The Myth of Scientific Conspiracy

I love a good conspiracy theory.

In times past I’ve been fascinated, bemused, irritated and appalled (sometimes all at once) by everything from Von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods and those wacky 9-11 truthers to the idea that the Mayans had rockets and the moon is an alien spaceship.

And don’t even get me started on that Timecube guy.

Dissemination of conspiracy theories has been both helped and hindered by Web 2.0, as both proponents and debunkers are just a few clicks away.

For the moment it looks like the debunkers are winning, but I suspect conspiracy theories will always be with us.

But where do they all come from?

Big Government conspiracies got a boost in the 1990s, as US hegemony expanded and it became very easy to believe we were being lied to. In the 2000s the whole idea came crashing down once it became clear that we were being lied to, but it was incompetence not conspiracy at the core.

And still no secret alien technology in sight.

Big Government conspiracies seem to have shifted now to Big Pharmaceutical and Big Oil, as profit takes over from political power as the assumed driver. As conspiracies go though, these are a lot less interesting. Big companies doing whatever they can to make money? It’s not quite Spaceship Moon is it?

Big Science gets a run as well. This is a particular favourite of anyone whose wonderful new Theory of Everything has been rejected by the scientific mainstream.

The list of Big Science conspiracies is endless.

Evolution? Young Earth Creationists will bang on for days about how it’s a scientific conspiracy to keep the real truth hidden … the truth being that those fossils are all less than 6,000 years old and were actually placed there by Noah’s flood.

Entropy? It’s a lie foist upon the public to hide the existence of perpetual motion machines that could provide free energy to whole world. (An obvious cross-over here with Big Oil).

And emissions? It’s all those left-wing scientists blinded by their green ideology wanting to shut down the factories and throw everyone out of work.

And they’re just the ones starting with ‘E’.

But here’s the thing. Here’s why the whole notion of scientific conspiracy is preposterous.

Scientists are not in cahoots.
They’re in competition.

When any new scientific idea is thrown into the ring there'll be a phalanx of scientists trying their damnedest to kneecap it before you can say phlogiston.

And why? It’s not to be malicious. It’s because that’s how science works.

Ideas that withstand the onslaught are accepted and became the basis for further learning. The ideas that fall are simply discarded.

And you might notice the ideas that fall are also the source of most of the conspiracy theories.

After all, it’s much easier to blame the Masons and the Illuminati and the cabal of Big Scientists than to admit your idea doesn’t really have any merit.

The New Normal

The death toll from the fires continues to grow. The final figure will likely be over 300.

We've not seen a peacetime tragedy on this scale in the history of our nation.

As we sift through the ashes of this disaster and comfort the wounded and rebuild our communities, our thoughts must turn to where we go from here.

This is our climate now.

We can no longer talk about the ongoing drought with the vague notion that at some point it will end. We can no longer hold any hope of getting "back to normal".

We may see wet periods in our dusty future but it will soon be clear that these are the rare exception, not the rule.

Hot and dry is the new normal.

We will see more heatwaves like the one last week. We will see more years with record low rainfall.

And we will see more fires.

This is the human impact of climate change.

Not in any particular event, because no single event is attributable.

But rather in the frequency of events, and the severity of events, we will see the impact as we adjust to a new way of life.

Fires

Over the weekend my home state of Victoria experienced the worst bushfires ever recorded in Australia.

The count is 131 dead. The figure is being updated hourly.

Entire communities have been lost. Countless acres of land have been razed. As more and more tragedy is uncovered, the scale of the disaster grows.

This is one of the moments that will still be spoken of for decades to come. Stories both horrendous and heroic pile upon each other and will become, in time, the legends of an event rarely seen but long remembered.

At times like this we understand what it means to consider humanity a united family.

The fires have taken no heed of race or religion. Nature doesn’t care about our petty beliefs or concocted tribal distinctions.

We are no more important to this planet than the bugs and worms crawling in the scorched and blackened earth.

All we have is each other. We have our common humanity.

And we have our deep shared empathy for those who have lost so much.

A Change on Climate?

Andrew Bolt has decided who’s to blame for those ridiculously high temperatures we experienced last week, and it’s . . .

. . . those evil Lefty Greenies!

That’s right. All those people banging on about stopping climate change instead of trying to protect people from the rising temperatures are the ones to blame.

For some reason this makes perfect sense in his twisted little mind.

Because what we need is more electricity use, not less! If we want to cool the Earth then let’s crank up those air conditioners!

