The Parable Of The Good Samaritans

Today's Kudelka cartoon. It's magnificent.

Death to Question Time

I know it's lazy of me but I can't help but plug this wonderful article by Greg Jericho on the ABC Drum website.

Ordure, Mr Speaker, ordure. Let's call the whole thing off

In it is a witty, comprehensive and pretty much incontrovertible elocution of why as a political process of any genuine use "in the national interest", it's bereft of any substance whatsoever. The comparisons with the briefer, sparser but to-the-point UK question time are telling.

The problem of course is that Question Time is pure politics. It is geared so that those inside the Canberra bubble can talk about the issues that they wish to talk about because they think those issues will provide the best grabs in the quick segment of the nightly news that is devoted to what our Government and Opposition are doing.

This leads into the worst impact of the Question Time – namely that media will talk about who won or lost (and I'll admit to have fallen into this trap many a time as well). A Government wins or loses in parliament by whether or not it gets its legislation through – question time has nothing to do with that. But if your leader "does well" in Question Time, the troops feel buoyed, leaderships are secured and so on and so forth…

I will freely admit that this is what makes QT such fun to watch, and why I'll continue to watch it when I can.

But as a key plank of the political process and the main conduit between the Parliament and the public (due to the ABC broadcast), we can do a hell of a lot better than this.

Australia vs Sri Lanka, 3rd Test, Day 5: Notes from the Boundary

In the end, there's only one thing to talk about - a sparkling, memorable last day captain's knock from Michael Clarke. Superb awareness of the match situation, controlled aggressive batting, seizing the initiative and taking the series out of SL's hands. That it was a special knock to watch aesthetically makes it all the better.

Australia vs Sri Lanka, 3rd Test, Day 4: Notes from the Boundary

• Dan Brettig's article on Cricinfo sums it up better than I had, but despite getting a hundred, the way Mathews batted in the first session and the last hour of yesterday was decidedly poor. I hate to describe it as selfish and obviously anyone approaching their maiden Test century and especially someone who has come close multiple times before will be somewhat self-conscious. However, the way Mathews batted today can only be described as showing a severe lack of match awareness as he deadbatted his way to a hundred with a decidedly unproductive tail (on past performance, and they didn't disabuse anyone of the notion today), restricted himself to scoring off one ball an over and generally whittled away Sri Lanka's initiative and their chance to win the match.
• On the other hand, Michael Clarke couldn't have been more pleased with the morning. By the end of the first session after Hughes and Watson had gotten started, the effective net gain for the session for SL was a mere 29 runs, four wickets lost and an entire session wasted. Often the drop-the-field tactic comes in for criticism and rightly so, but in this case, Clarke, having the match situation in mind and seeing the negativity of Mathews in particular, read it perfectly, and his bowlers backed it up with tight, probing lines that didn't bleed cheap runs to over-aggression as often occurs against the tail
• Phil Hughes's technical shortcomings are well documented and well trumpeted, but it cannot be denied that he has considerably improved his technique and especially his footwork in the time since the Ashes. To do so at FC and Test level exclusively is an impressive feat and speaks volumes of his determination. For that matter, he played a fine innings today - controlled aggression without undue risk, taking the initiative from the Sri Lankans through intelligent batting. Not to mention the fact that he actually made quite a lot of his runs on the onside.
• I make no bones about the fact that before this series I was deeply skeptical of Herath's claims as a top flight spinner, and even after his effort in Galle I was still a doubter. However he was extremely impressive today. He bowled clever lines and plans, exploiting the rough outside the right handers off stump, varying his flight and turn whilst maintaining very good accuracy. He's the man who could win Sri Lanka the Test.
• My instincts tell me they won't, though. This pitch is far too good for that.

Australia vs Sri Lanka, 3rd Test, Day 3: Notes from the Boundary

Not much to say, really. Persistent but not lethal bowling on a completely dead wicket against batsmen well versed in making runs in such conditions. Went as well as one could honestly hope, to be frank.

