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

I’m pretty sure that every kid in Australia learns this at some stage of their schooling, or is supposed to. Some may have forgotten, and many didn’t care enough (either about politics, or school) to really listen. In Britain, where minor parties are starting to make a mark, the system that Australia uses is the one often pointed to as the most suitable. It is sometimes criticized as being too complicated. For whatever it’s worth, I rather like it, and with the Australian federal election coming up in a few days, I thought it would be timely to provide a thorough explanation of how it actually works.

Let’s say you’ve got three candidates for an election: Alexis, Billie, and Casey.

Simple "First past the post" voting

A simple “first past the post” system is used and everyone just ticks one box next to a candidate’s name. Alexis gets 6 votes, Billie gets 17, and Casey gets 14 votes, so Billie wins. However, all the people who voted for Alexis pipe up and say “hey, if we had known that was going to be the result, we would’ve all voted for Casey!”. So even though more people voted for Billie, a greater number overall preferred Casey over Billie.

There are obvious implications here. Firstly, it discourages candidates from running. If you’re from a small political party, you may be discouraged to run for election because you may split the vote from the candidate who you might prefer to win. It also means that if there are a lot of candidates, a person may “win” the election with a very small percentage of the vote. It also makes all the people who didn’t vote for the winner feel like their vote was wasted.

Some countries combat this by having a second election, where the two most popular candidates from the first election have a “runoff”. I personally think that this is a very crude and inefficient way of handling the problem, and who the hell wants to have two elections?

The “answer” to this is instant runoff preferential voting, sometimes called the Hare-Clarke system (presumably after the people who came up with it, or first used it). First, an explanation of how it works in the case of candidates running for a single seat, such as in the case of geographical electorates in the house of representatives.

Same example as above, except instead of just ticking one box, we ask voters to number their candidates in order of preference from 1 to 3.

In preferential voting, you number the candidates in order of preference

So what happens now? Let us assume that the “1” voting reflects the results from before, with Alexis on 6, Billie on 17, and Casey on 14. Then what happens?

Contrary to what many people think, the numbers aren’t allocated “points” and then totalled up to determine the winner. What happens is this – the “1”s are tallied up and if any candidate has accumulated 1 vote more than 50% of the total number of voters, then the election is over and that candidate is declared the winner. If not, then whoever is last; that is whoever has the fewest number of “1”s is eliminated from the running. The votes previously belonging to that candidate are then redistributed among the remaining candidates according to those voters’ next preferences (in this case, the “2”s). This process continues until one of the candidates accumulates 50%+1 of the total vote.

If there are 6 candidates for a seat in Parliament, then this is roughly equivalent to having 5 separate elections where the last candidate is eliminated each time, then everyone votes again, until you’re left with the winner of a two-horse race. Of course, sometimes you don’t need all 5 of those elections – a candidate may accumulate a large enough number of votes long before it comes down to a two-horse race.

The Senate

The Australian Senate is composed of 12 senators from each state and two from each of two “territories” (The Australian Capital Territory, similar to DC in the US, and The Northern Territory, similar to a very large desert). They are elected according to proportional representation by a single transferable vote system (described above as preferential voting). This is where it all gets slightly complicated.

A sample ballot paper for the Australian Senate

This is an example of one of the “simpler” ballot papers, where you only have a small number of candidates and there are only two senators to pick. In your typical state, there can be as many as 80 candidates competing for 12 seats. So how does this work?

First, we take the number of voters in the electorate and divide that number by 13. We will call this number Bob. Bob is the magic number.

This process is slightly more complicated than the system for a single candidate. It begins in an almost identical manner to the above until a candidate gets enough “1”s to win a seat, that is, the number of “1”s exceeds Bob. Then it gets tricky. Let’s say Bob is a number like 12,000, and candidate A gets 16,000 “1”s. If this happens too often, we’ll run out of votes to count before we’ve filled all the senate seats. Something needs to be done with those excess 4,000 votes, and that something is this – candidate A’s 16,000 votes get redistributed according to their second preferences (same as if the candidate was eliminated from the bottom) except each one of those votes is worth . That way, the preferences of the voters for the senate are still honoured, and we manage to keep (or 4,000, a.k.a. the correct number of) votes still in the system. Once those preferences have been redistributed, we check to see if there are any candidates with more “1”s than Bob. If there are, we repeat the process for awarding a seat, then redistributing the votes according to next preferences multiplied by the fraction of the excess primary vote over the total number of primary votes. If there aren’t, then we eliminate from the bottom as before until a candidate has more votes than Bob.

In the Australian Senate elections (which generally take place at the same time as the House of Representatives elections) about 6% of voters actually bother to number 1 through to 80-ish. Instead, a voter can opt to vote “above the line” where they simply put a “1” next to the box of a major party, in which case their preferences will follow a predetermined order set by that political party. This is unfortunate because not only do many people not know what those preferences are, the major parties often do preference-swap-deals and this can have unforeseen bad side-effects, like Steve Fielding being elected.

Standard anamorphic film with analog soundtracks visible between the image and perforations on the left. The apparent noise you see on the outside of, and in between the perforations is actually the digital soundtrack.

When the iPhone 4 was first revealed to the world, one of it’s biggest selling points was that it had a fancy new “retina display” which was just a curiously stupid way of saying that it had a very high resolution. When Nikon released the D300, it too had a screen with significantly higher resolution than any digital camera at the time and while that feature wasn’t publicized in quite the same way as Apple’s announcement, the review on popular camera review site dpreiview.com sums it up well “This high resolution screen really has to be seen to be appreciated, it’s beautifully detailed and extremely smooth in appearance because the tiny gaps between dots are too small to be seen with the eye.”

This high resolution screen really has to be seen to be appreciated, it’s beautifully detailed and extremely smooth in appearance because the tiny gaps between dots are too small to be seen with the eye.

Such a quote got me thinking. A lot of TV manufacturers (or at least their publicity departments) like to talk about fantastic new “future proof” standards. Obviously, it is silly to even believe that you can make anything future-proof, and especially in this current age where technology becomes obsolete so quickly, it seems silly to even use it as a selling point. But they do, and it works. I thought about future proofing and it made me think about laptop computers. When I was in high school, your laptop could become obsolete in a matter of months. Within a few months, a newer laptop at a comparable price point would perform significantly faster than the one you had, and by “significantly faster” I mean it in a way where even people who were totally computer illiterate would notice. Within two years, your laptop would be practically unusable. Nowadays, this trend seems to be slowing significantly. A laptop that I purchased three years ago, while a little sluggish, is still perfectly usable, and considerations like size and weight have become more important than performance, hence the rise of the very cute “netbook” laptops. Why has this happened? I think it has to do with decreasing returns to scale, and the nature of how we use computers.

