Rumours of rain and war

Done

2008-10-03T11:11:00.002+10:00

I'm embarked on a new voyage. Want to follow me? Go left of the setting sun.

Chris to Google: go Gfck yourselfs

2008-09-22T14:09:00.003+10:00

Dear readers, this is the last post you'll see here on my blogspot account, except for when I put up an address for my new blog (probably wordpress, but I'll decide soon).

I put with the mysterious way blogger handled uploaded images (at least until I got a flickr account). I grumbled about the consolidation of gmail and blogger, but had to concede that since someone was offering me a free service, I was prepared to let them streamline their affairs as they saw fit. I was somewhat more alarmed when the posting and sign-in information that must logically have been available somewhere became publically accessible via a google ap (and if you think that's not a problem, I suggest you ponder the implications for river, or anyone else saying politically sensitive things in regions lacking the rule of law).

The final sticking point was trivial, until you consider that without email, I can't work. Being locked out of gmail for no reason that I can ascertain, albeit temporarily, even though I was only using it for a relay, has caused me to reconsider placing my personal writing and communications at the mercy of a very large corporation who increasingly, I mistrust.

I'll be back, soon, but in a setting whose terms and direction I feel more comfortable with.

Haere ra, Rumours of Rain And War.

Flashes of Auckland

2008-09-19T14:03:00.001+10:00

Yes, I've been here for seven weeks already. No, I haven't come up with a nice flowing blog post about being an ex-expat and all that. Of course Auckland is the last place I ever expected to find myself living, but now that I'm here it's not what I expected, and I like it.

It's a beautiful place, this. Whether it's the greenery that seems to be in every suburb, the way you always seem to end up facing Rangitoto, or the sudden view from the top of our road of Great Barrier Island and the mountains of the Coromandel peninsula lit up by the low afternoon sun after a rainy day, I'm continually stopped in my tracks. I will shortly get a myself a compact film camera (now about $20 on Trademe) to carry around.

The coffee! I could cry, honestly, and how good the average coffee is in this city. Call me tragic, I'm an Epicurean and I like my food and drink, which brings me to: the food! Various flavours of Indian, Thai, old-school bakeries with yummy stuff like pecan muffins, cheap and tasty meat pies (to any Australians reading: you have no idea what I'm talking about when I refer to a good meat pie).

Shame about the drivers. Aucklanders, you can't drive. You're inverterate tailgaters, you don't know how to use roundabouts, you quite frequently act as if you don't know where you're going, and your inability to merge is the main reason your motorways don't work.

I'm not too thrilled about the cheddar monopoly either, or that fact that wildly exotic fare like haloumi seems to be regarded as some sort of gourmet shit that only yuppies eat, and costs $7 for 100g.

But I do love the tui in the trees, and the beaches, and the way to sea is everywhere. I'm very happy with the train that's 15 minutes walk from my door and runs straight into town (on which the conductors never get around to clipping your ticket about a third of the time). bFM is a reasonable substitute for Triple J, and my local camera shop has Reala on the shelf.

Four years, 11 months, 16 days

2008-07-31T14:46:00.002+10:00

"Is that really how long you've been away?"
"Yeah"*
"Welcome home, then"

*I don't think a couple of one-week trips count...

Scatterlings and refugees

2008-07-11T16:41:00.002+10:00

I seem once again to be entering that phase of life where all my friends are spreading to the four winds. It's an occupational hazard of being in academia, and I'm about to join the diaspora myself. Although I don't think it counts as a diaspora if you're returning to the country of your birth.

It's a sad thing saying goodbye to people you've come to know well, and even in this highly-connected age of cheap air travel, it'll be a few years before I see some of them again. I hereby commend to you a rather sad, beautiful song by Joshua Ellis, he of Zenarchery, that dwells upon this very subject. This is a legitimate download direct from the artist's website, by the way. If you like it, go tell him so, or drop some money in his commercial front at red state soundsystem.

Scatterlings and refugess (demo).mp3

How to get a frog in your trousers

2008-04-30T10:07:00.000+10:00

It's not every day that you find a frog in your trousers. Indeed, some might say that they've never had one at all. It was something of a surprise to me, let me tell you. Would you like to know how I found a frog in my trousers? Are you sitting comfortably? Actually, I don't care how you're sitting, read my blog in whatever position you want. I'll begin however you are.

ANZAC weekend, tempting as it may be, isn't a particularly good time to go on a camping trip, especially not when it coincides with the end of the school holidays. Thus went our reasoning, so we didn't. Instead, the urge to leave the benighted, expensive, noisy city was channelled into a daytrip to Wiseman's Ferry, of which I have written before (there's a few pics of the last trip on my flickr page, by the way). I am pleased to report that Deschamps Delights continue to stock a fine range of pickles, and serve an excellent Devonshire tea. But clearly, I digress. Which I reserve the right to do, and if you don't like it you can go find a more linear blogger. Where was I? Oh yes, convict stoneworks.

You may, if you're feeling exceptionally masochistic, walk from Sydney to Newcastle by way of the Great North Walk. This follows, in places, the original overland route from Sydney to Newcastle, from before the time when the inevitable march of progress and the invention of both tarmac and the Otto cycle engine bought the people the F3 freeway. In the vicinity of Wiseman's Ferry it finds the luxury of not one but two convict-era (no, not Howard, the original settlers) tracks to follow. The day-tripper is thus able to avail themselves of the unusual luxury of a loop track, which starts about half a kilometre left of the ferry, goes up the hill to Finches Line, and comes back down about two kilometres down the road after considerable meanderings.

The first, uphill stretch of this track is a startling example of the 19th-century road-builders craft, and for once I am not being facetious, sarcastic, or even slightly silly. Admittedly, they were using convict labour, which was pretty cheap, but you have to hand it to those chappies: when they decided to build a road they Built A Road. There were no temporary measures. This particular bit of civil engineering skirts the side of a rock face one step removed from being a sheer cliff. Fitted stone blocks cut from said cliff face brace the outer side up to the width of a proper horse-and-cart track (they would have been pretty tired horses by the time they got to the top, mind you). Fancy diving-underground drains run under the road from the cliff side and drain out of buttresses on the outside, and thence down lined channels away from the foundations. Switchbacks are done in a proper curve of the wall, with natural watercourses run under the road and carried clear of the foundations on a lipped drain. All of this was built from stone quarried on the spot, faced up square and dry-fitted. We're talking serious stuff here, as testified to by the fact that it's still standing and usable 180 years later. Even more startling, they got the bulk of it done in about six months. Those convicts obviously didn't get much time off, the poor bastards.

Unfortunately for their industry, that inland track never really took off as a way to get from Sydney to Newcastle. Presumably that's why the original road is still there, rather than being buried under disintegrating tarmac. This is all to the good if you want to go for a walk in the bush with a nice view over the Hawkesbury. There was a lyrebird in the bush, giving his all. If you're not familiar with the talents of a male lyrebird when he's after a mate, I'd recommend a trip to YouTube; they're probably the most extraordinary mimics in the animal kingdom. This particular one was doing a fine line in native bird calls: kookaburras, whip birds, currawongs, a smattering of galah, you name it, he was spinning the disk.

The next diversion of a zoological nature was a big ant-hill. Going bush-walking with biologists tends to be full of zoological and botanical diversions, by the way. Australian ant-hills are kind of interesting most of the time. They're not particularly tall, but the ants cover them in different coloured stones depending on what the weather's doing: white on sunny days, dark-coloured on cloudy days. The attraction of this particular nest was that it was sending its winged reproductive offspring off to reproduce or die trying. Attempting to get some decent close-up photos of this event, I rather offended the ants. Australian ants, even in repose, tend to be a confronting if you're accustomed to the insects of more temperate climes. These particular specimens were the wrong side of a centimetre long, with jaws to rather more than match. I submit that most people would be somewhat discomfited to have such beasties swarming up their legs en masse. Eventually, dear reader, I was able to persuade most of them to go elsewhere. I'll leave my capering, leg-shaking and jeans-flicking up to your imagination, I think. Unfortunately they rather had their revenge on me for wasting ant time. They sprayed me with general-purpose attack-this-guy pheromone as they went about their work, and every other line of ants we passed made a beeline for my legs. I hadn't realised just how many ants were along the side of that hill, until that point. Most of them big.

Eventually, order was restored. We continued our loop, along a section that hadn't been subject to the tender ministrations of a British colonial-era roading engineer. The only Australian in our little party almost stepped on a legless reptile (the exact provenance of which is still open to debate: I thought it had external ears, which would make it a legless lizard, but it also had a very short tail, which is more of a snakey characteristic). Orchids were spotted. Apples were eaten. Views were admired. More steps than were cared to be counted were executed in a downwards direction following natural stratigraphic features underlying the the topography of the region, SIR! Ahem. The rather unfortunate ending to this loop track is along the side of a thoroughly 21st-century stretch of road, complete with 21st-century dickheads unfamiliar with the function of the pedal to the left of the accelerator.

Pausing at the ferry ramp to take in the scenery, I noticed yet another example of the local insect life attached to the hem of my trousers. The ant pheromones were obviously still hard at work. This particular one was some sort of wasp, so I chose to flick it off with circumspection. As I was accomplishing this task, I felt something cold and wet against my calf. Anyone who's spent any time in the Australian bush will be thinking "leech" about now. That was certainly my thought, that's why I was shaking my leg with some vigour, and no doubt why the frog fell out and hopped away in such a hurry. I still have no idea how it got there.

