Ok, breather done. Thanks, fellas.

Hi! Remember me?

I’ve been neglecting my blog lately but today it looked at me with big chocolate puppy dog eyes… so I’m back.

I have a post coming in the next couple of days about the Oprah-endorsed self-help sensation that is Eckhart Tolle. I’ve just finished reading his first book, The Power of Now, and I’m surprised because it didn’t make me as angry as I was expecting it to. Tolle’s writings are Philosophy Lite – he doesn’t say anything that hasn’t been said before (good and bad), but he says those things in a highly superficial way, to appeal to those who want easy answers and perhaps don’t really like reading.

I am also reading all the books shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award this year. I’ve finished 4 of them, and am about to start reading the fifth. The winner of the award will be announced on June 19, which gives me a bit of time to make my predictions and discuss them with you, dear reader. Hang on to your hats for that one.

Right. There. It’s in black and white, so I can’t possibly go back on my word. I will see you all very very soon.

Pee Ess: Don’t forget to submit your evolution-themed films to Kino Evolution on YouTube by June 30. The theme for July will be announced in mid-June.

Science-themed short film group on YouTube: Kino Evolution

UPDATE: I’ve been thinking about this quite intensively for the last couple of hours, and come up with a bit more of a plan of how this might work. I’ve set up a YouTube channel for Kino Evolution – it looks quite sparse at the moment, but with your help, I’m sure it’ll be a hive of activity very soon .

I think the best way to kick-off Kino Evolution is to throw out a challenge to all you filmmakers out there. Make a short film (fiction, documentary, animation, whatever) with the theme of ‘Evolution’. It’s a pretty broad theme, so you could, for example, make a romantic comedy about a biologist who falls in love with a young-earth creationist, or an animation demonstrating the evolution of the fruit fly… whatever you decide.

It has to be under 10 minutes by YouTube’s rules, and Kino Evolution reserves the right to not include a film if we think it is unscientific or off-topic. I know, I know, it’s sooooo unfair

All you have to do once you’ve made your film is to upload it to YouTube, then send the URL of the video to kinoevolution[at]gmail[dot]com, and we’ll include it on the playlist!

I’m going to give you all a deadline for this. Have your URLs submitted to the email addy above by June 30 2008.

Who knows, if this takes off, we could have a different theme every month! So do like the Kino kids all over the world do, and get filming!

————————————————————————————

Since 2005, I’ve been involved with a world-wide short film movement called Kino. Kino was founded in Montreal by a group of friends who were tired of sitting around waiting for funding, and decided they would stop whining (at which filmmakers are very adept), get off their butts and just make some damn films.

Some of these Kino founders came to my hometown of Adelaide in 2005 to run a Kino Kabaret (a week-long workshop) at the Adelaide Film Festival. After a week of intense filmmaking with some wonderful people (we made and screened films every 48 hours for 8 days), KinoAdelaide was born. 3 years later, we have hosted annual Kabarets of our own, and conducted (more or less) monthly screenings during the year where local and international Kino filmmakers can show off their hard work to slightly drunk, rowdy and usually appreciative audiences.

It’s not all fun and games, of course, when filmmakers and their egos are involved. Oh, and the apathetic and self-serving nature of Adelaideans generally doesn’t help either. So I made my exit from running KinoAdelaide after 3 years, and the co-organisers I’ve worked with for the last little while have since hung up their hats too. KinoAdelaide continues, with some new organisers and new filmmakers, but I don’t have much to do with it.

But I still love the idea of Kino. And I love science.

So I’m proposing to start a science-themed Kino group on YouTube. It won’t be a traditional Kino group, in that it will not geographically located in any particular city, but the basic philosophy will remain the same. All you science communicators and filmmakers – instead of sitting around whining about how disorganised/underappreciated/underrepresented science communication is, get yourselves a camera and shoot something to show the rest of the world!

I haven’t yet worked out all the mechanics of this group. It would have to be moderated to some extent, because it would no doubt be bombarded by pro-Intelligent Design propaganda almost immediately. Perhaps there could be a pre-screening process by a group of people (hey science bloggers, I’m looking at you!). This isn’t exactly in line with Kino philosophy but hey, we’ll call it the evolutionary process in action. In fact, we’ll call the group Kino Evolution.

What do you think? I’d especially appreciate any feedback from those who would be interested in participating in this group.

