I’m not sure I get the electoral calculus involved in this candid revelation:

While being grilled by a roomful of young Australians on ABC Television’s Q&A program last night Mr Rudd was asked if he would like to raise the legal drinking age to 21.

“Of course,” was Mr Rudd’s laughing reply.

Okay, there are more over 21 voters than under 21 voters, but the under 21s are voting for the first time. Kevin, do you really want to get them used to voting for your opponents? Read more »

The head of the UN’s climate change panel (the IPCC) Rajendra Pachauri has released a novel that cobines lessons on climate change with sexy story lines.

The protagonist in Pachauri’s book is eerily similar to Pachauri himself: an environmentalist and former engineer who inexplicably has a lot of sex with women (I can’t say whether the last part as any basis in reality). According to The Times the book: “mingles lectures on climate change with descriptions of Sanjay’s sexual encounters, including frequent references to “voluptuous breasts”.

Following last week’s visit from the Skeptic Dark Lord Mockton (who looks and sounds like an evil mastermind from a new climate themed Bond film) I can’t help but wonder if some of the increasing confusion about climate change stems from the eccentric oddballs who we’re told to believe.

Monday's speech is here: Read more »

It was roomy here in December

Australians flooded departure lounges as never before during the summer holidays, heading overseas in unprecedented numbers.

New official figures show a record 731,000 of us left the country in December, an astonishing 3.3 per cent of the population or roughly 1 in every 30 Australians .

A record 141,000 of those trips were to New Zealand which has become by far our most important tourist destination. Read more »

Very interesting post this morning by Peter Brent at Mumble. Under the heading “Rhetorically Challenged”, he says:

During the Howard government’s first term 1996-8, it attracted the label “rhetorically challenged” several times, usually from disappointed supporters. (Coined by Michael Duffy?) You could say the same about this lot. … Lindsay Tanner alone seems able to get an economic/political message across without dumbing it down.

It’s a good point, but I’m not sure “rhetoric” is quite the right word here. To me, calling the Howard government “rhetorically challenged” calls up echoes of the stuff that Paul Keating was able to come up with – soaring and inspiring one minute, witty and incisive the next – but that Howard and his team couldn’t. Read more »

Attention recruits. Those of you landing in Afghanistan in coming months may not have to engage in the sandbag stacking and trench digging usually associated with lowly grunt-dom. An $800,000 investment in an armored wall system known as McCurdy's Armor could have Marines rapidly erecting 6.5-foot-tall mortar-, RPG- and bullet proof fortresses in less than an hour, saving the days it can take to fortify an area by conventional means and making forward-operating units more nimble.

Named for Ryan S. McCurdy-a Marine killed in Iraq in 2006 while hauling a wounded comrade to safety-the system is designed to offer troops increased protection and mobility when setting up outposts in hostile areas. The walls can be ferried into place in panels that are easily stackable in a truck or trailer. Once in position, four Marines can assemble a single panel in less than ten minutes without any special tools or additional equipment. The panels then snap together like bomb-proofed Legos secured with steel pins to form a blast- and bullet-proof shelter. Read more »

The body is a resilient biological structure, but there's one thing medical science, an increasing number of Baby Boomers, and the majority of professional athletes will all tell you: Take care of your joints, because once you burn up the cartilage you started with, you're not getting any more. But a breakthrough by Northwestern University scientists will now allow adult joints to naturally grow new cartilage for the very first time.

Unlike bone, muscle and other tissues in the body, cartilage that is damaged or worn away over time does not regenerate itself. The cartilage you have when you reach adulthood has to last you for life; if it doesn't, you can suffer debilitating joint pain or even osteoarthiritis, which is neither pleasant nor effectively treatable. Read more »

Google's vision for a better world involves removing those pesky language barriers that keep people apart, and so the Internet search giant has begun development on a voice recognition and automatic translation system for cell phones. Such technology could either herald a new era of fruitful international collaboration or usher in new grievances and conflicts, depending on your viewpoint. The Times makes the obligatory reference to the Babel Fish of Hitchhiker's Guide that spawned bloody interstellar conflicts. Read more »

