Please note The Green Man is usually accurate however he does tend to drift into the mischievous areas of satire and parody from time to time. Such is the nature of the Green Man. In fact he is not above complete fiction when the fancy takes him.
I know you have taken the time to find out who the Green Man is so I don't need to tell you that he is a mythic figure from western Europe who is the Lord of Misrule and a general trouble maker in the pagan pantheon of Europe of the middle ages.
Knowing this you will not be surprised to find out that The Green Man has a penchant for things that challenge society and its social mores. It is in this spirit that The Green Man wholeheartedly recommends Illegal Art , a site that celebrates art that has been the subject of legal proceedings usually from large corporations who are offended by the way it lampoons their products or, in the case of movies, characters. It is interesting to see how thin skinned some of these corporations are. Obviously surgical removal of the humour centre in the brain is a prerequisite to a job in management.
Here is a picture of Mao constructed with US dollar bills by Ray Beldner that resulted in the knotting of numerous pairs of legal and administrative underpants.
I was in the shopping centre yesterday and wandered into a shop specialising in Dungeons and Dragons style war games. They sell little plastic soldiers, monsters etc. and the domains in which they do battle. It is school holidays at the moment so, even though it was a Monday, it was full of boys in the eight to fifteen age group. It is a smallish shop but it has enough room for some battle grounds on tables at the front and a work area for its clients towards the rear.
I have been into this shop before and each time I do it lifts my heart. Each time I see boys engrossed in constructive and creative activity. There is so little of this quality activity available for boys. In this shop boys can let their imaginations range across imaginary landscapes and control epic battles fought by iconic armies of knights, elves or any number of other creatures. Younger boys have simplistic battle strategies that grow more complex, sophisticated and abstract as their brain develops and matures.
At the back of the store, in the work area, preparation is underway for future battles. Minute figurines are being meticulously painted. Here boys are not only developing their future armies they are also developing their fine motor skills, learning about art and sharing their hopes and dreams with other boys.
In this shop conflict is played out on the minature battlefield and loses, whilst disheartening, are accepted gracefully. Boys are learning to compete in a constructive and supportive environment with no adults placing unrealistic demands upon them or abusing them from the sidelines. Compare this with the local football field.
The young adult males who work there are not trained in counselling or youth work but they share the passion with their customers. They relate to these boys and interact with them at a level that most youth workers can only dream about.
This store is about making money and it clearly does that but in doing so it delivers a rare and valuable service to boys in our community. If you are a father of a young boy check out if there is a store like this in your area. Your son may embrace this fantasy world and he has much he can gain from it if he does.
Why am I interested in this? Not only am I not from California, I am not even from the USA. Can't help it I am afraid.
University of Maryland have released a report indicating that the touch sensitive screen voting system, produced by Diebold, for use in the upcoming gubernatorial elections in California is "at high risk of compromise,". They found that "the Diebold software was badly written and full of serious security flaws,"
Alameda Registrar of Voters Brad Clark said "We don't care if the vote goes to the wrong person as long as it records the vote." Well, he didn't actually say that but he might as well have. My understanding of the word "democracy" is so much better now.
Read the University of Maryland report here.
Read a more detailed report at Wired News
Who said that John Howard was insignificant on the world political scene? John has made his mark, up there with leaders of USA and England. In fact the Guardian reports that Tony Blair may even be "learning from the master" so to speak.
Speculating on the inability of Mr Blair to utter the "s" word the Guardian cites precedents in political history, Nixon, Clinton and, you guessed it, John Howard.
The exact wording used tends to be of supreme importance in these cases, treading a fine line between doing what sounds like the decent thing and accepting culpability.The Australian prime minister, John Howard, would only go as far as to express regret for the treatment of the country's Aboriginal population,
It seems that Mr Howard has achieved his goal of being a notable Prime Minister but not, perhaps, for the things he wanted.
Those of you who are longer term readers of The Green Man will know that The Green Man has a soft spot for public nudity. It is one of those harmless outrageous things that makes the world a lot more interesting and its most adventurous form is streaking at major events. We could have done with a streaker or two at the Grand Final last Saturday. It would have given some joy to the majority of the audience, who were Collingwood fans.
There is not a lot to learn if you are planning a forey into the wild and crazy world of streaking.
Step 1. Find a large crowd
Step 2. Lose the clothes
Step 3. Run like buggery
If you are still unsure and wish to brush up on the finer points then you can visit Streakerama which provides detailed and informative pages on current streaking practice. There is a small amount of nudity there but not much, you are supposed to be providing that.
My personal crusade is for all politicians to have to give their televised policy speaches in the nude. Now that would bring some honesty back into politics (and make for much more humorous television).
The company Diebold Inc. is a leading American manufacturer of voting machines that register votes in elections. Who could forget that chad debarcle in Florida during the last US presidential election. All that talk of nipples had The Green Man's imagination off on flights of fancy when he should have been concentrating on other things.
Anyway, back to Diebold. If you visit their site (click here) you will see that patriotism is something that they have embraced with enthusiasm. In a move that would have me a little unsettled if I was a US citizen, Wally O'Dell, the CEO of Diebold, whose machines are critical to probity in the US presidential election, has written to all Ohio Replublicans in support of President Bush and soliciting funds for the next presidential campaign.
Maintaining an arms length distance between candidates and the voting system doesn't appear to be quite as important in the USA as we would view it here in Australia.
Your sitting on the bus, it's almost exactly half way between breakfast and lunch, your stomach is rumbling. Now that's a Snickers moment. There is only one thing more distressing than not having one with you and that is having one and not being allowed to eat it. How distressing is it? $50,000 worth of distressing according to Jamila Glauber who is suing the transit system in Juneau, Alaska for said amount. Apparently it is a long standing and well known rule that you can't eat on the buses in Juneau however when the bus driver enforced the regulation the distress was just too much for poor Jamila. The $50,000 will help cover the cost of counselling and recovery from this traumatic event.
Seems fair enough to me too. Doesn't the US constitution say something about the "pursuit of happiness", or was it the declaration of independance, who knows? Anyway a snickers bar, mid morning, on a bus, now that's persuit of happiness.
In the late 1930's Charlie Chaplin, by then already a famous actor, became increasingly concerned with the rise of fascism in Europe and in particular Adolf Hitler. Chaplins weapon was humour and his response was to make a movie than lampooned Hitler and his policies.
The picture is a classic example of biting satire. A common vehicle of satire is to take something to an extreme to show how ludicrous it is. Sadly, the extremes depicted in the movie did not even come close to the eventual extremes of Hitlers reality.
There is some retrospective irony in the production of this movie. In the late 30's Germany was a huge consumer of American made films. When Chaplin approached Hollywood looking for a studio to fund and make the film on his behalf he could not find a taker. The predominately Jewish controlled film industry did not want to upset one of their better markets.
At this stage in his career Chaplin was a wealthy man so, when the studios would not back him, he funded and produced the movie himself. The purpose of the film was to alert the world to danger that Hilters regime was posing. Events were unfolding so fast, however, that the world was to become aware of the danger without the need for the film. War was declared before the film hit the movie cinemas.
Another interesting factoid is that Hitler himself quite enjoyed the movie, watching it at least twice. He apparently had a reasonable sence of humour and, out of the public eye, was quite capable of having a laugh at himself.
Following an incident on the way to the field that delayed its senior players, Collingwood was forced to play its under 17s against the Brisbane Lions.
Whilst putting up a valient fight they were no match for the superior Lions and were convincingly thrashed.
Late Update: It wasn't the under 17s. It appears that it they just played that way. What were you boys doing? The colliwobbles strike again. :-(
Natalie Mahowald and Chao Luo of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado modelled the earths atmosphere with specific attention to the amount of dust it contains. Their most likely scenario is that by 2090 our atmosphere will contain 60% less dust than it currently does. This is because of the increase in plant cover of the land masses because of increasing levels of carbon dioxide and global warming.
This may sound like a pretty neat outcome however it does have a down side. Dust in the atmosphere is responsible for reflecting much of the heat from the sun back out into space and, as such, its reduction will see the earth get warmer still. Also the sea's plankton relies on dust as a source of iron and its diminishing will reduce plankton levels. This will have a ripple on effect through all sea creatures.
Nature reports the French Institute for Agronomy Research has announced the first successful cloning of rats. I'm sorry but isn't part of the pest problem that we have because rats are so good a reproducing themselves naturally. You can just imagine the way the planning session went.
"hmmm what can we spend our research dollars on? Hey why don't we clone an animal that we have far too many of anyway."
Only joking, it may seem silly but having genetically identical rats eliminates one very important variable when carrying out research into illnesses such as hypertension, diabetes and cancer. Having genetically identical rats enables us to test the efficacy of treatments and know that any benefit was not just because one rat was genetically more robust than another.
The whole sorry mess starts when Saturn, using a flint sickle given to him by his mother, Earth, castrates his father, Uranus. (whole male readership flinches) The blood flowing from the wound gives rise to the Furies, Titans and Nymphs.
Saturn goes on the marry his sister Rhea, a somewhat questionable practice, that is completely overshadowed by his habit of eating each of their children as they are born. Rhea is understandably not particularly happy with this practice and conceals her final pregnancy from Saturn. She gives birth the Zeus.