Australia's Muldoon?

2008-02-22T20:07:00.000+11:00

I normally try to avoid talking about politics on this blog, and there are other people who do it better. But I thought I might kick John Howard in the head one more time, just to keep the joy fresh. I'd like to share with you, dear readers, a thought that has occurred to me lately.

John Howard is Australia's Rob Muldoon. This only struck me when listening to the long-overdue "sorry" speech back-to-back with David Lange at the Oxford Union, but there's more to it an them both being ousted by fast-talking public-school boys who overshadowed them almost immediately. I'm not prepared to defend the resemblance between Rudd and Lange in any great length, but I think the Howard-Muldoon contrast has legs. Both small-minded, short-statured, xenophobic control freaks who won't be kindly remembered by history. They lived in different worlds, of course; Howard would have wet himself if he could have exercised the kind of power Muldoon had over the nation. But, like Muldoon, the attraction Howard held for the electorate is hard to explain in hindsight.

There a still a few of Muldoon's fanatical fanboys around, albeit diminished in numbers, but it's getting hard to find anyone prepared to admit to supporting the Springbok tour. Or who can remember what they thought, John Keys, you lying coward. It may be too soon to tell what'll happen to the memory of Howard, but Brendan Nelson's pitiful attempt to adopt a Howardesque stance on Aboriginal reconciliation certainly went down like a lead balloon. The man himself was conspicuously nowhere to be seen to defend his long-held position. And while his sycophantic toadies in the publication that we Sydneysiders laughingly refer to as our daily newspaper continue to toe the faltering party line, I think someone should tell them that they're rapidly becoming unfashionable. Miranda Devine, I am looking at you.

Don't pay the ferryman

2008-02-04T17:26:00.000+11:00

So, a while since I've written anything travel-tourist-overseas-adventure styles on these pages. The Indian wedding I was at on the weekend was pretty exotic and I shall hit you up with some Flickr love as soon as it becomes available, dear reader. But on a related note I've been up to Wiseman's Ferry not once but twice in the last two weeks (short version: reconnaissance mission, stag night), and I found that blog-worthy.

If you're not cognisant with the Sydney-speak (and why should you be), Wiseman's Ferry is the car ferry across the Hawkesbury River, up the back of Windsor and Dural; in other words, in the middle of nowhere. The only reason there's anything there at all is that it used to be the main route from Sydney to Newcastle, which just shows how hard against it the burghers of Sydney were getting around the countryside in those days. The terrain is not gentle. The area around Wiseman's Ferry is dominated by the extraordinary land feature that underlies and defines Sydney: a continuous slab of sandstone that starts near Wollongong, runs furrowed and magnificent beneath all the city's famous landmarks, and carries on up to the North where the F3 freeway cuts through sold cliffs of it.

Bondi's trademark headlands are outstretched, rather battered fingers of that same single slab of rock. The CBD is built on it, and many of the historic buildings are built out of the quarried rock. At the end of my street the Lane Cover river has sliced a furrow 100 feet deep out of it, baring cliffs and ledges to which eucalyptus trees cling and cockatoos circle and scream. Near Wiseman's Ferry the Hawkesbury river runs through a deep gorge that has cut right down the layer of stone. The first day we were there was one of Syndey's periodic bouts of soaking wet. The valley was roofed with cloud as we came down the steep, narrow, winding road that drops you from the plateau to the level of the river. Drifts of cloud hung around the broad stripe of orange rock exposed mid-way up each side of the valley. The view was particularly striking from the balcony The Champs Delights, where we took Devonshire Teas and bought pickles. Yes, you're quite right, it was rather civilised.

Calling Wiseman's Ferry a car ferry isn't strictly accurate; there is a car ferry running there (two of them, actually), but there was a ferry there before them, and I'm sure it'll be called the Ferry after they're gone. The ferries themselves are free, which makes the title of this post a bit of a smarty-pants classical allusion rather than something topical, but I'm not prepared to let that stand in the way of a snappy phrase. They also run 24 hours, and I can only imagine that being a night ferryman would be a remarkably boring job, no matter how interesting "Confessions of a Night Ferryman" might sound. Rather more interestingly, Australia's (alleged) oldest pub is up the road from the Ferry, on the other side of the river. Not a great road, it must be said. Not one of the highlights of the Australian driving experience. Fortunately the rain had taken the bite out of the corrugations and made the countryside all green and pleasant in a manner almost, but not entirely, completely unlike England.

I do recommend the pub, though. Just go up the other side of the river so that you approach it across the bridge. I'm a tad unclear on how the location of the pub on the old wagon route relates to the modern position of the ferry 20km downstream, but then again it was raining so we went into the pub instead of standing around outside to read historical summaries.

The stag night? Missed out the pub entirely, went the other way to Millers Creek camping ground. Saw a wombat (pretty cool, that was), failed to persuade it to do anything compromising to the groom. Had to chase brush turkeys away from the food at about 5 in the morning, which I don't really recommend as a start to the day. Didn't see any drop bears. I did take some photos of all this. Eyeball the Flickr widget on the left there, they'll probably go up eventually.

I'd not normally do this

2008-01-18T15:32:00.000+11:00

Deborah reports that Hone Tuwhare has passed away. I'm not hugely familiar with his work, but what I know of it I liked a lot. I also get the feeling that his passing marks the beginning of an end for an era. The world doesn't seem to be producing poets of his ilk any more. In honour of Tuwhare's passing, I'm going to lift a meme, which I don't normally do. John at Evolving Thoughts has one going about poems that stick in your head. I've memorised a few poems in my time, but most of them I had to sit down with for an extended period of time. The things that stick in my head are snatches, short sections that roll of the tongue. I'm a firm believer that poetry is a spoken art form. Hone Tuwhare had a great deep Maori voice that rumbled over the vowels of "Oh, tree..." liked a seasoned orator. There are a couple of poems by Sam Hunt that have snatches like that. From No exit:

Egmont dropping the the rear view mirror, as you drive drunk with all love lost in mind.

I don't condone drink-driving, of course. But I don't condone reading that to yourself, either: stand up and let that lovely alliteration roll of your tongue. I feel the same way about Conrad, incidentally, but people seem to think that's odd. One more piece of Hunt (from Naming the Gods) might, I think, make a fitting end to an obituary.

Ruamoko, earthquake god.

Not that a man dare answer back to a god like that,
Instead fall,
Hug if he can in her turning,
Mother Earth in her pain

There's more. You can go find the book and read if yourself. Aloud.

Nobody likes a smarty pants...

2007-12-20T15:55:00.000+11:00

Regular readers of this blog, and those who know me well, may very well have formed the opinion that I'm not a person with a religious nature. This would be the correct impression. According to the much-maligned Myers-Brigs test I should have spiritual leanings and I could, at a pinch, refer to myself as an Epicurean, but realistically I'm just a plain old unbeliever; an atheist (although I think atheist correctly means godless rather than without belief).

Now atheism of late has become rather trendy in intellectual circles. People whom I respect have signs on their personal websites attesting to their lack of theism, and various intellectual (sometimes self-appointed) heavyweights have weighed in (heavily) with books and essays on the matter. There's even considerable noise being made about evangelical atheism. Despite my self-professed membership of the aforementioned group defined by a lack of something (a dubious way to define a group, as any taxonomist will tell you), I am not about to join the ranks of the evangelical. Let me share with you my reasons...

I am not all opposed to the notion that a person might like, on occasion, to have a good think about their own beliefs. I think it's more than likely that a reasonable person coming at some existing belief-sets with a moderate knowledge of science, sociology and world events could find them a little questionable. Such a person might come away from their good think with a rather less constrained belief system of their own; and good for them. I'm not about to rush about noisily encouraging other people to do likewise, and nor do I particularly care to know the outcome of such a burst of cogitation, one way or another.

Anyone whose tastes in life lie even a little outside the mainstream very rapidly learns that evangelism, be it of God, atheism, vegetarianism, or Macintoshes, is really tedious. There is nothing more boring that someone going on at length about something. The capacity to get really intensely attached to a notion that you simply must persuade others of seems to go hand in hand with being, well, boring. Evangelism is boring, and so, by extension, are evangelists. Jessica Alba in a gold string bikini talking about how great it was being a vegetarian would be boring (I have no idea if the luscious Jessica is vegetarian or not, I'm making a point). PZ Myers talking about developmental biology is fascinating and informative. PZ Myers taking a stick to religion is nigh-on painful, and I haven't read his blog in ages because it's so unattractive. The Selfish Gene is one of the better general books on evolution ever written (even if I don't entirely agree with the premise), but The God Delusion is a bit silly.

In fact the whole concept of evangelical atheism is, in my humble opinion, a bit silly. You'd really really like people to believe in, well, nothing, really... whatever you want, y'know, some sort of rationalism... it sounds like a Monty Python sketch. Surely the whole point of loosing your religion is to get rid of it, not replace it with some other arbitrary set of beliefs that you can proceed to get worked up about? And please nobody come in talking about scientific thought, that's a method, not a belief system. And quite possibly an oxymoron. And I know enough about it to argue that case until the cows come home, get milked, and go back out into the paddock. So there.

I'm aware that there a sadly unenlightened parts of the world where people have to deal with the agendas of self-appointed religious thinkers on a regular basis. That's unfortunate, of course, and a huge drain on resources that would be better spent elsewhere. I don't have to deal with the kind of concerted nonsense that scientists get in those backward countries, but do I teach in biology courses with a strong evolutionary slant. You can't actually teach general biology any other way and do a good job of it, by the way. I've never had a student take exception to that general slant, either because it's pretty obviously the unifying theme in at least one course I teach in (at least the way I teach it), or because they're keeping their real opinions quiet.