We seem to be at an interesting point in history here.

We’ve just had a glimpse of what Mr Bolt’s focus will be once the fact of climate change is no longer deniable.

He’ll simply shift from ranting about it not really happening, to ranting about not enough being done.

His latest rant beautifully straddles these two lines of thinking, indicating that we might be somewhere near the tipping point.

It goes something like this:

“If the Earth is warming which it isn’t then it’s utterly ridiculous to tell people not to use their air conditioners because that would cool the Earth dummy and anyway it’s cold that kills people not warmth so global warming would be great even though it’s not really happening.”

He even added a caveat to his usual cherry-picked statistic that the Earth hasn’t warmed since 2002, saying “it may soon warm again”.

Andrew Bolt: neo-Greenie?

Heatwave II: The Reckoning

One might be forgiven for thinking that our state government is an incompetent pack of whinging little girls.

Apparently three days in a row of temperatures over 43° constitutes a “natural disaster”.

Sorry Mr. Batchelor, but no. It doesn’t.

This kind of thing should be expected and our infrastructure should be able to cope with it.

If a few hot days is all it takes to completely trash our public transport and power delivery systems, then that’s a serious indictment of our government’s dire track record in public maintenance.

News flash for those “in charge”:

This is not the first time this has happened. And it won’t be the last.

In fact, where the hell do you people get off being surprised by this?

The climate is changing. You might have read about it. It’s been in a couple of papers.

All utilities planning should be allowing for this sort of thing to happen every two or three years. Because a decade or two down the track, it will be.

We’re well past the time we can sit on our hands and start thinking it’s all going to get back to normal soon.

So Mr. Batchelor, Ms. Kosky and Mr. Brumby: get it the hell together.

Heatwave

It’s too darn hot.

And I make no apology for saying that.

Three days in a row of 40+ degree temperatures are enough to make anyone use words like “darn”. (That’s 104+ for our Imperial American friends).

It might not sound like much if you’re from Arizona, but we’re just not set up for this sort of crap.

The city is drooping.

We’ve got rolling blackouts across the state.

The train system is at a standstill.

And there’s no end in sight. The forecast says it’s not going to drop below 30 for another week.

What to do on a day like today?

Well, this afternoon I’ll be spending three hours sitting in a TV studio watching my sister compete in a game show.

I hope she does well.

And I really hope they have air conditioning.

Sorry, Global Warming Hasn’t Stopped

Apparently 2008 was a cooler year than 2007, which is predictably leading to the denial lobby screaming that this whole “global warming” thing is obviously a scaremongering crock.

Of course no-one ever said that global warming means we will have year-on-year warming.

This graph shows the average global temperatures over the course of the late 19th and 20th centuries:

The year-on-year changes in temperature jump all over the place, but the trend is ever upward.

In fact, out of the last 50 years there were 22 that were cooler than the year that preceded them: 1959, 1960, 1963, 1964, 1970, 1971, 1974, 1976, 1978, 1982, 1984, 1985, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1996, 1999, 2000, 2004, 2006 and 2007.

So it’s not surprising at all that 2008 was a cooler year than 2007. Based on recent history the probability of that happening was about 44%.

You’ll also hear the common refrain that global warming stopped 10 years ago and the Earth hasn’t warmed since.

Warning: this is just a convenient selection of statistics.

In 1998 we experienced the peak of the El Niño cycle (see the spike in the graph above) which caused a drastic one-off increase in global temperature. So of course it’ll take a little while for the trend of rising temperatures to get back to that point.

The same argument could have been made the whole period between the years 1944 and 1980. It wasn’t valid then and it isn’t valid now.

There’s nothing at all to indicate that the earlier trend has stopped.

In fact, with the continued increase of CO₂ in the atmosphere, there’s every indication that we’ve got quite a way to go yet.

Raining

It's raining in Melbourne.

Raining like it hasn't rained in years.

Raining like it used to in the dim distant rain-soaked past, before the Big Dry and water restrictions and desalination plants.

Once upon a time Melbourne was famous for its rain. Tourism ads for Queensland would play on the point. A rugged-up Melburnian looks out the rain-soaked window of a tram to see... sunshine! And beaches! And bikinis! And so much of it! Just a short(ish) trip away!

That all changed with El Niño, the weather pattern in the south Pacific that sucks all the rainfall to the north and causes endless political bickering.

To recycle? Or desalinate? Costs now vs costs later. Use less! Save more! Take a bucket into the shower. And an egg-timer. Don't flush that! If it's yellow let it mellow.

