Kevin and Penny have a child in primary school. She’s quite a popular kid, but she’s only young. She’s a little scared of the older kids, and is still finding her place in the school social order.

She has a heart condition. And she’s getting worse.

Kevin and Penny have consulted doctors from across the world. The virtually unanimous diagnosis is that their daughter’s illness is due to her obesity. Her diet is appalling. She’s dangerously overweight. Her lifestyle is sedentary.

She will die if she doesn’t act quickly to address her illness.

There are a range of treatments available, but the most important one is this: Her diet needs to change, drastically.

But these treatments also mean that life will have to change. Just giving up the sugar isn’t going to be enough. Just taking the medication prescribed by these renowned experts isn’t going to be enough. If Kevin and Penny want their not so little girl to have kids of her own, she’s going to need to exercise.

It will not be easy. She’s not ever had to maintain an exercise regimen before. And the other kids at school don’t really exercise much either. It will mean a comprehensive change in lifestyle.

But after listening to a lot of opinions from people with no real understanding of the illness – and many who refuse to believe that there is an illness at all, Kevin and Penny have decided that their daughter’s lunch money is just too important to the school canteen. They can’t bring themselves to stop her buying the junk food, but they do tell her to maybe sometimes buy Diet Coke with her chocolate fudge ice-cream, super sized chips and deep fried sausage wrapped in bacon.

They tell her not to worry. She can keep eating. She can stay on the couch.

Kevin and Penny aren’t the only parents with an obese child at the school, but their daughter does eat more than anyone else in her grade.

Kevin and Penny are on the School Committee, but they’re just not brave enough to suggest that maybe the canteen should sell some salads, and use wholemeal bread, even when the school accountant says they have to, otherwise it will cost more in the long run.

And there’s NO WAY they’re going to tell the school that physical education should be mandatory.

They vote instead to subsidise the canteen out of the school fees every parent pays, so the canteen can keep on making deep fried everything, and sell it to the kids at a cheap price.

A couple of parents suggest that they will be making lunches for their children from now on. Kevin and Penny find that a little curious, but ignore it.

They instead discuss the proposal to alter all of the water fountains at the school to dispense Fanta.

Nobody needs to worry because the lady making the burgers is working on a special pill that will make the fat disappear. She’s been on Today Tonight and everything.

None of the other parents are likely to get their kids to change their diets much either. The school canteen makes huge profits from the sale of the existing menu – it’s easy to produce and they have years of stock that they simply must sell. And now it’s subsidised!

The kids all keep eating. Some suffer strokes. A few are forced to spend the rest of their short lives in wheelchairs.

The school canteen eventually goes broke. By that stage, almost all of the kids are too sick to eat.

I loathe them with the heat of a supernova. I’d like them to suffer horribly. Coating them in honey, severing a few key blood vessels and leaving them atop a carnivorous ants nest is too good for them. I’d say they should be forced to listen to a Kyle Sandilands marathon if I didn’t think they’d enjoy it.

Ly•cra•li•en (noun): A male cyclist adorned in skin-tight attire that bears a striking resemblance to European junk mail.

I love cycling. I love anything on two wheels. But these people – that intimidate other cyclists and pedestrians with their machismo posturing, that sit around coffee shops with their helmets and oakleys still affixed while sipping short blacks and sweating on the seats – more than justify the pathological hatred many people here have for cyclists.

I cross a cycle path adjacent to the train station in City West. I cross it every morning on my way to work, and every evening on my way home. On a cold morning or after a long day, if the aching bones are misbehaving, it can take a few seconds.

There are bright fluorescent signs denoting that it is a pedestrian crossing. There are the universally recognised white lines across the path. These are the sorts of signs that even the never-leave-the-city four-wheel-drive-fuckwits heed. those people stop. Not the lycraliens. Oh no. If they’re in a considerate mood, you might have one shout a terse “bike” as they speed through. But they never slow down. They never *shudder* stop.

One morning soon, one of these wankers is going to find my walking stick shoved into their spokes. Yeah, mine’s carbon fibre too, cockface.