If that last point is the case, it's a wise move. I'm an evolutionary biologist with an interest in social history. If anyone does ever seriously try to bring up a creationist line of argument with me in my professional capacity, I've got at my disposal the metaphysical equivalent of a muscle-bound Austrian with a mini-gun and lots of ammunition; the resulting scene would not be pretty. I have no desire to create such a scene in general conversation though. It's not good dinner-table conversation, that's for sure. And it's not an argument I would particularly enjoy, even though I like arguing, for two reasons: firstly, like I said, I don't much care what other people choose to believe in, as long as they're prepared to do me the same courtesy; but mostly because as a wise man (actually it might have been Barbara Hambly) once said, you should never argue with a drunkard or a zealot. Neither of them know when they're beaten. And they're both boring.

And life is too short for all that.

Fin!

2007-12-11T12:24:00.000+11:00

Done. Handed in. Three years, ten months, 23 000 words, 2700 lines of code, about 10 000km, and more coffee than I care to contemplate.

Fin?

2007-12-07T16:01:00.000+11:00

I appear to be finished my thesis.

I say this with something of a sense of caution, since it's not printed yet and Murphy Never Sleeps. I intend to spend the weekend in a state of cautious optimism, and knock on the door of the printer first thing Monday morning...

PS: finished length was 120 pages, all up.

Almost there

2007-12-02T16:53:00.000+11:00

I'm head down at present, polishing all the edges off my thesis to try and hand it in this week.

Last time I was in this position, some disgruntled Arab gentlemen flew a couple of aeroplanes into the World Trade Centre. If something similar happens this time around, could someone please let me know?

Goodbye, Howard

2007-11-26T09:38:00.000+11:00

And good riddance. Now piss of into ignominy where you belong, you racist, war-mongering, self-serving, miserable little ideologue excuse for a human being.

Stardust

2007-10-19T10:22:00.000+10:00

Excellent movie. Go see it while it's still on the big screen.

The finer things in life...

2007-10-15T14:23:00.000+10:00

Having a conversation with a friend yesterday about women who've aged well. He suggested they could be likened to a fine wine.

Stevie Nicks. Smooth-bodied red with oak and earth flavours. Enjoy now, or cellar for 10-20 years.

Fun blog Friday: name that sign

2007-09-21T08:46:00.000+10:00

Well, dear readers, the time has come for this blog to go interactive. And to kick things off, I'm looking for good interpretations of this sign, as posted by the Right Hon Harold Amis, esquire. Here's the sign:

And here's my best efforts:

1: If proverbial hits the fan, flee! Do not stop to collect, or attempt to carry, any bits and pieces of skeleton you may have in your possesion.

2: Arrr, avast ye! Here be pirates with spinning blades of death, arrrr!

Your turn. Yes, you. I know you're reading this, I can see your little eyes moving. Pony up. Winner gets a coffee. If I live near you. And my undying admiration, if I don't.

One for my geekier readers

2007-09-14T12:20:00.000+10:00

Schroedinger's LOLcat, as done by someone who actually understands about Schroedinger's cat:

Original here, and nothing to do with me (unfortunately).

Shortest thesis ever?

2007-09-07T14:16:00.000+10:00

I've just stuck together the four data chapters of my PhD thesis, those being the ones where I've done something new rather than talked about stuff or rehashed my existing data (I'm getting to that bit, don't worry). Altogether those four chapters are 76 pages and 16 000 words. I'm looking at 100-odd pages for the finished article, after three and a half years. Brevity is good, right?

Two things I would like from the world

2007-09-05T09:35:00.000+10:00

1: Waterproof plasters that are actually waterproof.

2: Staplers that actually staple.

Oxymoron of the week

2007-07-31T11:15:00.000+10:00

Secret \Se"cret\, a. [F. secret (cf. Sp. & Pg. secreto, It. secreto, segreto), fr. L. secretus, p. p. of secernere to put apart, to separate. See {Certain}, and cf. {Secrete}, {Secern}.]
1. Hidden; concealed; as, secret treasure; secret plans; a secret vow. [1913 Webster]
2. Withdrawn from general intercourse or notice; in retirement or secrecy; secluded. [1913 Webster]

Police \Po*lice"\, n. [F., fr. L. politia the condition of a state, government, administration, Gr. ?, fr. ? to be a citizen, to govern or administer a state, fr. ? citizen, fr. ? city; akin to Skr. pur, puri. Cf. {Policy} polity, {Polity}.]
1. A judicial and executive system, for the government of a city, town, or district, for the preservation of rights, order, cleanliness, health, etc., and for the enforcement of the laws and prevention of crime; the administration of the laws and regulations of a city, incorporated town, or borough. [1913 Webster]

Secret police. An oxymoron of hate and fear. To go with secret evidence, and decisions made in secret, and lives turned upside-down at the whim of a political hack who "by law" need never give any account of, or reason for, his actions. Symptomatic of the casual overturning of civil rights won by brutal struggle over many, many, painful years. Of a population too easily lead and bovinely complacent to worry about things that don't immediately concern them. Yes, I am deeply disturbed by all of this.

Geothermal desalination

2007-06-25T17:42:00.000+10:00

ABC News: A geothermal energy company hopes to desalinate water from Spencer Gulf in South Australia using hot rocks.

Here's a radical idea, guys. If you're going to bother plumbing a heat exchanger into one of the largest accessible hot-rock layers in the world, how about you run that nice steam through a few turbines before you pump it into a storage dam? That way Victoria can possibly shut down some of its filthy brown coal power stations. Who knows, maybe the idea will catch on, once everyone realises there's enough heat there to make electriciy for about 450 years.

Just a thought.

Sic transit gloria mundi

2007-06-01T10:17:00.000+10:00

Have a look at my blog-roll on the left there; one of my regular reads is "Rest Area 300". I've just learned that the author has died. Posting as "Doddery old fart", his sense of humour and engaging stories were one of my emotional lifelines to New Zealand. Like many of the commentors on his final post, I felt that I knew him without having met him in person. My heart goes out to his friends and family.

Vale, Simon.

All your tropical cyclone belong to us

2007-05-21T14:17:00.001+10:00

Here I go again with the delayed gratification. I'm a one-man movement against the "I want it all, now, and I want it delivered" internet ethos. Either that, or I'm both busy and/or slack, or all of the above, take your pick.

Darwin. We were in Darwin in late February and early March (this being written in late May, hence the delayed part). February and March are well and truly the wet season, and this was well and truly exacerbated by Tropical Cyclone George choosing the Top End as the perfect place to gestate. It appears that a weather system gravid with a cyclone manifests as an awful lot of rain -- we got March's entire normal rainfall in 3 days, and as I believe I've mentioned, March is normally a wet month anyway. The old laconic Aussie strikes again; when they say "the wet", they mean you could just about wring out the air.

Unsurprisingly then, the area is green and lush, in a swampy sort of way. It's quite funny to see eucalypts in such a green environment, but there they were, quite happily standing above dayglo-green grass and steamy puddles (if the malaria mosquito-parasite combo ever makes it to Northern Australia, all hell will break loose).

I had expected the Top End to feel like Queensland, only more so, but it doesn't. It has a real independent-spirit frontier kind of feel to it, that I like. Also, unlike Queensland, you can get decent coffee. The roadside cafe type place at Coolalinga had one of those hand-pull espresso machines; I've never seen one of them in use before, it must just about be an antique. The Northern Territory only got open-road speed limits quite recently. The "130" signs all looked very shiny. There was an article in the (British) Top Gear magazine about how it was a shame, but probably for the best, seeing as Australians can't drive for toffee. In fact, he said:

"From coast to coast, Australians drive with the distraction a 90-year-old who's just found Viagra instead of Werther's Originals in the glovebox of his Austin Allegro".

Never a truer word was spoken...

Oh, and I've finally got somewhere other than blogger to put pictures online. Go and check out my flickr account if you want to see what I've been seeing. It's mostly got pictures of Citroens in it at the moment though.

Rum and toads

2007-02-20T21:30:00.000+11:00

Just a quick one today, mostly because my wrists hurt. At the end of last month I was up to Bundaberg doing fieldwork (and I'm only writing about it now, how's that for delayed gratification pre-internet styles? I'll be off to Darwin next week, just you see how long it takes me to write about that).

So, Bundaberg. Not a bad little spot, once you get into its strange Queensland groove; in saying that I must share with you the observation that the corners of the park near the city centre contained broken beer bottles, discarded Australian flags, and a bikini top left hanging from a branch... Anyway. For all that I grew to not mind it, high summer probably isn't the best time to visit Bundaberg. For the first few days it declined to rain, and the humidity was something to behold. I haven't sweated so much since I had to extract a grumpy possum from an attic in Sydney on a 30-degree day, while wearing full-length overalls, a floppy hat, and a rubber breathing mask.

En route to Bundaberg I finally had opportunity to observe Toowoomba at close range, Toowoomba being most recently famous for their recycled-water-or-refusal-to-countenance-same fiasco. Having seen the place now, it's easy to see the origin of their delusion about water: they're literally right on the edge of the green zone. To the west of Toowoomba, all is dry and flat and high. I had lunch with apostle birds in Stanthorpe, and they're arid zone specialists. It's only as you enter the margins of Toowoomba itself that the vegetation becomes green, and from there it stays green right down to the coast. Stand in Toowoomba and look east, and it would be very easy to convince yourself that you live in an area of high rainfall and should have plenty of water available. If you studiously avoid looking west, you might even manage to stay convinced.