Zeus, following a full and happy childhood that you would expect from such a stable relationship, grows up and challenges his father. Saturn is forced to regurgitate Zeus' previously devoured siblings. Together they then wage war on the Titans that were given life at the original castration.
In this mythology Saturn is the diety of time, ageing and death. In this context the devouring of the children is the ageing process. The image on the right is a painting of entitled "Saturn Devouring One Of His Children" by Goya painted circa 1822.
Here is a little interchange I just heard on the radio. It is not verbatum obviously.
Representative of Bush Government: "We can clearly say that the overthrow of the Iraqi regime has made America a safer place"
Reporter: "There were either WOMD and the facilities to produce them or there wasn't. If there was then they are now in the hands of another rogue state or terrorists and as such are still a danger. If there wasn't any then there was never any danger. So how can you say that things are now safer"
Representative of Bush Government: "I think we should stick to the facts. The overthrow of the Iraqi regime has made America a safer place." and terminates interview.
Good to see that logic is not getting in the way of some good spin.
"I just assumed life sucks and that's that." So thought Bill Thielkerand he just kept going through the motions of living. He was quite surprised when his doctor diagnosed depression. Time reports that, although two thirds of those diagnosed with depression are women.
in many ways depressed men are worse off than depressed women. They are less likely to recognize their condition through the cloud of seemingly beside-the-point feelings like anger, apathy and low self-esteem. And even when they know what they've got, they're less likely to acknowledge it to others or seek treatment. They are also more likely to self-medicate with drugs or alcohol and four times as likely to kill themselves.
In a response to this terrible situation the National Institute of Mental Health is releasing a campaign through television, radio and the internet called "Real Men, Real Depression" designed to counter the widely held view amongst men that mood disorders, like depression, are a sign of weakness.
All men in western societies have been socialised to believe that they must be able handle their own problems. The sad fact is that they cannot and suicide and substance abuse statistics provide conclusive evidence of this. Where feminism failed both men and women is that it failed to recognise that in the things that really matter, health, wellbeing, happiness, fulfillment, men are far worse off than women. Making women equal to men is doing them a huge disservice.
Have you visited a porn website lately? Come on you can confess to Uncle Green Man, he won't tell anyone. You haven't? Well it's not for the lack of them. The Seattle, Washington-based firm N2H2 reports that there are now approximately 260 million porn pages on the net. This is 1800% more than 5 years ago.
The net used to be dominated by Star Trek now it is porn. Have the nerds discovered their testosterone or are we seeing the nerds domain over run by a randier class of user? This is what happens when you make the interface so user friendly.
Perhaps the WWW needs to be replaced with WWP (world wide porn).
And I thought that George W and the first lady were good wholesome Christian folks. In a move guaranteed to shock and awe those fundamentalist Christian groups who are decrying Harry Potter as the work of the devil sent to undermine Christian values and Christianity itself, Laura Bush, that's George's wife, has said of the Harry Potter collection
"I loved them. They were so imaginative, clever and fun to read."
But then again what would she know she is only a librarian and teacher, and of course a Christian.
Ever thought the stock market trading was for you? Maybe you think that you don't have a high enough IQ. Well you'd be wrong. I am sure that stock market traders don't have a zero IQ but analysis of trading suggests that it wouldn't matter if they did. Nautre reports that J. Doyne Farmer, of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico has found that placing trades on the basis of random selection is just as successful a strategy.
Traders ... are rather like ants swarming chaotically through the guts of a great clock, barely affecting its ability to tick.
The research suggests that the supply and demand model that is used to determine prices is set by the actual buy and sell orders rather than any rational evaluation of the stock value and as such randomly generated numbers work just as well.
Tara Bulger is youth director for the First Presbyterian Church of Athens somewhere in the US (I presume Ga is an abbrev. for a US state) and she has learnt a valuable lesson about the new world in which we find ourselves.
In a "seemed like a good idea at the time" moment she encouraged some of the children of the church to perform a random act of kindness. A package was prepared containing Jolly Rancher hard candies and labeled "Random act of kindness". So far, so good. Sadly the bomb squad robot that removed the package from the cannon in the evacuated City Hall was incapable of reading this altruistic message and blew the package up with a shot gun.
"I just thought it was a good way for the children to put some kindness into the community," Bulger said.
But now?
"We'll talk with the children about how things don't always turn out like they're planned," she said.
If you are going to be poor then it pays off to be smart. A study by Carole Hart of the University of Glasgow has found that the average life span of people living in slums is significantly higher if they have a high IQ.
If you are over 25 then for each 15 points that is creamed from your IQ the chance of you dying increases by 17%. Part of the risk arises because poor neighbourhoods are inherently less safe and, to put it crassly, the dumber you are the more likely you are to get into strife that results in you getting killed.
As usual the wealthy are spared, there is no correlation between IQ and longevity in wealthy suburbs. You can be a thick as two short planks if you are wealthy.
I have just been visiting the website of the OCED (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development).
Boy, you know you are on a nerdy web site when their "Don't Miss" section contains "Frequently Asked Statistical Tables"
Clicking on this intriguing link brings up a list of intellectual morsels to sate the hunger of the statistician with the beigest cardigan. What a choice "Basic Structural Statistics" or "Main Economic Indicators: Non-Member Countries" but who could go past "Quarterly growth rates in GDP at constant prices". This is the stuff to make your average statistician wet his corduroys.
Come to think of it, forget I ever told you I was there. This is worse than being caught on a porn site.
Hypertension is persistent high blood pressure and it contributes to a number of conditions including heart disease, peripheral vascular disease, stroke and kidney disease. None of these conditions are a barrel of laughs for those unfortunate individuals that suffer them and it important to identify those at risk early so that preventative strategies can be put in place. Racial differences are present with black Americans being far more likely to suffer hypertension than white and, when they do, onset is earlier and more severe.
The American Physiological Society report on research into why this is the case. This is the first step in developing effective intervention strategies.
Soon valuable research into disease prevention like this may not be possible in the land of the politically correct (California). Proposition 54, soon to go before the people effectively nobbles research of this nature by banning the categorisation of people based on race. It would be laughable if it was not so sad. Presumably the individuals presenting this proposition are well meaning but they are damaging the very people that they are trying to protect. Politically correct science is worthless science. Scientists need to be able to ask questions that others may find uncomfortable, for the good of us all.
The Green Man, being an ancient woodland spirit, is interested in modern religions in a way that most professionals are interested in developments in other arms of their profession.
The Roman Catholics are getting far to happy and exuberant it seems. There has been outbreaks of clapping and, heaven forbid, dancing in church. Well heaven didn't forbid it actually, the vatican did, although, if you are a Roman Catholic, that is pretty much the same thing.
Yahoo reports that a draft report from the vatican says that this sort of thing is just not on and what's more there have been instances of, shock-horror, alter-girls. The church is making it quite clear that it prefers alter-boys. The Green Man mischieviously observes that this is quite obvious and it is what has got them into so much trouble lately.
Finally, they are also unhappy about "self-service" communion and why wouldn't they be? You don't see surgeons advocating for do it yourself operations, now do you?
We have a family of magpies that have been living in the neighbourhood for some years now. Each morning they come to visit to see what has been placed on the bird feeder for them.
Whilst magpies have a reputation for being ferocious and extremely territorial we have established a convivial relationship with our avian neighbours. Each spring we see them loading up their beaks to take back to hatchlings in their nest and later the young birds are brought down to feed from the bird feeder themselves.
If we have neglected to place any food on the bird feeder the male will come over and look in the kitchen door in an attempt to find out what's going on and remind us that they are waiting. His wife is more circumspect and waits on a branch above the bird feeder. This image is of him this morning. We had thrown some bread onto the balcony but he prefers red meat. Having had some bread he was coming over to see if anything better was on offer.
You hear those stories about a drunk American tipping with a large bill by mistake. Well, they all look so alike don't they?
Here is a bill that you don't want to be poking, in an alcoholic haze, into the big brandy balloon on the piano.
They were last printed in 1945 but continued to be issued until 1969. Even though they are not issued any more they are still legal tender.
See more big bills at the Memory Hole, click here.
Research on mice has shown an interesting response to panic in a crowded room that may point to improved design of emergency exit facilities. In a counter intuitive outcome it was discovered that a narrow doorway cleared more individuals in a certain period than a wider one.
Faced with a narrow exit the mice tended to queue and many exited successfully. By widening the opening the mice attempted to fit through more than one at a time clogging the exit and resulting in fewer mice exiting successfully. Similarly, multiple exits added an additional level of confusion. When one became clogged the mice went for another disrupting the flow of mice exiting.
Ethical dilemmas prevent scientists experimenting on humans in these situations and
like us, mice fleeing from life-threatening danger look for the exit and make for it, pushing others aside if necessary. What's more, like panicking humans, the animals tend to follow one another rather than assessing the best exit route.
This is an excellent example of why scientific research is so important. Objective research such as this by Caesar Saloma at the University of the Philippines shows the obvious solution is not always the best. By enabling better design of emergency exit facilities science can contribute to the prevention of tragedies such as the Hillsborough football stadium in Sheffield, UK, when 96 people were crushed to death.