Various TV resolution standards

The vast majority of people in the world use computers for word processing, managing spreadsheets, and communicating via the internet. None of these tasks requires a huge amount of computing power. Even people who spend a lot of their computer time playing games have slowed down somewhat in their quest for ever-faster processors as the advent of hard-wired graphics-specific processors (graphics cards) can give them more bang for their buck. High-end games, and high-end photo processing and video processing are really the only applications left which really continue to push a computer’s computing power. For the majority of us, the technology has matured and reached a point where more powerful computers won’t contribute significantly to making the user experience better – and indeed resources are now being diverted to other aspects such as the user interface both in hardware and software, where the improvements would more significantly enhance the user experience.

Does that mean that current computer processors are future-proof for most of the population? Not really. New screens, new methods of interaction like voice and touchscreen will likely require faster processors to render the integration of these solutions seamlessly, and there will always be those higher-end users whose work legitimately requires the fastest processors that can be made (weather forecasters, special effects studios, and people who try to find the largest prime numbers). I was wondering if the same can be said for screen resolution. Obviously, there will always be a need for higher and higher resolution screens and capture for highly specialized applications, but for most of the population, there probably is a reasonable “specification” after which most wouldn’t know the difference.

When asked about why Inception wasn’t filmed in 3D, producer-writer-director Chris Nolan replied that shooting in digital would have meant what was, to him, an unacceptable compromise in quality. The “Fusion Camera System” that James Cameron developed and used for Avatar is basically two Sony CineAlta cameras bolted together to film a stereoscopic image. Those cameras contain 2/3″ image sensors of approximately 2 megapixels each. Compare that with the resolution of 35mm film which is approximately 24 megapixels (for a 135-spec imaging area i.e. a still photograph), and you can see what Nolan was getting at.

High resolution sensor standards (current technology is 4k, film-resolution is 6k)

Of course, 1080p high definition is the highest resolution that any modern TV can reproduce. The only Reason you would ever need to shoot in higher resolutions than that is if you intend the image to be blown up to the size of a movie screen, or possibly even an IMAX screen. Eventually however, we can reasonably expect TV technology to improve to the point where higher resolutions are possible. (of course, bandwidth would have to increase significantly to allow for that amount of data throughput, as would data storage to be able to record it). How can we possibly determine the theoretical limit of the quest for ever-higher resolution?

The easy answer to this would lie in the human eye. There would presumably be a point, past which any increases in resolution would be imperceptible. By definition, what is known as 20/20 vision or “normal” visual acuity corresponds to being able to distinguish line pairs (telling the difference between two skinny lines and one slightly thicker one) at about one minute of arc. That means that if you draw a line from each of those two lines to your eye, and measure the angle between those them, that angle would be a 60th of a degree. The maximum possible visual acuity for a human eye (limited by diffraction) is, in these terms, about 0.4 of a minute of arc (for our eyes to have better resolving power, our species would need to evolve bigger eyes).¹ How does this translate into the resolution of a screen?

Say I’m sitting three meters (just under ten feet) from a TV screen. Say that TV is about 106cm diagonally across (about 42″). If it is a standard example of 16:9 ratio widescreen TV, then that gives the dimensions of the screen to be approximately 92.4cm by 52cm. A little bit of rough/basic trigonometry (it’s if you must know) reveals the vertical angle of view to be about 9.5 degrees. That’s 570 arc minutes (which is about the resolution of standard PAL TV!), which comes to about 1425 lots of 0.4 arc minutes if you happen to have theoretically-optimal eyesight. This probably means that people sit far too close to their televisions. In any case, this means that 1080p is over and above the average resolution of the human eye, if you happen to sit 3m away from your 42″ widescreen TV. If you sit a meter away, then you’ll need at least 1600 vertical lines of resolution for you not to distinguish pixels.

A typical cinema seating arrangement

In the cinema however, the screen takes up a much greater angle of view (especially if you sit in the front row of an IMAX cinema, like I did once). In the illustration, even if you happen to sit in the front row, you’re probably looking at no more than a 45 degree angle of view (and IMAX cinemas are similarly arranged to accommodate the larger screen. This ends up needing about 2700 lines of vertical resolution. Luckily the resolution of film is about 24 megapixels, or about 6000×4000 pixels, and at this point, the quality of lenses and the accuracy of focus become far more important factors in considering the quality of the image.

An interesting side note: almost all films these days are recorded on what is known as “anamorphic format” which, in technical sense is where each frame is four perforations tall and has an aspect ratio of 1:1.37 to allow for sound tracks in the image area. The standard aspect ratio of motion pictures is 1:2.39 so to achieve this special (very expensive) lenses are used for for filming and projection. The 24 megapixel resolution of film I often quote is from the still photography format which is about 7.5 perforations long and 36x24mm. Strictly speaking, since the area of film being used by motion pictures is 21.95×18.6mm, the corresponding resolution ends up being about 3660x3100pixels (11.3 megapixels) or 3100 lines of vertical resolution. Consider also that the aspect ratio “stretches” the image sideways to achieve the 1:2.39 aspect ratio, and you’re spreading those 3660 pixels over an even greater area (this is also why lens flare in cinematic productions is always oval-shaped). This all results in the resolution of film in the context of a movie cinema to be slightly higher than what is discernible by the human eye in the vertical direction, but slightly lower in the horizontal direction, at least if you sit in the front row. I guess the take-home lesson from this, is don’t sit in the front row of movie cinemas.

Relative size of 'academy format' on 35mm film and Imax on 65mm

So, we now have a general idea for theoretical maximum useful resolutions for everyday things like movie cinemas and televisions and know that the number is a lot less important than the actual angle of view per pixel. In reality those maximums are probably a bit lower because viewing conditions (and our eyes themselves) are not always optimal. For example, when it is dark (like at the movies) your visual acuity is slightly lessened because your pupils are maximally dilated to try to let more light in. We can always blow something up onto a large enough screen and then walk towards it until the angle of view represented by each pixel is large enough for our eye’s resolving power to “beat” the resolution of the image. But how about small screens like the D300 mentioned above, and the 4th-generation iPhone?