And now it's raining. Beautiful, cleansing, soaking, sodding rain. It's rained for almost 24 hours straight.

So is this the end of the drought? Can we quietly forget the recent admonition to use only 155 litres each per day? (that's about 40 gallons for our Imperial American friends).

Probably not.

We foolishly don't gather storm water so most of this precious bounty will just be running out to sea.

If it rains over the city catchments we might see the dams rise, but it'll take more than a day or two to make much difference.

This is just another round in the cycle.

You know ... those droughts and flooding rains.

Just like in the poem.

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.

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.

Once again, Bolt just doesn't get it

Last week Age arts critic Robert Nelson reopened the debate on the representation of children in art by publishing a naked picture of his daughter Olympia on the cover of Arts Monthly magazine.

Professional dyspeptic Andrew Bolt, in his new role as moral crusader (taking a break from his role as fingers-in-the-ears-antiscience-climate-change-denier) was obviously horrified.

On Thursday Bolt published on his blog an earlier piece by Nelson, in which Nelson talks about the ways in which images of children are sexual. Bolt describes Nelson's piece as "disturbing", but as is often the case, he's completely missed the point.

If what Nelson says about the images being sexual isn't true, then Bolt's own argument that the images shouldn't be seen . . . because they're sexual . . . make no sense!

Of course the pictures are sexual. But the point is that the pictures aren't sexualising the children. They're just bringing out, as Mr Nelson says, the latent sexuality that is already there.

You can't make a teapot sexual merely by photographing it naked.

Bolt and Nelson are actually in complete agreement on this point.

The only difference is that Nelson advocates the pictures' public display, while Bolt (along with Kevin Rudd and Hetty Johnston and all our other self-appointed moral nannies) wants them hidden away.

I have to agree with Robert Nelson. Let's bring it out into the open. Hiding our children away in dark corners does not keep them safe.

If we genuinely want to see a reduction in child abuse, then let's give our kids pride in themselves, pride in their strength and most importantly, ownership of their sexuality.

The problem with the current stampede of moral outrage is that it works completely counter to this goal. Kevin Rudd saying he "cannot stand" the picture of Olympia is a case in point.

Olympia was understandably offended by his statement because she's proud of her pictures, as she should be. And does Olympia sound like the sort of girl who would stand to be abused? Of course not.

A child with a healthy sense of his or her own worth is the child that will kick an abuser in the nuts and run away.

Surely that's what we want our kids to be.

As I Was Saying

Continuing on the same train of thought as yesterday, we're starting to see some of the growing pains of a cultural shift to less car use.

Sydney is wrestling with the idea of car pooling.

With the continuing rise in petrol prices, this is inevitable in a town with a dense centre, outer suburban sprawl and substandard public transport.

Sound familiar? Yeah. Expect similar discussions about Melbourne real soon.

In Wellington they've introduced car lanes for use only by cars with at least three people. And of course, people are using love dolls, mannequins, and probably even artful combinations of doonas-and-pillows in an effort to get around it.

Seinfeld, of course, covered this fifteen years ago.

We really are behind the times down here.

And in Science News

A group of thirteen national science academies today released a joint statement calling on the Governments of the world to do more to fight climate change.

Emarassingly, Australia was not one of them.

But this is hardly surprising. We're still very behind the times with all this stuff.

It was announced today that Toyota will be producing the new hybrid Camry at their Altona plant, to begin production in 2010.

Here's my tip:

Not long after 2010 we won't be interested in hybrids anymore. The race to produce the first mass-market electric car will be well and truly on. This decision will be seen as the one that put Australia on the back foot, by encouraging our car industry to huddle under its warm and cosy Government subsidies instead of getting out there and earning its keep.

You heard it here first.

Bolt Warms Up

Andrew Bolt has really irked me today. He's still banging on about climate change being imaginary.

Look, I understand that climate change is a difficult problem. I understand that people want it to just go away. I do.

But closing your eyes and putting your fingers in your ears and screaming "LA LA LA LA LA" won't make it happen.

I'm not sure if it's pride or ego or wilful ignorance or all three, but Mr Bolt is revelling in his supposed status as last-man-standing among the climate change skeptics.

His self-image is of a man standing tall, head high and proud. He doesn't appreciate that he's actually the last person on the tiny desert island in a 1950's cartoon (you know, 1 metre across with a palm tree in the middle), staring fixedly into space so he can't see the water lapping at his ankles.

