Distant Digital Futures

An article in today's Age talks about the eventual switchoff of Australia's analog television signals and the permanent move to digital.

The point of the article is that, for the Luddites among us . . .

". . . the Federal Government is considering offering financial and other incentives to convince people to upgrade from analog to digital television before the 2013 analog switch-off."

I would have thought that the option of digital-or-nothing would be incentive enough. But hey, what do I know?

Anyway, the switch-off date made me do a double take. It's 2013 now?

The last I heard it was going to be 2010. And that was after it had already been pushed back from the original target of 2008.

This is bad. Until the analog signals are gone and we've opened up the (much wider) digital spectrum to some decent competition, there's no incentive at all for our oligopolous free-to-air stations to lift their game.

I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that the FTA stations have engineered the delay in an attempt to retain the status quo. If they have, then it'll prove a costly mistake.

They desperately need someone to drag them into the 21st century. In five years' time, free-to-air television will be even less relevant than it is now, with downloadable, streaming and subscription content continuing to take over.

If our FTA stations are still doing then what they're doing now, then before long they'll be nothing more than a distant memory.

An Interesting Argument

When I'm in the mood, I sometimes wander around the intertubes looking for arguments, particularly of the theism/atheism variety.

An interesting one is going on at moment over at Atheism Analyzed. Stan has written a really interesting multi-part series of posts on why rejection of deism on the basis of scientific argument is irrational.

I've been meaning to write a post on this myself (with, as it happens, very similar arguments but different conclusions) so I jumped on in. My comments are on #4 in the series, although I'm mainly referring to the argument in #2.

It's all a bit wordy and analytical, but I know some of my readers are into that sort of thing. So feel free to jump on in too.

L to the H to the LHC

Just one more week until the Large Hadron Collider is cranked up to full power and starts bashing particles together at close to the speed of light.

There've had a couple of successful runs bashing particles into blocks of concrete, but really. One does not applaud the tenor for clearing his throat.

So hang on to your hats, kids. The secrets of the Universe are about to be revealed. We might even find that legendary Higgs Boson.

But to keep you amused until then, here's a brief introductory video.

Scorched

Last night we were treated to the world premiere of Scorched, a new Australian bushfire disaster movie.

It was disappointing, to be honest. But this isn't completely surprising. Apart from a brief flirtation with low-budget exploitation films in the seventies, Australian filmmakers don't have a great history when it comes to genre films.

In a sense, we've been victims of our own (limited) success.

Muriel's Wedding sent everyone scrambling to produce the next low-budget family comedy, and Lantana prompted a huge volume of overwrought family drama.

While these were great films and it's all very well to try to produce more stuff like that, you can't make a living from it.

You need a regular round of crowd-pleasers to fill the coffers, which can then in turn support the quality productions.

So where are the action movies? Where are the buddy comedies? Where are the horror films? Where are the gangster/heist/caper movies?

We have hordes of great screenwriters, directors, and actors ready and willing to ditch their artistic integrity and pump out some lowest-common-denominator dross for a quick buck. So what's the problem?

Well, it's actually quite simple. In fact, Scorched typifies precisely what the problem is, and it's this:

Australians just don't get how to make genre films.

Example: Scorched is a disaster movie about a ring of bushfires threatening Sydney. As such I, the viewer, go in expecting three basic elements:

(1) A shot of an enormous fire-front looming over the city, silhouetting the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge;

(2) A group of wild-eyed characters realising the ground is shaking, just before being almost trampled by a herd of kangaroos fleeing the flames, preferably down George Street; and

(3) A crazed religious character from Queensland, screeching that the fires are God's wrath against the city of sin, and then attempting to stop the flames with prayer before meeting a fiery death.

These are the basic, basic elements of this sort of film. And they just weren't there.

What we got instead was a film with far too much introspection and far too many attempts to be clever.

And that's the problem. This sort of movie isn't about chin-stroking reflection.

It's about visceral reaction. It's a popcorn movie. It's a gee-whiz special effects thrill ride.

This is disaster porn, for goodness sake.

Now do it properly.

A New French Verb

To Google.

This is a regular verb, and hence takes the form googler.

The conjugation is as follows:

Je google
Tu googles
Il google
Nous googlons
Vous googlez
Ils googlent

Babelfish doesn't appear to recognise this. But I suppose that's not surprising.

After all, it's owned by Yahoo.

Dead Pool August Update

With four months to go until the end of the year, August has been characterised by some celebrity deaths that might best be described as . . . unexpected.

On the 9th comedian Bernie Mac passed away at the age of 50, which prompted an outpouring of tributes from everyone he'd apparently ever met.

Then on the 10th musician and sometime voice-actor Isaac Hayes passed away at the age of 65. 'Shaft' to his older fans and 'Chef' to his younger fans, this prompted yet another outpouring of tributes.

On the 17th Dave Freeman, author of 100 things to do before you die, died after a fall at his home. And apparently he hadn't done all 100 of the things. Awkward.

The 27th saw the tragic death of All Saints actor Mark Priestley, who committed suicide by jumping from the window of his high-rise hotel room in Sydney's CBD.

And finally, on the 28th tech news website Bloomberg published the obituary of Steve Jobs, co-founder and CEO of Apple Inc.

He wasn't actually dead, and the document was quickly withdrawn. But it was up for long enough to get copied and re-published elsewhere and it's now available all over the web for all the world to see. Have a read.

And that's it for another month. The rankings haven't changed, with Kate still leading on 16 points.

An Innocent Russia Writhed

St. Paul's Cathedral. Flinders Street.

One of the final events of this year's Melbourne Writer's Festival was a reading this afternoon of works by Russian poet Anna Akhmatova.