By self-experiment, I have determined the minimum focusing distance for the human eye to be about 7cm. This is, by no means a definitive experiment (especially since the sample size was 1) but I would imagine that the real figure to be not far off. (If I had removed my contact lenses, that distance is almost certainly shorter, but that would be cheating). So, let’s do the calculations for the iPhone screen (seeing as it’s slightly bigger than the screen in the back of a DSLR). The screen is about 73.97mm x 49.31mm so… given a 70mm minimum focusing distance for the eye, gives a vertical angle-of-view of about 47 degrees requiring a resolution of about 2800 pixels, well short of the 960 vertical pixels of the iPhone. Of course, nobody reads their phone at 70mm from their eyes in normal everyday use, and indeed Apple’s own claim is that the screen exceeds the eye’s resolving power when held at 300mm from the eye. Based on the 20/20 vision definition of the eye’s resolving power, the phone would need a pixel count of greater than 788, which it satisfies, although if you happen to have slightly better than 20/20 vision, then you may need more pixels. It is, in any case, quite close.

Taking the 70mm minimum into consideration, the minimum pixel size resolvable by the human eye would be 0.02 of a milimeter (about 20 microns – or a fifth the width of a human hair, which explains why we can distinguish single strands of hair). Let’s say I wanted my 15″ Macbook Pro’s screen to have the maximum useful resolution to the human eye according to that – then it’s screen resolution would have to be 16500×10300, if we go by Apple’s iPhone resolution, then it would only need to be 4240×2650 (for reference, its current resolution is 1680×1050, and for the record I can see pixelation from my normal seated position of about 400mm away from the screen, but it really doesn’t bother me). This knowledge can also give us an indication of the relevance of megapixels in digital cameras – for a 15x10cm print, 1930×1280 pixels (about 2.5 megapixels) is enough, and for a 30x20cm print 3860×2560 (about 10 megapixels) should do the trick. Keeping in mind that an A4-sized print is actually quite large, and the vast majority of digital camera photos these days never make the trip from a hard drive or the internet into the real world, it’s a wonder that compact camera resolutions didn’t stop at 6 megapixels to concentrate on all the other stuff that contributes to image quality.

Of course resolution isn’t everything, and things like frame-rate (“optimal” frame rate is a much more complex question than resolution), shutter speed, and the fineness of colour gradation probably have a greater impact on how well-perceived an image may be. Not only that, but the quality of the optics, both for capture and projection will also come under closer and closer scrutiny as the resolving power of sensors increases (the above reasons are why a photo from a 12 megapixel compact camera suck when compared to a 12 megapixel photo from a DSLR). The resolution race still has a way to go, but the finish light at least seems to be in sight. The second Star Wars prequel was one of the first major films shot entirely in digital, and even though it sucked the fat one, it demonstrated that 2 megapixels, despite being a far cry from film resolution, was quite passable for most (remember Slumdog Millionaire? That was shot in digital with an SI-2k, whose resolution is only slightly greater than the technology of the Star Wars prequel). With the RED Scarlet and Epic (which can shoot 6000×4000, or 24 megapixels) just on the horizon, we’re finally going to be able to leave the resolution race behind and concentrate on more meaningful aspects of image reproduction.

A Spinning Top

Inception is a great movie, and one that really must be seen. Christopher Nolan delights moviegoers once again with a summer blockbuster that is sure to have everyone talking. This sci-fi heist movie is held together by great performances by the leads which tie in the resolution of emotional issues with strong dialogue and themes which constantly call into question the nature of reality itself. As much as the opening lines of this review seem clichéd, this is an unusual movie in that it truly does deliver on those promises.

Like the last epic blockbuster to grace the silver screen – Avatar, this film was almost a decade in the making. While James Cameron certainly had the kind of bankable reputation in Hollywood that would have allowed him to make Avatar whenever he wanted, he chose to wait until the technology was up to the task. Christopher Nolan’s setback was that he lacked the requisite reputation to convince a studio to give him the kind of funding that a movie like this really deserves. So, in the last ten years, he made Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins, The Prestige, and The Dark Knight. To borrow a well-used line, he had me at Memento (to any who haven’t seen it, it comes highly recommended). All the films except insomnia were also written by him or by the team of him and his brother. His remarkable and meteoric rise gave him the ability to bring us The Dark Knight, a true cinematic masterpiece (and, in my opinion, still his finest work), and the commercial success of The Dark Knight has allowed him to bring us Inception.

I will aim this article towards those who have not seen it, and will try not to give too much away. I may pen a later article packed with spoilers in which I will attempt to start some kind of discussion about the film, aimed at moviegoers who have already seen it.

I was fortunate enough to see it both in a regular cinema and at IMAX within a few days of each other. First a technical note – there is little to be gained by seeing this film in IMAX. With the Dark Knight, certain scenes were shot in IMAX format so for those scenes, you really noticed it. In Inception, no scenes were shot in IMAX format, although some were shot in 65mm (rather than the regular 35mm anamorphic standard). However, if you live in a part of the world where the quality of the seats in an IMAX cinema is significantly better than in a regular one, then perhaps it is worth it, as the film runs for 2:28 minutes which is a long time to be sitting in a seat. Something else unusual that I noticed is that, in Hong Kong at least, there were no previews and very few ads shown before the start of the movie, so it started very close to the stated start-time. Most people (myself included) are used to anywhere from 10-20 minutes to pass between the start time on your ticket until the time that the movie actually begins. This may not apply anywhere else in the world, but if you’re reading this and live in Hong Kong – don’t be late. Despite the length, from a plot perspective, this is a very dense film, especially at the start and at the end. Missing the first 5 minutes can completely change how you perceive the movie.

The pace never seems frantic though. It is sometimes difficult to keep up with what is happening and it pays to pay attention to the small details in every scene. Having seen it twice, I can say that I picked up a lot of things on my second viewing that I hadn’t noticed on my first. Those familiar with Nolan’s older work, in particular Memento and The Prestige, will know that Nolan, being a student of English Literature, loves to play with narrative structure. This film is no different, although instead of the usual tools of flashback, and cutting between parallel storylines with different characters, he plays with the perception of the passage of time in the dream state.