I have been working on a new image for the Green Man. The Green Man is normally depicted full face but I am experimenting with half profile at the moment.
Here is the first draft. It was drawn with Derwents last weekend.
As a child I longed for a complete set of Derwent pencils but they were for children with wealthier parents than I had. I had to wait for my son to give me a set, which he did, for Christmas, two or three years ago.
The final will probably be in water colour or possibly oil paint but, after all these years, I still turn to pencils first when working up new ideas.
Attending conferences is an important part of academic and professional life. It enables the attendees to keep abreast of latest techniques and development in the corner of the academic world that they call home. One has to be selective though, there are a lot of light weight events that contribute little to your development. It is just not worth going to this sort, unless someone else is paying of course.
The Green Man has eclectic tastes in conferences but he has stumbled across one that takes the cake, or is that bottle. The Whiskeys Of The World conference is scheduled for March 2004 at the San Francisco Hilton. "Of what scientific merit is this conference?" I hear you ask. The answer from those attending will undoubtably be "Who cares?" (spoken with a slur)
For one group of the species Rhagoletis pomonella the odour of love is apple, they are flies whose maggots eat apple you see. Consequently the most appropriate place for fly rumpy pumpy is on the apple where the eggs will later be laid.
Cornell University is currently documenting speciation in this organism. 250 years ago they only laid their eggs on hawthorn bushes which are native to North America. At this time the common apple tree was introduced to North America and, over the next one hundred years, a group of these flies started to utilise this new food source. Because fly nookie takes place on the fruit where the eggs are to be laid, those flies that are attracted to apple scent never mate with those flies who are attracted to hawthorn scent. This is known as sympatric speciation, a bit like Collingwood Football Club supporters vs the rest of the AFL. (err sorry about that, it is hard to get past Collingwoods presence in the Grand Final next Saturday at the moment.)
The individuals from the two separate groups could interbreed if they came in contact but they never do. Already they differ in a number of complex proteins and, over time, they will continue to diverge until it becomes physically impossible for them to produce viable offspring. Speciation will then be complete.
Here is some innovative video of John Howard and George Bush launching their joint singing career. Produced by Red Symons, breakfast presenter on ABC Melbourne.
Ah, aunty ABC you are spending my 8 cents well.
The Australian environment is hash and insect survival relies on their ability to find what shade and moisture that is available. These exhaust pipe and construction steel bullants find the underneath of the house an excellent base from which to launch their forays into the surrounding gardens.
The Guardian reports that in the UK there are around 50,000 children taking antidepressant medication. Of these at least 3,000 are taking a drug called Efexor in spite of recommendations that it not be prescribed to individuals under 18 years.
Studies have shown that Efexor can cause children to have suicidal thoughts or to become hostile, a word which in the context of clinical trials can mean homicidal.
In the USA there are between 1.5 million and 3 million children on anitdepressants for treating ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) alone. The rapid rise in the rate of diagnosis of this disorder has prompted concerns that it is being misdiagnosed and that many children receiving the medication have unrelated problems that may have been more effectively treated with counselling/therapy.
Clearly there are some children for whom medication is effective and essential however in many cases we are treating the symptom not the problem. If we took the time to understand the child we might identify cause of the childs behaviour and be able to address it. Our rush to medicating away a problem is meaning that many children will unnecessarily experience the bulk of their childhood through a medicated haze.
ABC reports that a drunken US soldier in Iraq has shot dead a rare Bengal tiger at a late night party at the Baghdad zoo. The killing of the tiger was in response to another, presumably drunk, soldier being bitten when he tried to feed the tiger through the bars.
I posted some time ago that there are over 200 companies in the US who will take you on a "safari" where you get to shoot tethered game animals and how pathetic this was. This has taken pathetic to a whole new level. Shooting one of the worlds most endangered large predators in its cage in an act of drunken revenge for the tiger behaving normally.
"That was the most precious and valuable animal in the whole zoo. It was 14 years old and had been born here."Zoo official Adel Musa said US soldiers often held parties in the zoo in the evenings. "We have no way of stopping them," he said.
If this is typical of the standard of US soldier in Iraq it is no wonder that there is rising discontent amongst the Iraqi civilian population.
If you are a child of western culture then the symbol of the German Nazi party, the swastika, is redolent with the fetid odour of racism and genocide. It is difficult for us to look at it and experience anything other than distaste. The symbol itself, however, predates the German Nazi party by thousands of years and is a sacred Hindu symbol.
The swastika is a symbol of Ganesh (click here to find out about him) and represents good fortune/health, in fact the word itself is a corruption of the ancient Sandscrit word SVASTIKAH, which means 'being fortunate'.
When you are travelling in India the swastika is everywhere. Swastika Electric & SC.Works, for example, make a range of microscopes and other scientific equipment. You can buy swastika oil, swastika blankets, swastika packaging, the list is enormous. People adorn their doors with swastikas, there are swastika ornaments, MSN India even has swastika wall paper for your pc, see below.
It is most disconcerting until you manage to separate this symbol from its recent horrific associations and align it with its original meaning of good health and good fortune.
CNNNN report that recent breakthroughs by US Military Intelligence have pin pointed just two possible locations for Osama bin Laden, the Middle East and the Indian Subcontinent. A spokesman for the military said that, although they haven't entirely ruled out Africa, they were positive he wasn't in Antarctica.
If you are fortunate enough to live in Australia, the ABC interrupt their normal broadcasting to take a feed from this cable channel on Thursday nights as 9:00 pm, otherwise you will need to check them out here CNNNN. This is excellent satire.
Here is a question for those of my readership who have an enormous ...... vocabulary.
A female dancer in the ballet is a ballerina.
What is a male dancer in the ballet called? Apart from Rudolf of course.
"Is that image a pathetic attempt to give the impression that a giant guinea pig is grazing next to a cow?" I hear you ask. Well yes it is and I am afraid that I have got sick of playing with it so it will have to do.
A giant guinea pig is something to be reconned with and one existed in South America about 5 million years ago. We know this because Marcelo Sánchez-Villagra of the University of Tübingen, Germany never got to make mud pies as a child and is now sating this subconsious need by grubbing around in the dirt in Venezuela.
At 700 kilograms it is the biggest rodent yet discovered and made an acceptable meal for the 10 metre crocodiles with which it shared its habitat. Known as Phoberomys patersoni, or Goya to its friends, it grazed on grass and had a generally fulfilling life until the unfortunate arrival of some trouble makers from North America who drove it to extinction. (A process that President Allende and the democratically elected government of Chile was, on 11th September 1973, to become extremely familiar with.)
Of course Goya is an light weight in in the mega fauna stakes when compared with the Australian Diprotodon optatum, a giant wombat that weighed in at 2,800kg. The arrival of the first serious predator in Australia saw the end to him. Who was that predator? Man, of course, in the form of the first aborigines.
You can read a more sensible article on these creatures in Nature, click here.
I saw this on a poster outside a newspaper shop
and wondered which Essendon player they were talking about and what he'd done. Click it to see the actual story.
There is way too much football happening in Melbourne at the moment.
Here is a picture of a new mural in Helena, Montana.
It dipicts naked bordello dancers. Any of them look familiar to you? Well, if you are from Montana and familiar with the image of your govenor then you may recognise her visage in the mural. For those of you who have barely (pun intended) even heard of Montana, let alone its Govenor Judy Martz, here is a photo of her with clothes on.
When questioned Govenor Martz replied "yep it's me. Not bad for a woman my age heh. It's part of my new electral campaign and I believe it will be a real vote winner, by the way, it was great fun posing for it. "
Local analysts have praised the move saying that early trends report a significant positive swing towards Governor Martz. "This is an innovative and dramatic endorsement by the Govenor of whatever that ammendment was that guarantees freedom of expression." said one "I think we can expect to see a rush of govenors posing nude after this."
Whilst Gov. Martz is happy with her participation, her experience was not completely positive. When asked about the place where she was posing in the nude with other people she replied "There are no naked men up there. It's just another prejudice against women,"
Oh how I wish this was true. Sadly Govenor Martz took the boring, prudish option instead. In bizarre event that you actually care, you can read the real story at CNN here.
Capuchin monkeys are those little guys that the organ grinders used to use to collect coins, here is a picture of some courtesy of Glasgow Zoo.
These little guys are good workers but they're not silly and you are not going to get away with short changing them. Researchers have been experimenting with their concept of fair play and discovered that they have it.
Sarah Brosnan of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia trained some capuchins in the concept of money. They could buy food with little plastic tokens and did they crack it if one of their neighbours got better value for their token than they did.
Normally a plastic token would buy you one small cucumber, quite acceptable food if you are a capuchin. Grapes, however, are a much desired delicacy and if a capuchin saw her neighbour get a grape for her token she was outraged. In about half of such trials, the short-changed capuchin either refused to hand over its token, or rejected the reward, as you would yourself.
In this shopping exercise it was the female capuchins that were most accutely aware of the unfairness and reacted badly.
Males were much less sensitive to inequality. Their minds may have been on other things, Males care about sex, and females care about food. The males might not consider the food differences worth worrying about.
I think no more needs be said.
Read the full story here.
