Greg Luck's Blog

I am in New Zealand for the Kiwi Foo Conference and to do the Tongerara track.

The Flight Over As my Air New Zealand flight took off over the Pacific the stewardess announced that they would shortly be turning on the Entertainment System. She warned us not to press the buttons too fast or it would lock up. Interesting. I was dutifully vary careful and pressed the buttons slowly. Then I started to watch a movie. Bored 5 minutes in, I pressed the Menu button. Bang. My screen went black and I got a Windows CE boot up screen. About 10 minutes later it had come back up. By this time amused, I decided to actually hit the buttons at normal speed to find out what would happen. The system went crazy.
It turns out that Windows is also making its way into the cabin. The Airbus A380's non-core avionics systems run Windows and according to someone at Foo Camp, there are photos of crashed Windows systems. Welcome to the future of flight.

Auckland

New Zealand has become very successful at attracting foreign students, mainly chinese speakers. My hotel in Auckland actually turned out to be a foreign student accommodation tower. The front desk did not speak English well at all. My check-in was finally accomplished by handing over my voucher. A China town has formed between Queens St and the freeway to the east – about 6 blocks. It sort of felt like being in Hong Kong, with lots of packed towers and high energy.
I gained some temporary respite by catching a live gig at an Irish pub a bit further down Queen St.

Warkworth

Driving north out of Auckland it is striking, to an Australian, how effortlessly green everything is. The area strongly reminds me of the Tillamook region of Oregon. Rolling green hills and bucholic bliss. Warkworth is a lovely town about an hour north. A freeway from Auckland is steadily making its way north. One day Warkworth may end up being a dormitory suburb for Auckland, but not yet. Warkworth is the home of Nat Torkington, OSCON and Kiwi Foo organiser.

The New Worry

New Zealanders lose people each year to Australia. A lot of them are men. New Zealand now has a sex imbalance and is becoming a bit matriarchal. At the conference the Mahurangi College has taken over the male staff toilet and turned it into a female one. So there are two female toilets side by side. The make toilet is outside across the courtyard in a converted store room.
The new worry though, is that with Australia rapidly drying out due to global warming, Australians might start migrating en mass to New Zealand. New Zealand seems blissfully unaffected by Global warming.

Internet

The Internet is expensive in NZ. Hotels do not offer it free. Hot spots are rare. I will never complain about the Australian Internet again. Fortunately for us we had our own Internet company sponsor. One satellite on the roof later and the conference was humming. Some of the conference topics reflected the frustration. One session was on how to use cooking equipment to create parabolic antennas to extend WIFI range. Another was on a commercial effort to create controlled hot spots using your own personal Internet service and WIFI card.
Apparently Google Maps does not do maps for New Zealand – yet. And google itself has been known to become inaccessible from New Zealand for lengthy periods.

Well I am back in the USA to attend the OSCON2006 Conference.

Observations/Trends

• Atkins is out. Glycemic Index (an Australian invention) is in
• Burger King now has a “BK Stacker”. They go to 4. That is: four beef patties interleaved with four slices of cheese. Yours for USD9.
• At the cinema, a small drink is 600ml, a medium is 1litre. Wow!
• Saw a lot less large SUVs and trucks on the road. I saw a lot of them parked at people’s houses. I saw plenty of Hummers sitting in car yards. Speculation: are people driving their smaller second car as their main car? On the other hand I am in Portland, which is known for being relatively green.
• I was here for record breaking temperatures. 11 of the highest temperature years have been in the last 14. The media seem not to be commenting on this.
• Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” is a hit. I saw the movie at the Lloyd Centre, Portland Oregon. It was almost sold out. The movie makes a great case that Global Warming is both real and bad thing. It covers the same material as Tim Flannery’s “The Weather Makers”. I think between them 2006 will be the turning/tipping point for Global Warming. Interestingly, the movie avoids mention of Diesel cars and Nuclear energy, neither of which are popular in the USA.
• The record heat meant that I was unable to get a room on the coast Saturday night and had to drive all the way back to Portland. It was 40c plus on the west coast.
• Omega 3 has been added to the plant sterol margarines. Also to a healthy peanut paste. I am looking forward to that coming to Australia.
• I checked out HDDVD and BluRay players. Neither was impressive. Perhaps we need to wait for new movies to be made. I thought it was in between DVD and broadcast HD. Interestingly, the HDDVD player kept crashing and had to be rebooted. Which one was M$ supporting again?

Whenever a nasty IE bug comes out I always fantasize about putting that up on my blog. The problem with acting on that desire is that it is probably unlawful here in Australia and in many other jurisdictions. Plus you are potentially harming someone. So I don’t do it.

