It’s easy to forget, in our modern world of globalized food supply-chains that oranges are native to tropical climates (along with most fruits). A long time ago, before the world was connected in the way it is now, it was difficult to transport oranges from tropical climates all the way to temperate climates before the fruit spoiled. Nowadays with lower transportation costs, as well as refrigeration, most people don’t think twice about buying oranges, even as far north a place as Denmark, where I will be spending this Christmas.

My meandering thoughts on oranges have caused me to reflect on the state of the modern world, and the culture that has evolved with it. If you transported an average family from the turn of the century into today’s world, they would be flabbergasted with what our modern technology enables us to do. Sure, by about 1900 globalization was effectively in place, but only a very small portion of the population was able to enjoy its spoils – tea and silk from Shanghai, and rugs from Rajasthan. Most of the world’s population was only beginning to feel the effects of industrialization – in particular, industrialized food production leading to more stable food supply.

My point, is that we take much of these advances in science and technology for granted. Theater workers (in Australia at least) still say “chookas” to each other, because before the advent of refrigeration, the humble chicken was a delicacy and could only be afforded if one was playing to a full house. Not only do we take technology for granted, we place no importance on the understanding of the underpinnings of how it came about, or indeed how it works.

This is a problem. Without an understanding of where our food comes from, people won’t understand our limitations in terms of how we interact with our environment. People forget how much transportation is involved with bringing us food, and thus fail to make the connection between energy prices and food supply. People don’t understand how truly urgent the problem of climate change is.

This holiday season, while we all indulge ourselves in what is hopefully very good food, I hope we spare a thought for the story behind it. I was very impressed with the clarity with which the story of stuff project presented the impacts of modern manufacturing processes. Perhaps sometime in the not-too-distant-future, someone can do the same with the story of food. After all, not only does everyone need stuff, everyone needs food. Moreover, without stuff… we’re just poor people, but without food – we’re dead.

I hope everybody enjoys their festive season. I also hope everyone takes the time to appreciate their food, especially those oranges.

Recent events have caused me to reflect on things, one of those things is the death penalty. Those who’ve known me for a long time know that I’ve been a fairly active member of Amnesty International for a long time. Anyone who knows Amnesty’s work well will know that they are opposed to the death penalty. Does this mean that I am also opposed to the death penalty? As a matter of fact, I am, but it was by no means an automatic following of Amnesty stance that led me to oppose the death penalty.

In my younger days, I was considerably more conservative than I am now on certain things. I believed that if you were poor, it was probably because you were lazy, if you were in jail, you probably did something very bad, and if you were on death row, then you probably killed someone. Wait, that’s not quite true – go through that last sentence and take out all instances of the word “probably”.

In the bubble I grew up in, you had to be very lazy to be poor (and even then, poverty was not guaranteed). I didn’t even know anyone who went to jail, that was something that happened to other people. But those bubbles burst, and your horizons expand, and you realize that there’s a lot more to it than that. You eventually insert the word “probably” into those sentences, then you realize the implications of a world where not everything is clear-cut, black-and-white.

Consider the fallibility of the justice system. Nobody likes to admit that they’ve made a mistake, but that doesn’t mean we should pretend that it never happens. When I was in high school, I acted in a play called “Twelve Angry Men” which, you might have guessed, is about a jury deliberating on the innocence or guilt of a man accused of murder. Two films have been made of the play, but the superior of the two is the black-and-white 1957 version.¹ I encourage all of you to go watch it. The play begins with a vote of 11-1 in favour of “guilty”, and as the discussion develops, inconsistencies are found in the evidence, prejudices are found in the jurors, and slowly but surely reasonable doubt wins the day, and they vote for acquittal. This probably doesn’t happen every day, and I think part of the point of the play is to show how easy it is for a jury to make a wrong decision. The point is that it is not so hard to imagine that an innocent person might be convicted, even with the allowance of “reasonable doubt”.

these developments cast a dark shadow of doubt over the conviction which I believe goes a long way past “reasonable”

The recent example of Troy Anthony Davis (pictured) is a good one. He was convicted of murder mostly because of eyewitness testimony. There was nothing else to link him to the murder. No murder weapon was ever found. Since the trial, seven out of nine eyewitnesses have either changed or recanted their testimony. Now, I don’t think he’s guilty, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that these developments cast a dark shadow of doubt over the conviction which I believe goes a long way past “reasonable”. In a flawed system, there is always a chance of punishing an innocent man, and the death penalty is irreversible.

How many innocent people are wrongfully punished? One for every ten guilty? Maybe one for every hundred? There probably is some ratio that society would deem to be “acceptable”, and I should hope that it is very high. However, when it comes to final and irreversible punishments, we could simply avoid it ever happening by abolishing the death penalty.

But what about the guilty ones? On the same day that Troy Davis was executed, another man named Lawrence Brewer was also put to death. His crime was the murder of a black man by chaining him to the back of a truck and dragging him until the body was so disfigured, that it was mistaken for road kill. In this case, he was convicted using DNA evidence which matched blood found on him to the blood of the victim. Surely people like this deserve to die?

Maybe they do, but it is not for us to decide. It is not the role of a state to kill people. The whole point of the law is to protect people, to guarantee our equality and freedom. Killing someone achieves none of those aims. Removing a dangerous individual from society can be accomplished just as easily with imprisonment. I believe the real reason we seem so keen on killing people is that we feel a need to satiate our desire for revenge. It is dangerous, and quite barbaric for a society to give into those feelings.

“…this is the point where I would have to abandon my support for the death penalty – it simply doesn’t work”

Maybe the death penalty could act as a deterrent. If this was the case, we would see a significantly lower incidence of violent crime in places where the death penalty is practiced when compared to similar places where it is not. If I really wanted to believe in the death penalty, if I really wanted to ignore all the wishy-washy philosophical and moral arguments about why it is wrong for the state to kill people, and concentrate on the facts, then this is the point where I would have to abandon my support for the death penalty – it simply doesn’t work.

Curiously, and counterintuitively enough, places that still practice the death penalty have a significantly higher incidence of violent crime than places that don’t. I don’t know why, but I can hazard a guess. If the state thinks it’s ok to kill people, then that sends a message to the population. People probably don’t even realize it on a conscious level, but the message probably goes something like “it’s ok to solve problems by killing people”. It certainly doesn’t act as a deterrent.

So we have a form of punishment that is irreversible, brutal, and final. There is always the chance that you accidentally punish someone who is innocent. In terms of protecting the rest of the population, it can be easily substituted. And to top it all off, it doesn’t even work as a deterrent. I understand that it used to be very common during medieval times (as was torture, but that’s another article), and maybe it worked back then, though I doubt it. It’s about time we pulled ourselves out of the dark ages and abolished this barbaric practice worldwide, once and for all, because it doesn’t belong here. We’ve gone to the moon, and we’ve sent probes to take our curiosity beyond the farthest reaches of our own solar system, yet we still have capital punishment… wtf mate?