The amazing fervour with which he clings to any piece of evidence, however slight and however manipulated, that climate change might not be real is sad. So sad.

I'll leave aside his insistence on continuing to refer to the phenomenon as "global warming". Presumably this is so he can use it as ammunition when climate models show that parts of the earth will cool as a result of climate change. Memo to Mr Bolt: that's why we changed it to "climate change".

His rant today was simply a reheat of the old chestnut that average warming levels flattened out in 1998, so what are we so worried about? After all, it said so in the New Statesman, so it must be true!

This argument has been going around for months now, and has been comprehensively debunked over and over again . . . for example here, here and here.

The fact that this argument is still getting recycled clearly shows that the anti-climate change brigade is really clutching at straws.

So anyway, I left a comment. It was published, but I reproduce it here for your enjoyment. I begin with a reference to Bolt's statement that many people are skeptics of climate change, some of them prominent scientists.

It's interesting that you say "some of them prominent scientists . . . ". How many of these "prominent scientists" are climatologists? None, I suspect.

I also suspect none of them are statisticians. Your argument, Mr Bolt, is based on a convenient selection of statistics that happen to tell your story.

The fact is that 1998 was an oddly high year for temperature, because it was at the peak of the El Nino cycle. If you cherry-pick 1998 as the starting point, then yes, it can be made to appear that warming has stopped.

But this is noisy data. You can't look at one isolated section and draw any meaningful conclusions.

If you look at the decades-long trends in the data, then it's painfully clear that 1998 was an anomaly, and it's painfully clear that the temperature is still going up.

Now let's have no more of this nonsense.

Bagging Andrew Bolt

Everyone's favourite misanthrope Andrew Bolt had a little rant yesterday, about Borders bookstores daring to charge 10c for plastic carry bags.

The upshot was that Bolt stormed off in a huff after rudely refusing a bag, choosing to carry his books rather than, as he saw it, donate 10c to some goddamn hippy environmental group.

The delicious irony in this story, for those of us interested in such things, is that Mr Bolt has illustrated perfectly why a plastic bag levy is such a good idea.

It's not about the measly 10c. It's not about whether or not it's donated to an environmental group. It's not even really about the bag itself.

What the levy does, and what Mr Bolt has shown, is that it makes people stop and actually think about what they're doing.

Some will think "well, I'll just pay the 10c". Others will think "I'll pay the 10c but remember to bring my own bag next time".

Still others, like our Mr Bolt, will apparently think "screw you . . . I'll carry my own goddamn books and never shop here again."

All are valid responses. And that's the point: to get a response. To stop everybody blithely taking plastic bags just because they're offered.

The message is that if you don't need one, then don't use one.

Mr Bolt, you have have illustrated the point beautifully. Well done you.

Earth Hour 2008

We were in the city last night for the comedy festival show Black Bag (review to follow), and so were able to enjoy Earth Hour from ground zero, as it were.

We saw the lights on the Arts Centre spire go out. We saw the lights dim at Federation Square and along St Kilda Rd.

It may be small thing, but standing and watching it happen around us was undeniably powerful.

Over the next few days we'll hear a lot of commentators talk about Earth Hour being "merely" a symbol.

And like ratifying the Kyoto Protocol and saying sorry to the stolen generations, it is a symbol. But symbols matter. Symbols are important. Symbols unite us and provoke us and focus our thoughts.

Andrew Bolt will drag out figures showing that the amount of energy saved was so minute that it clearly wasn't worth the effort. But this is to miss the point entirely.

Earth Hour is not about the level of emission reduction in that single hour. Symbols don't need to achieve anything measurable in themselves. That's not what they're for. Symbols like this work to prompt change in other areas.

Earth Hour is about drawing attention to the problem of climate change. It's about the emissions reduced over the coming weeks, months and years as people come to understand that it's just not that hard to turn off the lights.

We're going to see a lot of change over the next few years. Changes in the weather, changes in our cities, and changes in society as the centres of power and money are shifted.

A symbol like Earth Hour, with its visual and visceral impact, will keep us focused our goals and reminded of the endgame. And that's very important.

A long long day

I spent today in Sydney. While this is something I generally try to avoid, it was for work and hence compulsory. Or something.

Got up at 5.30 this morning for a 7.30 flight. First meeting in Sydney at 10, which we only just make due to extended waits on the tarmac (at both ends) and a mile-long queue for taxis prompting us to catch the train from the airport.