Dedicated to corporate psychopaths everywhere

 

 

Get this on a T-Shirt at my CafePress store…

Skeptics of Carlos blogtastic carnival

Skeptics of Australia, unite!

For Skeptics of Carlos is giving you the opportunity to spread your word through a new monthly blog circle for Australian bloggers.

The first edition is now up, so go on over there and have a look. There are blog entries from City of Skeptics (South Australia’s very own!); The Griffith University Society for Skeptics and Freethinkers; the person with the name I wish I’d thought of: The Skepbitch; Homologous Legs (who is new to me, so must check it out…); Podblack Blog; and *ahem* me.

Head on over to Skeptics of Carlos for your smorgasboard of Australian flavoured skepticism. Yummy.

And while you’re there, check out where the name ‘Skeptics of Carlos’ came from. If you don’t know the reference, you’re missing out on a magnificient slice of Aussie history!

Missing Douglas Adams

On May 12, 2001, I woke up in bed. This was not unusual, as I had fallen asleep there the previous night. After my quick inventory of body parts – yup, two legs, two arms, remember to swing legs, not arms, out of bed onto floor – I got out of bed, had a shower, and checked my email.

And read the news that Douglas Adams had died.

The impact this news had on me continues to amaze me. I was 21 when DNA (Douglas Noel Adams, for those who don’t know) died, and I had been reading and re-reading his work since I was about 13. I had read The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy at least once a year since I first picked it up. It’s fair to say that I had quite a bit of emotion and personal experience invested in the man’s writing.

But I didn’t actually know him. Personally, I mean. I had never even met him. So I’m still amazed that I cried when I found out DNA died.

I went to his website and wrote a tribute of sorts, explaining in my own impotent words just how sad I was, and found hundreds of other DNA fans doing the same. Those tributes are saved at that website for posterity – and the other day I found the message I left, along with a reply to my message from another fan (which I had never read before).

7 years later, I often find myself seeing or reading about events in the world and wondering what DNA would have said about them. We’ll never know, but we do have the words he left behind. So as a ceremony of remembrance on this anniversary of DNA’s death, I’d like to share with you some of my favourite bits of his writing, in no particular order, as I love them all equally.

Picking these excerpts was really hard, but I didn’t think anyone would appreciate it if I simply transcribed all of DNA’s books into this post. So here goes:

From The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, just before the demolition of the Earth and Arthur Dent’s house, (not in that order):

 ’I'm afraid you’re going to have to accept it,’ said Mr Prosser gripping his fur hat and rolling it round the top of his head, ‘this bypass has got to be built and it’s going to be built!’

‘First I’ve heard of it.’ said Arthur, ‘why’s it got to be built?’

Mr Prosser shook his finger at him for a bit, then stopped and put it away again.

‘What do you mean, why’s it got to be built?’ he said. ‘It’s a bypass. You’ve got to build bypasses.’

You’ve got to build bypasses. And underpasses, and taller buildings, and marinas in environmentally fragile areas so we’ll have somewhere to put our yachts… It’s called economic development, or, if you’re more ideologically inclined, progress. Surely you can’t argue against progress. I quote DNA’s lines silently to myself whenever I hear my boss speak. What else can you expect from the descendents of an unwanted bunch of hairdressers, marketing executives and telephone sanitisers…

DNA also created the one of the best curmudgeonly characters I’ve ever come across. Marvin, oh dear sweet Marvin, who was initially created for only one episode of the radio show, but was brought back (thankfully) due to popular demand:

A spasm of despair shook the robot’s body as he turned.

‘Come on,’ he droned, ‘I’ve been ordered to take you down to the bridge. Here I am, brain the size of a planet and they ask me to take you down to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction? ‘Cos I don’t.’

and from The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe:

‘Hey Marvin,’ said Zaphod striding towards him, ‘hey, kid, are we pleased to see you.’

Marvin turned, and in so far as it is possible for a totally inert metal face to look reproachful, this is what it did.

‘No you’re not,’ he said, ‘no one ever is.’

‘Suit yourself,’ said Zaphod and turned away to ogle the ships. Ford went with him.

Only Trillian and Arthur actually went up to Marvin.

‘No, really we are,’ said Trillian and patted him in a way that he disliked intensely, ‘hanging around waiting for us all this time.’

‘Five hundred and seventy-six thousand million, three throusand five hundred and seventy-nine years,’ said Marvin, ‘I counted them’.