Indeed the perception of reality is at the very center of this work. We ask ourselves “what would it be like if we could share dreams?”. There are hints of the Matrix here with characters interacting in a constructed reality, but in Inception that reality is constructed on the fly, by participants in the dream, out of a combination of their conscious and subconscious minds. One of the dreamers constructs the world, while the others populate it with their subconscious. The implications of this are many and varied, but as a heist movie the aspect which is explored is stealing information through the subconscious, because how can you guard against something over which you have no conscious control? As the title suggests, this particular story arc takes it one step further and explores the possibility of inception – planting the seed for an idea rather than stealing one.

The man hired for this job is Dominic Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio who does very well in this role. His character’s interaction with their new “architect” Ariadne, played by Ellen Paige, lends the plot an emotional backbone that draws the audience in and makes us care in what would otherwise be just another silly action film. At times the supporting cast seem only there to advance to plot and I would have liked to see a greater degree of character development for them. However, I suspect that it is likely that that character development existed at some point but had to be cut out due to time constraints. In any case, each of the cast members brings something to the table, especially with veterans Michael Cain and Marion Cotillard keeping it real. Marion especially brings exactly the kind of chilling, haunting quality to her character, befitting of the role she plays as DiCaprio’s character’s wife’s projection in his subconscious.

The acting is very good. Notable among the cast are Ellen Page and Joseph Gordon-Levitt who in this film make the transition into mature adult actors. Not that they weren’t before, but they had always played less-mature, less-serious roles. Page of course best known for her role as Juno in Juno and Gordon-Levitt whose last significant role was 500 Days of Summer, which was decent until it was shot in the foot with an awful ending, and who we thought would forever struggle to shake off his identity as Tommy from the TV series 3rd Rock From the Sun. An actor normally thought of as a teen/chick flick type is graduated to the role of right hand man to the lead, and action hero giving a strong performance of a strong character who incidentally will now be remembered for “winning” one of the coolest fight scenes ever to take place in a hotel corridor.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a hotel corridor

In true Christopher Nolan style, the layers of narrative slowly build throughout the film and eventually crash towards their inevitable climax. The plot never feels terribly tired or predictable, and although the action sequences could be criticized for being slightly on the fantastic side of reality, since it all takes place in a dream, it is difficult to be able to pin down a technical fault with that. Perhaps the naming of Ellen Page’s character “Ariadne” was a little bit over-the-top as she not only builds the labyrinth world of the dreams, but also helps DiCaprio’s character out of his own labyrinth (although thankfully there was no appearance of a Minotaur).

The special effects are well done in that they aren’t particularly intrusive. They also don’t look particularly “unreal” as effects shots tend to be in films these days (really Michael Bay, a robot climbing a pyramid?). This is no small feat considering that the dream worlds, by definition, had to be unreal yet believable. The difference really is between taking something that is obviously not real; like rows of abandoned apartment blocks collapsing into the sea in the way that glaciers calve, and then making it real as opposed to taking something that in principle could be real; like a plane crash, or shark, and making it look like it was faked.

It’s difficult to do anything other than recommend the film, and it is difficult to write too much about what makes the film great without spoiling too much of the story. So I will simply say that you should see it. Don’t forget to pee before entering the cinema, don’t sit in the front few rows (a lot of deliberately shaky camera work is used and those susceptible to motion sickness may feel ill), and be prepared in your mind to absorb a lot of detail and dialogue in a short space of time. While I still believe that Nolan’s best work is the Dark Knight, and while it is still only August, I will say that I believe strongly that this will be the year’s best film. Will it get an academy award? Who the hell knows – I didn’t think the Hurt Locker was that great a film (and the Academy needs to learn how their own voting system works), and the Academy and I often have our disagreements (not that ANYBODY gives a hoot).

As a frequent lucid dreamer myself, I should warn others in a similar way that the realism of the portrayal of lucid dreaming may scare you, especially the way in which unexpected elements of your subconscious often make intrusions. Also, if you are in the midst of an existential crisis which is severe enough to cause panic attacks, then I would highly recommend that you let that episode pass before seeing this film. Like Nolan’s other works, this film has that rare ability to entertain in very conventional ways, while also being challenging to the viewer, and quite original in it’s concept and vision. I give it five stars out of five.

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

Take your pick

It’s been a while since I’ve penned a controversial post. Experience (and my web stats) have shown me that the most popular posts on this website are either slightly controversial (curiouser and curiouser, selection news, and on skating at altitude) or to do with photography (photo gear, and the truth behind the shutter are the most viewed articles on this site). This post will likely fall into the former category. Those readers who have been paying attention know that I’ve been very close to elite sport for a very long time now. I’m also quite an enthusiast when it comes to things like mathematics, and reading academic journals… which is not so common these days among professional athletes. I feel that this combination allows me to speak with at least a little bit of authority on these matters.

First up, I should mention that I can’t prove in a legal sense, any of the accusations that I will inevitably make or imply. I don’t think I’m going to get into any trouble for saying any of this, although if I were ever to become famous for whatever reason, I may be called up on it. If that happens, I won’t back down. You see, you don’t have to believe anything that I say. You could write me off as an embittered ex-athlete, except if you actually knew me, you would know that I don’t really care enough about sport, especially my own achievement in it, to ever really feel embittered about it. I’m just calling it as I see it, and those who know me well, know that I don’t miss much.

The first thing one needs to understand when one approaches sport these days is that, beyond amateur community league sport, sport has very little to do with all that “faster, higher, stronger” nonsense that you get fed as a kid, and really falls more under the category of entertainment (NBC’s budget for the winter games was north of a billion dollars). That is not to say that elite professional athletes aren’t faster, don’t jump higher, or aren’t stronger than your everyday club badminton player for example. But being good at sport, and I mean very good, is an expensive undertaking and only within the framework of sport-as-entertainment can that level of performance be sustained.

The Olympic Games, supposedly the pinnacle of sport, is basically a huge show. I apologize to anyone who still has any illusions about the Olympics being an amateur competition, because it is not. With very few exceptions (curling, for example), pretty much everyone who goes to the Olympics does their sport full time. How can they afford to do this? Easy – they are paid to. Often it isn’t much, and I would be lying if I were to give the impression that all professional athletes live very comfortable lives, but the truth of the matter is that hardly anyone at the Olympics is an amateur. Would Pierre de Coubertin have disapproved of what the modern Olympic games have become? Probably. But in a strange way, the influx of money into sport that comes with professionalism has become a great equalizer in the world of sport. Prior to this, participants at the games were mostly very wealthy people who could afford the “spare time” required to train properly for the games.