Footnotes

So, it’s been a while since I’ve last posted. It isn’t often that the main site gets outposted by the Darkroom, but it’s finally happened. Of course, the fact that I’ve recently returned from Mongolia (a destination more photogenic than write-o-genic) has nothing to do with that. Anyway, two weeks ago I visited a little restaurant in Denmark called “Noma” whose main claim to fame is that it is apparently the best restaurant in the world.

Anyone who knows a little bit about me knows that I enjoy my food. That can be interpreted in a number of ways ranging from me simply enjoying copious amounts of food, all the way to me enjoying expensive haute cuisine where many very small courses are brought to the diner on pretentious large plates by waiters with French accents. If you’re wondering which end of this spectrum I gravitate towards, my answer is “yes”.

My most recent proper fine dining experience was on the event of my birthday, courtesy of restaurant A.O.C. in Copenhagen. Although the restaurant is the holder of a Michelin star, I did not feel compelled to write at length about it, mostly because earlier in the year I had visited De Librije and The Fat Duck, which are not only 3-star establishments (3 is the maximum number, and rarely awarded), but heavyweights in their own right in the world of fine dining. It surprised me though, that the city of Copenhagen with its small population, in the country of Denmark which not only has a small population, but is also not exactly famous for its fine dining scene, was able to muster up such an experience.

Noma itself is a curiosity in that the Michelin guide has only awarded it two stars, yet has now stood at the top of the world restaurant ranking for the second year in a row. The rankings are of course, calculated very differently – the Michelin guide sends reviewers in secret to all restaurants being considered and restaurants being considered for Michelin stars are often visited by many reviewers who then meet in secret in the following months to discuss their experiences. The Restaurant Magazine ranking is decided by surveying industry experts, insiders, and the chefs themselves. In such circumstances, it might be easy for a restaurant to gain an unusually high position by fluke for a short while.

However, this year Noma hit the number 1 spot for the second year in a row. During the previous year, members of the restauranting world, shocked at Noma’s surprise ascendancy to the top spot, probably went to great lengths to get a reservation (yes, it takes a special kind of persistence to get one of these) and see for themselves if its place at the top of the restauranting podium is deserved or not. Naturally, since I have dined at far too many places listed in the top 100 and eaten more Michelin stars than exist in all of Denmark, I decided that I too should “check” to see whether Noma was truly deserving of the accolade.

(click on the pictures for enlargement)

We thought this was a pot of flowers, simply placed on our table for decoration... but it turned out to be our first course

Noma is headed by charismatic head chef Rene Redzepi who earned his wings working at the famous (and now closed) El Bulli in Spain – the previous occupant of the number 1 position (The Fat Duck and the French Laundry occasionally displaced it in the 9 years of the ranking’s existence). What’s hot in fine dining these days is the art of “molecular gastronomy” pioneered by Ferran Adria of El Bulli and it involves innovative and often very unconventional techniques of food preparation. The other well-known restaurant to practice molecular gastronomy is The Fat Duck, where my dining experience there began with a dish prepared in a vat of liquid nitrogen (you just can’t make this stuff up).

One of the many intriguing things about molecular gastronomy is that chefs are no longer constrained by traditional parameters, like the shape of their ingredients. Indeed our first course, cunningly disguised as a table decoration consisted of a malt flatbread. The latitude for creativity in designing the courses makes for a very theatrical eating experience. Modern fine dining now expects more than simply good tastes and smells. Every sensory input imaginable is being used to enhance the experience of the food, and to great effect.

seemingly simple dishes, seemingly simple ingredients, surprisingly complex sensory experiences

Perhaps one of the things that separates Noma from the “crowd”, even the very small crowd of a handful of restaurants who dare the molecular gastronomy, is that there is an emphasis on local ingredients. Fine dining has always existed, it seems, to serve the very wealthy, and the very wealthy have a habit of demanding the very best ingredients from around the world. Redzepi bucks this trend by basically serving up ingredients sourced from the local area – almost all of the ingredients come from within a circle that extends about fifty miles from the restaurant. As if that wasn’t enough of a challenge for a restaurant of this calibre, the ingredients also have to be in season (I really must try dining here in the Scandinavian winter).

my first thought was that quails were not big enough to lay eggs this size, then the waiter opened the shell up to reveal the actual eggs... #awkward

The result of working within these considerable constraints is an experimentation and innovation level that is unusually high. This, I believe, is the real reason that this restaurant is held in such high regard. Every saturday night, all the chefs get together after the end of the service, and have a little show-and-tell. Here they present what is essentially a food-brainstorming session where new dishes are examined and tested. For those readers with twitter, @ReneRedzepiNoma is Rene’s twitter feed and he will often post pictures of promising projects to his feed (and making this Author very hungry in the process).

new techniques meet old ingredients in new ways

After the initial barrage of small appetisers we settled into a “journey” through the main courses. Something I often ask for at restaurants to “test” them is for them to match each course to a non-alcoholic drink instead of a wine. I first got the idea at Vue de Monde, a very good restaurant in Melbourne, and have done this a few times since (even at Vue, after they stopped doing it. I think their sommelier hates me). At Per Se, after an initial pause from the shock of such an unusual request, the front of house manager proceeded to improvise some very innovative drinks to match my courses. Here at Noma, they pre-empted me by already having the option. The drinks were mostly blends of seasonal fruits and vegetables which matched the courses very well. They also made for a very amusing game of “guess the drink” which we were surprisingly bad at.

My favourite dish of the night: razor clam and horseradish with dill and parsley sauce

The courses were creative and surprising, and it goes without saying that it was unlike anything I have had before. None of the dishes could be called “traditional” in any sense of the word, yet many of them invoked memories of dishes of days gone by, except with a twist. The dishes were delicious, but they were something more. In my many other fine dining experiences, the object seemed to be to take a combination of good tastes and smells and deliver them to the recipient in various different ways. Points would be awarded to good combinations and effective, appropriate delivery methods. Noma was different, it mixed things up and challenged the consumer. For example, I would never think of putting horseradish, clam, dill, and parsley in the same dish… but it worked, and it was weird, and I think it pushed the definition of “eating” for me (in a good way).

Scallops and beech nut (from beech trees) cereals, watercress, and some squid ink which looked simply wonderful on my teeth

In the tradition of molecular gastronomy, it was impossible to tell what you were eating simply by looking at it. The taste would often be a pretty good clue. I think if I had eaten the whole meal, then been told afterwards what was in it, I would have struggled to believe it. The ingredients were, on the whole, quite simple. One of my dining companions was a local and she often would remark “oh, we used to pick those when we were kids” indicating to me that Noma’s reputation for foraging locally for their food was no myth. The food itself was more than a (delicious) challenge for the taste buds, but also an invitation. An invitation to taste Denmark and look at it in a way that you might not have previously. This invitation to “interact” even extended to the food…

Eggs and other yummy stuff

Indeed the inevitable finally came – an interactive dish. At The Fat Duck, we were served a seafood dish along with a sea shell with a set of headphones broadcasting sounds of the sea. At Noma we were told to fry an egg, then mix in the various additives according to a certain order and timing (a timer was provided to assist with the timing). I can just imagine the furious diner now standing up and exclaiming “I didn’t come halfway around the globe to the best restaurant in the world just to fry myself an egg!”. The dining experience at Noma reflects a wider philosophy, and that is one where we connect with our food.

