I don’t think there’s much I can say that this video doesn’t illustrate a whole lot better.
Though this NYT graphic of budget surplus forecasts is pretty fun too.
two horrid wank-word trends
This is just a quick one really, a follow-up to my rant on wanky weasel words from a month or two ago. The first irksome cliche I’ve been shuddering about seems only to come from one person whose articles I read. I won’t name them, because aside from this irritating habit their articles are really great stuff. It’s just that there’s no reason why I should ever be asked to keep anything “in my thought orbit”. I’d be happy to bear something in mind. I’m willing not to forget. However, I refuse point-blank to keep something in my thought-orbit. Besides, I’d be the first to admit that my mind is incapable of gathering circling objects by sole virtue of its enormous mass.
The other phrase that’s really grinding my gears is a proclamation that “the optics are bad”. Or worse, that “the optics are terrible”. When a situation or someone’s actions create a poor impression, we’re generally not talking about how it literally looks. Surely the point is that the result is a negative emotional reaction is caused by the idea of what has happened. The aesthetic is not what’s important here, it’s the concept. To say that the optics of a situation is bad is to me equally as incongruous as saying, “You’re doing so well! I mean, you’re literally on fire out there!”
Bah. These don’t sound clever. They don’t get the point across more clearly and they’re not precious little nuggets of poetry. They’re both just a couple more examples of irritating cliches that distract and confuse. Stop that!
a few interesting things about our censorship system
I was reading this article on Refused Classification (RC) over at libertus.net and there were a few bits that jumped out at me, either because I wasn’t aware of them or because I’d not thought terribly deeply about them. Here, what do you think?
All web pages are required to be classified as “film”, regardless of their content
According to the Commonwealth Classification Act, a film is defined as “any […] form of recording from which a visual image, including a computer generated image, can be produced”.
Stephen Conroy has repeatedly asserted that RC content can’t be bought “[…] in a bookstore, you can’t go the movies and watch it, you can’t buy a DVD and look at it, and you can’t see it in newspapers. This is material that’s already banned in Australia.”
What he doesn’t mention is that some RC content can be bought in several shops not 10 minutes walk from my house. I’m talking about printed publications that include fetish material. Regardless of your opinion on that kind of material, a description of mild or stronger fetish activity here on this website would be eligible for blocking by the mandatory content filter, but would be perfectly legal to buy in a shop.
Huh. So if fetish material would be RC on the internet (and therefore blocked), I wonder what else would be RC that we might not expect?
Minor Crimes
Conroy also often talks about RC being the “worst of the worst”, child pornography and extreme violence and whatnot. Did you know though, that Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure was refused classification because it “provided elements of promotion of the crime of graffiti”. It was described by The Age as “Set in a city of the future, the game features a world where freedom of expression is suppressed by a tyrannical city government. Players battle the authorities to overthrow corrupt officials using only street fighting skills and graffiti”.
How about a satirical newspaper article in the La Trobe University student paper called “The Art of Shoplifting” being refused classification? There are several other cases of material being refused classification for similar reasons.
Looks like RC is not really the “worst of the worst” then, is it? Actually, it looks like the scope of RC is really pretty broad. Well that’s a bit troubling, because I’ve gotten the impression from Senator Conroy that this material is illegal! Does that mean I’ve been breaking the law if I’ve seen anything like this on the Internet? Actually, it turns out…
In most cases, possession of RC content is legal in Australia (except in WA and the NT)
Yep – as the law stands today, it’s legal to access or obtain via the Internet and to possess most RC material (with the exception of child exploitation/abuse type material). It’s legal for you to possess an RC video game and to play it. It’s legal for you to access and view YouTube videos about graffiti on the Internet. It’s legal for you to own and view personally an RC film like Baise Moi, in your own home. Mandatory content filtering will prevent Internet users from conducting what are currently totally legal activities in their own home.
The upshot
Censorship as applied in Australia today is inconsistent across media, illogical in its application to new technologies and yet for the most part is not applicable when considering personal possession.
With all this talk about the mandatory filter, maybe we’ve missed the broader picture that our censorship system is really quite broken. I really do recommend going and reading that full article on libertus.net if you have the time.
english-ish gibberish – ollraight!
This video was floating around on Twitter a couple of months back – it’s gibberish made to sound like American English to a non-English speaker. Neato!
beyond conspiracy and one world government
There are a few succinct explanations of the nature of climate change around and I thought it might be nice to spread the word a little bit further. The waters have become so muddy on the issue that we’re getting beyond “the climate isn’t changing,” “it’s just part of a natural cycle” and “even if it’s getting hotter, it’s not a bad thing.”
It’s now strange conspiracy theories of grant money hungry scientists and a complicit media manipulated by huge green companies’ agendas. All of them chasing riches, and some attempting to bring about a new world order.
Sometimes it’s worthwhile to take a step back from the current debate and get back to some fundamentals. Here’s a condensed version of a fairly science-heavy article entitled “The CO2 problem in 6 easy steps” from realclimate.org. It aims to explain why increasing CO2 is a problem without using models:
- There is a natural greenhouse effect. This is illustrated through calculations based on the mean temperature of the earth, the amount of energy arriving at the earth and the fact that the planet is in radiative equilibrium.
- Trace gases contribute to the natural greenhouse effect. Remember high-school chemistry – spectrometry? IR spectra from space show absorption lines associated with CO2, H2O vapour, CH4 etc. The effect of CO2 in the mix has been calculated from these spectra, and it’s significant.
- The trace greenhouse gases have increased markedly due to human emissions. We know CO2 has increased by more than 30% and methane has more than doubled.
- Radiative forcing is a useful diagnostic and can easily be calculated. This one involves some scary maths for the layperson, but the conclusion is that a change in the radiation budget at the top of the atmosphere is a pretty good predictor of future surface temperature change. Read the original article for more detail.
- Climate sensitivity is around 3ºC for a doubling of CO2. By analysing the climate’s response to known forcing changes from the past, it is possible to derive a sensitivity figure of ~3ºC.
- Radiative forcing x climate sensitivity is a significant number. Current forcing from trace gasses implies an equilibrium of around 1.2ºC – since we aren’t there yet (~0.7ºC of warming to date), we’ve still got another 0.5ºC in the pipeline. Additional forcing from additional emissions as per BAU is calculated to result in 2ºC to 5ºC warming – significant, right?
And if you want more information about this stuff, check out “Is Global Warming Still Happening?” and “Empirical evidence that humans are causing global warming” from Skeptical Science.
pretty pictures
Last night I finally finished uploading my many, many photos from New Zealand to my gallery, and a small selection to Facebook. Here are a few tasters, either click on the image or click “gallery” up the top to view them all (edit: you need to register to see any pictures of people such as me):