When throwing rocks at birds on the beach leave no tern unstoned.
In deference to Ogden Nash.
Wheel clamping of motor vehicles is illegal in the little part of the planet in which the Green Man chooses to violate local traffic laws but I can imagine that it is fairly frustrating to those less fortunate souls who are subjected to this indignity.
At last there is a super hero just for you! "Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's Angle Grinder Man!" The hapless parking offenders hero.
New anti-terrorist legislation means that the airspace is now more restricted and Angle Grinder Man's flights to assist clamped motorists are limited to London and South-East England. However, if this is your patch of the planet, you can go to bed tonight comforted that he is watching over your illegally parked car in that near-by corporate car park.
Visit him at his website here.
Fortunately the Jamaican statue discussed a couple of days ago, specifically with respect to the awe inspiring size of a certain appendage, is an inanimate object and therefore incapable of being humbled by a 400 million year old daddy-long-legs spider. It is currently holding the title of possessing the worlds oldest known set of genitalia. New Scientist reports
Fossils of harvestmen arachnids (Opiliones) have been found by palaeontologists in an ancient rock at Rhynie near Aberdeen in Scotland. Preserved within a male is a penis two-thirds the length of his body, and on a female there is a long egg-laying organ known as an ovipositor.
Two thirds of the length of his body hey, hmmmmm.
Read more about daddy-long-legs here.
The image of adventurous Alaskan fishermen standing in the shallows of a pristine lake fishing for one of the great eating fish, the salmon, is one of fresh mountain air, crystal clear water and a clean healthy environment. These salmon aren't here all year round though, each year they travel 1,000 kms up streams from the North Pacific ocean. On their journey these days they collect in their systems a veritable chemist shop of pollutant chemicals, the most deadly of which are PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls). Carnivores such as humans, the great Alaskan bears and eagles ingesting these PCB laden fish are exposing themselves to increased risk of cancer as well as diseases of immune system, reproductive system, nervous system and endocrine system.
The environment from which the fish are exracted may be pristine but it is more realistic to look on these fish as if they had come from the highly polluted waters surrounding a coastal industrial port, which indeed they have. The fish act as bioaccumulators of such chemicals. Even in the polluted North Pacific, PCBs are only at the concentration of 1 nanogram per litre. The PCB concentration found in the fish is 160,000 times this.
The one positive is that industrial PCB emissions have been falling for more than 20 years. In the futute we may see a gradual decline in this problem.
It is difficult at times to get beyond the obvious, mainstream sites when searching the web. Banana Slug has a fascinating take on this problem. You type in your search criteria, as you would in Google, and banana slug adds a random word of its own. The addition of this word throws up some interesting and obscure sites you may not have got to browsing normally.
(via J-Walk which is born again, after being shut down)
In an act of arrogance, the federal government has written to the Collingwood Football Club complaining about the placement of the Australian Flag in the logo.
A federal government official explained that protocol dictates that the sovereign flag appear on the left in cases such as this. "It is most important the protocol be maintained and the flag with superior authority be placed on the left" he said.
A somewhat confused representative of the club said "So we got it right then?"
Going to a Psychiatrist can be an expensive exercise. They charge by the hour and the sooner they can pick the psychiatric disorder that is right for you and dispense the medication the cheaper it will be.
Why not take a proactive approach, unless your disorder of choice prohibits it, and identify your illness before you go. A bit of homework work and it is just a matter of rolling up, telling him what you've got and collecting the medication. (They charge in 15 minute blocks so you might need to discuss the weather for a while to get your 15 minutes worth.)
Click here to take a test.
It seems our tough, outback, bronzed, aussie man is scared, real scared. No, it's not Osama Bin Laden and El Quaida that has him quaking in his Blundstones. The meerest hint of homosexuality has him hiding under the covers. One thing is for certain, though, the covers in question wont be made by Fairydown.
In Australia "fairy" is a disparaging term for a homosexual male and it seems that the company name Fairydown is just far too close to your typical aussie males vulnerabilities to be comfortable.
"Zone", on the other hand, now there is a nice neutral term that any tough aussie man can cower under in comfort. Accordingly, The Age reports this New Zealand icon of quality bushwalking and mountaineering equipment is changing its name.
We have sooooooo far to go. Producing a society of well adjusted, confident, mature males in Australia is still but a hope for the distant future.
Now, before you switch off, this is not some touchy feely, greenie, tree hugging, leftist piece. Here are some hard facts that we all should be somewhat concerned about.
The worlds oceans have been dying over the last 20 years, they have probably been doing it for longer but we only have data for the last 20 years. Their productivity is diminishing and there are no prizes for guessing where most of the damage is being done; the high population, high technology zones of the earth. In an interesting paper NASA, which is hardly renowned for its leftist greenie politics, has released images documenting the decline. Sea productivity is measured by the rate at which it is binding carbon, that is the activity of plant life, on which all other sea lift depends.
To save formatting problems for my 800x600 readers, click continue reading to view the evidence.
If you are in a hurry then simply click here to watch the sea dying.
If you want more detail view the research at NASA here.
Here is a map of net productivity of the oceans in 1997-2002
Now compare it with net productivity in 1979-1986
The differences are mainly near big population and industry. They are clearly identified in this comparison.
Ever wondered why you are involved with a particular religion. I am sure your motives are excellent, worship god, that sort of thing. It turns out however that, in America at least, it is also a remarkably good strategy for moving yourself into that category of individuals we know as "the wealthy". You know the concept, start out poor, end up rich.
If this is your motive for becoming involved (shame on you) then you would do well to choose your religion carefully, some are better performers than others in the accumulate wealth stakes. I would be looking for that lost Jewish ancestor if I was you because it appears that the Jewish religion is head and shoulders ahead of the rest in this race. Can't find one? Then your best bet is Catholic Christian or possibly a mainstream Protestant church.
Some of you who are concerned about the fundamentalist conservative Protestants can take heart that at least they won't be wealthy as well as narrow minded and insular. They did appallingly as far as amassing wealth.
The median net worth of the sample was US$48,200. Those people beating a regular path to the synagogue had a median net worth of US$150,890. Baptists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-Day Adventists, Christian Scientists, on the other hand, had a median net worth of US$26,200.
Sadly, the report did not mention the net worth of atheists so we don't know what ignoring the big fella completely does to your hip pocket.
To read the full research from Ohio State University click here.
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in
waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht
frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl
mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not
raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.
(hmmm. not much worse than my usual spelling.)
Before we left Australia for our central american odyssey we did all the important research regarding our stay in Cuba. We watched the Buena Vista Social Club and several other Cuban movies, we hunted out somewhere to stay via the internet and booked ahead. The place was full of mystique. Imagine snubbing your nose at the USA. We pictured a country where people were poor but basically happy and defiant. The reality is somewhat different.
Arrival at the international airport in Havana is the first culture shock. I think immigration is modelled on a John LeCarre spy novel, it is a first and dramatic introduction to a communist cold war mindset that is still alive and well in Cuba.
We were staying in Habana Vieja (Old Havana), we thought it sounded like the authentic and romantic Havana. It turned out to be the squalid Havana. Having travelled in India and Nepal you would think that I would be comfortable with squalor but I found it more disturbing here. In India the squalor arises from the poor constructing the best accomodation for themselves that their poverty allows. In Havana the squalor arises from the apathy with which great architecture is rapidly decaying in the tropical climate.
We had planned to spend some days in Havana but two was quite sufficient to see those icons of the Cuban capital and we made a dash for the country. Our logic being that the corruption and exploitation of tourists that is to be found everywhere in Havana may be somewhat diluted in the country.
Female bums are the subject of much attention from the male members of the community and with good reason. They are a sign of her health and fertility. Females with a good quality bum have children younger, more of them and they are healthier but it comes at a price. A bum is an expensive part of the anatomy. It takes a lot of calories to develop a bum that is attractive to males contributing approximately 14% to body weight.
Whether they realise it or not, males find a big bum very attractive. Males compete fiercely with each other for large-bottomed females and a big bum is probably the most prominant way a female can advertise herself.
Scientists have been studying this for sometime but a significant problem has been the way you quantify the measurement of a female baboons backside. (Oh, didn't I mention I was talking about baboons? Well never mind.)
Leah Domb, of Harvard University, and Mark Pagel, of Britain's University of Reading are working on a system as you read. They are analysing female baboons in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, where the baboons have been studied since 1967. Part of their research is to match the size of a baboon's behind to her breeding history.
To read more about it click here.
Economic rationalist theory seems to have pervaded almost all aspects of our culture except the sentencing of convicted criminals it seems. New research in the UK indicates that tougher sentencing of young offenders achieves exactly the opposite of what economic rationalism expects of a system, it costs more and has a lower success rate than alternative methods of punishment.
Reoffending rates for young offender institutions are as high as 84%, with a six month custodial sentence costing the taxpayer an average of £21,000."By comparison, alternative non-custodial options for a similar six month period cost as little as £6,000 and have markedly lower rates of reoffending."
So, it costs 4 times as much to imprison a youth and, in doing so, instead of fixing the problem, you increase the chance of them reoffending by 25%. Sounds like your classic "lose-lose" situation. Perhaps it is time to put aside our primitive need for vengence and look to alternatives from which everyone benefits.