“This is the new globalization, where things that are inexpensive to transport, and noncompetitive to share, like knowledge, ideas and creativity, move around the world with ease, while things which are costly to move, both in monetary and environmental terms, such as fresh food, don’t have to move as far – that’s smart.”

Too many people these days, especially fine diners, have forgotten about what food really is. It isn’t just expensive bits of funny-tasting stuff that we cook in a certain way so we can say “yum” then brag to our friends about it later. Its living things, things that grow, things that go through a long process before they end up on your plate. Using local ingredients is just a part of that, but what Redzepi has done is he has made it “cool” again to see food in this way. Perhaps indicative of Noma’s meteoric rise to the top is that, on its debut in the rankings, it was voted chef’s choice.

It is my hope that more restaurants like Noma pop up around the world. Not serving Nordic cuisine – that would be missing the point entirely. But embracing the philosophy of bringing the very best chefs, and techniques to bear on locally-sourced ingredients. Not just because it is better for the environment to eat locally-sourced foods (although that is a pretty good reason), but because it would give each restaurant its own unique character and identity – quite the opposite to the previous movement of carbon-copy big-brand restaurants like “Nobu”, “Pierre Gagnaire”, and “L’Atelier” opening up in big cities all over the world. This is the new globalization, where things that are inexpensive to transport, and noncompetitive to share, like knowledge, ideas and creativity, move around the world with ease, while things which are costly to move, both in monetary and environmental terms, such as fresh food, don’t have to move as far – that’s smart.

After six hours, we were done...

And inevitably, some of you are probably wondering about my verdict on the restaurant. This one is difficult, because the experience as a whole was subtly different to what fine diners are used to. We are used to being served, having the tastes and sensations washed over us while we passively experience and savour them. This was different. This was challenging, and interactive (and not only when we had to fry an egg which was both challenging and interactive). I suppose one could cop out and say that the comparison is too difficult, say that it is like comparing apples and oranges. But instead, imagine watching a well-executed blockbuster action movie – where the viewer is relatively passive, but nevertheless very entertained (something like Jurassic Park for example). Now think about a similarly well-executed movie, except that buried in the dialogue and characterizations are not just realistic, moving, and entertaining performances (all the great restaurants I’ve been to definitely have that “wow” factor), but this movie challenges you, nudges you out of your comfort zone, and really makes you think… perhaps a little bit like The Dark Knight. It was daring, it was different, and perhaps Noma really is the best restaurant in the world.

This thought spawned a little dinner table discussion with some friends and the question was put to the table “if our perception of time decreases like this, then when are you truly half way?”. Well, obviously if one takes the average age to be, say 80 years, then halfway wouldn’t be at 40, but at some point before then, but when? This spawned a simple but interesting back-of-the-envelope (actually, it was scribbled on my new ipad) calculation with a slightly counterintuitive result.

We begin at the beginning. Your first day/week/month/year of your life represents 100% of your life experience, and your second represents a half, and so on. One quickly realizes that we are forming a harmonic series.

So we have a few results already, because of what we know about the harmonic series. First, we know that, even though the individual terms converge to zero, the sum does not converge at all. So the sum of your perceived life experience doesn’t converge to a number, but really does depend on how long you live for (which, frankly, is a relief). From this, it is an easy deduction that the halfway point in this “perceived experience measure” also depends on the length of life we select for our calculations, and it must be finite.

So we have the graph of which should be familiar to anyone who has passed high school maths. We need to find the area under the graph between 1 and some number (the life expectancy age) to determine the total “experience”, then we divide that number by 2 and find some number (the perceived-life-experience halfway point) for which the area under the graph between 1 and is that number. So first:

which just turns out to be . Half of that is simply . So all we have to do is rearrange the equation:

so…

Which is not what you expect… In fact, I almost put an exclamation mark at the end of that result, except in mathematics, that would have an actual meaning (factorial). So this basically means that if you expect to live to a hundred, then your “percieved life experience” halfway point is actually when you’re 10, which is considerably lower than 50. So much so that I keep thinking that I have the wrong result.

Obviously, this doesn’t account at all for the fact that we tend to forget things that happened when we were very young, and recent memories are slightly stronger and so on, but even so (assuming that I haven’t made a mistake in my working) this is an interesting result.

I’d like to hear people’s thoughts on this…

Speaking of checking the news, some observant readers will have noticed that I did not mention any news applications in my previous reviews. With my old phone, I only had the New York Times application on my phone, and I wasn’t a frequent user of it, preferring to read the newspaper on my laptop. As you can see above, I’ve expanded the number of news apps on my phone. I’m not often a huge fan of newspapers… if you’ve ever really known about something, then read about it in a newspaper, you’ll know that they often get a lot of things wrong. Science writing in all but the largest, most well-funded newspapers is generally appalling, and most opinion writers don’t have very well-formed (or even well-written or funny) opinions.

Newspapers are, however, good for news. When stuff happens… this is where you find out about it. Finding out about it through the internet is quick, easy, and convenient. Having eight different internet news services to check ensures a reasonable spread and that as little as possible gets missed. As for the quality of their iphone apps, the range is huge. My favourite is the BBC app. It is easy to navigate, customizable, and everything works well.

The categories are organized in rows which can be “slid” to reveal more stories – very elegant

The CNN app is like all the others, just a list of top stories. Changing categories is buried in the menus.
Also worthy of mention is the Reuters app. The news section is like the other news apps in that it is a simple row of “top stories”. Of particular note though, are the markets and stocks section as well as the exchange rate section. The markets section allows you to not only look up where an index happens to be, and how much it shifted in the past day/week/month, but it features interactive charts which can be scrolled, panned, and zoomed to your heart’s content. The reuters app also features one of the most intuitive and user-friendly exchange rate finders I’ve come across (with up-to-the-minute exchange rates, of course).

Bottom of the list in terms of implementation of their app is Al Jazeera, whose app is nothing more than a glorified web browser with the Al Jazeera website as its homepage. Lucky for them, their news coverage, in particular of the conflicts in the middle east, is very good.

Evernote

I’ve been looking for a good note-taking app for a very long time. Those who knew me in high school know that I used to carry a little notepad with me everywhere I went in case I ever had a good idea. This was eventually replaced by various Palm PDA products, then a Moleskine notebook, and most recently, I’ve been using the plain old notepad on the iphone. (I still haven’t had a good idea, but we live in hope). Evernote combines everything – notepad, voice memo, and you can also make notes with pictures. Your notes are tagged with your location thanks to GPS, and your notes are all searchable.

…and as if that wasn’t enough to convince you that this app was worth getting, it even comes with an icon of an elephant, and everyone knows that elephants are cool.

