Don't Forget Where You Put It If scientists really have created an invisibility cloak, can they prove it? I mean, here's this guy with his hands up as if he's holding something, but you can't see it. Are you sure it's actually there? What happens if you put it down somewhere and can't remember where? I can see this being easily weaponised, too. Remember that jacket with the taser-like electricity delivery system built in? Now add the invisibility cloth as the outer layer.

Around Town
I had such a good time at the State Library in Melbourne, I thought I really ought to check out Sydney's NSW Library. Nowhere near as good. A lot of it was inaccessible, due to renovations or some such, but even what I could see presented none of the grandeur Melbourne put into theirs. Oh, well, it was a nice walk along Macquarie Street, where I could stop and say hello to Dribbles the boar.


As long as I was in a photographing mood, I brought my camera up to the office the following Monday. The industrial park where I work is notable mainly for two things: proximity to Lane Cove National Park and CSIRO, Australia's Commonwealth Science and Research Organisation, which is a number of buildings put up over the years, where experiments of one kind or another are conducted, with some evidence, based on the signage, at this location, that the focus is on food and food resources. "Wealth from Oceans" is one such.

I don't know what they're cooking in this place, but from the effect on the exhaust pipes, it's well done.


And I'm not sure, because I've never seen it in use or any evidence of recent usage, what this wall of glass might be about, but each pane is fitted with a fire suppression sprinkler head, which is my only clue.


Tomorrow is the Seven Bridges Walk, which should be fun and offer more chances to take pictures of stuff. 25 kilometers of stuff, seven of which are bridges, so it'll be a good day. If those thunderstorms hold off.

Killing Joke
There was a Monty Python skit about a joke that was so funny, whoever heard it, or even read it, would keel over dead. Similarly, David Foster Wallace’s epic novel, Infinite Jest, had an eponymous macguffin film that did the same.

There’s an amateur short film contest here in Sydney, called “Tropfest”, and back around the time of all those Japanese ghost story movies and Hollywood remakes, I suggested to someone trying to think of an entry that she should spoof The Ring, but instead of a videotape, it would be a cellphone call – “The Ringtone.”

It seems, however, that real life trumps art. It's a science fiction aphorism that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, although we may tend to lose sight of just how far apart our various societies are from one another in the latest stages of globalisation.

Boom
The Large Hadron Collider is up and running, and so far no black holes sucking us into another dimension. At least, not that we’re aware of. Let’s see what happens when they actually start smashing up protons.

Life, Meet Art
Finding Nemo: it’s all true.

The Future of Death Valley
I don’t usually buy into the standard time estimates for the development of some technology or whatever that will change the future. You know, “in 5 years,” “10 years,” etc., we’ll be doing this, having that, live like this. So when somebody tells me we could have 69% of America’s energy supplied by solar power by 2050, I’m sceptical. Not because I don’t believe the technology is possible, but because the implementation is projected as taking place in less than 50 years. I’m sure it’s possible, just not probable, and certainly doesn’t factor in the opposition it would face. Vast swathes of southwestern desert don’t get converted into solar farms that easily. The studies that would have to be done are as immense as the areas of land to be converted. Should we care about all the gila monsters and cactus species to be dispossessed? What would the effect be on the weather? Global warming? It’s hard enough to work out what’s going on as things stand, but such a massive implementation would have to be transformative in many ways, and not just on reducing fossil fuel dependence and carbon emissions. On the other hand, I know a country with an even bigger area of desert where such a project could be accomplished, although the subsidies projected in this study may be out of reach.

Island of Lost Souls
Human-Animal embryos? That’s just wrong. England, a pioneering country against animal cruelty and vivisection, is going down a seriously dangerous path here. What would H.G. Wells say?

Plenty for Everybody
The Japanese “research” whaling program is a farce: it’s all about food, and probably a substantial amount of it is pet food. Well, pet’s have to eat, too, I suppose. Still, the arguments put forward by Minoru Morimoto, Japan’s commissioner to the IWC, are largely just an attempt to recast the argument, making out Australia as irrational and out-of-step with a substantial international community, who all, quite reasonably, kill and eat marine mammals, including whales. Do Australians eat much dolphin? No more than Canadians are stuffing themselves silly with seal burgers. But what’s really getting up Morimoto’s nose is Australia’s insistence on claiming a 200-mile area of prime whale breeding grounds off Antarctica, and the High Court’s decision that any whaling by Japan in that zone would be a crime, albeit a crime without any recourse to justice, as well as the successful chase by Greenpeace of the Japanese fleet (and now the outcry over the hostages).