But what does this have anything to do with drugs in sport? Well, if I gave you some growth hormone, or EPO and said “here, take this” you probably wouldn’t do it. Why wouldn’t you do it? Well, you’re messing with your endocrine system, the viscosity of your blood, you might get caught, and the side-effects might leave you sterile or give you a heart attack. In short, it’s a risky thing to do. Maybe you can find a doctor to supervise your performance-enhancing drug taking, well then it starts to get expensive. All things considered, taking performance enhancing drugs effectively is an extremely expensive (the drugs themselves are also costly) and dangerous thing to do. In order for someone to make that kind of investment, and to take those kinds of risks, a very large reward is needed as incentive. So here’s where the money-in-sport equation starts to become relevant.

“Each one of the riders on the tour draws a salary of at least one million euros”

Take professional cycling as an example. The Tour de France is one of the most grueling and challenging sporting events ever dreamt up, and it is watched on TV by people all over the world. Because of this TV coverage, there is a huge potential for advertising on riders’ jerseys and, as a result of this, large and very well-run, and well-funded professional teams have formed who compete with each other. Each one of those bikes costs upwards of $10,000, and they have lots of bikes per rider for all kinds of situations and eventualities. Each one of the riders on the tour draws a salary of at least one million euros on top of all the free gear. Think about that for a second – one million euros a year just to get on a bike and ride all day. Riding is also fairly low-impact so a good rider can expect to have a career in excess of ten years. Six or seven good rides in le Tour during that time, and you may never have to worry about finances for the rest of your life. Does that create a strong incentive to dope? I would think so… and I would go so far as to say that everyone on the tour does it.

Don’t these people get tested? Of course they do, they just don’t get caught. The doping on the tour is systematic and the team doctors supervise it. Of course they do. Erythropoietin – better known as EPO increases your blood’s ability to carry oxygen, an obvious advantage in an endurance sport like road cycling. It also thickens the blood. I’m not exactly an endurance athlete (in fact, most would call me a “specialist sprinter”) and my resting heart rate is in the low 40s, a career endurance athlete would likely have a resting heart rate in the mid-to-low 30s. Think about that – that’s a beat every two seconds. Under normal blood pressure, if you’re running a beat every two seconds, if your blood is unusually thick, then it has a tendency to clot. If one of those clots ends up in a coronary artery, then your heart will stop. One of the roles of the team doctors these days is to wake up riders in the middle of the night, and get them onto the stationary bikes to keep their heart rates up to stop them from dying in their sleep. Of course, now that there’s a test for EPO, nobody uses it anymore, and another similar drug has almost certainly replaced it.

The trouble with tests is that you can only test for a known substance (you can obviously detect anything, but the quantities are so small that it would be impossible to show that any old anomaly was a performance-enhancing drug). Marion Jones doped for years on a designer steroid known as “The Clear” (tetrahydrogestrinone) and nobody would have ever known about it except that a sample of the stuff was turned in by a bitter coach and so a test was developed for it. If that sample had never been turned in, it would still be in use today, and remain undetectable. There is a very good chance that there are more designer steroids out there which may never be detected.

Does this ruin the world of sport? I don’t think so. It just makes it a little bit different. A lot of kids grow up thinking that being really good at sport is just a matter of training hard and being dedicated. When you slowly make your way up the ranks of elite sport, there is a point where you realize that this isn’t true, and a myriad of factors that are completely outside your control, like genetics, play a huge role in determining how successful you ultimately are at sport. Despite what he says, it is almost certainly true that Lance Armstrong, along with everyone who rides in the tour, is doped up to the eyeballs. That doesn’t make his achievement of winning seven tours any less remarkable. He still had to train very hard and be a bit of a genetic freak of nature to do all of those things. His battle with cancer is no less inspiring. There’s nothing “unfair” about the doping that goes on in the tour, because it is still very much a level playing field because everyone does it.

So which sports are rife with doping and which aren’t? As it is with most things these days, you have to follow the money. Anything that appears in the Olympics is a likely candidate because the exposure that the Olympics guarantee will raise the kind of money that makes doping “worth” it. Track and field is a good example of a sport in which not-doping places you at a severe disadvantage. Take Usain Bolt for example. I would contend that his world records are not “clean”. Of course, I don’t think any world records have been clean since the late 80s when athletics really started to become very financially lucrative because of sponsorships, endorsements, and the IAAF world athletics tour.

100m world record progression (try to ignore the background image lines)

As a side note, when viewing word record progressions in sports, it is always interesting to note that whenever a test is developed for a significant and widely used drug, such as testosterone, the frequency of world records suddenly drops, but always eventually catches up. The year before a sex test was developed for women there were about 15 women who ran 1500m in under 4 minutes. The year after the test was developed, that number dropped to 2.

The Jamaican case is an especially good example of doping evasion. One of the major advances in anti-doping efforts was the introduction of out of competition testing. Prior to this, people would dope for 3.9 years and then be “clean” for the Olympics (they often didn’t bother being clean for anything else – Carl Lewis, gold medalist in 1988 after Ben Johnson’s famous disqualification himself failed three tests in the two months prior to the Seoul Olympics). Out of competition testing involves randomly showing up to an athletes home or training facility and demanding a urine sample. This generally works very well, making it almost impossible to systematically take any detectable drugs. However, there is a flaw in the system – WADA, the world ant-doping agency requires respective countries’ IOCs to ensure that the testing is carried out. Countries like the USA have USADA and Australia has ASDA to conduct their out of competition testing. However, countries like Jamaica don’t have such an agency.

Again, I emphasize that I am not taking away from any of these guys’ achievements. In a perfect world where nobody doped, Usain Bolt would probably still have won his gold medals and set his world records. Those records would have been a little slower, sure, but no less impressive. The margins might also have not been so great because the absence of out-of-competition testing gives the Jamaicans a distinct advantage over their counterparts from other countries. One might be tempted to think that this advantage should be huge, and that the playing field is no longer level, but this isn’t quite true. Firstly, countries that have their own out of competition testing programs also tend to be a bit wealthier, and thus have better access to better drugs. Secondly, out of competition testing programs aren’t without their flaws.

