In early voting, Margaret Thatcher is emerging as the erotic favourite to sing Touch Me at 36% ahead of Julie Bishop and Natasha Stott-Despoja tied on 18%. I’m guessing that’s because my non-Australian readers don’t known who the others are. Perhaps I should have included Madeleine Allbright, Golda Mier, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Queen Elizabeth II.
Day and Night
I’ve been looking at this photograph for hours, scattered over the last few days.
It was apparently taken from the space shuttle Columbia. No it wasn’t, scroll down for the comments. I shouldn’t need to point out that the big lumpy thing in the foreground is called Africa, and further back there’s the thing they call Europe.
It fascinates me because it — literally! — puts things in perspective. Some of the world’s greatest cities are invisible, at least in daylight. The Low Countries are just starting to blaze in artificial light. But the brightest lights are the flares of oil wells in the deserts of Algeria and Libya, and off the coast of Nigeria.
Hey, aren’t the people there starving? That can’t be right, if they’ve got all that oil, surely?
Thanks to Memex 1.1 for the pointer.
Christian Kerr in conversation with Anthony Green
I’ve already reviewed The Crikey Guide to the 2007 Federal Election, so I’ll keep this brief. Editor Christian Kerr is in Sydney at Gleebooks this Thursday night, conversing with über-analyst Antony Green. There will be maps. There will be a long white pointer stick!
Crikefied again!
I’m rather chuffed that Crikey ran my piece Failing the Citizenship Test today. Every little bit helps.
Failing the Citizenship Test
Excellent. On the basis of the Draft Citizenship Test Resource Book released yesterday I’d fail Australia’s new Citizenship Test. And if a privately-educated 5th-generation Aussie-Anglo like me can’t do it, I reckon few other Australians would pass either.
But that’s OK, because a multiple-choice “Citizenship Test” is meaningless. Let’s remind ourselves what happened when Apu went for US citizenship in The Simpsons. “Being American” was reduced to a cliché.
And the booklet itself is a gorgeous piece of political propaganda that’ll achieve the following:
- The bitter old Alan Jones listeners Howard thinks he needs to placate will be relieved to see an emphasis on the UK as the biggest source of migrants and Christianity as the biggest religion. They’ll think this will stop the “wrong” people becoming citizens. Once more, Howard is Big Tough Daddy protecting them from the woggy bogeymen.
- It’ll cause Howard’s much-hated “elites” — that is, anyone capable of using logic, analysis, multi-syllable words or joined-up thinking generally — to run around in circles for a week or two, losing focus on real election issues.
- Howard gets another chance to moisten over all those “achievements” he personally considers important but which he could never achieve himself — being a soldier (because of his hearing problem) and playing cricket (because he’s completely bloody hopeless).
- It’ll create a minor black market in the answers to the test, which will appear approximately a week after the first potential citizens are processed.
What’s remarkable is how backward-looking the booklet is… and how biased to Howard’s personal interests.
The words “science”, “physics”, “medicine”, “genetics”, “aviation”, “satellite”, “solar” and “film” don’t appear at all, despite Australia’s renown contributions in those fields. “Beer”, “ale” and “lager” are completely absent. “Literature” appears just once. “Computer” only once too — in the context of the test being computer-based.
Who was the first Prime Minister of Australia? Who cares? “George Washington,” suggested our Korean cleaner this morning with a laugh — but of course most Australians would indeed know more about the US system than our own. Do we really need to know where Phar Lap’s heart is? Will the Opening Ceremony of the 2000 Olympics really be of any relevance in 5 years time?
Are we choosing Australian citizens for the 21st Century, or putting together a geriatric pub trivia team?
One question really makes me laugh, though. Who do members of Parliament represent? This is a trick question, right?
Nuclear reactors hacked
Just so you can get a sound night’s sleep before a busy working week, here’s the news that it’s easy to hack into US nuclear power plants:
The first time Scott Lunsford offered to hack into a nuclear power station, he was told it would be impossible. There was no way, the plant’s owners claimed, that their critical components could be accessed from the Internet. Lunsford, a researcher for IBM’s Internet Security Systems, found otherwise.
“It turned out to be one of the easiest penetration tests I’d ever done,” he says. “By the first day, we had penetrated the network. Within a week, we were controlling a nuclear power plant. I thought, ‘Gosh. This is a big problem.'”
Yes, Scott, I reckon it is.
Of course Australia’s “critical infrastructure” wouldn’t have any problems like this, would it.