How I spent my summer holiday

2007-01-13T15:17:00.000+11:00

This is an article I wrote for the Citroen Car Club of NSW newsletter, hence the absence of my usual prognostications. Hover your mouse over the pictures for captions

If you go to the beach for your holidays it'll probably be full of people, and most of them will probably be Holden drivers. Unless, of course, the beach is beside a lake that dried up 15 000 years ago. With a faultless reasoning like that to the fore, we decided to spend our New Year at Lake Mungo in south-western New South Wales. The mighty GS wagon with the Mystery Clunk would take us there (mostly because it's the only car we have).

Such an epic trip requires an early start, what my brother-in-law calls a Longson start. Out the door by 7am, in other words. Toll roads may be a vile capitalist excrescence on the fair face of Sydney, but the M7 sure is handy if you live in Marsfield and wish to travel south. I'm a convert, even with the merry cheeping of the Etag to remind me how much money the whole thing is sucking out of my account. Being able to drive up the road, turn left onto the M2 and bypass most of the city at 100km/h is almost worth it. In just the time it took to discover that the tape player was having a bad hair day and the only music available was the contents of the mp3 player, we'd made the jump to lightspeed down the M5 onramp and headed down the Hume.

When you live in Sydney the boisterous summer weather and regular thunderstorms make it easy to forget that there's a drought. Once you get away from the coast it gets pretty hard to ignore. I've done the trip to Canberra on plenty of occasions and seen it brown along that road, but now it's gone past brown and into grey. No wonder they had to close the playing fields in Goulburn; the ground even looks a bit like concrete. It's a slow-motion natural disaster and you really have to feel for the people who make a living off the land out there. Now, can I suggest that if you are heading through this particularly dehydrated bit of the wide and generally brown land, and morning tea time is approaching, that you say "yes" to Yass? In particular, the Cafe Indulge on the main street has parking right out the front and do a first-class country chicken pie, not to mention a passable Devonshire tea (although you may have to call it "scones and cream" before the girl behind the counter knows what you're talking about).

Next stop from Yass was Wagga Wagga, although you must first bid adeiu to the Hume Highway and get yourself set onto the Sturt. In actual fact there's a dirty great sign about this, but I'm trying to make it sound harder than it is because when we went through there a few years ago we missed the turning and ended up joining the Sturt via Lockhart. Wagga Wagga is on the banks on the mighty Murrimbidgee. Australia's great rivers don't seem to have inspired the same degree of lyricism as the rivers in other continents ("Oh Murrimbidgee, I love your daughter" ...it's not quite the same, is it?). We ate lunch behind the visitors' centre, above a bend on the river lined with construction work to stop the water scouring the bank out. It didn't look like it was really working.

West of Wagga isn't quite like West of the Black Stump, but the landscape is pretty Aussie out there. I find it quite compelling. Between the dead flat land and gaunt trees with their angular trunks and branches, there's a spare kind of beauty to it. Part of the attraction is the light, I think. From strong, white, and unrelenting at midday to low and golden in the evening, it throws all the shadows and angles into sharp relief. The land wouldn't look half as good without the light, and the light in turn would be completely lost without the landscape. I must admit that this interplay of light and form would be better appreciated from inside a car with air conditioning, because it does tend to be accompanied by air temperatures of 30-odd degrees.

It would be nice to report that we saw lots of Citroens out there eating up the miles and further enhancing the landscape with their elegant good looks, but on this particular day we saw a grand total of... none. On the bright side, the friendly owner in the caravan park at Hay remembered the DS coming through her hometown the year that Citroen won the London-Sydney race. The legend of the Goddess is alive and well in rural New South Wales.

Day two saw us heading to Mildura (and seeing a C4, who didn't even give us a second look). If you're scratching your head over a map, you're quite right: Mildura isn't the most direct route from Hay to Mungo. We had to stop into the Parks headquarters and get a pass. You might think that Parks offices would spend a lot of time sorting out passes, and that all the regional offices would have great overflowing boxes of the appropriate paperwork. You would be sadly mistaken. Mildura has some history with us, because the last time we crossed the bridge over the Murray heading into that bustling metropolis, the car spat out a driveshaft which cracked the gearbox casing on the way past... this time, all things mechnical didn't appear to notice the transition. Even the Mystery Clunk was silent.

Duly Parks Passed and stocked up with fruit and veg (Mungo and Mildura are inside the fruit fly exclusion zone, and you pestilential Sydney-siders can't bring in any of your infested greenstuffs), we headed towards Mungo. Almost immediately you're on unsealed road. I don't know what the Parks people spend the pass fees on, but it obviously isn't on running a fleet of graders. I do not like corrugations... There are three schools of thought on dealing with corrugated roads. First is the "slow right down" school, which has its place when the rough patch is someone's driveway, but rather less utility when you still have 100km ahead of you. There's also the "grin and bear it" approach, best employed by manly men in 4WD utes with interior fittings bolted together from quarter inch steel. Myself I favour the "flying over the bumps" school of thought (although I will admit the occasional foray into flying over a drainage gulley whoops where did that come from), which involves what an engineer might describe as decoupling the driving frequency from the natural resonance of the car-wheel system. In other words, accelerate until the shaking stops... The critical velocity differs for each vehicle, but I find it's about 80km/h in a GS, leaving the magic floaty suspension to cope with the more serious lumps and dips.

So we floated and flew off down the road towards Mungo. After rain this road turns to sticky clay mud and is impassable. In dry weather the clay just makes drifts of red dust and it's invisible, at least after someone passes you going the other way. Eventually we caught up with someone in a pretend 4WD who followed the grin-and-bear-it school, so we had to bear it too until he turned off. I don't know exactly when the shaking killed our clock, but I feel inclined to blame the driver of the Mosman schoolbus on general principles.

Fifty thousand years ago Lake Mungo was a wide, very shallow lake filled by an overflow from one of the neighbouring Willandra Lakes, which were in turn filled by a side branch of the nearest river. I'm going to have to do a Schenk here and admit that I can't remember the name of the river. A long history of fluctuating water levels eventually led to the lake drying completely about 15 000 years ago. The sand from the old lakebed was and is picked up by the prevailing westerly winds and deposited in a long sand-dune along the eastern shore. The upwind side of this sand-dune forms the Walls of China for which the area is famous, and the dune as a whole is pretty much the only topographic feature for quite a long way.

The road into the park reaches the lake at the western side, so you look across at the Walls of China. Sunset is supposed to be the best time to go and view these, but we were more interested in ducking into the lovely cool visitors' centre and then back to the main camping area to set up our tent. The main campsite is actually quite well equipped for a wilderness camp, with gas barbeques and rainwater tanks. It isn't particularly sheltered from either sun or wind, unfortunately. A couple of families of apostle birds hang out there and make off with leftovers and spilled water. Seeing their response to a thimble-full of water spilled on the ground makes you realise how precious fresh water is in that environment. There was also a goanna wandering around that had managed to get a bone poking out through the side of its throat, presumably from someone's barbeque leftovers. There was nothing we could do for it, but its future looked grim.

The next morning we set off to the Walls of China and out along the loop track through the park. The road initially cuts across the old lakebed and up to the base of the Walls; that part is two-way for the sunset Walls-viewing traffic, but the rest of the loop is one lane and one-way. We would have got to see a big snake on the road at this point, if the 4WD in front of us hadn't scared it off. You can't take some people anywhere.

Neil Armstrong would feel right at home in some of this area, particularly as you go up over the shoulder of the dune. Around the back of the dune is normally more sheltered and has higher vegetation. Stopping for a look around in a red-earth picnic area, I heard a hissing noise... lo and behold, a puncture. One expects the odd puncture on gravel roads, but this was a nail! Lucky us, to find the only spare nail in the middle of a wilderness area. Out with the spare and the Citroen tire-changing party trick, and so much for the prospect of leaving the park via the longer north route; driving on remote gravel roads when you're out of spare tires just isn't that appealing a prospect. I bet Neil never had this problem.

We had lunch at the Belah campsite at the farthest point of the loop track. We had planned to stay at this site, but with the thermometer reading 37 degrees in the shade, the wind blowing through and almost no shelter from the spindly Causurina trees, it wasn't all that appealling. We did get to see some pink cockatoos playing silly beggars in the trees (do cockatoos know any other way to behave, I hear you ask). On the return leg of the loop, not only did we discover even larger corrugations, but we were treated to a an extremely brief desert rainshower, accompanied by an amazingly strong smell of rain as the water hit the dry ground. Having failed to be moved by the charms of the Belah campsite, we settled in for another night at the main camping area, complete with gusty easterly.

The more direct road from Mungo to Balranald is somewhat better than going via Mildura, but it still wouldn't be much fun in a C2. This time we only lost a hubcap. Removing a GS Club hubcap is normally a bit like getting the mouse out of a mousetrap, so having one go AWOL was a surprise. Balranald is another town nestled in a curve of the Murrimbidgee, although I'm sure the river gets smaller instead of larger as you go downstream. Must be all the water that the local horticultural persons spray high into the air over their crops at midday.