‘Well, here we are now,’ said Trillian, feeling – quite correctly in Marvin’s view – that it was a slightly foolish thing to say.

‘The first ten million years were the worst,’ said Marvin, ‘and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million I didn’t enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.’

I wish I could be so eloquent in my angsty moments.

One of the reasons I admire DNA is that although he wasn’t a trained scientist, he loved science and technology. He mentioned in a few interviews that if he could re-live his university days, he might have chosen zoology as a field of study. If I could re-live my university days, I would probably study astronomy. Or maybe glaciology – that would certainly serve my ice fetish well. But I understand the yearning to understand science, especially modern developments in science, but being held back somewhat by not being able to access all the technology and knowledge.

Even though he knew so much, DNA had a way of writing about dense subjects like cosmology in a way that didn’t rely on the the reader’s familiarity with these subjects. He didn’t alienate his readers by showing off his knowledge. When I first read the books at 13, I knew very little about science (much of my science education was self-directed, and didn’t happen ’til I was about 20). But I knew that what I was reading was very, very funny.

As I re-read DNA’s books each year (yes, I’m a nerd), I started to understand more of the scientific references, which only increased my appreciation of just how clever he was. For example, I came quite late to the ‘intelligent designer’ issue in biology, but once I understood what it was, reading the passage below about the speech-translating Babel fish became so much sweeter:

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

The argument goes something like this: “I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”

“But,” says Man, “the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.”

“Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

Apart from the scientific references, there are other references in the book which started out as a mystery to me, and now make up some of my favourite sections. The best of these is the story of Krikkit.

My family moved to Australia when I was 10, and that was pretty much my first introduction to the sport of cricket. Lost in its bewildering rules, I wondered if any human could possibly be responsible for inventing this sport, and more importantly, I wondered why they’d bother. Cricket was invented by the British, so maybe they were trying to make up for foisting cucumber sandwiches on an unsuspecting world. Thankfully, DNA offers this explanation for cricket in Life, the Universe and Everything. Slartibartfast speaks:

‘The game you know as cricket,’ he said, and his voice still seemed to be wandering list in subterranean passages, ‘is just one of those curious freaks of racial memory which can keep images alive in the mind aeons after their true significance has been lost in the mists of time. Of all the races in the Galaxy, only the English could possibly revive the memory of the most horrific wars ever to sunder the Universe and transform it into what I’m afraid is generally regarded as an incomprehensibly dull and pointless game.’

‘Rather fond of it myself,’ he added, ‘but in most people’s eyes you have been inadvertantly guilty of the most grotesquely bad taste. Particularly the bit about the little red ball hitting the wicket, that’s very nasty.’

‘Um,’ said Arthur with a reflective frown to indicate that his cognitive synapses were coping with this as best they could, ‘um.’

Now, don’t get me wrong. I adore cricket. I recommend that anyone who has read The Hitch Hiker’s Guide watch at least one full cricket test match – the whole 4 days of it. Then you’ll really understand what DNA was on about.

Ok, let’s take a quick break and review what I’ve written so far…

This post has been a little fractured, hasn’t it? I find it tremendously difficult to be coherent when it comes to my thoughts about DNA. There’s just so much to tell.

But I’m sure there are others out there with their own stories, and I’d love to hear them. So leave a comment if you feel so inclined, and use this day to read one of DNA’s books, listen to the Hitch Hiker’s radio show, or ponder the answer to the Ultimate Question of life, the universe and everything.

Or, go stick your head in a pig.

(If you think I’m being rude, you’re obviously not as well-versed in Douglas Adams as you should be. Put down the computer and go read some of his stuff. Now. Go.)

Apologies for the delay… have some beer commercials while we wait for takeoff.

Hi everyone,

I was committed to never writing one of those ’sorry I haven’t been blogging’ posts, but here I am, doing exactly that

I think I have the flu, or something very much like it, with all the fun stuff that goes with it: weakness, chills, and aches all over. It’s one of the perks of working in an office with poor ventilation and co-workers with young bug-ridden kids. I don’t get sick easily, but I’ve never been sick more often than since I started working at my current office. Not even when I was a primary school teacher, with 30 of those aforementioned bug-ridden kids hanging around me all day.

Anyway, I’m working on a post at the moment which I promise will be much more interesting than this one. It should be up sometime tomorrow, so please check back then and hopefully you will be so highly entertained and informed that you’ll forget all about this ’sorry I haven’t been blogging’ transgression. It won’t happen again.