Momento

Apart from being one of my favourite Christopher Nolan films, Momento is also my favourite diary app. Always there on your phone to record memorable moments, you can tag your entries with your location, the names of people mentioned, and even attach photos to them. It also offers passcode security to open the app, so you don’t have to worry about people flicking through your personal diary whenever you lend them your phone. All that I suppose is expected of a diary application, but I have until now struggled to find an app which brings them all together in such a user friendly way.

Another interesting addition to what you’d normally expect out of a diary is that it can import your tweets, facebook stati, as well as last.fm activity. This all goes towards giving an effective snapshot of the particular time you’re looking back on. In fact, it somehow managed to import my facebook stati all the way back to August 2008. Tagging people can get interesting over time, because you can look up your tags and see just who ends up getting tagged a lot.

So far, I’ve made at least one entry every day. Something I’ve found, is that since my phone is the first thing I reach for whenever I wake up (before my glasses!) I have been using this as a “dream diary”, jotting down what I’ve been dreaming about before I forget. Like I said before… looking back to see who’s been tagged a lot is very interesting.

iXpenselt

Budgeting is not one of my strong points, so it’s a good thing that I have an app that helps me do it. Apart from being a combined notepad and calculator which helps you keep track of your inflows and outflows from day to day, it has a “reporting” function which constructs a summary, some bar charts and (and this was my favourite) a pie chart showing a breakdown of which categories consumed what portion of your budget. Those who know me will not be surprised at what the following pie chart looks like.

iRail

I recently purchased a 10-day eurail pass so that I could travel more cheaply by train across Europe. When one purchases a eurail pass, it comes with a booklet with train timetables in it. LOTS of train timetables. Convenient as this is, you still have to figure out connections and routing yourself, and if you’re not very familiar with the European rail network, and need to make a long trip which is not serviced by a direct route (or if you’re traveling in or out of a not-major train station), then it can be fiddly and time-consuming to look up. The iRail application does it for you. With a very simple interface, you can get from just about anywhere to anywhere else in Europe. It will tell you how long it will take, how many stops, where they are, and it will give you various options.

Just for fun, I searched for a journey starting in Paris, and ending in Vladivostok. Turns out the train leaves tomorrow (Tuesday 5th October 2010) at 6pm and arrives at midnight in a little over a week.

boy am I glad they give you a sleeping car on the 6-day-train from Moscow to Vladivostok… I see it this way – it’s a week of comparatively cheap accommodation.

(notice how all the stops in Germany already have platform numbers assigned)

Light-O-Matic

Those readers who have gone backpacking will know what I’m talking about when I say that your phone’s most common use in a youth hostel is as a light (not for cigarettes). With the advent of smartphones with maps and GPS (and entire travel guidebooks stored in them) this has probably changed a little, but I’m sure many of you have wondered about somehow being able to use the small LED-flash on the phone’s camera as a torch. I know I have.

This app is relatively simple, and does what you’d expect. It also has a very nifty “safety mode” (not to be confused with the “safety dance”) for emergencies, where you can type text into a box, then it can translate that text into morse code and signal it using the LED light. Who needs walkie-talkies when you’ve got a morse-code translator? (ok, I realize it’s on a phone)

Hipstamatic

They say the best camera is the one you have with you. I often tote around a very chunky Nikon D700, but sometimes I can’t be bothered. I don’t like being “that guy” at parties carrying a huge camera around (it only seems to be acceptable practice when the party’s attendees are all photographers). For parties where carrying such a large camera was inappropriate, I used to carry my point-and-shoot around, tethered to my wristwatch, which worked moderately well during the Vancouver Olympics’ afterparty, but was still a bit of a burden. Finally the iphone seems to have a fairly decent camera in it. It even comes with a flash. It even comes with a ton of processing power that is totally useless for a small 4 megapixel camera… unless… you’re into lomography.

Pick your lens, pick a flash, pick out some film… then shoot. This application basically simulates the effect of the diverse variety of unusual and low-tech cameras used in lomography. The results are interesting, and often quite amusing.

And once you’ve taken your photo, you can review it, then do what everyone obviously wants to do with their artsy photos, and that is share them with their friends. The app offers a number of way to accomplish this.

And… just in case you’re crazy like me, and aren’t sure about what film, lens and flash combinations work best, I’ve included a chart in which I combine every different lens type with each different kind of flash. (click the images for larger versions, the first row is without flash).

(if anyone would like the full-sized version of this, (a 25 megabyte png file) I can email them). The next chart shows the combinations of film with or without flash, and using the first kind of lens from the above chart.

Oh… and in other news, after agonizing over whether to use this, or that photograph for my laptop skin, I have found a use for the photo that I didn’t use – as my iPhone lock screen. The higher screen resolution really does do it justice.

Upside-down world map. Notice how the projection still makes countries like Greenland, Russia and Canada much bigger than they really are (Africa is in fact many times larger than Greenland). Cartographers for Social Equality wouldn't be happy about this.

I’m not happy with the world. I should be more specific – the world is great, but I’m not happy about the way humans conduct themselves while they are on it. It’s no secret that I have a strong belief that if we carry on doing what we do, and treating the world the way we have, then we’re not going to be around for too much longer. Our existence simply isn’t sustainable. Moreover, it is unsustainable on many different levels. One of the biggest problems I have with conservatives, and I may write more about this in a later article, is that if you had to boil conservatism down to its most fundamental principle, a principle that spans as broad a base of conservatism as you can hope to encompass, then it is this – trust in the old ways, for they served us in the past and will continue to do so in the future. The hidden implication here is that new ways should be viewed very cautiously and resisted on principle. Of course, to continue on the line of hidden implications, it also implies that the past is always a good blueprint for dealing with the future, and also that “keeping things the way they are” is necessarily a desirable thing. Both are questionable. In this post however, I do not wish to talk about politics.

To begin, a (criminally) brief overview of the whole-earth equation. We grow food, we eat it. Eating gives us energy so we can grow more food. If we have extra energy or food, we can do something with it. So basically anything we do that isn’t linked to either the growing of food, or the generation of energy must be “paid for” by the surplus of our production. Energy complicates things slightly because solar, geothermal, and gravity (the moon’s – tidal) are the only sources of energy that really exist. Things like coal and oil are merely “batteries” that have been charged over millions of years and happen to be very dense energy-wise which makes them useful. This is why electricity is so useful – it allows us to easily convert energy from one form to another with minimal waste. Throwing more energy at a problem is usually a pretty good way to solve it, which is how we manage to feed the population of the world on the amount of land that we have – through the use of chemical fertilizers and industrialized farming methods, we basically pump more and more energy into the ground, and in return, it gives us more food.

In fact, the energy contained in food these days is often exceeded by the energy that is required to manufacture it. How is this possible? It is because we are quickly depleting the fossil fuel “batteries” that I was talking about earlier. The obvious conclusion from this is that we’re going to run out of batteries and be forced back to an energy budget that is dictated by how efficiently we can harness the renewable energy sources available to us. At the moment, my feeling (and I’m sure there have been studies done on this) is that we wouldn’t be able to cope. Firstly, too many everyday things still require fossil fuels and are not able to substitute anything else (most cars, ships, and all airplanes). Secondly, even if we were to forget about that and assume that everything can be recharged at a power point, I’d bet a lot of money that we still consume far more energy than we can currently extract from renewable sources.