That very night in Balranald, a thunderstorm grew and grew. This thunderstorm was the real deal, the authentic item. It built with great towering clouds, multicoloured lightning and fitful winds. The galahs all settled in the tallest tree and hung on tight (yes, I know about tall trees and lightning, but try explaining that to a galah). Then the rain came down. Or possibly the river started flowing sideways. Suffice to to say that a lot of water came out of the sky. And continued to come out of the sky, as the lightning continued to do its thing directly overhead, for most of the night. Who needs man-made pyrotechnics to see in the new year when you can enjoy the naturally occurring version. Lucky our car doesn't leak. Much. Or our tent... much...

In Balranald we also met a couple from Adelaide, who had met a French couple travelling in an AMI 8 on Kangaroo Island. Sydney club members may remember Jacques and Catherine's very interesting talk in January last year. People are going to start thinking all old Citroen wagons are painted the colour of photocopiers, at this rate. I wish we had even half as many interesting miles behind us as Catherine and Jacques though, even if our cars are almost the same colour.

The drive back across the Hay plain next morning didn't reveal any features of the landscape that we missed the first time, apart from the interesting reflections the clouds were making in the new puddles. I think I've probably wasted more film over the years trying to take photos of light amongst clouds than of any other subject. We stopped the night in Narrendera, an interesting place where they've banned swimming in favour of a waterskiing lane along a big stretch of river and then built a swimming pool right beside it. Don't let anyone tell you that the people of Narrendera aren't well catered for in the civic amenties department. I can't really recommend the camping ground though, not unless you have a sloping tent that you find unsatisfactory when used on flat ground.

It's on the last leg of a trip like this, I find, that you start to wonder why you wanted to go so far for your holidays. At least it was cool and rainy for that bit, with some of the water falling on Goulburn, no less. I'm sure they were dancing in the streets. It also rained on my foot, while I was driving. I know what that means... time to break out the wire brush and the POR 15.

Catch you later, as the poets say.

Climate is what a place should get, weather is what actually happens

2006-12-23T21:17:00.000+11:00

This is an afternoon thunderstorm, Northern Sydney style. A day, hot and slightly hazy, the presence of the desert continent carried on the breeze in a way you can almost smell. Not so much hot as vast and slow. Sunlight with a yellow-orange cast and bushfires burning in another state. Dense grey clouds that clot overhead in a matter of minutes, then mass, biding their time and rumbling to each other in Brobignagian conspiracy as the desert heavy wind slows and the rumour of rain lies heavily over the querulously chattering birds and drooping trees.

Chasing the dust bunnies around with a big stick

2006-12-01T20:57:00.000+11:00

It's been a while coming, but I've finally upgraded the template for this page. The new colours are supposed to suggest desert and sky, but we'll see how I get on with that conceit... the links will be active soon.

Draughts, huffing and Happy Birthday to Us

2006-09-19T20:54:00.000+10:00

According to my calculations, this blog is now a year old. To celebrate, I'm going to contribute something that appears to have some details missing from the sum total of the interweb. I'm going to talk about draughts.

Draughts (checkers, in some places) is, you might say, an old ladies' game. You'd be quite right, and if you've never played draughts against an old lady you've probably never been so comprehensively beaten at something in your entire life. One of the basic principles of draughts is than when an opposing piece has a space behind it, you can jump your piece over it, thereby removing if from the board. Old ladies can join five or six of these jumps together to deprive you of half your pieces in one foul swoop. You really do have to jump and remove pieces to get somewhere a game of draughts, but there's a variant on this that appears to be unique to Irish grandmothers, or at least my Irish grandmother (or possibly the Irish in general, it's that kind of a thing), and that I can't find any mention of anywhere else. It's called huffing. Huffing changes draughts from the mindless and inevitable plonking of pieces to a winner-takes-all game of bluff and daring.

It works like this: if you have a chance to jump any one of your opponent's pieces and you don't take that chance, the piece you would have jumped with is taken off the board -- provided your opponent notices and huffs you. You can't huff someone for not jumping if they've jumped somewhere else at the same time, but otherwise it's open slather. "But you would have...(done blah blah etc etc)" is not a valid excuse.

See? Daring, treachery, bluff and double-bluff. Try it with your grandmother sometime. Just don't be surprised if she beats you.

Now just in case Google doesn't notice this the first time around: Draughts rules huffing jumping checkers Irish grandmothers.

Spring has sprung

2006-09-07T21:11:00.000+10:00

...the grass has risen, it's rained again, and I've been in Wellington, where spring is definitely still on its way, next week at the earliest, guvnor. I took my new toy to Wellington with me, although I should admit that my new toy is actually older than I am. It's a Spotmatic F, last of the screw-mount Pentax SLRs, and a very nice toy it is too.

I found myself enjoying being back in Wellington. It's really nice to be able to waltz into a cafe and get better service (and better coffee) from a girl with seven facial piercings than you do at many a pretentious establishment in Sydney. Wellington has a groovy little vibe that I hadn't realised I missed. With the benefit of some time between me and my final cash-strapped days as a Wellington resident, I found meeting that vibe again very agreeable.

To commemorate the putative arrival of spring and attendant torrential downpours (did I mention it rained? 'cos it did) I've dusted off something I wrote smack dab in the middle of winter and never got around to posting:

Sydney has been turning on some lovely days of late. They're not what you might call a typical Sydney day, which involve heat rolling out of the West like it was an open oven door, a lingering cloud of pollution over the city and emerald-clear waves breaking onto overcrowded beaches. These days are crisp and cool and start without a cloud in the sky.

It's not like that any more. Spring here arrives all at once, as if all the plants and animals had a calendar. When I got home on Sunday night our street was warm and still and smelt like jasmine flowers. Big dragonflies with iridescent wings were darting and fighting aournd the courtyard at work on Tuesday. This morning there was just a little bit of water on the ground. And pouring down the hill. And overflowing the causeway over the extremely swollen local watercourse. Oh, and on the floor inside underneath the ventilators. With a bit left in the sky for good measure.

My new toy came with some extension rings, so I'll probably be taking more photos like that one there. Cop you later.

A good cause

2006-08-11T16:58:00.000+10:00

Please sign this petition. It's against the damming of the Mary River in Queensland, the only breeding area of the incredibly ancient Australian Lungfish.

Season of sudden but well-meaning showers

2006-08-08T19:43:00.000+10:00

Whenever it rains in Sydney there's a sudden explosion of umbrellas. I never see anyone carrying a folded umbrella any other time, so I can only assume that they have them cunningly folded and secreted about their person at all times, ready to spring into action at the first sign of moisture from overhead.

I find umbrellas amusing in direct proportion to their complete uselessness. To me, an umbrella is symbolic of not taking weather seriously. In a real storm, and even assuming it doesn't turn violently inside out and become a colander, an umbrella isn't going to keep you dry. The little bit of water it will keep off in a gentle shower probably isn't going to change your life one way or another, now is it? Not to the same extent as having your eye poked out my someone else's umbrella, anyway.

Of course, not taking the weather seriously is a popular pastime in Sydney. How else do you explain a city that regularly gets down to freezing over winter and over thirty degrees in summer, where houses aren't insulated and don't have decent curtains...

I told you I was ill

2006-07-15T18:27:00.001+10:00

With apologies to Spike Milligan.

As promised quite some time ago, that's what our friendly neighbourhood widowmaker looks like now. In the meantime, the drought has broken, at least in the general vicinity of our garden:

Out Goulbourn and Waragamba way, alas, the dams are still dropping and the grass is still brown.

Apologies to the people who've asked me to post more often. Various things have kept me tied up at uni, and given that this is meant to be a travelogue rather than a diary I haven't had much to write about. I've got some more Sydney things to post though, so stay tuned. If you're a reader, please feel free to leave a comment to let me know you exist, even it you just leave a stone, like this: (o)

EDIT: The web control-freak in me is coming out. I don't like the way blogger handles images...

Stillsuit for a nation

2006-05-20T22:07:00.000+10:00

The eucalyptus tree in front of our house would appear to be dead.

It's not a small tree. It reaches to at least twice the height of our two-storey townhouse, and it's certainly one of the taller trees in the block. Its branches, not the usual feeble eucalyptus efforts, spread wide and variously play host to crows, cockatoos, noisy miners and kookaburras. The kookaburras are especially fond of it at about 2am, when they are wont to have noisy domestic squabbles that preclude sleep for those of us who don't have wings.

I take the precipitate departure of our tree to be the sign that the drought continues apace. As little as a month ago those spreading branches were completely fleshed out with green leaves. Last week I looked up and they were all brown. The poor thing is going to look pretty shabby once they all drop off, but unless we get some serious ground-soaking rain soon that will be the least of its worries. Presumably this means that the current shortage of said bountiful precipitation is unusual even in the lifetime of a 20-metre gum tree.

Not that it hasn't rained in the last week, of course, in fact it's rained several times. But this rain doesn't stick; two hours later, washing left out in it is dry again. Not only our stately eucalypt but the hardy kikuyu lawn at the university are showing the symptoms of a long-lasting imbalance between the water they need and the water they're actually getting. Water levels in the Sydney dams are at the 40-ish percent mark and dropping steadily.

Things do not look like getting better any time soon. Any sane person, indeed any sane regional body, confronted with such a situation, would take steps to reduce their reliance on rain as a source of water for minor but important facets of civilisation like drinking and washing. You might think, for instance, that instead of pouring enormous quantities of somewhat dirty fresh water out to sea every day via the business end of water treatment plants, that perhaps you could recycle some of it. Perhaps even go so far as to make it fit to drink, as is done in many major cities around the world.

