July 25, 2010

Letter to the Editor, Australian Election

I had a thought during this election – and wanted to express it.

The traditional venue, beyond blogs and opinion, is Letters to the Editor: in the hope that one might be considered.

I found a page at the Age online (http://www.theage.com.au/) where I could write:

“Dear Sir/Madam,

I think it important in the context of the present election debate to point out that

both Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard are naturalised British immigrants.

The hypocrisy of the whole argument about immigration is breathtaking.

Is anyone actually ‘from here’? I think we know the real answer.

sincerely,

Peter Morse.

PS. I am an immigrant as well – from Britain. After 30+ years, it is an alien country to me, as here is my home.

I am naturalised.. I am very lucky to live here and I appreciate that fact – and, more particularly, I enjoy the emergent multi-culturalism of our modern society.”

 

I haven’t found anywhere at the Murdoch Press – i..e the increasingly right-wing rag ‘The Australian.’

 

Try it and see: go here and search for ” letter to the editor” : http://www.theaustralian.com.au/

You will be presented with garbage in response.

Very telling.

July 6, 2010

Tobias Stretch animations

Just discovered the work of Toby Stretch via a video on the Guardian (Crystal Fighters ‘In the Summer’) – it’s really amazing work.

Lots more at his website: http://web.mac.com/tobystretch/Site/Film.html  - be interesting to find out more about him.

What struck me is the use of Pagan English imagery – corn gods, straw men and so on – actually very powerful stuff when used in this way – a kind of mythic pantheon of figures and bizarre hinted-at tales and relationships, referring to those forest and harvest spirits lurking just out of sight. I have to admit – it has a powerful charm – and is used here with a slight sense of threat – as opposed to a kind of dreadful kitsch ‘druidic’ celtic norse rune-stones type of bollocks.

Anyway – inspired and inspiring work – I’m a fan.

 

 

June 29, 2010

GOCE Gravity Map of Earth

Interesting post in slashdot:

“The European Space Agency’s GOCE satellite, launched in March 2009, has provided a spectacular, highly detailed map of our favorite gravity well. This map shows the normalized surface of the earth as defined by gravity, showing the relative altitude differences from the average for each surveyed point. The article provides the helpful metaphor that a ball resting on this surface would not roll anywhere, even though there would be visual slopes, as gravity is equalized across the globe. There is a fascinating deep area in the Indian ocean (-100M) and a high area near Iceland (+80M), proving conclusively that our world is not homogeneous in terms of density (or practically any other measure). 

The article links to the BBC story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8767763.stm

and three earth-observation websites:

ESA GOCE: http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/GOCE/index.html

Earth Explorers (ESA): http://www.esa.int/esaLP/ASEWGWNW9SC_LPearthexp_0.html

GRACE (Uni Texas): http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace/

ONERA:  http://www.onera.fr/synindex/accelerometres-ultrasensibles.html

I will have to return to these to look through the data – so this post is mainly for my own reference. I wonder what can be visualised from these data?

 

 

June 25, 2010

Revivifying the ancient blog, FB decisions

OK – I have finally got my blog client running – Marsedit, having faffed around with the increasingly ancient and annoying ecto. Interesting featureset and a nice interface means that I will migrate entirely to marsedit, methinks. It looks like I can edit all my blog entries and wordpress pages offline – which is marvellously convenient for when I don’t have network. Now – I wonder if there is a Marsedit iPad app?

Here’s my first post, anyway – more to come. I’ve decided to re-orient my activity away from Facebook as that is an appalling black hole into which your information disappears, and there is no way of getting it out – or, at least, it is not simple. So Facebook will be useful for trivia and propaganda and social networking fun, but that’s it. I won’t use the FB messaging system anymore and simply ask people to email me – I don’t like the thought of my email being plumbed for advertising or other purposes unknown to me by some giant company. I guess that includes gmail too.

Naturally, I also have to go through every single post here to reconfigure it – get the links and pictures working, the movies etc. A slow job to do over time – and there are blog entries from other sites I want to draw in and centralise. It’ll be fantastic to have it finally all sorted in one place. The hope is that this will also spur me to be a more regular blogger – as I used to be – assuming it is of interest.

February 13, 2010

Hacker spaces

I thought this was pretty interesting: http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Hackerspaces

The idea is community-operated physical spaces where people meet and work on projects – described in this Wired article as a ‘Fight Club for Nerds.’ What’s interesting is how global it is and that there are quite a few operating in Australia (map) .

What’s appealing about it is the shared resources and expertise – something very useful when you have a crazy idea for a project but can’t quite pull it off yourself. This is something I discovered when inventing the Hurley Dolly – couldn’t have done it without Chris – but that’s a story for another post.


May 4, 2008

Boolardy

Here’s a 25 minute videoblog of a recent helicopter trip to Boolardy, with colleagues from UWA. Uploaded soonish…

January 28, 2008

Mawson’s Huts Foundation Blog

The blog for the Mawson’s Huts Foundation 2007-8 Expedition can be found here:
http://mawsonshutsexpedition2007-8.blogspot.com/
I set this up in blogger because of the convenient email-to-post feature in blogger, that enabled us to post text and images via email over the iridum phone – our only form of internet access (i.e. no web-bowsing) – with posts limited to 25kb, except for the occasional picture post (up tp 100kb!).

November 2, 2007

Mawson’s Huts – after 7 years!

This is one of those things that you superstitiously don’t want to talk about too much before it comes true – but it’s true! I’ve found out – today – that I’ve passed my final medical approval for the forthcoming expedition to Mawson’s Huts with the Mawson’s Huts Foundation – a dream, for me, of 7 years – ever since I returned to Australia from Berlin in 1999. It involved litres (joke) of blood tests, ECG, audiometry, snellen charts, poking, prodding, palpation – just about everything (almost) you could imagine, being assessed as a biological machine. I conclude that I am well and truly alive and can expect to persist for the foreseeable future. This is a good thing. I like being alive.

As for the adventure of sailing to the End of the Earth – I am, well, thrilled; amazed – it’s been such a journey – but worth every minute. I’ll post more details as I embark on this unfolding voyage into my unknown future. It will be the most amazing thing to finally see this place that I have imagined and virtually imaged, for so many years, in all its reality – some empirical resemblance of a dream, but only made real by persisting in that dream and eventually, concretely, rushing into reality. We sail on December 5th, 2007.

August 7, 2007

Roger Penrose on “What Happened Before The Big Bang?”

Just arrived back home after a lecture by Roger Penrose on "What Happened Before The Big Bang?" – incredibly stimulating to hear and see an over-head-projector talk on very complex material by one of the great minds of the 20th and 21st centuries. I will not attempt to make any remarks about the ideas – and the million questions that have have flooded my mind after – other than to say that it was complete privilege to me to be there, and to think of the universe in the most analytical and grandiose terms – how wonderful is consciousness! His idea of "aeons" and the mathematical congruity of the Big Bang singularity and the infinite expansion of the "heat death" of the universe – they are one and the same as types of hyperbolic infinities.

 

It was his birthday today, and in a remarkable human moment, prompted by the kind offices of David Blair, everyone sang him "Happy Birthday" – he must be 77 – and he seemed very moved, but it was a wonderful, sincere moment of appreciation of a great man, who with simple interest had shared a public lecture with us all, with wit and generosity. Fabulous! And good on him:)

May 3, 2007

Boolardy

Here’s a 25 minute videoblog of a recent helicopter trip to Boolardy, with colleagues from UWA. Uploaded soonish…

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