Obviously, the smart thing to do would be to dedicate as many resources as possible towards increasing the efficiency of renewables to meet our growing energy demands  as well as coming up with solutions for all those situations for which fossil fuels have no easy substitute. Small inroads have been made in the form of electric cars and more energy-efficient appliances, but I’m almost sure that the rate at which our renewable energy capacity is increasing is being outstripped by the rate at which our energy consumption is growing.

As if that alone doesn’t present an almost insurmountable challenge to the current generation, we have the additional problem of climate change. It turns out, that in burning these wonderfully convenient fossil fuels, we release large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which in turn disrupts the greenhouse effect and makes the planet hotter overall. Of course, carbon dioxide only makes up 385 parts per million of the atmosphere, but the unprecedented growth of the human footprint on this planet in not only burning fossil fuels, but also deforestation (forests are a significant carbon sink) has meant that that number has increased by over 20% since the industrial revolution began. The reasons why this is bad are covered in detail in The Earth Debate series elsewhere on this website, but suffice to say that the future isn’t looking very bright at the moment.

So with this in mind, I have compiled a short list of a few small things that I would like to fix which I believe will make a significant impact on ensuring that future generations can enjoy this wonderful planet that I grew up on.

Photographs changed the public opinion on the Vietnam War

War

The observant among you will have noticed that the title of this website is “Daniel Yeow and the Quest for World Peace”. I believe that this is still a worthy and significant goal. Perhaps surprising in my analysis of the current state of the planet is that I believe strongly that this is achievable in our lifetimes. Mankind has been at war with itself for as long as people have been capable of killing each other. Strangely enough, one of the periods of time during which we were most optimistic about achieving a lasting world peace was just prior to the first world war, when it was believed that the extent of international trade and globalization meant that warfare no longer made any sense because all parties had so much to lose due to their interconnectedness.

Of course, we all know what happened next. After World War I, the alliance was so vengeful that they subjected Germany to reparations so burdensome that the treaty sealing the end of the first world war effectively guaranteed the second. Out of the second world war emerged the United Nations along with the Bretton Woods institutions. However, since the end of WWII, the number of armed conflicts both between as well as within states has decreased dramatically. There are certainly still areas of tension – North and South Korea, Russia and Georgia, Israel and Palestine to name a few.

So what makes me think that war is on the way out? Photographs. Think about the two world wars for a while, pay special attention to the images that come into your head. Just about every image from those wars that was contemporary with the time period wasn’t seen by anyone until quite long after the still or motion picture was published. Moreover, in a technical sense, it was so difficult to get those images and publish them that it was relatively easy for states to control the flow of information. In the Vietnam war this changed significantly, and images from the conflict, despite the government’s best efforts, turned the tide of public opinion against the war.

Journalistic standards are pretty bad these days, but Keith Rupert Murdoch is 79 years old and even he cannot live forever. The progress of film making technology is such that making documentaries has become easier and cheaper than ever before thereby leveling the playing field, previously dominated only by those who had the backing of the state, or large corporations. One only needs to look at the world of climate change documentaries to sense this leveling effect. Two significant climate change denial documentaries have been made – The Great Global Warming Swindle, and Not Evil Just Wrong. Both were backed by money from conservative, libertarian think tanks or big oil, and despite claims to the contrary, are blatant mouthpieces for those special interest groups. Despite these, and the many baseless attacks made, An Inconvenient Truth still stands above those, as do documentaries made on much lower budgets like The Age of Stupid, and less-directly-aimed documentaries like those produced by the Yes Men.

As information flows more freely and easily (think about Wikileaks) more and more of the general population will be exposed to what war is really like. They will not be insulated from it any more, and this will make it more and more difficult for elected officials to get away with waging war. Many people claim to support the war, while others still confuse supporting the troops with supporting the war, but a fundamental fact remains, and that is that people generally don’t like killing each other. The video “Collateral Murder” released by Wikileaks earlier this year caused such a furore because it showed something that nobody wanted to see – innocent people being killed. It happens in a war, and most people can accept that, but they don’t like it.

As an aside, more of the world’s GDP (GWP?) is spent fighting wars than on anything else. If we could finally end this childish and brutal practice, then we would finally be able to divert a very significant amount of our productivity to solving these pressing problems of preserving our civilization.

Kevin Carter's famous Pulitzer-winning photograph. Carter committed suicide not long after this was taken due to depression.

Poverty

I became concerned with poverty after reading Jeffrey Sachs’ book “The End of Poverty”. So concerned that I ended up at Columbia University sleeping 4-5 hours a night completing a masters degree in the hope that I would learn one or two things which would help me achieve this goal. The reason this problem shot right up my priority list was because I realized that if we were to solve this problem, it would go a very long way to solving a lot of the other problems of the world. Starting at the top of the list, ending poverty would go further towards achieving world peace than ending the small arms trade would.

The “poverty line” in many countries is arbitrarily determined by a number. Even the UN has figures on poverty defined by the number of people who live on less than $1 a day, or $2 a day. Thinking about that for a second, that really isn’t enough to live. True enough, millions of people die in the world every year simply because they are too poor to stay alive. That’s a pretty sobering thought – to imagine that there are people in the world who die because they can’t afford to stay alive, when we hear about people complaining because they can’t afford a new car/iphone/jacket. The implications for that kind of poverty are pretty obvious – if you are given the choice between dying because you’re too poor to stay alive, or killing someone else for the chance to live a little longer, then it might not surprise you that that is exactly what a lot of people do.

It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to extend this concept to large, organized groups doing it. A lot of idiots from all colours of the political spectrum like to lay the blame on Islamic fundamentalists. While it is certainly true that religious extremists are often the ones who perpetrate crimes of terror, I strongly feel that the reason that the extremists become so extreme has more to do with poverty than with religion. It is a fun hobby of people like Geert Wilders to quote verses from the Koran and label them as inherently violent. Of course, even a cursory glance through world history will show that all religions have experience periods of extremism and committed atrocities in the name of whatever deity they happen to follow. Indeed, one of the most peaceful religions in the world today – Buddhism, is widely believed to be responsible for the invention of martial arts because soldiers would often plunder temples when regional warlords exchanged pleasantries, and the monks got sick of being defenceless and invented self-defence.

What I’m basically trying to say is that if you’ve got a roof over your head, and enough food to eat, you’re very unlikely to want to go out and kill someone. Everyone’s after the same contract – work hard, and be given the means to provide for oneself and one’s family. If that contract cannot be provided, or is broken, then people will feel their lives threatened, and will likely take the matter into their own hands.

The other advantages of ending poverty are numerous. Food security for a family results in less children because the probability of a child surviving into adulthood is greater. The further out of poverty a people can be, the more likely they are to invest in themselves, in the form of infrastructure, and education, which further improves their quality of life and productivity, which in turn increases their ability to dig themselves out of poverty… and so the spiral continues.

