairly good at dealing with it. Of course, we live in a non-linear world. Per unit increase in input, the outputs don’t necessarily increase in proportion. Traffic in New York is a good example of this. If the number of cars on the road goes from say 0-1000 cars, the increase in energy consumption would increase in proportion. However, as the number increases past a certain point, the energy increases by ever increasing amounts per car because traffic causes trips to take longer. If you were to close the subway, you would have an extra 5 million or so passengers to take care of every day. Sure, many of them wouldn’t take cars, but I fail to see how this could possibly decrease any measure of per-capita energy expenditure.

Being inadequately equipped to deal with non-linearity is one of the great problems we face today. It is not that we haven’t in our possession the necessary mathematical tools to understand and deal with these problems – such tools have existed and been understood for a long time. The real problem is that most people just don’t understand. Take the example of a volcano spewing volcanic ash into the atmosphere. Our inconveniences stemming from such an obviously unlikely and far-fetched scenario do not increase linearly with the increase in ash. They increase in steps, or more likely giant leaps. Between each of these steps, there would exist a small amount of linearity, but not very much. To start with, the nearby glaciers will melt causing local flooding. A relatively small inconvenience involving having to evacuate and relocate people. Increase the ash output a little though, and you can shut off air travel in almost all of Europe for a few days – more than just a minor inconvenience. Keep increasing the output, and you will start to get fluctuations in the climate (and possibly a global shutdown of air travel). At a certain point, the output of volcanic ash can effectively block out the sun for a long enough time to be very inconvenient to the continuation of human civilization.

These non-linearities can be found everywhere. Take for example the giving out of cash handouts by governments when it comes close to election time. Do these handouts make a difference to anybody? Not really. But they can get a government elected, after which it can steal spend vastly higher sums of money on other things. Yet a great deal of time is devoted to educating people about systems with linear returns, or at most slightly decreasing or increasing returns to scale. Once upon a time, this may have made sense, since the world that lay within the sphere of humankind’s influence behaved in a mostly linear way, but now, humanity is able to influence extremely high-impact events (because it has created for itself a huge, interconnected world where small disasters can propagate through the network and become very big disasters very quickly).

Another rather large problem the Earth is facing this Earth day is the disconnect between people and the planet. Now, I’m not one of those crazy people who advocates going back to living like the “good ol’ days” because, frankly, the good ol’ days were not a very good time to live – life was short, people were generally hungry and vulnerable to disease, and most of the world’s population, even in supposedly wealthy countries, lived in abject poverty. However, because of technology and urbanization (2008 was the first year in human history where more people lived in cities than in rural areas) our productivity has increased enough to provide a very large proportion of the population with living standards to rival that of a king as recently as 200 years ago. One of the side-effects of this though, is that people have lost their connection with our planet. By “connection” I don’t mean that we don’t hug trees often enough (although I am not opposed to hugging trees per se), I mean it in a more pragmatic sense. In the sense that, most kids leave school not understanding why the seasons are the way they are, and why they are flipped in the southern hemisphere (and some kids don’t even know that they are flipped in the southern hemisphere).

What is needed is better education. People should know where their food comes from, how it is grown, how it comes to be in our supermarkets to be had at such great convenience. Umberto Eco articulated in a great essay from La Repubblica: “Science, Technology, and Magic” about how we treat modern technology like magic in that we don’t really understand what goes on behind it. There have been many brilliant attempts at getting this kind of information out there, such as the story of stuff project, but sadly there are not as widely-known as they ought to be. Some might argue that there is little value in understanding these things, and that all we need to do is accept that they work, and move on. I disagree, in fact, I very strongly believe that one should understand the tools before one is allowed to use them. For example, very few people really understand how utterly dependent on steady, predictable rainfall our complex civilization really is. Recent price fluctuations in oil have started to make some people realize how dependent we are on cheap energy. But most take it for granted.

The real problem with this disconnect is that it leaves us very unprepared for unexpected events. If recent history is any indication, people don’t realize anything until there is a crisis. Moreover, people won’t care unless the crisis has a direct impact on their lives, by which time it is either too late, or too expensive to be able to come up with a good solution, and people get suckered into accepting very bad solutions. In fact, Milton Friedman is largely responsible for advising governments to use crises to pass legislation that would otherwise be too unpopular to be passed under normal circumstances, thus short-circuiting the entire democratic process. Most people would agree that such compromises are a bad thing, but try to get them to agree to a carbon tax, and it’s a different kettle of fish. Even though that money spent now will save a lot more money being spent later.

Investing early to save inefficient emergency spending later does not only apply to money. Being well-educated about how our world really works would save invaluable time and grief later. An investment in good information in a knowledge economy should be a no-brainer. But instead, we leave these things until the last minute, when the only sources of information (and I use the term very loosely here) which can tell you what you think you want to know in a short time are news reports and made-for-TV documentaries which invariably have to filter information, and often with an editorial slant. Indeed it is very sad that this is the means by which most people have learned about such weighty issues as the world economic crisis, and climate change.