Akhmatova lived through some of the greatest upheavals of the twentieth century: the Russian revolution, two world wars, the rise of the communist state and the awful tyranny that accompanied it. These were the times that unalterably shaped the political landscape of Europe and the world.

Her poems were banned for many years by the Central Committee, and hearing their passion and power it's not surprising. They capture the feeling experienced by a people trapped by their history, and a people powerless to fight the forces arrayed against them.

But while her words reflect the despair for what has been lost, they also shine with the hope for what may be retrieved.

It's a celebration of the human spirit, best summed up in this beautiful piece read by Helen Garner.

Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,
Death's great black wing scrapes the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?

By day, from the surrounding woods,
cherries blow summer into town;
at night the deep transparent skies
glitter with new galaxies.

And the miraculous comes so close
to the ruined, dirty houses --
something not known to anyone at all,
but wild in our breast for centuries.

Anna Akhmatova, 1921

Actuaries Gone Wild

It's been a whole year since the last one, and so this week it was time once again for our annual actuarial company dinner.

The venue this year was the Rendezvous Hotel in Flinders Street, which featured lots of alcohol, some passable food, and a waiting staff whose command of English was roughly comparable to John Howard's command of Klingon.

"Can I get a beer?"

blank stare

"Beer"

blank stare

"HIq?"

nervous sideways glance

"Oh, never mind."

For some reason the entertainment (once again provided by those "fortunate" enough to have completed their actuarial training since the last dinner) sat at the let's-get-the-crowd-involved end of the spectrum, rather than the more palatable (for the audience, at least) let's-put-on-some-silly-costumes-and-do-a-skit end.

And so it came to pass that the people at our table had to construct a story and improvise a play using some found objects, including two small suction cups, a bottle of liquid paper, a roll of yarn and a hot pink fright wig.

The details are too tedious to recount, so I'll leave it there.

Anyway, thank God there was beer.

At least, there was once I found a waiter who spoke Klingon.

When Idols Cry

In the wake of the sad train wreck that was Big Brother 08, Australian Idol has reared its ugly head once again.

Like most years, I feel compelled to watch the auditions, if only for the occasional musical gem hidden amongst the festering pile of people who've clearly never bothered to actually listen to themselves sing.

Mercifully, the hideous multi-headed beast that is the judging panel has been downgraded from a four-headed Hydra to a mere three-headed Cerberus; somewhat appropriate given their (purported) guardianship of the gate of musical quality.

The prize is still a recording contract, although that must have less and less appeal for contestants.

Once upon a time such a thing was the only way for a young artist to get an album made and distributed, but that's just not the case any more. Any teenager with talent and some bootlegged software can record a track in their bedroom and sell it all over the world.

The only real benefit Australian Idol imparts upon its contestants, and admittedly it's not an inconsiderable benefit, is publicity. But all the contestants get that, or at least the final 12 do. It's not just the winner.

In fact, I could see someone going into Idol with the clear intention of getting kicked out before the final three.

They'd get all the publicity, no parasitic record company leeching off them afterwards, and an independent album where they get to keep all the profits.

Sounds like a plan.

This is what it feels like

This most excellent cartoon by artist Justin Bilicki was the winner of the 2008 Science Idol competition.



I'll think of this every time I read yet another climate change denial article by Andrew Bolt.

Doomsday Delayed

I posted previously about the Large Hadron Collider, and some of the talk surrounding it, vis-a-vis its potential to destroy the Universe.

Some of you may have noticed that two-week deadline came and went, and we're still all here.

Don't worry, it's only because the switch-on date has been pushed back to September 10.

So we've got another 20 days at least.

The Burlesque Hour

fortyfivedownstairs, Flinders Lane

Moira Finucane has returned to Melbourne with her latest show, combining grand old saucy burlesque with some other stuff you probably wouldn't show your granny.

Borrowing elements from gothic horror, Virginia Woolf and Japanese lolita culture, it manages to cross every line you think of, some you don't, and ultimately plays like Cirque de Soleil on magic mushrooms. There's acrobatics, dancing girls, nudity, adult themes and some violence.

The revue format is good, mainly because it means that if you don't like this act, the next one is not far behind. Also, there's no common theme, except in the most general burlesque tradition of sex-as-comedy.

And make no mistake, it is very very funny.

Some will find the show offensive, but those will invariably be the same people guilty of taking sex far too seriously. The show is more or less designed to offend such people.

In fact, the beauty of this style of burlesque is that it dares to treat sex precisely as it should be treated . . . as something wonderful and something to be enjoyed, but at the same time something very human, a bit grotesque and most importantly, faintly ridiculous.

3.5 out of 5

Cool Warming Vase

Science meets art in this cool vase.



Produced by artist Nathan Martell, the shape is based on this graph showing average world temperatures over the last 150 years:



The apocalypse as art. Eat your heart out, Albrecht Dürer.

On a related note, people like Andrew Bolt are fond of showing only the last few lines of this particular graph, dominated by the El Nino peak in 1998, and claiming that warming has stopped.

If you find someone who insists on doing that, smack their fingers out of their ears, force their eyes open, and show them the whole thing.

Monster Wine

On the weekend Ty and Debbie dropped in from Sydney. Which was awesome. Particularly the dinner we had on Saturday night at St Jude's Cellars in Brunswick Street.

Their coffee venison is worth a blog of its own, but I'll leave that to my loyal commenters (if they care to expound).

Instead, I wanted to mention some of the wine we had. One bottle in particular caught my eye:


It's a Riesling from the Clare Valley, on the Some Young Punks label. Check out the website.

I've no idea what it tastes like. Haven't cracked it open yet. But really, that doesn't even matter.

Nerds and wine. A beautiful symbol of a great weekend.