The book “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond, (which is essential reading for anyone who wants to save the world btw) gives some good answers to the question of why some people in some parts of the world became wealthy while other parts of the world have remained in poverty. Simply put, the land that you happen to grow up on has a certain carrying capacity which depends on many factors such as rainfall, soil quality, accessibility of clean water, to name a few. The higher this number, the more likely and the more complex a civilization is likely to develop.

In truth, the development of complex societies around the world was varied and sporadic until quite recently, and reason for this is that the world has become more interconnected. This connectivity has allowed us to spread the inherent risks of depending on a small plot of land for all your food. This way, if a large area were to suddenly have a few years of drought, the society there doesn’t die off completely, but instead is supported by an ally with the understanding that when the situation is switched, they would do the same.

It’s about time we extended this protection to the poorest parts of the world. With the coming unpredictability of climate change, it is not outside the realm of possibility that someday the most impoverished countries in Africa might become the world’s breadbaskets. Equipping them with the infrastructure and knowledge to help themselves benefits both them and us. In truth though, we shouldn’t do this simply because it makes us a little bit better off in the economic equation, or that it increases the overall utility in some whole-earth equation. We should do this because it is the right thing to do.

Although he met an untimely end, his nonviolent "fight" against injustice inspires us to this day

Injustice

Dr Martin Luther King Jr once said “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”. Justice is a funny concept, and one that deserves a lot of thought. Far more thought than this article can realistically contain without going too far off-topic. A common thread in all historically successful civilizations is a strong sense of the rule of law. Hammurabi’s code of laws, one of the earliest examples of codified legal and economic systems has such laws as “If a man strikes a pregnant woman, thereby causing her to miscarry and die, the assailant’s daughter shall be put to death.” Most of Hammurabi’s laws end with the accused being put to death, and one would hope that we have developed a more humane way of dealing with injustice in this day and age.

Most, but certainly not all countries have laws which work fairly well. The major advantage of having laws, even if some of them are silly or make no sense, is that it makes things more predictable, and when things are more predictable, then things are easier to plan, and when things are easier to plan, then more can get done. A mature justice system, in particular if it is enforced well, is a pretty sure-fire way to prevent civil conflict.

I find that in general, codes of laws and the legal systems of individual countries are far more well-developed and “just” than the loose sense of international law that exists between countries which still resembles playground politics than anything else. For example, in the middle east (and I’m sure I’m going to cop some criticism for this) you could write entire libraries on why there is always conflict in the area, but what it boils down to is “your brother killed my father, but he’s dead now, so I’m going to kill you”.

Many argue that we should not interfere with the affairs of others, but I think this is a hopelessly naive way of looking at the world. It implies that the actions of people in one country have no effect on those in another, which is demonstratably untrue. As our footprint on the world grows ever larger, we need more than ever to learn how to live together and get along. One of the greatest challenges of international justice is that it is trying to exist in a system of anarchic states with no higher authority to appeal to. It is then left to us to be good neighbours to each other and we’re doing a pretty poor job. As W.H. Auden once said in the concluding lines of a poem on the eve of World War II, “we must love one another, or die”.

So there you go, three little problems that I would like to solve. I’m not too sure how I’m going to go about doing any of these things, but getting a job at a bank isn’t really on the cards (sorry dad). In solving these three, hopefully we’ll be some of the way towards ensuring that a somewhat habitable world will be available to future generations, and the same opportunities that have been available to me in my sheltered, privileged life will be available to everyone. Yeah, I’m a dreamer, but I reckon if everyone in the world dreamed as I did, then it wouldn’t be a dream. I dare you all to imagine a better world.

One of many signs dotted all over Cuba proclaiming the "A Better World is Possible"

“We could learn a lot from crayons; some are sharp, some are pretty, some are dull, while others bright, some have weird names, but they all have learned to live together in the same box” ~ Robert Fulghum

My New iPhone

About two weeks ago, I received a long-awaited package in the mail – my new iPhone 4. My previous phone was the original iPhone, purchased in September 2007 about two months after its initial release, and before it was available outside of the US. Of course, I didn’t know any of this at the time, and simply bought the phone because I’d heard good things about it, and I happened to be in the 5th Avenue Apple store on my first day in New York buying a new laptop computer. While my shock and awe at first switching on this iPhone will never compare to that memorable first time, when I was an iPhone virgin, popping my iphone cherry, it was still pretty special. The most obvious difference is the new screen, which has an impressively high resolution – not quite high enough for me not to be able to distinguish individual pixels, but almost.

The second most obvious difference is that it takes micro-sim cards, rather than mini-sim cards (which are the standard on all mobile phones. This is a much smaller problem than it seems, because the chip itself is actually the same size, only the plastic surrounding it is smaller. A pair of scissors and a nail file later, my new iPhone was ready for action. Another welcome addition was the inclusion of an orientation-lock function which can be accessed by double-tapping the home button, making bedtime (read: sideways) iPhone reading just that much easier and thus making my already busy and hectic life a little more bearable.¹

In actual everyday use, the device is much faster than the original iPhone as it has a faster processor as well as more RAM. In addition, the model I ordered has 32gb of storage space, while my old phone only had 4. While my old phone was only really useful for checking emails, browsing the web (slowly), and playing the occasional song or game, the new phone has the capacity to do so much more. As a result, I’ve been installing and testing a whole bunch of apps, and here are some of my favourites. Click on the headings to be taken to the website of the app.

Align of Sight

This may go down as one of the coolest apps ever. The intent of the app is for cameramen to be able to align their cameras in an exact manner. In particular, it allows the user to take a shot, record everything to do with that shot position-wise, so that the shot can be repeated later. As a photographer who occasionally dabbles in motion in addition to still photography, this is a very useful app. However, in being able to do all those things, the makers of this app have created a very powerful tool which can be used for many other things. It is a GPS, a spirit-level, and a compass all in one. In one foul swoop, this app has pretty much replaced three apps that I used quite frequently. The screenshots speak for themselves:

Sleep Cycle

This is one of the applications that existed on my old iPhone. The idea is easy enough – it tells you how well you sleep. It does this by using the accelerometer built into the phone. When you need to sleep well (like, say, if you’re a professional athlete training for the olympics), you need to first have useful feedback about how well you’re actually sleeping. This app provides that information in the form of a handy sleep-graph. It is also supposed to wake you up at a “convenient” time as far as where you are in your sleep cycle is concerned, but that isn’t really what I use it for.

The more time you spend in the “Deep Sleep” region of the graph, the better you are sleeping. This way you can look for patterns in your sleeping behaviour over many sleeps. For example, you may be partially woken up every night at 3am because your heater makes a funny noise and that could be causing you to sleep poorly for the rest of the night. Without a sleep graph, you would never have known. I used to wear a heart rate monitor to bed once or twice a week to figure out the same things and, while it was interesting to learn that my heart rate hovered at around 40bpm while I was in deep sleep, this is better mostly because it isn’t as uncomfortable, allowing you to monitor your sleep every night.