In the meantime, please enjoy a sampling of some of my favourite beer commercials. Why, you ask? Well, why not? There’s more to beer ads than the simple act of selling beer.

So much creativity goes into making beer commercials.

The people who write and produce beer commercials are the cream of the advertising industry. I’ve seen too many cars zooming effortlessly through curvy mountain roads and too many girls skipping along beaches during their periods to be impressed anymore (although this Australian ad is a new and slightly cheeky take on the old menstruation/tampon issue). The writers of these commercials know pretty much what will be expected of them. But those who write beer commercials (the good ones anyway) have to think at a higher level. They are expected to be different to what has come before.

It’s not all beer and roses in beer advertising, however. There is still an obvious gender imbalance in beer ads – it is unfortunate that the beer industry hasn’t seen fit to cater as lavishly and humourously to its female customers as to its male ones. Women drink beer too!

As an aside, I wonder if all the cleverness actually pays off? I wonder how many people start drinking a new brand of beer because of the quality of its advertising? Anyone have any data about this they’d care to share?

Here, for your viewing pleasure, are some of my favourite beer ads from the last few years:

A brilliant look at evolution, from Guinness. I wonder what Ben Stein would have to say about this:

The Carlton Draught ‘big ad’, set to the tune of O Fortuna! from Carmina Burana. Speak to any Aussie you know about this ad, and watch their eyes light up:

Molson Canadian ads are always amusing, with their angsty explorations of mainstream Canadian identity:

Ah. I feel better already. ‘Til tomorrow, my friends.

Curmudgeon is a great word

If I said this was a work of fiction, would you respect me more?

I am 28 years old. I have a job towards which I am mind-numbingly apathetic. I feel, like most egomaniacs, that I am capable of greater things but that I am being robbed of my true potential, and that I am systematically under-appreciated. I drag myself to work each day dreading the new forms of stupidity that will have evolved overnight, and I skip to the bus stop at home time. I skip merrily.

And I have angst – truckloads of the stuff. Emo kids have nothing on me.

All of this makes me extremely short-tempered and pedantic. I had a ten-minute argument with someone at work today about the placement of an apostrophe. Look, it’s not that I think you’re stupid for not knowing where that apostrophe goes, it’s just that I know more about punctuation than you. You do what you’re good at and I’ll do what I’m good at. That way, we’re all happy. It’s just unfortunate you DON’T GET PAID TO TALK ABOUT SHOES.

I draw pretty graphs for a proud capitalist so that he and his diamond-studded-dollar-sign-cufflink-wearing friends can buy their fourth houses, third yachts, and second wives. Meanwhile, I think twice about buying lunch two days in a row. When he’s tipsy, the proud capitalist tells me he sees potential in me - which makes me want to run home to have a shower. In fact, pretty much the only time he talks to me and others like me is when he’s drunk. Last time he asked us how we were, unprovoked, one of my colleagues was so sure he couldn’t be talking to her that she ignored him until he walked away.

Maybe if I ignore this job long enough, it too will just walk away. Unfortunately for the sanity of people around me, I need this job right now. As soon as I don’t need it anymore, I will be moving to the Yukon with a team of sled-dogs. I know mail in the Yukon isn’t delivered by sled anymore, but I’ll convince Canada Post to pay me to offer this ‘olde worlde’ experience to Twitter-weary travellers.

Until then, I will daydream frequently and drink beer only a little less frequently. And hug my lovely husband, who has to listen me going on about this every day.

I hope I have managed to emotionally blackmail you into leaving a comment to this post. But don’t let it keep you up at night if you decide not to. It’s only to be expected. Rotten bloody world.

Time for my annual shower: Eta Aquarids

UPDATE 2: Didn’t actually get up in time this morning, but there were clouds everywhere in any case.

UPDATE: I got up at 4am and everything, but no joy. All I saw was the almost total cloud cover. I’ll try again tomorrow morning, I guess Any reports from people who did see something?

Maybe this should have been my Friday Lovefest post, but I only came across it a few moments ago:

My New Scientist feed tells me that the Eta Aquarids meteor shower this year peaks on a moonless night. The Eta Aquarids meteor shower is the one of the best we see in the Southern Hemisphere. I’ve been dabbling in meteor shower-gazing ever since I saw my first Earthgrazer during the Leonids shower a couple of years ago, which resulted in excited squealing and my running around the backyard like a madwoman. I get excited easily. 