Fat chance. Recycled water here in Oz is at the receiving end of what I can only call a propaganda war. Let's insist on all calling it "recycled sewage", for a start. That'll really sell it to the public. Almost everyone who ever mentions recycled water in the media talks about recycled sewage. Anyone would think that rainwater was created in a blaze of celestial light just above the cloud layer and never made contact with anything less pure than the wings of angels before coming out the tap. I have drunk the tapwater in Adelaide, and I swear you could taste the urine of at least five different species of river fish in it. Recycled water could not possibly be any worse!

Instead, desalination plants are held up as the great white hope for supplying drinking water. Desalination, the molecular equivalent of pushing water uphill with a pointy stick. A more involved, energy-intensive and ecologically damaging version of the same technology used to clean up waster water and make it fit to drink. I wonder who's getting rich of that idea, then? Someone, no doubt, who is friends with someone else who's conveniently forgotten where Sydney used to put its untreated sewage until fairly recently.

I took some photos of our tree today, I'll post them up once they're developed and I get a chance to scan them.

Energy, and why you should care

2006-03-18T19:19:00.000+11:00

I've been meaning for some time to write something about energy, in particular its relationship to climate change and associated issues. In a radical breach with blogging custom, this is something I have some professional knowledge about and I hope to bring in some facts.

If you know that my profession is that of biologist and ecologist, you might be forgiven for wondering exactly what I have to contribute to the realm of public knowledge about energy. In actual fact, ecologists spend a great deal of time thinking about energy; how it moves through ecosystems and what organisms do with their finite energy budget. The comparison is rather more cogent than that, because human ecosystems ultimately get most of their energy from the same place as most natural ecosystems: the sun.

Fossil fuels are of course at the heart of this matter, seeing as they're the primary source of the extra atmospheric CO₂ that's causing global warming. Fossil fuels are very handy things, being as they are the concentrated remains of very old plant matter. They also represent energy that came from the sun millions of years ago, and was locked up in plant tissues. Those plant tissues became in time the handy long-chain carbon molecules that burn so easily and are so easy to carry around in cars and ships.

The world's food supply is also the result of energy from the sun being trapped by plants. The interesting thing about food crops is that they represent what some call a subsidised ecosystem. The productivity of an ecosystem is defined by the amount of carbon fixed per square metre over some set time period. The most productive natural ecosystems of all are coral reefs, for reasons that aren't important here. On land, the most productive ecosystems are probably temperate grasslands; they're made up of fast-growing plants that fix carbon very efficiently, and they generally get good rainfall and plenty of nutrients (despite the popular image, rainforests aren't all that productive, because of the slow growth rates of trees and the high level of competition all the vegetation in a forest experiences).

Modern, selectively bred crops grown in an intensive manner can fix at least twice as much carbon as a temperate grassland, and probably more like 4-5 times as much. This is also more than a coral reef, if you're wondering. I'll dig up the exact figures if I remember. This sounds like a great thing -- we can get 4-5 times as much energy out a piece of ground than if we were harvesting a natural ecosystem. Unfortunately, this is where the "subsidised" bit comes in. That high productivity figure is a result of intensive crop and soil management. It comes at the expense of burning quite remarkable amounts of fossil fuels. Some of this is used in machinery, of course: tractors, harvesters, water pumps and their ilk. The rest? Fertiliser. Modern agriculture requires lots of fertiliser; the plants are bred to expect it, and we turn them over too fast for natural soil fertility to last long.

Fertiliser is horrendously energy expensive and the production of it uses lots of fossil fuels. Some of this is actually used directly as part of chemical reactions that incorporate nitrogen into compounds that plants can absorb (making nitrogen compounds other than N₂ is like pushing water uphill with a stick -- it's the breakdown of nitrogen compounds that powers most explosives). The rest creates electricity to power other energy-intensive processes, up to and including transporting raw materials and the finished product around. In many ways fertiliser is fossil fuels.

Subsidised? Without a doubt. Only everyone can currently ignore the source of the subsidy, because it's the same discounted, concentrated energy we already pump out of the ground for so many other purposes.

Believe it or not, I do have a point here. I want to talk about biofuels. Biofuels are the great white hope of alternative energy, and not without reason. To summarise a diverse field, biofuels are stuff produced by living things, stuff that burns well. In general they're refined into some form that's similar to existing fuels; bioethanol and biodiesel are the two main one, although they come from different sources. Biofuels produce CO₂ (y'know, the greenhouse gas) when burned, of course. The trick is that this is new carbon, not the old carbon that's in fossil fuels. Cut down a crop in April, burn it in September and the net change in the carbon balance of the atmosphere is zero -- especially if that CO₂ is then absorbed by next April's crop.

Astute readers may see where this is going. If agricultural crops are subsidised by fossil fuels, and you replace fossil fuels with biofuels, which are an agricultural crop themselves... Some of the energy from your crop needs to go straight back into the production process. Efficiency drops immediately, and the price of your produce probably rises -- an inevitably consequence of your energy no longer being almost free.

Depending of the efficiency with which you can produce your biofuels, the situation could be grim indeed. Some people have calculated that it takes more energy to grow the crops that can be fermented to ethanol than what you can get from burning the ethanol itself. Fortunately I don't think we should believe them, and not just because of the power of wishful thinking. Like Yoda, my reasons I shall below explain.

Firstly, it depends a great deal where your calculations are done. In many developed countries agriculture is already, realistically, not economic. I'm referring of course to agricultural subsidises and the "toy farm" industries that they encourage. I strongly suspect that no crop is energetically or economically sustainable when farms are run as an extended tax-fiddle. Show me figures based on New Zealand farming practices (no subsidies, no tax breaks, nothing) and I might be more inclined to believe you. I can't bring myself to care about the probable fate of subsidised, trade protected European and American farms if the effective cost of energy rises. I'm sure someone will find a way to keep them employed, maybe in a museum where they belong.

Secondly, the production of biofuels is fast-changing business. Take ethanol, one of the more widely touted biofuels because you can make it from a range of crops and burn it in petrol engines with trifling modifications. Ethanol is produced by fermentation, involving our old friend the yeast. Ordinary yeast can only grow on fairly sugar-rich mediums, and by sugar I mean sucrose, table sugar. This means you need to either grow crops like sugar cane, or break down things like wheat to release sugar. Taking it up a step, you can use industrial processes to liberate sucrose from most plant material, including the woody waste from fast-growing crops like wheat, or from a crop like buffalo grass chosen specifically to grow like buggery. Having digested such a crop though, you're left with about 40% sucrose and whole lot of funky sugars like xylose. Yeast can't normally break down xylose, but there's no theoretical objection to xylose being broken down. Clever people like Microbiogen have bred a yeast that can break down xylose. Impressed? I certainly am, and ideas like that are receiving a lot of attention at the moment. Expect this kind of thing to only get better. Improving the availability of the raw materials and increasing the efficiency of the production process obviously reduces the costs of producing fuel and takes less of a chunk out of agricultural production. I'm making an example of ethanol, but there is plenty of work going into the production of other biofuels.

[Time for an aside on organic foods. Tree-hugging type people tend to like organic food. I doubt that any of them have ever been to a proper organic orchard and seen the big scary "chemicals in use" signs permanently bolted to the fence, but that's a grumble for another day. Organic farming makes a great deal of taking care of the soil and not using fertilisers. Laudable aims, but the brutally simple upshot of this is that for high-yield crops like wheat, an organic farm produces about half the food of a conventional farm of similar size (that's why organic flour and so on is so expensive, apart from the snob value). If all the world's crops were organic, we would need far more farmland. As a ecologist the idea of even more farmland fails to appeal to me, and depending on whose figures you trust there wouldn't be enough arable land in the world to feed the projected peak human population, if all food was grown organically. Even with minimal fertiliser use, organic farms still need energy input from machinery and transport and to refine all those chemicals they spray around. Inefficiency at growing crops would also translate into inefficient production of energy crops. I've never seen any figures for organic farms in this regard, but I suspect they would be pretty shabby.]

OK, aside over. The prospects for biofuels are actually pretty good, especially if we can arrange to extract them from plants that grow fast and utilise sunlight efficiently, rather than whatever food crop we happen to already have in the ground.

I want to say a something about hydrogen while I'm in an energy frame of mind. There's a lot of noise and light surrounding the idea of hydrogen economy, and that's all it is -- noise. I don't even see much evidence of light at the present time, that's how empty all the idea is. The problem, minor as it may seem, is this: gaseous hydrogen is vanishing, infinitesimally, get-out-a-very-small-jar-I-might-have-some-here rare on earth. There are many many compounds that contain hydrogen (water is the one that everyone knows), but you need to apply energy to actually get the hydrogen out, normally quite a lot of energy. Where do you get the energy from? Not hydrogen...

Leaving aside this minor but pressing issue (I think nuclear power often assumed. I might deal with nuclear power later, but let's be charitable and assume some sort of solar power). Once you have hydrogen in your hand, few fuels are more of a nuisance. It burns very nicely of course; you can even persuade a piston engine to run on it, and boilers will run on anything you can shove under them (the recovery boilers in paper mills do very well burning wet, green bark). The real problem with hydrogen is transport and storage. Gas pressure is mostly a result of kinetic energy in the molecules. Being very small, hydrogen molecules move very fast. At a given pressure a given volume of hydrogen contains far fewer molecules than most other gases. In other words, it's bulky. You need big tanks to store it and big pipes to transport it (some piston engines designed to run on hydrogen have one intake valve that's solely for the fuel). On the other hand, being such a small molecule hydrogen also makes its way out through seals and so on very easily. That means it leaks. In fact hydrogen is such a nuisance to transport and store (even if you like dealing with liquids at minus lots and lots of degrees Celsius) that the most sensible solution is probably to attach it to some carbon molecules, to make something like ethanol... (or sugar, which is basically what plants do). Not to put too fine a point on it, the "hydrogen economy" is utter bollocks.

