…off to go find out what Twitter is all about…

Well, I wasn’t going to use this blog as a diary, but I’ve really been having an eventful life recently. Yesterday I got an email from a brother I didn’t know I had, and I’ve now learned that I have another three half-siblings. Three brothers (27, 14 and 8 ) and a sister (18). Two have indian names, two western names. No coherent thoughts on this yet, really. I need to digest it. I have curiosity. They, along with my father, are all living in Sydney, which is a four hour flight away, on the other side of the country. The brother who has been trying to track me down is interested in knowing if I might like to meet them sometime. I am, but I need to think about all this first and take things slowly.

As you probably know, I’m a science geek, and i’ve been wanting to spend a night out, in the open, under a clear big sky, for yonks. I do overnight walks all the time, but it has always been in forested areas. So it was good to get out on the Nullarbor Plain for some camping this time. I tried to get some photos of star trails, around the south celestial pole, but haven’t yet gotten my film developed. I suspect it didn’t work. But there are a few holiday snaps from my digital camera below. As usual I have hundreds of photos, but haven’t gotten around to looking at them yet!

Incidentally, on science-geek things, I was disappointed that the Skylab museum at the Baladonia Road House is now closed. Apparently the artifacts have been sent back to the US. The Skylab space station, if you didn’t know, burned up over this region of Western Australia, leaving bits and pieces of itself all over the Nullarbor Plain.

I arrived in Esperance a day after the worst of the storms. But I was impressed by how quick the tourist operators were adapting! The original plan was to return to Perth via Hyden, but of course the storms destroyed a bridge. So the only way to get back out of Esperance was to go back via Kal again, dodging the stray sheep and cows crossing the road, and the flooded sections.

I was just sent this link, today, as I test my GUI for these very same issues.

Well I’ve decided to start posting again. But first off, may I point you to an organisation that I think is worth supporting. Engineers Without Borders. It is yet another ‘aid’ NGO. But I like that is very focussed on fixing problems, ‘on-the-ground’. As an engineer myself, I also perhaps have more appreciation for what they do, in trying to provide basic power, clean water, sewage and communications, sustainably, to isolated communities. And in some ways it is easier to evaluate the organisation’s effectiveness, in comparison to some other NGOs. It also seeks the co-operation of governments where it does work. An advantage of being non-political.

I have been a member of Amnesty International for a long time, but am considering moving my money to Engineers Without Borders, instead of splitting money between them. I very much do believe in many of the general goals of Amnesty, but I’m not certain that I like their broadening of their mandate a few years ago. Amnesty has decided to work on economic and cultural rights, in addition to the goals they are better known for (and which I am happy with), like -

• to free all prisoners of conscience
• to ensure a prompt and fair trial for all political prisoners
• to abolish the death penalty, torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment
• to end extrajudicial executions and “disappearances”
• to fight impunity by working to ensure perpetrators of such abuses are brought to justice in accordance with international standards

I think concentrating on a narrow set of well defined goals is good. And trying to meet basic physical needs (as EWB does, in a culturally sensitive way) seems to appeal to me more then more philosophical goals – goals which may sometimes (to my thinking at the moment) conflict with each other. In human rights, it seems to me that there is a clear cultural bias, that says that some actions are wrong, and some are right. I don’t see a problem with this. So what does it mean to incorporate “cultural rights”, when the traditions of a culture may conflict with human rights)? There seems to be a conflict of interest there, and the only solution would seem to be that AI will have to be judgemental and say ‘to hell with your cultural rights’.

And is there no potential for conflicts between economic rights and civil/political rights?  If this situation comes up I expect that AI will throw out being holistic, and weigh one over the other, which is probably exactly what the government being criticised will be doing, and that government may say that they are implementing what they believe is the best compromise solution.  So why should Amnesty’s weighting be right?

Maybe I am misunderstanding something, or ‘human rights’ is too complicated for me. Not that I disagree with the actions of any of the campaigns that I’m aware of, but perhaps the higher level goals are more nebulous then I am entirely comfortable with. (Though some goals are very sharp, like campaigning for the abolition of the death penalty, in countries that have it. Always. Which I totally support. I also entirely agree with their stance on asylum seekers, in Australia. And their views on “rendition“.)

Amnesty also has a relatively huge funding base already – so perhaps I want to support a more grassroots type of organisation.

Just a short post to say that I’m still alive.  Been distracted by various personal things recently, and as this blog isn’t really a diary I haven’t been posting… But will have more posts sometime soon.  The positive event is that I’ve just started renting a villa by myself in Yokine – yay.

Somebody just sent me this – maybe of interest if you’re also into software development.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000734.html

There are some interesting comments.

(More holiday photos on the way!)

“Environmentalism is the new religion in this post modern world and like all religions you have an ”end times” senario to believe in.”So us sinfull humans must be punished for our love of the fossil fuel and motorway and overseas travel.And the penance we must pay is carbon tax.And we all await a fiery future with global warming for our sins!”

Something that shits me at the moment is the frequency with which I’m seeing comments like this – that environmental activism is just a new religion. I’ve seen it on blogs, in newspaper Op-Ed pieces, and on Usenet. Often it is combined with a view that market forces will avert problems or provide the best solutions.

Yes, it’s true that environmental activism may be a religion to some. But to others it is just cold, rational, thinking. It is simply not in our interests to severely disrupt an environment that our comfort, economies and lives are deeply entwined with, in complex ways that we sometimes have a poor understanding of. ‘End-times’ scenario’s are often the realistic consequences of not changing our behaviour to acknowledge this.