Australia vs Sri Lanka, 3rd Test, Day 2: Notes from the Boundary

• Mike Hussey really is the hallmark, the epitome, of the Test batsman in this sort of form. His judgement, his ability to rotate the strike, to attack, defend, read the situation, bat with the tail, make him a batsman for all to aspire to.
• 316 may look decent after being sent in... but not on this pitch. I'd say we're at least 100 behind being "OK" and ideally we need far far more.
• And Mahela and Sanga, who once put on over six hundred here, are currently in the process of demonstrating that. Tomorrow, I fear, will be a long, long day.

Australia vs Sri Lanka, 3rd Test, Day 1: Notes from the Boundary

I'll try to do this for every day of Test cricket (hell, any cricket) I watch. It'll just be a collection of random dot points, mostly observations, predictions and trends, sometimes verging onto summary.

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Aus vs. SL, 3rd Test, Day 1
Notes from the Boundary

• That surely must rank as one of the most hideously ugly shots I've seen in recent times from Phil Hughes. Bat nowhere near pad, playing right across the line with an angled open face. So loose, Ravi Bopara in the 09 Ashes loose. A fisherman's shot. He better improve fast or he won't be deserving of a trip to South Africa.
• How many times have we seen Watson drive or cut way too hard at a wide delivery and spoon it to point? Did it many times throughout last summer, often at deeply inopportune moments (Adelaide Test, 1st dig comes to mind), and now twice on tour. It simply isn't good enough from our form batsman.
• Ricky looks awful as of now (about the 20th over). But at least he's still there. And those two cover drives are perhaps an indication that he's finally finding his range... now if he can not throw it away.
• Lunch approaching and it's quickly looking a daft, daft decision to bowl first, frankly. Unless this pitch becomes completely dead after Day 1, there really isn't enough in it to not simply bat first. SL haven't exactly bowled the right lines, though.
• Fucking rain.
• As much as he's batted beautifully, he could work on his strike rotation, Shaun Marsh. A lot of fairly innocuous deliveries are being blocked back to the bowler, when he really should be looking for ones.
• What did I say about him throwing it away? In fact I think everyone could do with a good long session about leaving the ball.
• Attritional day of Test cricket then. A mixture of tight without overly threatening bowling and a mixture of watchful and terrible batting.
• Finally, this light business is ridiculous. There is no way this light is "unsafe".

Deep philosophical musings

Sometime last year, I had a quite in-depth conversation with a mate about the definition of life. Where does life begin and what constitutes life? Is life just a self-replicating bag of chemicals that interacts with the environment?

The more I thought about this, the more I realized that under any logical definition of life, you always had gray areas which are difficult to categorize and reconcile. For example:

• A self catalyzing bag of chemicals (ie. a bag of chemicals that facilitates its own replication). It reproduces. It interacts with the surrounding environment. So why is it not alive?
• A virus. Conventional wisdom dictates that viruses are not alive, as they are not self-sufficient - they must directly co-opt another living organism in order to survive. But why does that matter? And how does that differ from all the other organisms which rely on others to survive? (Albeit in a much less direct matter)
• A few years ago, modelling suggested that under certain but very much possible conditions, interstellar clouds of plasma (for the rest of you, a plasma is the "fourth state" of matter [there are five], whereby the electrons of atoms are stripped away, leaving the whole thing very sensitive to electric and magnetic fields) could organize themselves into helical structures and start behaving a way that was very suggestive of life. Big dust cloud, but alive. Very science-fictiony.
• On a more fundamental level, how about an artificial intelligence, controlling a factory or software? Self-replicating, can evolve (if it's a full AI), interacts with environment. At what stage do artificial constructs or pieces of code become "alive"? (Think Geth from Mass Effect) Can they ever come alive?

Just a random thought.

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This post, for the curious, was inspired by this report: Scientists Take First Step Towards Creating 'Inorganic Life'

The Political Compass

Those who know about my work on various forums over the years - namely, none of you - will be well aware of my disaste for political labels. Traditional political labels, I mean. Liberal, conservative, even more arcane ones such as libertarian and whatnot.