Speed skaters get tested a lot. As do badminton players, I’m told. That’s because they don’t dope. I’ll get to why that is the case shortly. But my point here is that an out of competition testing program sets itself a goal of a certain number of tests. It them measures its “success” by how many positive tests it gets. Often (and I cannot prove this, but I’m pretty certain that it happens) when the doping is systematic and state-sanctioned, the “random” anti-doping program will be timed in such a way as to coincide with periods in a doping program where an athlete won’t test positive. During times when an athlete will test positive, the anti-doping agency will simply test other athletes. This way, they can still get to the end of their month or whatever, and say that they have a certain number of negative tests. Taking the randomness out of the system effectively renders it useless, and does so in a way that makes it seem like it still works.

So why don’t badminton players and speed skaters dope? Like I said before, not every elite athlete leads a luxurious life of multi-million dollar endorsements. Many sports also don’t benefit a great deal from doping. The greatest advantages to be had are in sports which require endurance, and muscle bulk. Badminton is great sport, and one must be quite fit to play it at the elite level, but the potential gains that doping would have on badminton, while they do exist, are probably not great enough to make the risks worth it.

Speed skating is an interesting example, and one that I’ve thought about for a while (for obvious reasons). I’m actually pretty sure that doping does exist in speed skating (apart from the obvious case of Claudia Pechstein) but that it is not very widespread. Curiously, Pechstein was only caught because of the introduction of the Biological Passport which doesn’t directly detect the presence of illegal substances in the blood, but rather it looks at the parameters of certain biological markers and sees how much they fluctuate over time. Strangely enough, Pechstein managed to get an injunction which allowed her to do one race at the Salt Lake City world cup in December 2009 (where I was also present, photos here) and, not surprisingly, she failed to qualify for the Vancouver 2010 games.

I mentioned before that riders on the tour earn upwards of a million euros a year, which over a long career can be a pretty strong incentive to dope. There are probably one, maybe two speed skaters in the world who make that kind of money. Everyone else kind of just scrapes by. The other factor at work here is income inequality. Speed skaters, by necessity, almost always come from fairly wealthy countries. This is because it is an expensive sport – the skates are expensive, ice time is expensive, the suits we wear are expensive. To even be able to compete, a huge amount of money needs to be invested first, over a long amount of time. The facilities also present a problem – I don’t know of a single long track in the world that doesn’t operate at a loss. Those things are extremely expensive to run, and most do it with government support, and a government has to be fairly wealthy in order to support that kind of sport.

This is why income inequality is important – it all comes down to a fairly simple equation: on the one hand, you have the enormous cost and risks, both legally and health-wise associated with taking drugs, and on the other you have the potential financial gain that may result from success gained by taking drugs. Most of the world’s speed skaters come from the Netherlands or Norway, both are very wealthy countries with high standards of living. In other words, it’s going to take huge amounts of money to make them want to dope, and while there is a lot of money in skating, there isn’t enough for that. Speed skating is also quite popular in many former eastern-bloc countries, and while the argument for doping in those cases is more plausible, it is still unlikely because, without the huge inequalities that used to exist, and without the massive state-driven systematic doping machine (whose last “product” was a young Claudia Pechstein) poor kids who want to make it in life have much better options (like internet scams) and the people who end up in speed skating tend to come from relatively wealthy families.

Contrast that to running, where athletes can come from very poor countries, and where entry-level equipment is very cheap. Compare a kid who is a talented runner in Jamaica with one from Norway. Who’s going to take the huge risks? Who stands to go from a life of poverty to one of unimaginable wealth? Who is going to receive help from their own sport’s governing bodies with systematic doping? Keeping this all in mind, I’m actually very optimistic about the eventual demise of systematic doping. Because in a perfect world, the monetary incentives just won’t be strong enough for people to want to take the risks. The only people left who will dope will be the crazy sociopathic people whose desire to win outweighs their sanity (at which point sport will obviously be only for entertainment purposes). Of course, such a world is still a very long way off. In the meantime, we’ll still have to put up with similarly crazy people who defend doping by being either ignorant of the way sport works (“but doping can only affect a 3% gain in performance at most”… uh duh, a 3m margin in a 100m race is kind of a big deal) or ignorant of the health risks involved, keeping in mind that those most at risk are also the poorest and least able to protect themselves from those risks.

At the moment, a lot of people “love” sport, but I suspect it is only because sport is their ticket out of poverty, which is what ultimately opens the door to the possibility of doping. In an ideal world, even though Olympic athletes would still be professionals, and would probably get fairly decent pay (as entertainers), it wouldn’t be so much that it would necessitate the need for performance enhancing drugs. In that sense at least, they would be doing it simply because they love the sport, which is where the word “amateur” originally comes from.

Further reading: “Positive” by Werner Reiterer, my own review here.

Of course, physics tells us that we cant pull ourselves up...

There’s a peculiar little saying that many of you have probably heard, and that is “to pull yourself up by your bootstraps”. The implication here is that, without any help from others, you can work hard and make it in the world etc. etc. It is an especially favourite refrain of libertarian and other politically-conservative movements who like to frame “I believe in hard work” against “I believe in government handouts”. Herein lies one of the fundamental problems with any kid of libertarianism-based economic doctrine, and that is that there is a tacit assumption of the independence of individuals in an economy. On the surface of it, this all seems great. Work hard and you’ll do well… and if you’re not doing well, then you’re obviously not working hard enough.

Of course, large scale economies inevitably have their ups and downs. When there’s a down, it’s all the fault of big bad government, and when there’s an up, it is all on the shoulders of the hard working people. It surprises me that such simplistic, and obviously incorrect, reasoning can still pass as an “argument” from a politician… although, having observed similarly simplistic “kindergarten politics” at work at the pointy-end of climate negotiations, maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised. The truth of the matter, is that no single person can be successful without the cooperation and help of many others. And I’m not just talking about the obvious sources of help, like your immediate family, or emotional support from friends or a spouse, I’m talking about countless numbers of complete strangers who you will never meet, and who may not even speak the same language as you.

This is the result of globalization, and it is a good thing. Globalization has allowed us to distribute labour and resources like never before. This allows for spectacular increases in efficiency, and therefore productivity. So why do so many people protest globalization? Well, the productivity pie has certainly gotten bigger, but the slices of that pie that people have been getting have not always followed suit. Why has this happened? It’s because of democracy. When people come to vote, it will always be for their own best interests and that will often mean that governments will be encouraged to pursue foreign policy which is “not nice” towards the interests of workers in other countries. I was recently in a discussion about an upcoming election (which may or may not have been mentioned previously on this website) and one of my friends asked me “should I vote for myself or for my country?”, implying that she had to choose between her own self interest and the longer term interest of the country. Of course, the choice of voting in the interests of “the world” isn’t even on the table.