Not a great deal was achieved in the morning, although there was a nice lunch at The Rocks, up close and personal with the Bridge and the Opera House.

The afternoon brought the real purpose of the expedition; a mini-conference (pretentiously referred to as a "Knowledge Fair") with a few different topical presentations to choose from.

I decided the one I'd chosen a few weeks ago looked boring, so went instead to one about climate change. Or more particularly, the opportunities that emissions trading schemes will offer the financial services industry.

K-Rudd has said Australia will have an emissions trading scheme in place by 2010, which will have a huge impact on the way heavily-emitting companies operate (in Australia, that's primarily the mining and coal power industries). Like any other commodity, carbon credits will fluctuate in value as they are traded between
(a)those that can cheaply cut their emissions and
(b)those that can't.

It'll be a complex and dynamic market, and buy/sell/hold decisions will be best left to the experts.

This'll all become second nature to us soon. In three years' time, the value of a carbon credit will be reported at the end of the news alongside the Aussie dollar and the price of a barrel of oil.

Anyway, this was followed by a plenary session about different attitudes to risk in different demographic segments, and how this affects the insurance market.

Much of it was yawnworthy, but I was interested by the observation that Generation Y, often accused of being blasé about risk, are in fact more aware of risk than any other generation. It was pointed out that Gen Y have lived with a war- and terrorism-laden worldview for most of their lives, have pretty much resigned themselves to never owning their own home, and place a low value on everything except their social network. The upshot is that transience is seen as the normal state of being, and there's just no value in traditional risk-avoidance strategies like insurance.

Sounds plausible. But Corey Worthington's still a dickhead.

At this point we left to get the plane home, which was again delayed on the tarmac for no apparent reason. What's up with QANTAS today? Drip trays giving them trouble again?

Arrived home just after 9. A long long day.

Byron Bay

Last Sunday Kate, Eliza and I flew north for a week of R&R, and hopefully some cooling off, in Byron Bay. It seems odd to have to go to northern NSW to escape the heat, but there you are. Climate change and whatnot.

It had been raining up there for a week and our arrival heralded the first day of sunshine. The weather was just starting to get hot again. The ground was steaming and the air was humid.

We picked up our Prius from the airport and headed south in a cloud of smug.

It was a couple of hours before we could check into the house we'd rented, so we decided to take a quick detour to Nimbin to pick up some 'supplies'. You know, postcards and stuff. Unfortunately, the road was flooded (as it was in many places around there) so we went back into Byron, only to confront the mother of all traffic jams.

We thought the crawling traffic was because of the once-a-month market in the town, but after a few days we realised it's actually like that all the time. Once we made it into town we wandered around said market for a while, got our fill of hippiedom (and local sausages - very nice) then went to find our house.

The house was in Suffolk Park, a three minute walk from Tallow Beach and far enough away from the madness that is Byron Bay proper to afford us some peace and quiet. The owner insisted on giving us a long, comprehensive and mostly superfluous guided tour before asking for next-of-kin details, on the off chance that we were all to perish simultaneously in (for example) a car crash. And she actually used the word 'fireball'.

Debbie and Danielle were arriving on Monday afternoon, so once we got rid of the owner, we had the place to ourselves for the first night.

The next few days consisted of doing nothing but laying around the house reading, laying around the beach reading, and playing cards on the deck overlooking the oddly lush (well, for a Victorian, anyway) tropical garden.

This, um, activity was broken up by a spa visit on Monday for massages and sauna, and on Tuesday another attempt, this time successful, to get to Nimbin. While in Nimbin the heavens fairly opened for a storm the likes of which had not been seen for at least a week (apparently) and we were thinking we might be stranded there. But just as we were starting to think this might not actually be a bad thing, the rain stopped and we left. Oh well. Great town, though.

On Wednesday Kate and Eliza braved the very choppy surf of Tallow Beach while I sat on the sand reading and snoozing. Same again on Thursday, although this time the surf was even choppier. The dirty foam lining the sand was knee-deep and before long it started to rain. We didn't stay long that day.

We got up early on Friday to pack up and get out before the owner got there and subjected us to another half-hour spiel on some irritating minutiae. (We just made it as it turned out . . . we saw her sitting in her car outside as we drove off).

On the way out of Byron we stopped off at the famous Sharky's Tattoo to get some ink. I got a Möbius strip on my back (so sticking with the nerdy vibe), Kate got 'miel' ('Honey' in French) in white ink on her wrist and Eliza got her father's (my uncle's) initials on her back, in memory of his passing away one year ago yesterday.