My issues with labels are two fold.

Firstly, anyone whose political opinions are so regimented, standardized and predictable that a single word can completely described them are, in my view, political sheep. Their views lack the critical depth, clarity, flexibility and adherence to the nuances and complexities of the real world that separates pure, mouth-breathing ideologues from genuine political thinkers. Fortunately, however, few people exist, because we are not talking about political automatons (for the most part), we're talking about people. Human beings. With their own lives, perspectives and opinions. A card carrying ALP member, for example, may not agree one bit with the current Australian government's attempts to try and defuse the singularly embarrassing and depressing asylum seeker debate via the Malaysia process, just because they are a card carrying ALP member. Likewise, there are plenty of born-and-bred GOP (Republicans for the rest of you) members who would never think of voting blue (or anything other than red) once in their lives, but have deep reservations about the social lunacy of the extreme social right of the GOP. So these labels such as liberal, conservative, left-wing, right-wing, start to lose meaning when the positions they refer to become vague. "Oh yeah, he's a liberal" - what does that even mean? What positions does he hold that makes him a liberal? If - well, when - he disagrees with some of those, do we call him 80% liberal, 10% conservative and 10% green? What?

Number two. More important. I've seen, so, so, so often, labels used as a byword for good/bad. Think guilt-by-association, or, erm, glory-by-association. A self-description of "libertarian" does not often mean "adherence to a political policy emphasizing limited (but not zero) government interference or control in all facets of a society and economy", but rather a tag to big up oneself by associating with the intellectual-highbrow school of libertarianism. A nice crutch for many far-right social conservatives seeking to show off their intellectual values whilst completely ignoring the "society" aspect, and hence appeal to the often genuinely libertarian centre. (not to mention that libertarians, generally speaking, show something approaching a social conscience. Being against public funding of hospitals is one matter. Advocating the refusal of treatment on financial grounds...).

The result is that many of these basic labels become, in the words of one poster on one forum I no longer frequent, anti-words. They actively obstruct meaning, and are often used as blunt instruments with purposes far beyond and far more insidious than merely summing up one's political views.

Which brings me to the original point of this post (I assure you, it had one!) - the Political Compass. For, oh I don't know, six years? now, I've regularly performed the test on the Political Compass website, to see how my views shifted. The test is available here:

http://www.politicalcompass.org/

What I like about it is that as a simplification tool, it works so well. It treats your views on the two fundamental scales - social and economic. It formulates your overall position based on your opinion to specific questions, and on specific issues, which is the only true way to gauge someone's opinion. It doesn't allow you to sit on the fence, it makes you think. Most of all, by giving it a weighted numerical scale, it avoids the whole vagueness and misinterpretation issue that a simple "left/right" label will end up, without immense qualification ("centre left-leaning social libertarian" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue).

And my latest result is (x-axis is the economic scale, y-axis is the, erm, state-control or social scale):

Yes, I'm surprised too. This is the first time I've been right-of-centre economically, just left-of-centre (although I have been shifting that way for a while). Just goes to show that you can't pigeonhole people's opinions when your own are constantly shifting.

Welcome

Welcome, dear reader. Welcome to this strange, unexplored and frankly completely pointless space of externalized thought, realised in writing. Well, not physically in writing. Metaphorically. Physically, more a certain array of electrical signals altering the electric and magnetic fields within the set of nematic crystals (I think?) within a LCD screen... but I digress.

In keeping with the complete pointlessness, there will be no particular theme to this mess. I'll just write - type - whatever I damn well please here, but it'll be, as one may have guessed, generally one of four things - science, cricket, politics, or music. The chances that you'll see me spaffing about my own personal life here is very low, never fear.

So, then. Onwards.

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And I am never saying "dear reader" ever again. Christ I feel like I've been pulled out of 1940 with that shit.

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Oh, and yes, I will swear from time to time. Sorry.