You could possibly argue on the basis of all this that energy in general, and transport in particular, are liable to become more expensive if and when we switch to biofuels. You would quite possibly be wrong, not because biofuels are cheap but because fossil fuels are expensive. Thanks to the dubious joys of the free-market economy, what's likely to happen is that consumers (that means you) will switch (if the choice is available) when alternative fuels become cheaper than the dimishing fossil fuel supply. For ethanol that point was reached and passed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. You can buy ethanol-based fuels in Australia already, albeit manufacturers won't guarantee their cars to run on it (although the same manufacturers do make that guarantee in Brazil). The future is now...

Hippy Days: Byron Bay

2006-01-31T18:13:00.000+11:00

What to say about Byron? It's a funny old place, and I have to admit I don't feel comfortable here. The surface veneer of blatant commercialism is of course part of it, what with the backpacker's who have touts outside pushing their free internet access (after extensive research, I have concluded that any backpacker's offering anything for free is a dive). And of course the surf shops on every second corner, trying to sell you expensive clothing to cash in on what is basically an inexpensive sport.

Beyond the crass pursuit of the almighty dollar though, and the wonderful hypocrisy the local council displays towards same, I'm forced to wonder what all these people do. Admittedly I've never understood the "sit in one place for two weeks and do nothing" school of holiday-making, but the disjointed mix of people in Byron doesn't help my confusion. Hippies, backpackers and beer-swilling Ockers. It's like they all move through a different Byron, intersecting at the beach and the supermarket.

Looking around I have sneaking suspicion that most of these people are bored. They're waiting for Byron to surprise them, and it isn't happening. The hippies at least can keep themselves entertained with the whole process of being a hippy -- Byron was probably nicer when it belonged to them. I should some and check it out in the off-season sometime.

Cronulla

2005-12-13T11:03:00.000+11:00

I'm not going to try and write anything glib about the current unpleasantness in Sydney's southern beach suburbs -- plenty of other people are already there. I am going to take exception to the slippery semantic slope in the media, that goes from "people of middle eastern appearance" to "Muslim" without pause.

Bollocks.

A friend got the call to come down to Cronulla this weekend. Having more than two brain cells, he ignored it, but the text of the message was "Come and support leb and wog bashing day". For those not familiar with the Aussie vernacular, "leb" is short for Lebanese, probably short-hand for all of the Middle East as I doubt most people who use the term could find Lebanon on a map. "Wog" is a general term for people of eastern European descent -- mainly Greece and Italy. Not necessarily Muslim, in other words. More to the point, the local yobbos of the Shire have been beating up yobbos from elsewhere over access to the beach since the 1970s. That this latest bout has a racial overtone just meant it attracted snot-balls like the Patriotic Yoof League or whatever they call themselves, who no doubt escalated things.

There are other things at work, of course, the first of which is undoubtedly alcohol. How many of the mob on Sunday were sober? I don't know whether it's a cultural thing, the dubious contents of the beer or the speed at which they drink it, but Aussies drinking get aggressive very quickly. As a group, they seem to have a inordinately high proportion of angry drunks. Heaven forbid that we should acknowledge a national problem with attitudes to alcohol, of course.

Australian race relations are a joke. The "multiculturalism" policy is all about assimilation, and always will be until white Australians are willing to refer to themselves as such without sounding like arseholes. In general they just call themselves Australians, with the unspoken implication that everyone else must be some other form of life -- wog, leb, chink, abo. Yeah, think about that last one a little harder, why don't we... There isn't an Australian equivalent to the word pakeha. Meanwhile there are, at least in Sydney, many ethnically distinct communities, some living in poor neighbourhoods, with all the strife that goes along with that. Multicultural. Right.

Can I go home now?

Knobbly grey-barked gums

2005-12-09T22:31:00.000+11:00

Given that this blog is meant to be, at least in part, a record of my experiences here in the land of the headless politician, herein lies my summary of the trip we took up to Brisbane and back for the ESA conference.

We drove up via the New England highway, which runs inland past the Hunter Valley, Armidale and sundry rural centres. Some of which are definitely taking their time on the 21st Century... Non-withstanding that, I like the New England Highway. For a start, it's much less busy than the twit-infested Pacific Highway that runs up the coast. The road itself is more like a New Zealand highway, mostly only two lanes, occasionally hilly and with the odd corner (not many, though, this is Australia and people might get scared).

It's a very scenic route, in a farm-country kind of a way. Grey-barked gums with wonderfully knobby, crooked branches that come in close to the road. The bedrock protrudes out of the side of falling-away hills, and sometimes just in the middle of fields. Even when it's green, there is a very Australian feeling of weatheredness about it, offset by the ubiquitous Australasian grazing country things like wire fences and bloody pine trees (just because they remind me of home, doesn't mean I have to like them). In keeping with that kind of plains country, we also got a bit of lightning and rain. Fortunately the heavy bits of that were overnight, while we were trying to sleep under a tin roof in Armidale.

The New England Highway is also home to Tamworth, which is home of the Country Music Festival and a motel with a "world famous guitar shaped pool". Let it be said that we did not stop to examine the veracity of the second half of that claim. Further north there is the bustling metropolis of Tenterfield, where they've heard of coffee but apparently can't be having with the whole idea of being able to taste it.

The New England highway cuts back into the back of Brisbane from the rather surprising maximum altitude of just over 1000 metres. I must be said that for such a flat country, Australia does manage to concentrate all its slope into fairly small patches -- mostly along the east coast. The drop down to Brisbane-level is pretty sudden, and if you get stuck behind a truck full of incontinent cows it pays to be positive at the first passing lane. Of course the rain came back on for that bit. Cities where it doesn't rain for months at a time have poor drainage on their roads. At least the shiny four-wheel-drive brigade got to feel manly (possibly womanly too) as they charged through axle-deep puddles that the rest of us had the sense to skirt.

Brisbane itself was rather nicer than I remembered it. Full of Queenslanders of course, who are by definition as mad as meat axes. Must be the heat... December to February I would rather be elsewhere!

The conference itself was good. The opening plenaries were all on climate change. There seems to be an avalanche of rather disturbing evidence coming in. Even for someone (me) with a fairly low threshold for environmental hysterics, it really does look as if your head would have to be well and truly in the sand to try and claim that climate change wasn't real and immediate. Don't buy waterfront property, is all I can say. I went to another interesting talk related to this. The speaker was saying that it's actually very hard to predict if places will get wetter or drier with increases in temperature, and barring other changes in weather patterns there's no reason to assume that hotter = drier. Hot air can cause more evaporation, but it can also hold more water. Some long-term records show a decrease in evaporation, even with increasing temperatures. Of course the popular media love the idea of creeping deserts, evidence or not.

Back down was via the coast road, for a few reasons (mostly a need for one of us to do half an hour's specimen collecting at Broken Head). That would be a nice drive too, were it a whole lot less busy. It's much more built up, but there is still a lot of bush around, with much taller, straighter, closer-together trees. Presumably this is down to the joys of trying to propose controlled burns along main highways. I'm going to have to get back into a completely different way of thinking about disturbance regimes when I get back to New Zealand! Whadaya mean, no fires?! We found a rather good and incongruous Mexican restaurant in Wilgoolga, just north of Coffs Harbour.

Getting back into Sydney is always a bit of an emotional challenge, not least because some sizeable proportion of the population always seems to be southbound on the freeway coming in, all following too close and refusing to maintain a steady speed. I think Sydney's ridiculous sprawl and drab urban ambience is spoiling me for other cities -- I was still wondering when Brisbane was going to start when we were about 5km from the city centre.

As always when I do a long trip in our car, I was blown away by how well it coped with the whole thing. Four adults and all their gear on board, and it still rode like a Rolls Royce, handled like it was on rails and got over 30 miles per gallon. Go Citroen! Thirty-one years old and still purring like a kitten and happy to run for hours at 100-odd km/h (passing many newer and more pretentious cars dead on the side of the road as soon as the weather got hot, ho ho ho -- the Australian school of car maintenance strikes again).

In general, I don't understand why most Aussies immediately think of flying when they want to travel long-distance. The driving is generally pretty easy, and this is a spectacular country to travel in, not least because the native flora and fauna is still very much alive and kicking, getting on the road and dropping branches in campsites. I could partly blame it on the aforementioned Australian school of car maintenance, but that's rather a chicken-and-egg suggestion. Then again, lots of people my age from all over the world have seen more of other continents than they have of their own country. Very shortly I will have seen more non-urban Australia than most Australians. I'm looking forward to it.

Just a job

2005-11-21T21:26:00.000+11:00

I'm feeling grumpy about the way that science as a career is approached, and how that relates to me. Science is my job, it's what I do in order to eat and pay rent. To be strictly correct, at the moment my PhD scholarship is what I do to pay rent, and there's the rub. There is this tendency for people in science to be completely consumed by it, to spend all their time working or thinking about work. I did that myself while I was doing my Honours degree, but that was for less than a year. At the age of 25 I have more important things (and people) in my life, and I'd rather put in a solid day, then go home and do other things, or spend the weekend doing other things. And I'd like to get paid for this approach, thank you very much. I am, in fact, mostly doing a PhD in order to get access to permanent work at half-pie decent rates of pay. One might argue that this is the wrong reason to do a PhD -- one would be welcome to continue doing skilled work for 12 dollars an hour (if you can find it at all), in that case.