Environmentalism pretty much never makes it to the table as far as election issues is concerned. Sometimes small pockets of voters will make it important to an equally small pocket of politicians, but it probably won’t become a major issue until the environment begins to affect everybody’s everyday lives in an obvious way. The economy is where it’s at. Anyone who’s had to sit through one or two elections in any country knows that the hip pocket is the surest way to any citizen’s vote. Whenever a politician has to frame a debate or a policy decision, it must always be in terms of a voter’s (often) first response – “what’s in it for me?”

Recently, something that everyone seems to be getting rather obsessed about is the budget deficit. I’m not referring to any country in particular in fact, as most countries run some amount of deficit. Everytime a government opens its purse strings to spend some money (as is inevitable in the running of a country), this falls under “deficit spending”. Deficits are easy tools for the politically-minded. First of all, the nonsensical comparison between personal debt and a national deficit is an easy one to make and use. It makes it easy to convince people that the deficit is “bad” and adding to it in any way is “worse”. The inability of most people to think much further than their own personal affairs only makes this psychological trick an easier one to pull off. Of course, if a government really needs to spend money, then this can be a problem.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what this actually all means. I have concluded that these deficits are simply “tomorrow’s money” being spent today. We shouldn’t be frightened of large numbers, which is something that deficit scaremongers have a tendency to try to make us scared of. Deficit numbers are often very big, but they should be taken in context of other things, like growth and GDP, and happiness index, for example.

I was thinking about what money actually means. We make stuff, and we have to exchange it, so we start swapping bits of gold. Eventually, it becomes too inconvenient to cart around lots of bits of gold, so we swap it for receipts, and just swap those instead. So by that logic, we should have stayed on the gold standard right? Well, no. Gold was only a convenient medium of exchange because it was rare and didn’t corrode easily (at the time that currency was invented, it may have been the *only* metal that man had access to). It is only a medium of exchange, it doesn’t *mean* anything. This is no compelling reason to tie up our money supply to gold. I think the only reason that the gold standard appeared to work as well as it did for as long as it did, was because the world’s economic productivity remained essentially the same up until the industrial revolution.

Of course, fiat money has its own problems. Nobody really knows how much it is worth. In fact, the only real definition for how much it is worth is “how much you can get for it”. During my time at Columbia University, we had many and frequent discussions about ending poverty. One of the more insane ideas that came up was to print lots of money and give it to poor people. Obviously, this wouldn’t work because as you print more money, with nothing to back it, it is effectively worthless.

What does back our money up? Is it the amount of stuff in the world? I don’t think so. When we take a raw material and make it into something useful, we add value to it. Perhaps the amount of money is somehow reflective of the amount of capital + labour in the world? Maybe. I was thinking about the growth in financial markets recently and about the value of speculating. I have determined that there really isn’t very much value to all the speculating, and that all of this extra growth in the economy which has supposedly come from the financial sector is actually a fraud. Moreover, all the extra money has gone into the coffers of some very mediocre people who think the world of themselves in the form of obscene bonuses which are not-at-all representative of their contribution to the economy.

So if the value in our economy doesn’t come from ego-inflated investment bankers and hedge fund managers, then where does it come from? If we go back to the econ 101 definition of economics as the way in which we distribute scarce resources, then perhaps the value in our economy just comes from stuff. Or stuff + the value that is added by labour. However, if you think about this deeply for a while, you come to the inevitable conclusion that the system will blow up in our faces because we will eventually run out of stuff. Oil, metals, and minerals will eventually run out.

Of course, one can argue that we can recycle a lot of those things, but the truth of the matter is that we don’t. Our economic system should make it prohibitively expensive NOT to recycle these non-renewable resources, but it doesn’t, because the system is created and shaped by myopic idiots. Of course, that’s not exactly fair, the people who dreamed up this economic system never had to deal with 6 billion people and lived at a time when these resources were virtually limitless. Also, everything is renewable is you take a long enough time frame…

So what is really happening? When we burn oil, we’re not burning money, we’re simply borrowing it from the distant future at a time when that oil replenishes itself. The same can be said of other supposedly non-renewable sources. So now we’ve reduced all consumable resources into practically the same terms. Obviously, fish stocks replenish themselves much more quickly than iron ore would (but that doesn’t stop us from overfishing, does it?). Perhaps an interesting intellectual experiment would be to consider this “borrowing from the future” in the same terms as taking out a loan from a bank. The interest rate would be tied to how quickly you could pay it back AND how quickly the resource replenishes itself, which in the case of something like iron ore or oil, would be extremely slow, therefore making these loans extremely expensive. (which is how they should be)

So, for all resources, we have some kind of “sustainable” carrying capacity and anything above that is borrowing from the future. What determines this carrying capacity? Now I get to use a common refrain of the climate science skeptics – it’s the sun, stupid! Those of you who paid attention in high school physics will be familiar with the concept of the conservation of mass. Thanks to gravity, very little mass from the earth escapes into space (the weight of all our artificial satellites is negligible) and even on very long time-scales, very little mass is ever added to the earth. The sun provides all the energy for converting one kind of matter into another kind, therefore the “budget” of the earth is ultimately limited by what the sun provides (there is a rather big exception here, in nuclear energy, but I’m going to ignore it for the moment).

So there you have it. Somewhat counterintuitively, the amount of value in the economy shouldn’t be determined by the amount of “stuff” in it. When you think about it, it actually makes a lot of sense. Under the current system if I dig a lump of gold out of the ground, I can sell it and become richer. If you really think about that for a while, you realize just how absurd the concept is. However, if I take the energy of the sun and use it to produce something that we can eat, then I am converting something that is useless into something that is useful and actually making a contribution towards the world economy. Likewise, any process requiring labour is using energy to add value to something and so contributes to the economy as a whole. Speculating can be useful to a point, because it encourages investment in (it is assumed) more efficient enterprises over less efficient ones (here, the questionable substitution of “efficient” for “profitable” is made) but we are well past that point.

Of course, you try explaining all of this to an i-banker… they’ll think you’re crazy, and you probably are. But this all sounds so crazy, it just might work.