Undercover

Ever had a phone stolen? How about a computer?² Well, the purpose of this application is simple enough – to locate a lost or stolen iPhone, iPad, or MacBook. It’s pretty simple really, if your phone is stolen, you log in to the website (where you’ve registered previously) and report your phone stolen. The device gets pinged, and you are well on your way to finding it.

(it's actually about 50m off...)

Convertabot

There are a multitude of unit converter programs out there, but this one has stuck with me. Converting units is simple enough, but designing an intuitive, user-friendly interface is sometime difficult, and convertabot does very well. What also impresses me about this unit converter is the number of units from which one can choose. For example I can convert nautical miles to angstroms, smoots, or even light-minutes…

World Weather

Just as there are a multitude of unit converter apps out there, there are a plethora of weather applications available for the iPhone. I like world weather because it doesn’t tell me more than I really want to know. Of course, what I want to know, and what anyone else wants to know are not necessarily the same, or similar, which probably explains why there are a plethora of different weather applications available. (if you’re wondering about what information I’m interested in, there’s a weather box towards the top-right corner of this website). At first glance, it tells you the essentials – temperature and windspeed (actually the most obvious first thing is the sun or lack thereof, which is fine for me because I usually check this when I’m still in bed and the curtains are drawn). Then with one tap, you get all the other stuff. If you’re not bored of the weather by this point, you can rotate your phone to see a 6-day forecast…

First three days of the six day forecast:

Shazam

Don’t you hate it when you hear a song in an elevator and don’t know what it’s called?³  I used to try remembering an unusual section of the lyrics, then google the text later in between double inverted-commas. This doesn’t always work though, because the lyrics aren’t always very clear or distinct (try googling something like “I miss you”, and you’ll see what I mean). Sometimes a song won’t have lyrics in a language you understand (like Juanes’ “La Camisa Negra”), and sometimes there won’t be words at all (most of Enigma’s “Return to Innocence”). Shazam is an application that can listen to a small section of the song, and identify it… which is pretty darn nifty if you ask me.

Red Laser

The icon says it all – this is a bar code scanner. You would be surprised how much fun you can have with this. Walk up to your favourite hemorrhoids cream at the supermarket, hold up your iPhone, and the camera scans the barcode.⁴ Then it searches the internet for various sellers and prices so you can see if your local Aldi (or Woolworths, Tescos, or Wal-Mart) is ripping you off, and by how much. Then you know exactly what to say when you finally get around to writing that angry letter to the manager about price gouging.

Lonely Planet Guides

This might sound strange, but I’m not actually much of a guidebook person. I’ve used guidebooks before – Nick’s Mexico lonely planet saved us from being ripped off by a taxi driver within an hour of landing in Mexico City, and my Footprint South American guide pretty much got me through my 5-month odyssey, but I generally like to just talk to locals and do non-touristy things. That said, the iPhone lonely planet guides are actually very useful. They provide a lot of background information you wouldn’t ordinarily learn and they also now have very useful and useable maps which, when paired to an iPhone with GPS, can save you a lot of time and stress if you’re sightseeing on a tight schedule. The information in the electronic guides is not quite as comprehensive as in the books, but they also cost a lot less, and take up less space, and weight in your baggage.

Also… and I’m not sure why, but I like reading through lonely planet guides of places I’ve lived in (Melbourne, New York, Hong Kong etc.)

Gourmet Restaurants

Anyone who has been paying any attention to this website will know that there are three things that I love to do with my time – traveling and eating good food.⁵ I haven’t yet gotten around to downloading all the Michelin guides available for the iPhone (for some unknown reason, they’re not available in my local itunes store) but this gourmet restaurant guide is a good start. For each region of the world, they have chosen seven of the best restaurants they can find. They claim to have worked with a group of well-traveled food editors, and it seems like they really have. In the regions with which I am familiar, they have chosen roughly the same restaurants that I would have chosen. The page for each restaurant contains a short description, along with contact details like address, website, and telephone number, as well as useful tips like “The Fat Duck only accepts bookings by telephone up to two months in advance of the desired date”.⁶ How useful this app actually is remains to be seen, as most of the restaurants listed require bookings months in advance.

Games

Now finally we come to games. Obviously, I have all the well-known and popular games, such as Angry Birds, Stick Wars, Doodle Jump, Bubble Free (where my high score is a staggering 337), Oregon Trail, and Flight Control, but I thought I’d include some of the lesser-known games which I have also spent a lot of time… er… testing.⁷

Auditorium

Auditorium is a game I first came across before iPhones existed (I think). The concept is simple enough – a stream of stuff flows across the screen. You are given some things with which to direct the stuff at little squares that look like graphic equalizer bars. Ok, that was an uncharacteristically awful description, but play the demo on the website and you’ll know what I mean. I was asked by a friend to recommend a game for procrastination purposes, and being as I am, an expert in the arts of procrastination, I directed my friend to the website where I then learned that the iPhone version had been recently released. The majority of my solo train trips in Holland were spent playing this game. It is challenging and rewarding, not only because it is challenging, but also because the game is aesthetically beautiful; observe:

iGo Free

Go is an ancient board game with origins in China. Earliest records date to the Zhou dynasty, but it is likely that the game is much older. The game is rich in strategy despite having very simple rules. I prefer go to chess because games are generally quicker, and because go can be played in a smaller board if a faster game is desired. Another interesting point about go is that computers are very bad at it. It took a computer until 1997 to beat Gary Kasparov, while a computer has not yet managed to come close to beating even an intermediate-level go player.⁸ The fact that the number of possible go games exceeds the number of atoms in the known universe may have something to do with this. They say that playing board games reduces the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, so this one’s for my health.

The free version of this game allows you a maximum of five games per day (I play about that many in a week), so if you’re a go nutcase you might want to invest in the full version.

Age of Curling

Did you really think I wouldn’t have a curling game on my iPhone? After trying out a few different curling games, this was, by a long way, the best of them. In terms of simulating the actual game of curling, this game does a very good job. You decide how much you’re going to spin the thing, then you adjust the weight of your delivery, then you throw your rock. The graphics give a realistic account of what it is actually like to follow the stone down the ice as it approaches the house, and you can vigorously rub your iPhone’s screen to simulate sweeping. The AI is decent, but not brilliant, and I am by no means an experienced curler, but when you are able to deliver a stone as consistently as the game allows you to, it is difficult not to win as long as you have even the most elementary smattering of curling strategy know-how.⁹ A full 8-end game takes about a third the amount of time that it does in real life, and it obviously lacks the social aspect of the game, but it’s a fun distraction while waiting at the airport.

and finally, a screenshot of my lovely background image:

Footnotes

Melbourne Central Shot Tower

So I’ve been in Melbourne for nearly three weeks. What do I think? That question sort of carries with it the assumption that I think at all. There is also a hidden implication because of the context that I have thought about Melbourne at some stage during my almost-three weeks here. Truth is, I have thought about Melbourne, I thought about it a lot before I even got here, I thought about it a lot while I’ve been here, and I will probably think about it a lot after I leave.