If Japan was honest about their intentions, then we might really be able to make progress towards an end to commercial whaling. Instead, they play Simpsons-esque tobacco giant games to ensure a steady demand and to drum up support for their fleet and activities, while claiming it’s all about the science. “We now know more about . . . whale biology than at any time in history”, Morimoto says, and I’m sure that’s true, as far as it goes, but what did we learn this year different from last year or in the last ten years that’s actually helpful to anyone, let alone helpful to whales themselves? That they’re delicious deep-fried? I think someone already worked that out, besides which, there are many other things also delicious prepared that way.

We’ve got a positive result in the High Court, and maybe we can translate that into something bigger. Meanwhile, Japan’s behavior gets more intransigent.

There’s a Movie About This
Make that a lot of movies: Japanese government believes in UFO’s. No reports on Mechagodzilla, though.

R.U.R. Update
There’s my robot. My God, it even pours for you. Reminds me of someone (and not the obvious someone, either).

Advances Australia
There are a panoply of Australian inventions that we can point to with great pride, chief among them the cochlear implant, Australian Rules Football, and Tim Tams. And now, a wash-and-wear wool suit.

The Eye of the Beholder
If a bad self-image is a brain glitch, what about when someone really is ugly?

Moving
Don’t you love (un)natural phenomena? The sliding rocks of Racetrack Playa (via Kottke.org) are explained as the result of strong winds, maybe, but I think I saw something about this on ”The Outer Limits”, when I was a kid: they’re alive, and if they ever get out of the desert, they’ll take over the world. Where’s a scientist with a steel plate in his head when you need one? Or one with a video camera and some weather station equipment.

R.U.R
Across from the office, the ASIMO show is being set up. For the last three days, workers have been slowly assembling the tent where Honda’s robot will dance around for the delight of school children impressed by such things. I’m more impressed by the vacuum cleaner robot, but I don’t know a lot about what ASIMO does these days. Runs, I hear. Bet he can’t build a car. Well, it’s bad enough robots are taking over factory jobs, but they’re infiltrating aged care, too. Actually, that’s pretty impressive. I mean, tomato sauce and toast, not so much, but maybe he’d bring me a beer.

Frankenfood Lurches Closer
NSW will allow farmers to grow genetically modified canola crops, a decision that’s sure to stir up controversy, even if mainly from other states not yet on the GM bandwagon. Segregation of GM and non-GM crops sounds good, but is unlikely to achieve anything. Cross-pollination is a near certainty, which I’m sure will help Monsanto out no end. While I’m sure there’s nothing in the plants that would be harmful to humans, and genetic modification is only a high-tech method of selective breeding, I still have questions and don’t trust politicians to ask the right ones themselves. Using the genetic material of a disease-resistant soy bean to produce a likewise resistant corn makes me wonder what other, unidentified characteristics might be transmitted at the same time? Soy bean to soy bean breeding programs differ in that they’re not transgenic. So what’s being done with the canola? How many generations of regrowth have been studied? What nutritional implications are there?

I’m still waiting for my heirloom tomatoes to start producing, but it’s starting to look like I need a bigger garden.

Advances in Science
Via Arts & Letters Daily, an analysis of paranormal phenomena that disproves the existence of ghosts, vampires, and zombies. Except that the two physicists have failed to do so, due to having incompletely understood the governing “rules.” Ghosts, for example, can walk up stairs because they’re not walking. They’re floating. They appear to walk because the ghost, as a being trapped in the physical plane by their inability to accept their transition to the spiritual realm, emulate their own past behaviors. Vampires would not overrun the earth, or haven’t already, because the assumption here, that being bitten by a vampire creates a vampire, subtracting a human, is incorrect. Vampires are created when humans consume the blood of a vampire and then die, whether from being “drained” by the vampire or otherwise. Not all victims so partake, so the vampire population is not exponentially increased, neither is the human population exponentially decreased. Zombies of the “28 Days Later” or “Night/Dawn/Day of the [Living] Dead” variety are not the same as traditional zombies, per the discussion of the case in Haiti. Modern movie zombies are more akin to vampires, and, as per that discussion, don’t exist, because their bite, or body fluid transmission, invariably infects the victim, and would therefore cause an exponential population dominance transfer, as depicted in the example movies. However, traditional zombies may yet be considered as possible, since these are brain-damaged persons, whether by the malicious infliction of drugs or by disease, who fall into the control of unscrupulous persons, who treat them as slaves or as agents of terror.

I mean, really, if you watch the movies, the rules aren’t that hard to figure out, and the traditional explanations are pretty clear after all this time. Scientists, go figure.

You Throw Like a Girl
And now, for just $25, you can prove it. (Via Josh Rubin’s Cool Hunting.) But do not whack it with your personalized Louisville Slugger.

Mind Games
Weird. Initially, the dancer spun counter-clockwise, but, as the article points out, you can switch it with a little concentration, so I got my right hemisphere engaged - somehow. Oddly, when I began the keystrokes to copy the URL for this post, the spin reversed, presumably because my right-brain kicked back in to accomplish this task. Don't you love science?