With that perspective, I find the approach taken to PhD students to be a mite irritating. For a start, the official line is that a PhD is a 3-year degree in most British-style universities. This is bollocks. You generally get up to 2 and half years to do a Masters, and a PhD is only supposed to be 6 months longer? In practice, at least in Australia, you get funded for four years of research, and I don't know of any whole-organism biologists who've finished in three years. Except that scholarships are generally only for three years, unless you spin a particularly good line in bullshit, in which case they might give you another six months. From the end of the university year, that is, generally early December. But we mostly don't start our degree until March... so that'd be a 2 3/4 year PhD, then, with a start right after a field season.

Further to my irritation, PhD students are supposed to produce an original piece of research, a "contribution to the field". Sorry, if that were really a requirement, half of PhD students would be stopped at the gate. The chemical sciences in particular seem to have students spending three years trying to isolate or synthesise one particular compound. Being an unpaid lab slave does not constitute original research, to me. It would be more honest to admit that a PhD is training for a job, in which case learning to be a lab slave can float your boat all you like.

Perhaps some of this is a hangover from science as a pursuit for gentlemen, where one might get a sponsor if one needed a little financial backing (there are echos of this in the painful and circuitous rigmarole of applying for scholarships). In those days no one would have dreamed of calling science a trade, but I think in modern times science has more in common with the trades than white-collar work. It tends to be at least somewhat hands-on, to require a particular way of thinking about the physical world; and most importantly in the context of this little essay, a long period of on-the-job training. And can you imagine a welder turning up to work for free "to get some experience"? I can imagine him getting a wee talking to from people who wanted to get paid...

The root of my irritation is getting a tune-up from my yearly review panel for not having made enough progress "after two years". Firstly, one year and eight months does not equal two years to my obviously addled brain, especially when it includes only one summer and I work on a seasonally active animal. I'd also just spent 25 minutes talking about some theoretical work that I've put a lot of work into, that's almost ready to be published (original thought, that thing we're supposed to do). Of course if my panel hadn't consisted of a chemist and a population geneticist they might have understood some of it.

Part of why I did a PhD was a chance to develop some general skills and knowledge that I lacked. I've spent a lot of time in the last year and a half reading about topics like evolution, ecological chemistry, and life history theory. For the first time in my life I have a medium-sized handle on the maths behind population ecology. This might be considered a useful thing to know, were I trying to train myself to be a professional ecologist.

The irony here, in my struggle to become a proper grown-up scientist and my frustration with the system that makes that happen, is that given a free choice, I would probably be a writer. That's the one thing that I've always been best at. I like words, I like poetry, and can remember the lyrics to more songs than anyone else I know. Having a good feel for words and concepts was helpful in learning biology, since I can remember terminology and species names without much effort. It is a pretty sad comment on our society that someone who's intelligent and can write, among other skills, is obviously going to go into science... especially when we don't create work for scientists anyway.

I've come to realise that the bits of science that I like the most aren't necessarily related to research -- writing, ideas, synthesising conceptss or communicating them. Attempting to play to these strengths has, so far, mostly had the result outlined above. The actual research part of science I can do, but left completely to my own devices will be rather disorganised about. Part of what I enjoyed about my Honours year was being involved in an active lab with regular discussions and involvement in the process of getting things written.

Meanwhile, I don't really do that much writing; scientific writing really doesn't count -- it's practically an oxymoron, although I do my best. Part of the purpose of this blog was to keep my hand in, but after sitting at a computer all day I really don't feel like coming home and writing. It's been a couple of years since I wrote any poetry, despite some unsubtle hints from my sister that I should stick at it.

So, yes. Grumpy.

Brilliant ideas #1: Shark training

2005-11-03T20:52:00.000+11:00

Those of you who know me will be aware that I like to spend time on the water. Of late this time has mostly been on a surfboard. Now, most people who've surfed will have thought from time to time about sharks. It's well known that sharks, and particularly Great Whites, have an occasional tendency to take bites out of surfboards and whoever happens to be sitting on top of them.

Now, the thing is that the sharks tend to spit that bite out and not bother taking another. Despite their reputation, Great Whites (especially large Great Whites) are fairly canny operators. They like seals. Seals are rich and fatty and an excellent source of high-energy food for a shark on the go. Sharks don't like mouthfuls of skinny white neoprene-wrapped surfer, or nasty epoxy-coated polystyrene foamy stuff. That's why they tend to spit out the first bite they take. Too bad that bite might have your kidney in it.

Seals do have this unfortunate habit of lolling about on the surface with a fin or two sticking out... rather like a surfer waiting for a wave, especially on a short board (so not me). I think that we're going the wrong way about the shark problem. What we should do, rather than hanging shark nets around beaches, is anchor a row of shortboards about 100 metres offshore. Any incoming shark that feels inclined to mistake a board for a seal will have a go at the empty boards and be educated on the differences.

Sharks have excellent vision, so the next time it sees a surfboard, being an intelligent and now educated critter, it will associate it with a nasty and unrewarding mouthful of fiberglass and foam, and leave it alone.

Genius.

The smell of water

2005-10-22T22:08:00.000+10:00

In New Zealand it would never occur to me to smell for rain, mostly because in New Zealand there's always water around, rain or not. Here in Australia I've gotten quite into the habit of having a sniff for incoming rain, and it's usually possible to smell it before you see it. I find still this quite an interesting novelty...

This was something I experienced in a more startling way last year, when I helped out a friend on a field-trip to North Queensland. We travelled up the inland route (to be said in broad Strine, as in "thin land root"). Basically, if you look at a map of Australia and draw a straight line up from Sydney to Cairns, you'll see the way we went. This route cuts quite a long way inland, including going inland of all the coastal hills, mountains and plateau type things. As a consequence most of the country is rather dry, to put it mildly.

When we came back to the coast we pretty much cut around the corner of some hills and straight down to the coast road. The smell of the sea was amazing -- salt, iodine and water, totally immediate and unmistakable. You couldn't fail to notice it after a week having your nose dried out and smelling mostly dust and dry grass. It was probably the first time in my life I've been far enough from the sea (or at least, large bodies of water) to come back to it as something startling and fresh. We wound down the windows and breathed it in like we were driving through a field of flowers.

2005-10-08T16:39:00.000+10:00

Dear me, it's been weeks since I started this blog and I haven't posted again once. I don't want it to turn into a ghost page, even if I did only start it right now partly to nab the name. Part of my excuse is that I've been busy, firstly gallivanting up to Port Macquarie for a few days to look for cane toads (still too cold by the looks), then writing a talk and winging off to Fremantle to present it at the meeting of the Australasian Evolution society. I can now report back from Western Australia... Fascinating place. We only had a few days to spare after the conference ended, so we hired a car and headed south into the jarrah forest. My conference-rain-god attributes were at full strength, so of course the famously dry region turned on several days of intermittent showers. The rain wasn't an entirely bad thing, because it made everything nice and green, especially compared to Sydney. The jarrah forests turned out to have a somewhat different feel to eucalyptus forests in the east -- more open, with a lower and herbier understorey. And a scattering of rather large fallen trunks. Some of the tree species have gum-nuts of singularly large dimensions, they look more like conkers. It's particularly striking when you see one of those species on the side of the road, with a pile of the things underneath them. You wouldn't want to drive over them, it'd be like hitting a patch of ball bearings (especially in a Toyota hirecar with chassis technology reminiscent of a 70s Honda Civic). It probably goes without saying that a couple of days is not nearly enough in which to explore WA. The place is big. We made it as far south as Margaret River, or more accurately Privelly Beach. If you're ever in that vicinity, don't stay at the caravan park -- it's a bit of a ripoff. The coast itself is quite reminiscent of New Zealand's West Coast, wild and rugged with muscular surf. It was my first taste of the Indian Ocean, but after watching the waves for about three seconds I was in no hurry to have a swim. The mouth of the Margaret River is allegedly a popular surfing spot, but there is a break somewhere around there called "the guillotine". While in Dwellingup (there are lots of towns in that part of the world with funky names that end in "up"; we're told told it means "place") we checked out the rainforest resource centre. This was notable on its own for being constructed in rammed earth in the outline of a jarrah leaf, this being actually much cooler and more subtle than it sounds. Surprise highlight there was a pendulum clock made almost entirely of local hardwood, including the mechanism, the pendulum and the weights. No pictures allowed, unfortunately. We shall go back to Western Oz one day, with a lot more time on our hands and a groovier vehicle.

The first drop

2005-09-14T15:10:00.000+10:00

Welcome my new and shiny blog, to be updated on an irregular basis with my best effort at enjoyable writing. The title is from the novel River of Gods by Ian McDonald, and feels appropriate because I'm living on the eastern seaboard of the driest inhabited continent on earth, and the drought that might actually be the weather pattern for this century contines while the politicians rush through the legislation for their stupid desalination plant as the oil prices soar. Because this is a city where thousands of commuters throng every day over stonework laid by convicts shipped halfway around the world, and trains whine under high-voltage cables over elegant sandstone arches in the summer heat-shimmer. Where our bedroom alternately smells of jasmine flowers and bushfires in the evening. And I want to write about all that...