Over the years I have gotten very annoyed when sites block browsers other than IE running on Windows. It has made me want to block IE back. When I saw Explorer Destroyer I thought “why not?” So if you are reading this you are not using IE.

I tested the page using IE 5.2 for Mac. It works. And it does not harm.

If you want to help create an IE dark web, go to http://www.explorerdestroyer.com/.

The last book I read on climate change was The Skeptical Environmentalist, by Bjorn Lomborg. He is a statistician and argued that the global warming we witnessed up to 2000 could have alternate explanations than greenhouse gases, such as increased sunspot activity. He was lambasted at the time and investigated by the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty. He was cleared of dishonesty in 2004.

The point I talk away from his book was that, at the time of writing, there was not sufficient data to conclusively prove that global warming was caused by greenhouse gases.

However, since that time there has been a lot more science done, spurred on I suspect by Lomborg’s and President Bush’s doubts. A great summary of where things stood mid 2005 is provided by The Weather Makers, by Tim Flannery. Tim is a conservationist from way back. He is famous for The Future Eaters. His new book promises to be the Silent Spring of climate change.

Where things stand does not look good. Carbon Dioxide has risen from 2 parts per 10000 to 3 parts per 10000. The role of Carbon Dioxide in retaining the Sun’s rays has been understood since the 1800s. The evidence now strongly suggests that the warming is due to increased Carbon Dioxide and to a lesser extent Methane.

To figure out exactly what will happen, scientists model the climate. This is complicated and frequently revised as new data comes in and there is new understanding of the interactions between the many things that make up the climate. Some things that a likely to happen are:

• Rising of the sea level due to thermal expansion and melting of ice which is on land.
• Destruction of the Great Barrier Reef, due to coral bleaching due to warmer water due to warmer air. 82% destruction for a 1 degree rise; total destruction for 3%. Total destruction is looking likely.
• Mass extinction
• A Semi-permanent El Nino affecting Eastern Australia.
• Permanent strong hurricane seasons for the Western Atlantic.

Anecdotally, where I live in Brisbane we are in our worst drought ever and 2005 was the hottest ever year. The hurricane season in the US was the worst ever. The Great Barrier Reef is bleaching again.

So what to do? The latest number we need is 70% reduction of 1990 levels of greenhouse gas emissions.

Kyoto is the international effort. But Australia, the US and the developing world are not signed up, and its goals are too modest. Still, there has been a previous international success with CFCs and the Montreal Protocol. It started with only part sign up but then gathered steam. The depletion of atmospheric ozone has now stopped and we can hope for return of our sunscreen.

Tim Flannery points out that each individual can fairly easily get to 70%. Here’s how:

• Tick the renewables box on your electricity bill.
• If you have a petrol car, change to a diesel or hybrid one, or to a smaller one
• Use gas if you are on town supply. (1 atom of carbon compared with 4 four coal)
• Use a solar hot water system if it makes sense where you live

In my own situation, I drive a diesel, use town gas for water heating and am going to tick the renewables box.

Some other things to expect that should happen:

• Startups trying to solve parts of this problem.
• Gas rules supreme
• Nuclear regains its past popularity
• Wind, tidal, solar, geothermal and others get more popular
• perhaps a worldwide carbon pricing and trading scheme

Australians per capita are the worst carbon polluters in the world. This is becase we use a lot of energy and we use 90% coal to produce that energy. Expect Australia to end up an international pariah before action gets taken here.

Some things you can do to get involved:

• Read the book.
• Get two other people to tick the renewables box on their electricity bill

Updated 14 October

H5N1, also known as bird or avian flu, is a new influenza variant that first infected humans in HongKong in 1997 from chickens.

Since then it has become endemic in wild birds in South East Asia.

Based on everything we know about flu, H5N1 needs to make a few changes to spread readily from humans to humans, and then to kill much less than the current 52% so that it becomes an efficient propagator. The smart money is that this is a matter of time.

I have been monitoring events in Asia daily since US President Bush mentioned the start of US Tamiflu stockpiling in mid September.

In September I obtained Tamiflu for myself, my wife and my family. According to our pharmacy, his supplier has now run out of Tamiflu. Some worrying signs have emerged in the past few weeks that some of the H5N1 samples are Oseltamivir resistant. Consequently I have also obtained Relenza, which seems to work for the Tamiflu resistant strains and an older antiviral Amantadine. If we get this thing we will hit it with a cocktail of all three anti-virals at once.

Experience with recent disasters shows that you need to act early. Once everyone becomes aware of the threat a panic starts. That has already happened in New Zealand and Australia where people are hyper ware of the threat and have been stockpiling Tamiflu. I have been monitoring contacts in other parts of the world. There seems to be no level of public knowledge in some parts of the world. In the US, there is growing public knowledge. The US has of course been distracted by hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

There are other efforts underway right now for H5N1. Test kits and vaccines are being developed.