I can empathise with the rampant upgrade-itis that besets these people. I just bought a new Ducati. I will not get anywhere close to meeting the potential of this bike. I got it coz I likes it. So I won’t pour scorn on you if you trade your Moots frame in for a DeRossa that will do less to reduce the weight of your ride than having a good shit that morning.

But it’d be remiss to not point out that while you may think that wearing lycra adorned with “Kazzinc” and “Astana” makes you look like Alberto Contador, it actually just makes you look like a dickhead.

Whatever pollution you’re offsetting by cycling is more than offset by the fact that you put five people off cycling for life every time you poonce about in public with the contours of your groin on display.

So for the benefit of the whole planet, here’s a few things you lycraliens should know:

1. You’re deeply unattractive in that attire, and this adversely affects people. The world does not need a that much information about you.
2. Many of you are probably the same people that complain about “hoons”. You don’t need an engine to be dangerous you know.
3. An aggressive attitude to other cyclists and pedestrians does not make you faster. But it does make you a wanker.

Old white guys, can’t you just go back to playing golf?

The Facebook “Compare People” application is not suitable for people with serious self esteem issues. Like me. It does strange things to the minds of the self-obsessed. You’re reading this on my blog, for ghod sake.

For those people unfamiliar with the concept, you’re presented with a random pair of your Facebook friends, and asked to choose who “Would you rather kiss?” or who “has a better laugh?”

If you complete enough questions, you’re then taken to your own results page – where you can see where you score relative to your friends, based on the percentage of wins and losses. It’s heaven for the paranoid, narcissistic children of web 2.0…

People without broadband – those in country areas – just listen to Kasey Chambers sing “Am I not pretty enough…?”

My own rankings are full of contradictions, fallacies, stating the fucking obvious (Nobody thinks I can drink more!), how-I-wish-that-were-true statements and meaningless trivialities. How the hell is someone that I haven’t seen in real life for 15 years going to know how punctual I am?

Apparently I am almost as cool as I am hot. No wonder my bones ache.

Nobody wants to be trapped on a desert island with me, but most people are willing to risk travelling with me anyway.

I’m a better listener than everyone else, but there are 45 people that are better friends than me. Odd, given that everyone asked thinks I’m more generous or more likely to do them a favour.

Everyone asked would rather date me, but not everyone would rather sleep with me. Just what the hell are we dating for? Oh, the listening thing. Or my pretty eyes.

You’d all rather marry me, but you have serious doubts about my ability as a father. And I’m neither loyal nor reliable.

Everyone would rather hang out with me for a day, but nobody thinks I’m outgoing. You just want to come to my house then? Does this have anything to do with you all wanting to be stuck in handcuffs with me?

Perhaps I shouldn’t complain so much about it. Maybe it’s rude and gutless to mock people for their Facebook survey choices. Well, I came stone-cold last in bravery and good manners, so fuck off.

This is probably the longest I’ve gone without posting since I began blogging here a year ago.

There’s been a variety of reasons – new job, (not)relationship, tragedy, illness, travel, writing elsewhere, Twitter (though I’ve not been Tweeting much either in recent weeks) and general apathy.

But the biggest reason is that I have no idea what I want to say. I gave myself a year to figure out what I wanted this blog to be about. During that time I was going to write everything. While I didn’t go quite that far, I did write about a fair range of “me” with varying success.

One day I wrote something politically motivated, the next I was bitching about my illness or latest relationship debacle. All of this is intensely interesting to me, as is writing about it now. All of this is part of me, but that’s far less interesting for anyone else.

It turns out it’s a blog about nothing. And I fucking hated Seinfeld.

The solution is, for now, some self-censorship. I’ll probably write less, but write less crap. There is a seed of an idea for a new “single-subject” blog, but it’s still in gestation.

I’ll be here for a little while yet. Next: Twitter and the Hagakure. Fascinating. To me anyway.