Did you wash your hands after that trip to the airport toilet?
Yes, then you must be from Toronto. Toronto airport toilet frequenters are by far the most diligent in washing their hands after answering the call of nature, 95% of males and 97% of females. This compares with a survey average of 74% of males and 83% of females. Some claim that this is a direct result of the SARS outbreak but I like to think they are just nicer people.
You can read the full results of the survey here but don't expect to find the answer to the really big question, namely "How did they get away with loitering in the toilet observing people without being arrested?"
I am thinking that an elephant would make an excellent addition to the household. It would compliment the two dogs I currently own perfectly. I am not sure it could be a house elephant though, the dog flap in the kitchen door is just a bit too small.
Imagine, taking your elephant down the street to do the grocery shopping. You would have to teach it to stay inside it's white lines in the shopping centre car park of course, and not to sit on the neighbouring car. It could help with important trimming of overhanging trees on the way down the road and supply local gardeners with manure that was conveniently located on their nature strip for them to collect.
It seems I'm not the only one who fancies the idea of having an elephant. Carol Buckley and Scott Blais have similar desires and not content with one they now have 7 living on 2,700 acres in Tennessee. They established the Elephant Santuary as a sort of retirement home for elderly and unwanted circus and zoo elephants. You can visit the web site that documents their project here.
Very early on in life all boys in western society come to know the boy code. If they are to avoid humiliation and rejection they must embrace it for themselves and enforce it in others. It is the genesis of the attitudes in men that inhibit self-care and help-seeking behaviours. If you are a man or adolescent male in a western society you know what this code is but I will detail it here anyway.
To be accepted as a boy you must:
- focus on physical accomplishments and external success
- be tough, aggressive and competitive with others
- not express emotions and deny any emotional vulnerability
- be performance oriented with your sexuality
- reject homosexuality
- deny pain, tough things out and avoid seeking help.
So here is the choice we give our boys,
1. they can adopt the code and subject themselves to lives that are characterised by loneliness, violence, physical and emotional health problems. They can spend their lives ignoring their own emotional and physical needs until late in life, if they live that long, they come to realise that their life has been a meaningless waste.
2. they can reject the code and be subjected to continual reminders that they are inadequate as men. Men who choose this path choose a path of isolation from other men in mainstream society. They are viewed with suspicion and distrust.
At least this is what it used to be. We have seen a glimmer of the light of hope in the new men's movement. Some caring men are coming out of the closet to talk and share their emotions.
We must confront the code and demonstrate to boys that rejecting the code does not doom one to ridicule and isolation. The time has come for western men to lead healthy fulfilling meaningful lives but they can only acheive it if we actively work to undermine the boy code.
Australia may not have many individuals, 20 million actually, but we are making up for our lack of numbers with size. Two-thirds of Australian males and half Australian females are obese or overweight.
We are still running third to the US and Britian however. Australia's level of obesity is 17.6 percent for adults aged 25-64. That compares with 21.8 percent for the United States and 21.7 percent for Britain.
Never mind I am sure, with extra effort, we can catch up.
Wind can play havock with the kilt and we all know what's worn under the kilt, don't we? Nothing, its all in perfect working order. Ha!
No higher with that right leg please Ewan!
That is not detering The Oak Brook Hills Golf Resort in Chicago from hosting the Illinois Saint Andrew Society Kilted Golf Classic that commences tomorrow.
Participants in the tournament will all be kilted up and there should be some interesting spectacles when the clubs start swinging.
"there's nothing like riding in a golf cart with a kilt on." says Ed Rorison, chairman of the Kilted Classic but he has some sage advice for men making a grab for their balls in the rough. "Most guys don't have the common sense to bend at the knees." (think about it!)
If your kilt is at the cleaners you can rent one on the day for $65.
For further evidence of kilt tradition vis-a-vis underwear click continue reading.
A scientific report points the possibility of early onset dementia, as young as 30, being triggered by extensive mobile phone use by teenage and pre-teenage children. The report argued that neural development in these individuals was not complete and, as such, the radiation from mobile phones had an impact on brain development.
What a strange world we may be entering if this turns out to be an accurate prediction and the results are comprehensive. Given that mobile phone usage is expensive then the wealthier your parents are the more access to use of mobile phone you have as a child/teenager. The level of wealth now being inversely proportional to brain function in 20 years time?
Fancy that, the poor may inherit the earth.
BBC has some information here.
Thanks to the Homeland Security legislation the practice of science is getting just a bit too complicated in the United States. This arises from two main areas:
Firstly, the bureaucratic hassles of maintain stocks of things that are are capable of being utilised for WMD has meant that many laboratories are abandoning research endeavours that may utilise these same things for the benefit of mankind and destroying their stocks.
Secondly, as many as 550,000 foreign graduate students and postdoctoral researchers who help staff US laboratories may move their research and innovation to countries where visa hurdles are less rigorous.
The focus of scientific innovation may be shifting back to Europe where it originated and to a lesser extent to countries like Australia. If this is the case America's great scientists will have little choice but to follow.
Wired magazine has a more detailed investigation of the issue here.
If you think this is a beat up then read what happened when a US Law Professor asked to view 30 year-old, declassified, archives of the Saudi royal family at the National Archives in Washington. Read it here.
Exploitation and victimisation on the web. Yes it is a big problem and porn sites are featuring in the news again as a participant in the whole messy business but this time things are not what you would expect. Several prominant porn sites are claiming they are being exploited and victimised by a hacker, going by the name of Deepsi, who has been attempting to extort money in exchange for not doing to their sites what they typically depict.
The good news, or bad news, depending on your view of these sites, is that Israeli policy have arrested 20-year-old Pavel Vladislav from Be'er Sheva on suspicion of blackmail, extortion, theft, interfering with an investigation and conspiracy. Boaz Guttman, an Israeli attorney and computer-security expert, representing Cyber Trend, had a bit of trouble getting the authorities to take him seriously. Miriam Golan is a woman who is both head of the antifruad squad and totally disinterested in the wellbeing of the porn website community. Persistance paid off however and the police in Be'er Sheva rose to the occasion (so to speak)
"I hope he's gone. He deserves to go to jail for a long time," said one webmaster who was supposedly threatened by Deepsy. "He attempted to shut down businesses that make tens of thousands a day. Imagine walking into your local grocery store and shutting down their cash register system for a few days. There would be hell to pay."
"Tens of thousands a day" hmmm our weaknesses are making some internet webmasters mighty wealthy me thinks.
You can read the full article here.
A flurry of activity amongst the emergency services in Germany saw 40 officers and fire services personal mobilised when reports were received of a man who appeared to be battering a blindfolded person on her hands and knees with a stick in a black Porsche.
It eventuated that it was, however, just the sadomasochistic sex games of a German man and woman who had met on the internet.
Whilst not owning one, The Green Man has been in a Porsche on a couple of occasions and there is not much room. I am thinking these must have been mighty cramped sex games, the mind boggles.
How many dots are there?
If you are a woman it took you around 50 thousandths of a second less to decide that there was four dots.
Only joking, there is only three but I made you look
Although we can obviously count larger numbers of dots, small numbers of dots we can recognise without counting each one and women are better at this than men. "Why the brain treats small and large numbers differently is not clear. Some social animals - rats, lions and chimpanzees - can count, a skill that perhaps enables them to decide how their group should react to single or multiple intruders." says Brian Butterworth of University College London who conducted the study.
This ability in higher mammals suggests that our ability to handle small numbers may have developed long before our general ability to count.
The study was conducted on visitors to the Bristol Science Museum and the difference between males and females was not anticipated.
Read more about the study here.
Visit the Bristol Science Museum in a virtual way by clicking here.
The Green Man has a keen appreciation of irony and as such could not resist publishing on this ironic turn of events in the Harry Potter phenonemon.
The Pakistani fundamentalist islamic group Lashkar-e-Taiba is currently up in arms over the Harry Potter series of books. Why, because they claim they are a plot to spread Christianity throughout the muslim world. The magazine Zerb-e-Taiba is the mouth piece of the group. Its August, 2003 edition is purported to be ranting against the series. (The Green Man is finding it difficult to verify aboslutely since his arabic is a bit on the rusty side.)
So, the fundamentalist Christians are against the books because they claim they undermine Christian values and Christianity itself and the fundamentalist muslims are against the books because they claim they are spreading Christian values and Christianity itself. Ah, the irony, the irony.
And I thought they were just well written teenage fiction, I must have missed something.
You can find more detailed ranting and links to the source articles on Daniel Drezners blog
Of the thousands of languages spoken throughtout the world it is likely that, over the next few decades, over 90% of them will disappear. And the mainstream languages are largely to blame. English is the major culprit but Spanish and French are also playing their part. Take Quechua, for example. It is the common language of the Andes region of South America.
Today around 10 million still speak Quechua and it is hard to imagine that it is endangered. Modelling by Cornell University however shows that this language matches the characteristics of a language that is doomed to wither and die."It was once what English is today, the common language people used to interact even when they had their own local language, but it's now disappearing very quickly," Abrams, a graduate student at Cornell, says. It is steadily being replaced by Spanish.
You can read more of their research here.