Earthgrazers are seen when the radiant of a shower is low on the horizon. At this time, debris tends to ‘graze’ the upper atmosphere in a sideways direction, creating long, bright paths across the sky. As the radiant gets higher in the sky, debris falls through the atmosphere at a steeper angle, creating much shorter paths.

For all you Northern Hemisphere readers, New Scientist has this to say about the Eta Aquarids:

Because the meteors will appear to originate from a point near the horizon as seen from the northern hemisphere, the debris tends to travel through the upper atmosphere “sideways”, producing bright meteors known as Earthgrazers. The best chance of catching these is around 0200 local time.

Question for those of you more well-versed in astronomy than me: if Earthgrazers appear when the radiant is close to the horizon, doesn’t that mean that Southern Hemisphere viewers will also see them when the radiant first rises in the east?

Even if we don’t see any Earthgrazers, Southern Hemisphereans can console themselves with the fact that we will see a higher hourly rate than our Northern counterparts (20-60 meteors, compared with 5-10 in the North).

What you need to know if you want to see this shower:

The Eta Aquarids shower is caused by Halley’s Comet. From the previously mentioned New Scientist article:

…every time it passes near the Sun on its 76-year orbit, the nucleus of the icy object sheds about 6 metres of material, which spreads out along the comet’s orbit. Twice a year, the Earth runs into this dusty detritus, producing the eta Aquarids in May and the Orionids in October.

You will be able to see meteors from this shower if you get up before sunrise in the next few days, but the best time to see the shower in Oz is before sunrise on Monday 5th May (although viewing should be pretty good on Sunday 4th May and Tuesday 6 May, as well). Look to the east, as the meteors will appear to be radiating from the constellation of Aquarius. More information on this shower, from the International Meteor Organisation, can be found here.

I’m gonna be sleepy at work next week!  

Friday Lovefest #2: The sublime and the ridiculous

This edition of Friday Lovefest will not contain the same levels of unadulterated adulation as the previous one. You’ve been warned.

Today’s edition is all about the juxtaposition of the sublime in life with the ridiculous, and how it can lead to oases of sanity and pleasure in an otherwise uninspiring day. It’s 1:45 in the pee em as I write this, and I’ve achieved absolutely nothing today, work-wise. What I have accomplished is an extra-long lunch break where I had a wonderful noodle dish (the sublime) while reading The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle (the ridiculous).

It’s just one of those damn days. I don’t exactly hate my job, because the word ‘hate’ suggests I possess strong emotion towards it. Oh no, I don’t hate my job. I just can’t be stuffed with it any more. And that’s worse than hate. As Warren Zevon sang, “I’d rather feel bad than not feel anything at all”.

Feeling unmotivated to tackle the next piece of inanity in my ever-expanding inbox, I thought I would escape for a while in to the fresh air and dappled sunshine. I am lucky that my office is located in the same street as the State Library, the Art Gallery of South Australia and the South Australian Museum, so today I walked over to the library and decided to browse a while amongst the shelves and tattered covers.

I came across The Power of Now  – the first book written by Oprah’s latest New Age obsession, Eckhart Tolle. I’ve mentioned that I was feeling a little down, right? Well, what better to perk me up than a surge of anger at the ramblings of the latest self-proclaimed ’spiritual teacher’? I’d struck the motherlode!

I borrowed the book, legged it to my favourite little noodle shop, and cosily ensconced at my favourite table, I began surging with anger and giggling in turns at the unmatched silliness that is Eckhart Tolle and the people that endorse him.

I only read the introduction and first chapter at lunch, but even at that point, the anti-science jibber-jabber and self-aggrandising is at a frenzied pace. I won’t quote from the book right now because I will faint from embarrassment if any of my workmates catch me with it in my hands. They might even ask to borrow it, in which case I will progress from fainting to death. 

You’ll just have to wait ’til I get it home. I can’t wait to share this experience with all of you

Oh, and the fried tom yam noodles I had were delicious. Really, really terrific.

This is your brain on climate change denial

Dedicated to all those so-called journalists who mistake ‘weather’ and ‘climate’ and don’t know the difference between ‘proof’ and ‘evidence’. May that populist rag, the Adelaide Advertiser, keep giving you column space because I don’t want you to starve and thankfully, no one with half a brain takes it seriously anyway.