Part of the problem is that the issues with the biggest consequences also have the longest time scales, and we’re not good at thinking on long time scales.

When waste products are produced which have obvious consequences on short time-scales we have no problem with taxing their production. For example, the “end-time scenario” for not constructing sewage systems in our cities is us being buried in excrement. We’ve realised this and nowadays people pay taxes that maintain and build sewage systems.

We find it more challenging to deal with medium time-scale consequences. In much of the developed world industrial pollution must now be made inert before being released into the environment. This is done because there is an end-times scenario for us – death and deformity by poison. Industry pays to neutralise these toxins, and now most people agree this is good. They value health over GDP (if we accept the questionable claims that clean industry means damaged economy, and that GDP is the most important parameter of the economy). But in many cases this had to be hard fought for in the developed world – and is still being fought for. And it is still not the case in parts of the developing world. Market forces just don’t work without a cost being put on pollutants.

A longer-term issue, in Australia, is salinity. This is a serious and expensive environmental problem over much of the land. A result of land clearance and inappropriate agricultural practices. Once upon a time it wasn’t known that salinity would be a problem in Australia. There was some evidence of it by the 1890s, but it wasn’t until 1925 that it was generally accepted in science. It was believed that everything would be okay, and it wasn’t worth doing anything about it. Despite this, even now, there are some that still aren’t taking seriously, with further economic cost to us. How could this have been averted? Well a tax on land clearing and poor management practices might have been a good start.

Global warming is even longer-term then this and so is  tougher still. Some people still argue that there isn’t any evidence for it (though not Lomborg) and that it isn’t worth doing anything about it (like Lomberg). A problem with global warming is that the science allows for effects that may not be blindingly obvious at this time, and which may be difficult to do anything about by the time they become obvious (a bit like salinity). So people can jump up and down claiming that global warming ‘alarmists’ are just religious nuts. But given the complexity of the issue, it seems to me that folk who emit quotes like the one above may be the True Believers. They have an irrational belief that they are Saved, through an unwavering faith in market-forces/natural-variability/Superman.

Given that the market doesn’t seem to work when the resource being damaged is

a) free,
b) damaged slowly

it seems to me that a carbon tax, or some other way to add scarcity or cost to carbon, is a very sensible precaution right now. Perhaps also an opportunity to prove that there really is intelligent life on earth, that we can learn from past mistakes, and that we’re not ruled by our religious beliefs.

Interestingly, when industry is forced to change its behaviour for a better environmental outcome it’s often found that the costs to the industry are much lower then what is claimed by them while they are fighting the change. An example of this was sulphur dioxide emission control in the US. When the US EPA decided (in 1993) to auction off permits for the right to generate a quantity of SO2 above the given quota, the auction price began cheap and got cheaper to just $70 per tonne. It was suggested beforehand that they might go for as much as $1500/t. There was little demand for SO2 permits because industry had been exaggerating the costs of reducing SO2 [1]. The reality is that it was cheap and easy . A topic for another post.

[1] The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford, pp 98-101 (London, Little Brown, April 2006)

I’ll be rescanning a few of these, and perhaps adding a few new photos. Unfortunately some are blurred because of a remove dust-and-gunk-on-the-scanner filter. Also the colours look a bit out in some cases. Nonetheless you still might find some of them interesting!

There are 25 more in this post – they may take awhile to download if you don’t have a broadband Internet connection (click on ‘Read the rest of this entry’)!

According to Wikipedia:

In Hinduism, the river Ganga (feminine) is sacred. It is worshipped by Hindus and personified as a goddess, who holds an important place in the Hindu religion. Hindu belief holds that bathing in the river on certain occasions causes the forgiveness of sins and helps attain salvation. Many people believe that this will come from bathing in Ganga at any time. People travel from distant places to immerse the ashes of their kin in the waters of the Ganga; this immersion also is believed to send the ashes to heaven. Several places sacred to Hindus lie along the banks of the river Ganga, including Haridwar and Kashi. People carry from ganges, sacred water that is sealed in copper pots after making the pilgrimage to Kashi. It is believed that drinking water from the Ganga with one’s last breath will take the soul to heaven.

In most Hindu families, a vial of water from the Ganga is kept in every house. This is done because it is auspicious to have water of the Holy Ganga in the house, and also if someone is dying, that person will be able to drink its water.

Many Hindus believe that the water from the Ganga can cleanse a person’s soul of all past sins, and that it can also cure the ill. The ancient scriptures mention that the water of Ganges carries the blessings of the Lord’s feet. Hence mother Ganges is also known as Visnupadi [Emanating from the Lotus feet of Supreme Lord Sri Visnu].

Some of the most important Hindu festivals and religious congregations are celebrated on the banks of the river Ganga such as the Kumbh mela or the Kumbh fair and the chhat puja.

The most important city sacred to Hinduism on the banks of the river Ganga is Varanasi or Banaras. It has hundreds of temples along the banks of the Ganga which often get flooded during the rains. This city, especially along the banks of the Ganga, is an important place of worship for the Hindus as well as a cremation ground.

You can see examples of the copper pots that people use to carry Ganga water in the photos below. Along the river are the many ‘ghats’ that are used for different purposes. Some (dhobi) ghats are used by people to wash their clothes, others are used for ritual bathing. And at others cremations are performed on open bonfires (there is no where holier to be cremated). Early in the morning the ghats are crowded with people performing rituals while facing the rising sun – this is the best time to visit.

[Yes, this needs to be rescanned! They had feet on the print!]