If you would like learn about Quechua click here.
The nude photo shoot by Spencer Tunick in Melbourne was an inspirational event. Here is a TV advert inspired by this exhibition of group ratbagginess by 4,500 Melbournians. It is only slightly risque but quite funny.
It is 1.5 Mbytes so if you have a slow connection you will need to be patient. Click here to view.
You can read of my experiences as one of the ratbags here.
Up to 10,000 Mexican peasants marched on the World Trade Organistion's opening meeting in Cancun yesterday. The protestors had the support of the Zapatistas, a rebel group that runs around one third of the neighbouring state of Chiapas. These guys are not to be taken lightly.
We encountered a group of rebels in southern Chiapas. We had taken a boat up the San Juan river that forms the border with Guatemala to the Mexican border post and hopped onto a bus to take us to Palenque, which has some of the best Mayan ruins in southern Mexico. The rebels had blockaded the road on a particularly deserted section. They had a truck, 2 cars and our bus trapped. There would have been about 200 men I suppose wielding machetes and similar implements.
When we first stopped several men, including me, got off the bus to "sus things out". The naive bravado with which we approached the barracade evaporated in the blast furnace of Mayan hostility that engulfed us as 200 angry men bristled at our approach. In what would have made a hilarious piece of home video we scurried back to the relative safety of the bus.
I would insert a photo of the scene at this point but I was too shit scared to take one, if you excuse the colloquialism, so here is a postcard of some Zapatista rebels. It is about this point I am slipping the Diners Club card into my shoe so that we had something left.
Nothing happened however and there was little else to do except settle down in the bus for a long wait. Fortunately, even for angry Mayan peasants, the novelty of holding a group of foreigners gradually wears off and after approximately 2 hours our bus was allowed to approach the blockade. A period of brief argy bargy in rapid Spanish between the bus driver and the rebel leader saw us on our way for a mere 200 pesos ($20). In a testament to just how poor these guys are, the 200 pesos was greeted triumphant cheers. I wasn't going to point out it equated to 10 cents each.
About 3/4 of an hour later we pulled into Palenque, a delightful tourist town with pleasant market stalls occupying the town square of an evening selling memorabilia to happy tourists, most of whom are oblivious to the reality of the rebel activity that exists within a 3/4 hour drive.
A new statue called "Redemption Song" that has been recently unveiled in Kingston, Jamaica. The statue is to celebrate the freedom of slavery of the blacks and it seems that they are taking the opportunity to undermine the self-esteem of white men at the same time .
Caucasian men have secretly wondered about those rumours of a racial disparity in endowment and the size of a certain appendage on the male member of the couple seems to confirm it. It has raised some Kingston eyebrows and questions are being asked by certain females as to the identity of the model.
The Jamaica Observer has some discussion on the merits of the sculpture, artistic and otherwise, click here.
In promiscuous baboon societies females mate with numerous males. You would think that this would obscure the blood lines but recent research indicates that baboons fathers know which of the offspring of a female are theirs. Fathers will rush to protect their own children when they become involved in an altercation.
Here is a baboon father sheltering its child as another young baboon approaches.
We know which baboon children are fathered by which male through blood testing of the group. How the baboon fathers know is still a question to be answered, one could hypothesise it may be smell.
Evolutionary theory would suggest that fathers who can correctly identify their offspring and support/protect them would have an advantage. Accordingly it is understandable that this has developed as a trait. Prehistoric humans males had a similar problem. How do you know whether a child was yours? Being a species that relies mainly on visual clues it is natural that this sense was used for this purpose. Research by Gordon Gallup of the State University of New York at Albany shows that, even today, fathers favour children that look like them over children who do not.
More about baboon families here. More about the link between facial similarity and affection here.
A new York Judge has given the go ahead for relatives of the victims of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center to sue the airlines for negligence in as much as they should have forseen the possibility of a terrorist hijacking a plane.
Personally I see this as the lowest form of money grubbing. Fortunately I knew no-one who suffered in the attacks but, if I did, my feelings would be of grief not of how I could much money I could make out of the tragedy. If my son, or brother, or wife, had been killed no amount of money could compensate me for that and to place a value on their life is to diminish it.
No-one is arguing that the relatives of the victims have suffered but the suffering cannot/should not be compensated with money. To do so cheapens the lives of those who have died.
No, I am not talking about the TV show here. Being the educated lot that you undoubtley are, you will be familiar with the origin of the name. It was coined by George Orwell in a novel entitled "1984". If you have not read it then you should do so. It is, at once, enthralling and terrifying. One of the main concepts is Big Brother, a state organisation that monitors our every move. There is no escape from the total supervision of every person.
Literary lesson over! The European Space Agency are prototyping a black box that could be fitted to a car. Once fitted to every car in Europe these black boxes could be monitored continuously by a satellite tracking system. The proposed system is scheduled to be tested towards the end of 2004 and if successful your road taxes and insurance costs could be calculated on where you travel and the distance travelled.
With privacy and personal rights currently in the process of being flushed down the drain along with the terrorist bathwater I am thinking that this system will be used for far more than a more equitable taxing of motorists. The omnipotent state moves one step closer.
This is like watching a car crash. You can see the impending destruction of something and there is nothing you can do. Still, horrified, you stand there transfixed. We are currently witnessing the technological destruction of individual privacy. What this means for our future psychological wellbeing, who can say.
I am thinking about the frequenting of bondage/domination parlours by British MPs and judges. It seems to have been a common practice and clearly they derived something from it. Maybe when you are in a position of extreme power it is grounding to spend some time where someone else has power over you.
Perhaps this is something our current Prime Minister could use to excellent effect. Imagine: John Howard in a plush room, naked, on all fours with a studded collar and leash. A tall leather clad madam standing over him says "That fib you told about not meeting the man from the ethanol company, that was very naughty John. I am afraid I am going to have to punish you for that." and whacks him on the bum. Next day he bounces into parliament feeling cleansed and ready to tackle what lies ahead.
Come to think of it, some days he does bounce into parliament looking cleansed and read to tackle what lies ahead. hmmmmmm
Don't you people understand reverse psychology!
When I put the warning "What ever you do, don't click on the ads above" everyone did as they were told. You are getting far too obedient when you are taking instructions from a mischevious woodland spirit like the Green Man.
Here is a hint; in the spirit of the quest for knowledge you were supposed to click on them to find out why the warning was there.
I see I have some training in the spirit of inquisitiveness to do, not to mention cultivating a healthy disrespect for authority.
If a man is in a forest alone and there is no woman there; he is still wrong.
courtesy Red Symons of 774 ABC Melbourne.
Self-image is an important aspect of self-esteem. I wrote some time ago about the Pollyanna Principle in which we tend to see our selves in a more positive light that is strictly justified. It is an aspect of a normal healthy mind to have an unrealistically positive opinion of yourself. This is also important for children and adolescents as they try to make sense of the world and their role in it.
One group who find it exceptionally hard to have postive feelings about their image is burns victims. It is a bit difficult to ignore, what is often, horrendous scarring. In what can only be described as a mixture of genious and compassion Marvel comics, in collaboration with the Starbright Foundation, are releasing a special X-Men comic entitled "The X-Men in: Life Lessons ". The comic introduces a new teenage X-Man named T-Ray who survives a serious burn injury. Aimed at 9-12 year old burns victims it deals with the issues that have to be faced as part of their emotional recovery including
-The importance of self-acceptance in order to gain acceptance by others
-Not defining yourself by your injury
-Managing interactions with others by managing your actions and responses
-Responding to questions, teasing and staring with confidence
-Finding coping strategies that work for you
Click here to learn more about the comic including a teacher resource on it's use.
More information for burns sufferers at Pheonix Society.
Hmmm. Sounds like one of those S&M/Bondage nightclubs doesn't it? You wouldn't be into that sort of thing would you? Of course not, but it is intriguing though, so long as no-one catches you going in. You'll need to get the appropriate leather gear, you don't want to stand out in the crowd, particularly in a place like that. I wonder if you can rent it at a costume place. There is always the dog's lead and collar, I suppose, unless you have a chihuahua or something.
Ah, I digress. The American Academy of Pain is actually a real academic body.(It is actually The American Academy of Pain Medicine but I didn't think that sounded nearly so good.) Click here for their website. They have developed a Web-based textbook that will be available to medical students without charge beginning September 2004. It covers the neurobiology of pain, patient evaluation and common types of pain, such as cancer and pediatric pain, and includes self-tests.
In one of those relationships that gives one the uneasy feeling of conflict of interest the project is being funded by Purdue Pharma Fund, a branch of the drug company that makes the painkiller OxyContin. OxyContin contains the drug oxycodone, which is among the most-abused prescription medications.
Pain is one of my pet concepts at the moment, it is highly subjective and has both physical and psychological components. Expectations of a pain free existance is a modern concept and completely unrealistic really. Pain is part of life and when we accept that the mindset change makes the pain more bearable. Pain needs to be managed but drugs should only form a part of the management plan. Meditation and similar mind techniques have proved particularly effective in the management of pain.
Sufferers of chronic pain can find additional resources at The American Pain Foundation
In Australia The Pain Research Institute is a good first start.