Our flight out of Coolangatta was in the evening, so we had almost a whole day to kill in the north coast hinterland and the Gold Coast.

And kill it we did. We drove through the Tweed region, which was reasonably entertaining and pleasantly eccentric. For example, the Tweed town of Mooball has taken its branding potential to a somewhat ridiculous extreme, with just about every surface (including power poles and the occasional rock) painted in black and white cow spots.

We stopped in Murwillumbah, a pretty little town with a cinema that the tourist lady breathlessly told us (two or three times) was original art-deco and had, would you believe it, bean bags. Gosh.

We had lunch in the cutely-named Tumbulgum before driving through Coolangatta to Surfer's Paradise. I'd not been there since our 1988 family holiday and it doesn't seem to have changed a lot. The architecture is staunchly 1980's tack (there must have been a bylaw passed requiring this) and the whole place screams North American Tourism. The mini-golf course is even named Putt-Putt Golf. We stopped at the beach for two minutes to dip our feet, then got the hell out of there.

We ended up being a little early for the flight so Kate did what she does best, and sweet talked the check-in guy into getting us on an earlier one. It's just as well she did. All the flights were delayed by a few hours and the earlier flight ended up leaving at our original flight time, with our original flight leaving much later.

All in all, a great relaxing week. Now it's back to work. Sigh.

And here's some photos.

Before: Footy field on the the road to Nimbin when we arrived on Sunday afternoon.


After: the same footy field 48 hours later.


Soaking in the atmosphere in Nimbin.


Tropical garden at the house. Thankfully the water feature (the pipe and tub contraption on the left) wasn't working. I hate water features.


Your humble correspondent faces the mighty Tallow Beach surf . . .


. . . before having a snooze.


Kate's feet. This is the only photo of her she'd let me use.


Eliza and Debbie playing Chinese Checkers. I think I'm reading Famous magazine.


Eliza and I at Surfer's Paradise. We didn't stay long.


No photos of the tattoos at this stage. I'll post some in the next day or two.

Amsterdam

Here we are in Amsterdam.

The trip was long, but pleasantly uneventful. Even the 1-hour layover in Singapore, which had the potential for a bit of Race-Around-the-World style airport dashing, was straightforward, mainly because we arrived from Melbourne half an hour early.

We got into Amsterdam at about 5.30am on Monday, breezed through Customs (which makes sense . . . who's going to smuggle anything into Amsterdam?) and caught a double-decker train into the city.

We weren't going to be able to check into our apartment until about midday. But that'll be ok, we thought. Surely a party town like Amsterdam never sleeps.

Actually, it does. Between about 4am and midday on Monday is when everyone seems to recover from the rest of the week. Nothing opens until midday. In the three days we've been here we've not seen the place as dead as it was when we first arrived.

Eventually we find our apartment, get in touch with the agent, and get them to let us in. Like most Amsterdam houses (and people), it's tall and thin. The staircase is about 80cm wide and goes up at an angle of 70 degrees. No point wasting space on things like staircases. This'll be tricky after a big night out, I thinks to myself.

(Side note: apparently it's a tax thing. Between 1200 and 1900 or thereabouts people were taxed on the width of their houses, so the standard house design is tall, deep and thin. You can tell the really rich areas cos it's where the houses are wide.)

Tuesday we decide to get a bit of culture (it can't all be red-light district, can it?) and go to the Van Gogh museum. Actually, it was only Sarah and Greg and I that went. We lost Kate and Shannon in some market along the way. I think deliberately on their part.

The Van Gogh museum was interesting, but clearly made up of the bits and pieces no-one else wants. None of the really famous painting are there, except for Irises and one of the Sunflowerses (but not the good one). It was all arranged in chronological order though, so you can see him getting madder and madder. Which was nice.

What amazed me was that he was only 37 when he topped himself. He looks about 70 in those self-portaits.

This morning we took a cruise around the canals. The cool thing about Amsterdam is that you're never more than a block away from a water view. The uncool thing is that it's also the sewer and serves as a reminder that it's all going to disappear under the ocean before the century's out. Still, we can enjoy it while it lasts.

Or maybe they can make the dykes bigger. Actually, now that I think about it, Amsterdam will probably be the one place to survive the rising oceans, given it's already below sea level.

That's about it for the moment. Sorry about the lack of photos. Unfortunately, I can't seem to upload from this particular net cafe. We've taken a bunch, though, so stay tuned.