Humanity's search for the secrets to immortality has inspired Ray Kurzweil's Singularity vision and DARPA's hunt for ageless synthetic beings. Now scientists have discovered a single gene that appears to control how quickly individuals will biologically age, The Telegraph reports. The discovery could not only encourage people to adopt healthier lifestyles earlier, but may eventually help people live longer if scientists can figure out how to manipulate the gene. Read more »

A battery that runs on air? Why, that's almost as good as a car that runs on water! Those cars are fantasy, but batteries that run on air are actually quite common, especially among older people. Tiny zinc-air batteries are widely used in hearing aids, where they have replaced toxic mercury-based batteries in providing a small but steady stream of power. They supply more energy for their size than any other battery, because they draw some of their power straight from the air.

All batteries generate power with two chemical reactions: one that produces electrons at the anode (negative terminal) and one that absorbs them at the cathode (positive terminal). This creates a circulation of electrons-an electrical current-from the anode to the cathode. Most batteries contain all the chemicals needed for both reactions. Read more »

When you're just wearing PJ bottoms, and you have them Harry High, do you ... do you feel like Obelix?

Yeah ... you know you do.

Click on images to enlarge

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Remember me?  That grumpy old bloke who once obsessively spewed forth half-baked opinions here at Troppo?  After being AWOL for some time a comeback of sorts seems imminent.  I’m experiencing fitful urges to post, usually on very silly topics like whether Jen may have committed reportable child abuse by forcing young Jessica to watch KRudd being quizzed by members of James Farrell’s dumb generation on Q & A. Read more »

The death of the last surviving member of a Paleolithic tribe on the Andaman Islands:

The last member of a unique tribe has died on India’s Andaman Islands.

Boa Sr, who died last week aged around 85, was the last speaker of ‘Bo’, one of the ten Great Andamanese languages. The Bo are thought to have lived in the Andaman Islands for as much as 65,000 years, making them the descendants of one of the oldest human cultures on Earth.

Boa Sr was the oldest of the Great Andamanese, who now number just 52 …

The surviving Great Andamanese depend largely on the Indian government for food and shelter, and abuse of alcohol is rife.

Boa Sr survived the Asian tsunami of December 2004, and told linguists, ‘We were all there when the earthquake came. The eldest told us ‘the Earth would part, don’t run away or move’. The elders told us, that’s how we know.’ Read more »

Today in the House of Representatives two speeches were given by the current and former leaders of the opposition. One was forceful, well reasoned, cutting, intelligent and persuasive. The other was given by Tony Abbott. Read more »

Former Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull spoke in the House of Representatives today, in debate on the reintroduced CPRS bills. Bernard Keane has a full wrap at The Stump. From Keane’s coverage, it appears that Turnbull devoted most of his time to demolishing Tony Abbott’s plan:

Turnbull tore apart the proposed plan as economically inefficient, environmentally ineffective and unable to meet the task of reducing Australia’s emissions by 5% by 2020.

It is relatively easy for economists to debate efficiency issues e.g. when we discuss privatisation.

But when we are discussing a host of particular economic issues – such as the distribution effects of labour market deregulation, or the role of health care, or the role of investment in education, or why a government stimulus is needed (when interest rates are up against the zero bound) – one problem keeps coming up. Has economics now become so “mathematized and divorced from moral philosophy” that it is no longer concerned with trade-offs between equality and efficiency? (Something Greg Mankiw recently reminded of this).

Does it now mean that, within the Paretian framework, there is no reason why a person B does not need to care about the effect of government public policy on the welfare of another person B – so long as person B can theoretically be made materially better off?

This leaves us with an economics literature that “few people …can truly understand, either in its content or its relevance the important moral and economic arguments that confront us today”? Read more »

Sughra Raza. Brown Girl. Jumeirah beach, Dubai.

Painting: acrylics on canvas ca 2001; digital photograph on Jumeirah beach, January 2010.

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a Eulogy by Wes Bishop

On the evening of January 27, 2010 President Barack Obama was nearing the end of his first State of the Union Address.

Before a joint session of Congress, before the leaders of the military, his cabinet, and the nine Supreme Court Justices, Obama addressed the people of the country by talking in front of its most powerful individuals.

Meanwhile, in California an aged scholar and historian was drawing his last breath.

The man was Howard Zinn. Read more »