Who says Physics does not tackle the big questions? If it wasn't for years of careful research by physics researchers at The Niels Bohr Institute and the Technical University of Denmark we would not now know that
Most of the water on the bottom of the tub flows toward the hole but about one centimeter before the hole, jumps upward before turning around and going down the hole.
You can log off now. Your daily thirst for knowledge should be sufficiently quenched. No? Well read the solutions to more of lifes little conundrums here.
For years Australia has been dominant in the skin cancer stakes. No nation has succeeded in approaching our rates of skin cancer. Intense exposure to the Australian sun on skin that evolved for the pallid northern european climate was the winning combination. Not to be outdone the USA is making a break from the pack and challenging our supremacy. Whilst their climate is approaching ours they are taking the race up to us by augmenting their propensity for skin cancer by using tanning studios. Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and University Hospitals of Cleveland research shows that 11.2 percent of the 13- to 14-year-olds to 47 percent of 18- to 19-year-old girls use tanning booths. Predictably boys, being less concerned with their body image, are not frequent users of tanning studios.
The study also found a higher percentage of indoor tanners among teens from the Midwest and South, from rural areas, and among dieters, as well as among teens reporting recent use of alcohol and tobacco....Girls who participated in routine physical activity were less likely to use tanning booths.
This is a long process but in 20-30 years I think we will be coming a serious second. The rise in obese, prematurely aged, middle age women with skin cancer in the US will kill us (please excuse the pun).
Are you planning a career in professional football? You are? Then you will need to bone up on your cliches. "Taking it one match at a time" and "Next week is a whole new ball game" may have sufficed in the amateur leagues but they won't be enough to get a sound bite on the national TV.
Here is a site to help on your way to mastering the art of maintaining a seemingly endless stream of meaningless cliches. Cliches such as
with flying colors
fall between the cracks
with bated breath
when shit hits the fan
keep going in the same circle
life is not hard, it only needs some positive thinking
When you lie with dogs you get fleas.
to be at the end of one's tether
A good heart is hard to find.
knows what side his bread is buttered on
fold up and leave
walking encyclopedia
evil eye
I could go on but check them all out at the Cliche Finder. Personally I like the random cliche function the best.
How do boys learn what it means to be a man? Before the Industrial revolution, in agrarian and hunterer gather societies they could do it by modelling themselves on the men they came in contact with. Their father was the most important role model but not the only one. Uncles, those adult males who were some relation but not part of the boys initial upbringing often play an important part.
It is a sad irony that, for all the sophistication of our society, our boys are developmentally poorer than many third world boys. Many have virtually no contact with adult males in any constructive form. Fathers are either separated and live apart or working so many hours per week that they rarely interact with their sons in a meaningful fashion. Teachers in school are almost exclusively female. The only role models boys have are older boys who are not yet mature themselves or TV/Film actors whose characters portray disfunctional and unrealistic models of behaviour.
This is a recipe for building adult boys not well balanced men. Go to the footy on a Saturday, you can find ample examples. A group of men in Byron Bay, Australia, amongst others, has recognised the problem and are fulfulling their obligation to society in a way that so many of us are not. The organisation "Uncle" is a loose group of men who are volunteering some of their time to spent with boys who would otherwise not have any adult males in their lives. This is a good news story for the boys involved. Australia needs more caring men of their calibre, as do many other urbanised societies.
The copper canyon in nothern Mexico is one of the great natural wonders of the world. It is a must see destination. Twice as deep and four times as large as the grand canyon in the USA its scale is almost impossible to comprehend even when you are standing there.
Starting at Chihuahua a train runs through the canyon, down to Los Mochis on coast. A couple of days stopover at Creel is an essential part of the trip. Creel has the feel of an old west town but in a modern context, utes replacing horses in the street. (You can also stay at El Divisidero right on the edge of the canyon but that takes big bucks)
This is the land of the Tarahumara indians, Apaches to you philistines. Like many native tribes they are poor. Some exist on the fringe of the township but most live in small, largely self sufficient, farming communities throughout the copper canyon. Caves are numerous in this region and many adapt these natural shelters into warm and secure homes.
If you want to see some more my pictures of this area click here.
Learn more about travelling to an in the Copper Canyon here.
On the practical side, don't get sucked into going the 1st class train, the 2nd class is much more fun and you get to meet the locals. In Creel stay at Casa Margaritas, it is inexpensive and has varying levels of acomodation, all including breakfast and dinner. We had a motel room style which suited us well.
You can do a trip to Divisadero stopping off to see different arms of the canyon. Save this trip till the day you depart. You can pack your stuff and take it with you. Finish the trip at Divisidero and you will save the cost of the train trip between Creel and Divisidero.
Those of you who are not computer programmers may not realise but in the heart of all programmers is a special place for those amongst us of sufficient foresight and intelligence that they have developed their own computer language. These people are apart from the day to day hurly burly, they think in strange ways unlike the rest of us, a bit like serial killers really.
"What?" you say "Surely that cannot be!"
Well here is an opportunity for you to see if you can distinguish the programming language author from the serial killer.
I did appallingly.
In what is probably a first. Several high profile men's movement activitsts in New Zealand are pushing for the establishment of a Men's Ministry to compliment the Women's Ministry. The major issues that they wish addressed are the same ones plaguing men in Australia, US, UK etc, namely
- Boy's under-performing at school;
- Father absence and lack of rights in the family court;
- High male suicide rate;
- Crime - 90% of prison inmates are male;
- Men's Health
Sadly State Services Minister Trevor Mallard does not see a need. Apparently none of the above issues are significantly important enough for him to bother about. Women may have had problems breaking into a mans world but getting men to take their own wellbeing seriously eclipses that.
My memories of Kathmandu, and Nepal generally, are positive. I know it as a peaceful city where people, including tourists, can walk safely. It is not rich but its inhabitants seem pleasant and friendly. It was not always this way. Kathmandu has a history of human rights abuse that, for its size, rival China. Stories of torture and state sanctioned assasinations are easy to find.
It seems that the dark days are returning, democracy is crumbling. The current King, installed after the murder of most of the royal family by the prince, is shifting the country back to its repressive past. He has ignored the popularly elected government and installed his own. The government has been rounding up and imprisoning activists. Over 1,000 were arrested in Kathmandu yesterday. Here is a photo of some of the typical activists arrested. We can expect some of them to disappear forever. Others will be unusually quiet and subdued after they reappear.
"Long live democracy!" and "Down with the king's repression!" protesters shouted out as they were driven away by police to the Dasharath football stadium, converted into a makeshift jail, according to news agency AFP.
In todays high tech world it could assumed that new inventions in the medical field will be the result of millions of dollars of research and high tech equipment. One of the contestants in this years Medical Futures Innovation Awards is demonstrating that duct tape and a bit of lateral thinking can lead to a significant reduction in brain damage arising from heart attack.
Oxygen depravation to the brain is a major problem in heart attack victims. Mark Wilson, an anaesthetist from East Surrey Hospital, has built what he calls a "Shock Sheet" from a blow up car cover held together with duct tape.The Shock Sheet increases pressure on the legs to force blood to the brain.
With a predicted cost of 10 pounds, he is hoping that it will become a standard part of the toolset of ambulance officers and emergency departments.
So far I have been spared the delights of working for a company that believed a theme song was a great way to build team spirit and rally everyone behind the company as it lumbers its way forward. For those of you who do not operate in the rarified atmosphere of upper management you probably don't know that this is called "aural branding". It used to be primarily a tool of Japanese and US corporations but many others have given it a shot. It was abandoned in Australia after the cost of cleaning up the vomit became too high.
Wal-Mart, for example, used modified versions of sing-along marching songs in an attempt to control the behaviour of their employees by fostering feelings of happiness and a positive attitude towards the company. Clearly the lower oxygen levels at the altitude occupied by their corporate psychologists in the corporate headquarters had interfered with the rational thinking. Predictably the songs were rapidly adapted by employees to incorporate anti-company feelings and encourage cynicism amongst the workforce.
Fujitsu, to take another example, tried to introduce a Gospel style song called "ahh Fujitsu". This was somewhat less than a complete success as they discovered when they distributed the sheet music to employees. Somewhat unsurprisingly most of their employees could not read sheet music.
Here is a little tip, free of charge, to those large corporations. Value your workers and treat them with respect and the loyalty and commitment will flow naturally. If that is too hard just accept that your workers are going to turn up because they need the money and sack those overpaid organisational psychologists who tell you that they can artificially produce the loyalty and commitment.
(this piece based on research by Warwick University contact Jenny Murray jennifer.murray@warwick.ac.uk if you want more information.)
Good judgment comes from bad experience, and a lot of that
comes from bad judgment.
At $1.2 billion the new Space Infrared Telescope Facility is no chicken feed project. It was launched into space by a Delta rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida on 25 August 2003. Not all things in the Universe are best viewed using the visible light spectrum and this highly sensitive instrument allows us to peer at aspects of space which are hidden from optical telescopes.
So far it has delivered one image, a test. Here it is.
Wow, 1.2 billion for that. Clearly I am missing the subtly of astronomy. Fortunately the telescope will be taking photos for the next two and half years so the cost per photograph should drop considerably.