One problem right now is that there is up to a two year wait for the Tamiflu manufacturere to fill backorders. Supplies available to the public are, or soon will be, exhausted. Tamiflu is under patent, so no other drug companies can manufacture it.

I think the best thing that could happen now is a worldwide panic. That would then accelerate vaccine efforts and create pressure to waive the Tamiflu patent. This post is an effort to start that panic. If the panic does not start until we get human to human transmission it will probably be too late. In 1918 about 50 million people died of “Spanish flu”, actually H1N1 influenza. This time it might be an order of magnitude higher.

The levels of spam I receive have been growing in the last few months. Much of it comes from this blog. Last year my approach was to require commenters to be approved. An email would come to me and I would approve them, or not, if they were spam.

Lately the spam level has gotten so high that I am missing emails. On my Mac, the bayesian filter does a good job. On my Linux laptop, I just cannot seem to get Evolution’s spam filter to work. Beats me.

Anyway this weekend I declared war on spam. I have added Blacklist to my blog, deleted all spam comments and trackbacks, and I wait to see how that goes.

This post is partly to see how my spam filters go. Update: A page full of trackbacks… Turning off that feature. Try again.

This Christmas I noticed for the first time the use of the term “Happy Holidays”. I cannot find who created this term. It is closely related to the term “Happy New Year”, so I suspect it came from that.
Ideas often take some time to make it to Australia. It seems this trend started in the US in the 1990s. So as not to offend non Roman Catholic derived faiths, the religious aspect is evacuated from all references to the holiday.

The history of the Christmas Holidays

The reason I say Roman Catholic is, that it was brought to my attention in the Sunday service at St John’s Anglican Cathedral (which welcomes all denominations and faiths) that Christmas fits into the ancient Roman festive season of Saturnalia. This festival started as a celebration of the winter solstice and then expanded to the latter part of December. Romans would give good-luck gifts and place trees with candles in their halls.

5 January Anyone?

Orthodox and Eastern-rite Christians don’t celebrate Christmas on 25 December, but rather the 5 January. Why? They still follow the Julian calendar. In their calendar our 5 January is their 25 December. The history of calendars is itself fascinating. In my blog entry The metric system: a case study in technical standard setting I discuss how hard it is to change standards once they are in. The Gregorian Calendar standard still has it’s holdouts.

Enter Multiculturalism

The western liberal democracies enshrine in their constitutions freedom of religion. Christians should be able to publicly say Merry Christmas to each other. As should others with of Ramadan, Sarvasham Eakadashi and so on. Secularists can say “Happy Hoidays”.

Secularism

A key idea behind western liberal democracies is the separation of church and state. Religion and governance should be completely separate. Where the water gets muddied is when there is a majority of one religion in a democracy. Then the flavour of that democracy follows from that religion. Contrast India with Australia, or Malaysia with USA.
Perhaps the problem is that in a secular system, there should be no holidays for religious festivals at all.

The politically correct thing

What seems to be getting played out in Australia is the systematic banning of all Christian symbols from our schools and public life. Santa Claus is banned from our local play group and school. Christmas becomes Happy Holidays and so on.
The French have come under attack for banning headscarves in schools. However they actually banned all religious symbols, whether they be Christian, Islamic, Jewish or others. They are motivated by a desire to integrate their various cultures and faiths into a peaceful country.
So, I think either all religious symbols and references should be barred from public life, or I am going to keep saying “Merry Christmas”.

The Luck family are off to the United States for a year. I am doing an exchange with my company. There is a lot more involved in going to a place for a year than in passing through as a tourist. We have relatives who have gone over on a defense exchange. They shared their horror stories and we are thus prepared. Perhaps the best advise I can offer is to talk with someone who has just done it.
An example. You cannot get car insurance unless you have a driving history. We have gone to the Queensland Department of Transport and gotten official extracts of our driving history. This is an example of a requirement difficult to predict in advance. In a nutshell, there is little distinction made between you, resident legally under a Visa, or an illegal immigrant. From the point of view of most companies you are an alien without any US domestic history. Leasing a house, obtaining insurance, and many other things that are trivial in your home country are major issues. More on this once I get there.
We are being defensive about this. In particular we are concerned about Vegemite. For those of you (the whole world outside Australia) who have not discovered the joy of Vegemite, click [here](http://www.vegemite.com.au/). We worked out our consumption was 500 grams per month; therefore we need 6 KG to last the year. Fortunately, the supersize jar of Vegemite is 1 KG, so we only need 6 jars.
We also need to consider the few weeks we are travelling. We have a special 250 gram tube of Vegemite to get us through.