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.

Dutch election results by municipality

Contrary to popular belief, I don’t like to be nasty to people. While it is certainly true that I have a pugnacious side to my nature, I am a generally peaceful and conflict-averse individual. The day that I departed the Netherlands also happened to be election day (I somehow timed my departure from my brief trip to the UK to coincide with their election as well). In this election, Geert Wilders’ party, the Party for Freedom (Dutch pronounciation – partee for de fry-hide) won 24 seats, up from 9 in the previous election, making him non-trivially powerful in a parliament where government is formed by coalitions of many small parties. Geert is a particularly interesting figure because he is regarded as controversial owing to his strong anti-Muslim stance. Recently discussions I’ve had with friends who live in the Netherlands has revealed that part of his popularity stems from his perceived straight-talking nature, and because he says things that “everyone is thinking, but is too afraid to say”. Of course, most of these things turn my stomach, so I’m going to take this opportunity to read between the lines for all of those out there who have either been too lazy or too stupid to do so yet.

Geert Wilders

First off, this guy’s a fucking idiot. Unfortunately, he’s an idiot in a way that isn’t easy for ordinary people to detect, which makes him that very worst kind of idiot – the type that people take seriously. Sadly, these types are increasingly common in politics. The main thrust of what he says basically revolves around some rabid anti-Muslim sentiment with a bit of racism thrown in. This is really the main sticking point for me – regardless of what he actually says, and how sound his policies may sound, what he’s basically saying is “I am a racist, a xenophobe, and I hate Muslims” (even though he has been known to explicitly state the opposite, I’ll believe him when he gives me good reason to). If you vote for him, you are, by extension, saying the same things. A lot of people, at this point, accuse me of being some kind of liberal, leftie, hippie, apologist, appeasement nutcase who’s too afraid to face up to the horrible truth, or other such nonsense like that. While I would certainly agree that I am fairly left-leaning, I’m certainly no bleeding heart, and I’m not afraid of facing the truth. In this case though, I would say that I have a clearer perception of the truth than most.

What he’s basically saying is “I am a racist, a xenophobe, and I hate Muslims”. If you vote for him, you are by extension, saying the same things.

There is a very real issue here; that of the identity of a nation. These old white guys, who are used to being in charge of everything, feel threatened by all of these very different-looking, and different-behaving people. They don’t like their culture, customs, habits, and especially their religion. They don’t want them coming into their churches, their houses, or (god forbid) marrying their daughters. Obviously, enacting divisive social policies is going to fix all of this. If the concept of the Dutch national identity is based on some kind of ideal of a homogenized society based around a single religion, ethnicity, and culture, then obviously there is a problem. I would go so far as to say that, without realizing it at a conscious level, a large number of Dutch truly do perceive their national identity in those terms. There’s nothing very wrong with that, it just means that society needs to grow up a little bit and realize that things that are ordinarily viewed as traditions, and norms, are not immovable, fixed concepts that have been around for time immemorial (which is what conservatives always seem to imply with their “traditional values” nonsense), but they are dynamic and increasingly-rapidly changing things.

There are also secondary issues. Like the freedom to practice religion in general, and whether or not we can really place value judgements on the validity of religions in the world today. Various friends of mine assert that there is something fundamental about Islam that makes it more dangerous, or in some way inferior to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Without going into too much detail of the arguments for or against religion in general, as opposed to a completely secular society, and having read all of the Bible and most of the Koran, as well as religious texts of various other major world religions, I would say that none are particularly superior to any of the others. Wilders once said that Muslims should tear out half the Koran before coming to the Netherlands, which may be a valid point, but a great deal of the Bible would have to be removed as well if we were to be consistent in our application of religious discrimination.

The real problem is that while most of the very visible Christian extremism in the world today involves crazy people in the US getting their knickers in a knot over gay marriage and trying to repeal Roe vs Wade (and Sarah Palin, did I mention her?), the visible examples of Islamic extremism involve large fiery explosions. There are various reasons that the extremism has taken on the form that it has, and most are related to the fairly random distribution of wealth and, in particular, wealth inequality that exists around the world today. It is my opinion (and you’ll find that I have very strong opinions about this) that religion, at least as far as the belief in God is concerned, has absolutely nothing to do with the reprehensible behaviour of those who supposedly act on their God’s behalf. Religion has always been a convenient tool for wealthy, powerful people to use poor people to kill other poor people for profit; in all religions.

But the dirty world of politics is diluting these important issues. The “debate” isn’t about what’s really going on at all. It’s posturing about terrorism and national security. It is playing to the politics of fear, because using fear is a much easier way to control people than using rationality. Aristotle recommended two parts logos, one part ethos, and one part pathos, but modern politicians seem only to ever use pathos in their rhetoric; it’s cheap. The slightest logical scrutiny of the arguments involved quickly reveals them to be quite nonsensical. But why should that matter to the electorate? They don’t want to hear that there is a very important difference between the statements “all terrorists are Muslims” and “all Muslims are terrorists”; no, they want to believe that their scary brown neighbors who speak a different language are dangerous but it’s ok because the government is going to do something about it, thereby improving national security.

Everyone seems to want an excuse to be nasty to everyone else, so a religion, and now anti-a-religion has become the tool of choice. The power-hungry are simply trying to create an pitched battle where only small misunderstandings exist. Perhaps they truly believe all of what they say, in which case they are simply very stupid, but I don’t buy that; I think they know what they are doing, and that is more morally reprehensible than any of the crimes that they accuse the “other” of committing. But we must not allow ourselves to be sucked into this ridiculous game of political point-scoring based on ill-founded emotional appeals. Very real and complex issues that require considerable thought and introspection are being simplified and externalized and one of the world’s major religions is being used as a scapegoat. We could be level-headed about this, or we could slip into blame-game finger-pointing reminiscent of the world of playground bullying that most of us (but not all politicians) grow out of. People don’t want to think, and they’re giving that responsibility to their “leaders”. The world “leader” seems to imply that some kind of progress is being made, but in the case of Geert Wilders, anyone foolish enough to follow him is only being lead off a very steep cliff.

Wilders calls his party the party for freedom, but I say he is offering the opposite. Aung San Suu Kyi once said, “The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear”. If you really want a free country, the first thing you must do is free your mind from fear, and the first thing that the Dutch should do, is free itself from Geert Wilders.

beyone petroleum... but not bullshit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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