Imagine "Spider, an intelligent rock drifting through space listening to and absorbing everything – especially music – and looking for a place to nest and lay his children. " This is the basic plot of Lavie Tidhar’s story Temporal Spider, Spatial Webs which won this years Clarke-Bradbury International Science Fiction Competition that is sponsored and organised by the European Space Agency.
Lavie has only been writing fiction for one year and and has had several stories accepted for publication in various anthologies and magazines. He also writes a regular review column for an online site and reviews short fiction magazines for a bi-monthly magazine.
To misquote Mr Olivander (of Harry Potter fame) "One thing is clear, I think we can expect great things from you Mr Tidhar"
Attention writers:
Do you waste valuable creativity on thinking up names for you characters? I know I do, here is the site for you.
http://www.kleimo.com/random/name.cfm
Using data from the US census it generates random male and female names for characters. Try it out. It is quite handy.
(via J-Walk)
This is the oldest piece of figurative art discovered to date. Carbon dating places it at approximately 30,000 years old. It is old enough to have been the work of either early modern man or our neanderthal relatives. It was discovered by archaeologist Nicholas Conard of the University of Tübingen in Germany, at the Hohle Fels cave near Ulm. As well as this "lion-man" other pieces included representations of a bird and a horse.
We can only guess at the meanings that pieces such as this had for their makers but the combination of both human and lion characteristics in the piece is significant. This signals an important develop in man where we augmented the concrete reality in which we find ourselves with the abstract world of symbols and metaphores. Objects such as these show a human mind that is making sense of and interpreting the world rather than just experiencing it. If they were, in fact, done by Neanderthal artists then we need to rethink our understanding of our near relatives. They may not have been as primitive as has been proposed.
The Green Man is the participant in many of the festivals of the old English countryside. As such The Green Man and beer are long term companions. This relationship is celebrated in Asheville, North Carolina at the Jack of the Wood pub. The pub brews in the English tradition and, if I was in the area, I'd be dropping in.
You can visit them on the web at www.jackofthewood.com
Here is an article about the pub from the Citizen Times.
During a war people are encouraged, through propaganda, to dehumanise the enemy, it makes it easier to kill them that way. The fact is, though, that they are human beings. After the second world war many Germans claimed they were just following instructions when they committed the many atrocities that occured. Naturally, citizens of US, Aust, UK etc, were still thinking of them as monsters and this suggestion was laughed off.
About this time Stanley Milgram was a young PhD student in Pyschology at Harvard University. Of Jewish descent he had it in his mind (we suppose) to prove that there was some flaw in the German psyche that enabled them to obey instructions to torture and murder Jews and Gipsies the way they did. By way of proving that decent US citizens would not do this he constructed an experiment in which participants, ordinary US citizens, believed they were delivering increasingly high voltage electric shocks to subjects. (they weren't of course but they didn't know that)
Even when the "subjects" were displaying agony and screaming for mercy the volunteers, under instruction, continued to increase the voltage they thought they were delivering. 60% of participants continued to a level that they knew may kill the subject. These were ordinary US citizens "torturing" other US citizens! The experiment has been repeated in other countries with similar results. Interestingly best results are obtained when the person instructing them is wearing a white coat.
We like to think that we are capable of independant thought and judgement but the fact is that, when someone in authority tells us to do something, few of us have the strength to say "No".
PS. The experiment scarred some of the participants for life. It is not easy learning that you are capable of torture and murder simply because someone in a white coat tells you to. We could not ethically perform this experiment today but it taught us some valuable things about ourselves.
Maes Howe is an example of burial in stone age times. Skara Brae, on the other hand, is the most complete example known of stone age living. Also situated on the Orkneys in the north of Scotland it is a small stone age village that has miraculously survived 5,000 years relatively untouched.
Unlike many small communities across the world, the community at Skara Brae used predominately stone in the construction of its artifacts and accomodation. No-one knows why the village was abandoned but it was left intact with many of the artifacts of day to day life remaining. This is real life Flintstones.
Click here to see a short online video clip from the BBC on this ancient community.
Mase Howe is located in the Orkney Islands at the extreme north of Scotland.
It is a burial mound dating back to 2,700BC. The mound is 35 m in diameter and 7 m high. The internal construction is stone slabs and consists of a number of chambers. It is a excellent example of prehistoric burial mounds that can be found throughout Britian and Europe.
During the winter solstice the sun shines down the entrance passageway into the central chamber, the rest of the time you need to make use of the lighting that has been installed.
The tomb was raided and emptied of artifacts before the birth of Christ. Vikings later used it as a shelter from the storms and the viking graffiti can be seen to this day carved on the interior walls in runes. What did they write? The same sorts of things that graffiti artists write today ".... was here", that sort of thing.
It is an intriguing development that we can now all be connected to this relic of our distant past via webcam. The webcam is not live at the moment but click here to view some recent action in this ancient passageway on a distant Scottish island.
Here is a site on which you can squander a few idle moments.
http://svt.se/hogafflahage/hogafflaHage_site/Kor/hestekor.swf
Have your sound on and click each horse, click the horse a second time to switch it off.
It is important, when purchasing a product, to be as fully informed as possible on the nature of what you are purchasing. The world of Physics has much to offer in this regard. Here are some possible product warnings for your consideration:
HANDLE WITH EXTREME CARE: This Product Contains Minute Electrically Charged Particles Moving at Velocities in Excess of Five Hundred Million Miles Per Hour.
ATTENTION: Despite Any Other Listing of Product Contents Found Hereon, the Consumer is Advised That, in Actuality, This Product Consists Of 99.9999999999% Empty Space.
IMPORTANT NOTICE TO PURCHASERS: The Entire Physical Universe, Including This Product, May One Day Collapse Back into an Infinitesimally Small Space. Should Another Universe Subsequently Re-emerge, the Existence of This Product in That Universe Cannot Be Guaranteed.
CAUTION: The Mass of This Product Contains the Energy Equivalent of 85 Million Tons of TNT per Net Ounce of Weight.
hmmmmm that tin of jam is more dangerous than I thought.
More timely product warnings from the world of physics are to be found here.
Near Earth Object Centre in the UK report on an asteroid which will be dropping by on 21 March, 2014. It is travelling at about 20 miles per second, is about about 1 kilometre across and could wipe out a continent if it hits us, which it probably won't. The asteroid is called "2003 QQ 47".
What is it with scientists now adays? There's more to astronomy than looking at the stars you know. What about the impact (excuse the pun). If you're going to grab the public's attention you're going to have to come up with a better name than that. We have got a asteroid heading our way that could wipe out a continent. It needs a name to invoke fear, to grab the headlines. I propose Zipacna: Son of Gukup Cakix, a giant from Mayan mythology, who pretended to be the sun and the moon, and came to a bad end. Now there's an asteroid to be fearful of!
Just consider these two headlines.
Asteroid warning for 2014
Zipacna hurls his firey destruction at earth.
I am thinking I know which one will sell more papers.
Update: I have found the source of the problem, a quick check of astronomy curricula at some major universities revealed that not one of them included any content on naming your celestial body. I am putting together my subject outline, this has to be a winner.
To Swedish naturalist Linnaeus you were definitely "Homo Sapien". He was the one who designed this standardised dual name approach to classifying organisms.
It is 250 years this year since he published his seminal 1753 book, Species Plantarum that classified over 5,900 different plant species and has served as the template for scientific nameclature ever since. In 1758 he published the book Systema Naturae which extended this approach to animals. This is when we first acquired the definition Homo Sapiens.
I am a bit of a Himalayas fan but I am thinking that the chances of me getting to the top of Everest are on the slim side. For a start I am quite attached to my fingers and toes and people going up have the unfortunate habit of becoming parted with at least some of them. The US$10,000 fee per climb is a bit off-putting as well.
Anyway, if you would like to know what you get to see for the price of $10,000 and several digits you can see a panoramic 360 degree image here.
I know people take their soccer seriously but I didn't realise quite how seriously. Swiss researchers report there was a 60 percent increase in the number of cardiac arrests occurring outside hospitals during the last World Cup.
Australian rules football I could understand but soccer????
I must be missing something.
I was at the pool swimming pool again on the weekend indulging in exercise. (Always traumatic for the usually sedentary Green Man). One of the problems I have with exercise is I find it boring and my mind tends to wander. On this occasion it wandered to a young girl standing on one of the high diving boards at the diving pool. She would have been about 8 and she was standing on a board about 3 metres above the water.
She stood at the very end of the board looking down at the water below. If you have not done this, it is surprising how much further it looks when looking down than when looking up. She had her hands clutched across her chest and was clearly scared. All of a sudden, after 30 seconds or so, she jumped. When she surfaced again the expression on her face was one of exhilaration. There was no particular danger here but the situation was scary and she had overcome it.
It got me thinking how the perception of danger had caused us to deny our children important development opportunities in an effort to protect them. Children used to have time explore the world around them completely unsupervised. They could make mistakes, get dirty, manage their relationships with other children, have adventures, be creative - all away from adult eyes. Many children today are denied this.
There are greater risks for children when they are in the world unsupervised but the dilemma for parents is that, through continual supervision, we deminish the quality of our childrens lives and deny them the opportunity to learn valuable life skills.