Walking around Melbourne CBD

It has been almost exactly three years since I was last in Melbourne. When I left, it was “home”. Even though I wouldn’t technically call it home at the moment, it is the closest thing I have to a home in this world right now. I have a lot of friends here, and as an Australian citizen, I don’t have to worry about being deported or running into any legal trouble in the event that I should decide to stay here. There’s always a familiarity when you return to a place which you have at some stage in your life called “home”. I lived in Melbourne for about ten years and these years were very significant because they were very much formative years, and I also lived very independently during those years – at first, in a high school boarding house, then in an inner city apartment.

Melbourne

So what do I think? The first thing I noticed was that I was suddenly surrounded by Australians. This might seem an obvious point, but after living for three years in very non-Australian environments, it’s surprisingly comforting and relaxing to be surrounded by Australians. What’s different about Australians? Not much really, they’re just very laid back and friendly people in general. Most places I’ve lived, people are quite friendly, but sometimes they’re not friendly to strangers, or foreigners, or people on bicycles. In Australia, the friendliness is quite universal. Speaking of friendliness, one should also speak of friends, and that is what I have been spending most of my time here doing – simply catching up with good friends who I haven’t seen for over three years. Most common comment – “you look exactly the same”.

Shopping Arcade

The public transport in Melbourne isn’t too bad. I may only be saying this because I haven’t yet tried to go to too many places that aren’t serviced by public transport. Obviously New York’s public transport was superior in almost every way imaginable, but New York’s population density is also many times that of Melbourne. For a city of its size, or rather, of its population density, Melbourne does quite well. I did spot a rather unusual white elephant during my first walks around the city – the blue bikes. This idea is borrowed from the Velib’s in Paris, which have been mostly quite successful. The Melbourne version seems like it should be a hit – more bike lanes have been introduced, and the cycling culture here has grown significantly in the time that I’ve been gone, but there’s a catch – over here, it is required by law to wear a helmet while riding a bike. So if you want to spontaneously use one of these bikes, you need to also happen to have a helmet with you – epic fail.

Another Shopping Arcade

I suppose they could change the law, and relax the helmet rule, but I don’t see that happening. Too many people would abuse the relaxation of the rules and get into bad crashes. Drivers are also not known for their willingness to share the road with cyclists, and many cyclists aren’t particularly respectful of the road rules either. Only in an environment where there is a long-established culture of cycling (such as in the Netherlands) and where there is a lot of cyclist-friendly infrastructure (such as in the Netherlands) can you hope to get away with not having to wear a helmet.

Sampling the food at Bistro Vue

Melbourne seems to have “grown up” slightly since I’ve been gone. A lot of construction sites have miraculously become fully-grown buildings. One of the things I immediately noticed was that the “eating out” culture has expanded considerably. Apparently a very popular TV show about cooking has inspired a large number of Melbournians to get into fine dining. As a result of this, the number of decent eateries in the city has grown considerably. Old trends die hard though; Melbournians simply love those little eateries tucked away in small alleyways. I think it is because it allows them to feel special in “discovering” this small, out-of-the-way place that nobody else has heard of (except that people clearly have, because there’s a massive queue to get in, and not much space for it because you’re stuck in a small alleyway).

Breizoz creperie - I was going to take a photo of some crepes, but when they came, I got too distracted with the eating, so this is what you are left with

Strange location obsessions aside, the quality of the food is still pretty good. In a bout of nostalgia, I had to visit a lot of my old hangouts, and I have to say that they’re all still as I remembered them. Vue de Monde’s menu gourmand is still some of the finest food you’ll find anywhere in Melbourne, the fish soup at The Brasserie at Crown still smells like Marseilles, and the Crepes at Breizoz are still pretty fantastic (although I’ll have to visit Brittany before I can give you a definitive judgement on how authentic they really are).

Small alley eateries continue to be popular

Another interesting addition to Melbourne is the “Ice House”. It is a large building that contains a lot of ice. Being somewhat familiar with large buildings containing large amounts of ice, I decided that I should visit. I also took the opportunity to have a crack at short track speed skating. Short track is different to long track in that you skate around a much smaller sheet of ice, about the size of a standard ice hockey rink (or in this case, EXACTLY the same size).

Exterior of the Ice House

I’ve only ever been a long track skater, and while I would consider myself pretty good at it, I had no expectations for being any good at short track. My first session proved disastrous in a humorous way – for technical reasons, I was unable to mount short track blades to my (long track) boots and was forced to do the session in long track blades and boots. This is a problem for many reasons, but the main one was that long track blades are designed to turn corners of a 25m radius (which, funnily enough, is the radius of a long track corner) but a short track corner has a radius closer to 10m. This meant that whenever I got up to speed, I wouldn’t be able to corner very well and would almost hit the barrier. My subsequent short track sessions were better because I had the right blades on; I was only hampered by having long track boots, which are much lower and much softer than short track boots. I still struggle to corner, but I’m probably taking entire seconds off my long track times by learning how to corner like a short tracker.

Fired up for curling

Of course, everyone knows the real reason I got into winter sports – curling. Having become interested in curling during the Olympic Games with the help of meeting some of the Olympic curlers, I decided that it was high time I really learned to do it properly, and not just joke about it with all my speed skating friends. In typical no-half-measures style, I’ve joined the curling league (even though I’ll only be here for two more weeks). I’m certainly nowhere near Olympic level, and I have a nasty habit of bruising my left knee during the delivery because I get very low, but I am hopeful that I will continue to improve and perhaps get a chance to represent Australia (no, seriously). A final note about the ice house – the banners that hang around Bradbury Rink depict an ice hockey player, a figure skater, and a speed skater. Trouble is, the speed skater is a long track skater (this can easily be seen from the skates), which I think is a little dishonest because there are no long tracks in the entire southern hemisphere. Of course, nobody outside of speed skating would know the difference anyway. The second and more contentious point about the banner is that the skater in the photograph is Claudia Pechstein. I realize that very few people in the world would be able to recognize her from the angle the photo was taken, but hey, I’m one of them, and it bothers me. Pechstein, of course, was implicated in a very high-profile doping case which saw her banned from competition just prior to the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver. Probably not the best person to be putting on a massive poster in the Olympic training center in Melbourne. Just sayin’

The train lines leading into North Melbourne train station

A word on my current location. I’m staying with a good friend from my days as a young mathematician at Melbourne University – Stefan Rampertshammer (isn’t that just the coolest name ever?) in a small house in West Melbourne. Of course, West Melbourne is really north of the CBD, and the house is literally right next to the North Melbourne train station. This is an extremely convenient location because I can take the train straight into the city (of course, when I used to live in Melbourne, I lived IN the CBD, and skipped this step). It is also very convenient because it is within a 20 minute walk of the Ice House… so basically, quite randomly, I’ve scored well with this accommodation. (oh, and Stefan and Brent, his housemate, are really awesome too… I should probably mention that).

View from my window at sunset

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.