“For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” ~ John F. Kennedy

This Earth day, spare a thought for the Earth, but remember that to truly understand many of the complicated earth systems which affect us takes time and effort (and I should know, I did a whole masters degree in it, and still only scratched the surface). Go out and learn about where your food comes from, how stuff gets made, and what happens to things after we throw them away. While you’re at it, learn about how the Coriolis effect works, and why the seasons are flipped in the southern hemisphere. Maybe teach yourself why the world’s deserts are located where they are, and not over the equator, where you might expect (because that’s where it is hottest). But most importantly, remember that the problems we face can’t be solved in one day, nor can an understanding of them be achieved in one day. Remember that, no matter how selfish you think you might be able to get away with being, we all share the same planet, and with matters relating to it, we must be better than our own selfish instincts. We must think on a planetary scale, and that means long-term, and wider-reaching than “my back yard”. Respect the Earth, it is the only one we’ve got, and if we’re not careful, we might break it in a way that we cannot fix, then we’ll be really be in a fix.

The week prior to that, most of us were in Moscow for the Junior World Championships. Of course, only two of the skaters in our squad are actually juniors, the rest of us were basically there as “team support” otherwise known as tourists. I had run into some visa trouble prior to departing, the main problem being that I didn’t have one. You see, it ordinarily takes 6 working days to process a Russian visa, but since I had only returned from Canada 6 days previously (and only 4 working days) there was worry that I might not be able to get my visa in time. Add to that, the strange quirk that the Russian consulate was closed on international women’s day, and the fact that it took two hours (and almost 50 euros) each way for me to get there by train, I really only had two working days to play with. Luckily, everything worked out and I was able to travel to Moscow as a tourist team leader for Australia (and Sophie also tagged along, as the team’s medical person).

Touristing around Moscow was an interesting experience. Traveling is something that I do quite often but it is very rare that I get to experience a place that is as “foreign” as Moscow city is. First, there was the language. Prior to arriving in Moscow, I did not know any of the letters of the Cyrillic alphabet that weren’t obviously the same as those from the Latin alphabet. On the evening we arrived, I grabbed a few tourist maps of the city and began trying to teach myself the alphabet, if only to enable me to recognize train stations. By then end of our four-day trip, I was able to read Cyrillic (although not very quickly, and not with any understanding of what the words actually meant, though most were guessable). Trains in Moscow are pretty special. The Metro is the second most used in the world (behind Tokyo), trains run frequently, and the coverage is good. The stations themselves are magnificent. My darkroom website features a stitched panoramic shot of the Komsomolskaya station to give you an example of just how wonderful these places are.

We had a good day and a half of dedicated touristing during which we saw a lot of the city. We began with a bus tour just to get an initial familiarization with the sights and layout of the city. As it was low season (apparently, everyone comes in the summer time and not in the middle of winter) the bus was empty save for us, so even though we arrived late, and in the wrong location, the bus actually came around to pick us up. After the bus tour, we went walking and did a bit of museum-hopping as well as visiting Lenin’s tomb. Lenin’s tomb is an interesting sight because, despite dying in 1924, his body has been preserved (quite well, if slightly discoloured) in a tomb where anyone can come and visit.

St Basil's Cathedral at Red Square

Not only is Russian architecture very different to anything that I’m used to (a constant reminder that I’m in a foreign city) Russian history itself lends a strange backdrop to the experience of modern Moscow. In many ways, Moscow reminded me of Beijing, and the parallels don’t stop at comparisons of communist regimes. Both China and Russia experienced long histories of very powerful dynastic empires, “glory days” if you will, during which the respective countries were dominant world powers. Then the empires fell into decline, exacerbated by war, and were eventually overthrown. Now they are both growing and struggling with their image and identity in the world.

Here is a link to some of the photos from the trip.

Junior world championships went well, with a few Australian records falling (not just junior records either). We all seemed to enjoy ourselves and are very hopeful for the future of Australian speed skating. And now we come to the reason for the name of this blog entry – the future of Australian speed skating will most likely not include me. Obviously I will continue to skate (because I really enjoy it) but intense training and high-level competition are not for me anymore. I am also getting older, and my body is becoming less-suited to sports like speed skating, and more-suited to sports like curling, which I intend to take up. I also hope to continue my academic career a bit, and eventually get a job and save the world (though not necessarily in that order). Do not be alarmed – this is not the penultimate post of the website, but it is the penultimate post concerning speed skating.

Why penultimate? Because I expect to have one more.

Some of you may be aware already, but I’m currently in the process of shooting and then putting together a documentary about the journey of the Australian speed skating team from about October 2008 until now. This is a difficult process because, apart from all of the shooting that has to be done and interviews (all on a super tight budget), I will soon have to hit the editing suites and begin editing video and sound until this documentary feature comes together. Hopefully it will be of high enough quality to do justice to the extraordinary story of this group of skaters. If anyone out there knows anything about documentary film making or would like to help out, I would really appreciate any assistance (I’ve never done this before). Eventually I’d like to hit a few film festivals and then get this doco shown on Australian and Dutch TV, and maybe a few other countries depending on how successful it is. Hopefully I can get this all done before the next Olympic Games in Сочи (Sochi).

And finally, possibly the last Yeow News Network update to primarily feature speed skating. (This one is of a slightly comical nature) Enjoy!

This video was actually shot during our second ever game of ice hockey, which saw us improve dramatically over our first…