We went to the Hoyts IMax Cinema in Cannington to watch the Watchmen last week. It was my second viewing and the rest of the crew were a mix of seasoned Watchmen veterans, and tentative – cynical even – Watchmen noobs.

The movie itself has been described better elsewhere. I think it was brilliant, but whomever collated the heavily clichéd soundtrack really missed a couple of golden opportunities. “Life on Mars” during the flyover of said planet, and “End Of The World As We Know It” during the end sequence or credits would round it off nicely.

But the IMax Cinema… Quite the misnomer, that. I’ve been to IMax cinemas in other cities, and they are an impressive, immersive experience.

The Perth one however, was not an IMax. This was – at best – an ILittleBitBigger. The experience it offered could be very easily reproduced just by sitting three rows closer to the screen than you normally do in a regular cinema.

For twice the price, I was expecting, yes, more. Alarm bells rang when the cashier quite desperately informed us that, “There’s no refunds”. Clearly I’m not the first to register my dissatisfaction.

An IMax cinema is supposed to give you that feeling of scale. You’re supposed to not feel safe in there because the screen is so massive, and you’re up so high, that instinct screams out for an abseiling harness or safety net. The feeling of insecurity is not supposed to be triggered by a financial fleecing.

You’re supposed to feel dwarfed, insignificant, miniscule in the face of such magnificence. Like standing at foot of Uluru at sunset, or comparing your own idiocy to that of a Manly rugby player. The wall of sound is supposed to be murder (© Phil Spector). You take someone who is dubious about their likely enjoyment of the film to an Imax so that there’s every chance they’ll either be overwhelmed by the experience, or their otherwise vociferous complaints will be inaudible.

Experiences like this make it so hard to understand why so many people would rather download, really.

As it was, the highlight of the evening ended up being a drag race with a fastidiously permed man in a red Corvette convertible. We won. In my divvy van. Tosser.

Oh how we laughed.

I’ve never had a really serious game addiction. I’ve certainly dabbled. There’s been some games that I have been completely ensorceled by, and have spent solid days of my life utterly transfixed.

The first was an LCD handheld game where you caught coins then played a poker machine. My parents kept taking it off me, I kept sneaking into their room to take it back.

My first NES had me shooting up Duck Hunt, and chasing the Double Dragon 2, which was also the method my brother and I used to resolve punch ups.

My Playstation brought with it Kula World. Best. Game. Ever.

I still dabble occasionally. I would play for days at a time.

Then came the PS2, Tekken and Gran Turismo. My brother and I would work shifts on GT, completing levels, acquiring new and faster cars. We’d swap spots at the end of a work day, there’d be junk food, a briefing for the incoming player, and the player that just completed his 20 hour stint would shuffle off to bed, dreaming of the perfect exit to that corner on the really long track that meant you’d be going 55km/h faster at the end of the straight.

If GT was an example of geek co-operation, Tekken was war. Bitter, savage, cruel war. My brother is a naturally gifted freak at games. I could do OK at racing and puzzle games, but everything else would be an exercise in demonstrating my inadequacy. He’d unleash a maniacal laugh as I threw my controller away in disgust – obviously he had the good one, and mine clearly wasn’t working properly.

It’s been a long time since I have been hooked, though I’ve had many dalliances.

Sabian and I were having a chat about this on Watchmen night – I hope he tells his gaming problem story on his blog soon [EDIT: he has - in an alarmingly rapid response... and it's brilliant] – I’ve never needed Gamers anonymous.

The very existence of it intrigues me.

For example;

• Are the twelve steps something like: ↑, ↑, →, ←, □, ○, x, L1, R2, ↑+□, R2+x, ↓ …?
• Do they introduce themselves using their handle/avatar, “I’m Draganslya44 and I’m a game addict”?
• If you get caught using a cheat, do you finish the program really quickly, but not get a button?
• Do they need to stay away from pretty much any electronic device because that would be an enabler?
• If they fall off the wagon three times is it game over?
• Does the program you can get from Bali actually work just as well, so long as you’ve been modded?

SO many more questions…

If you have a gaming problem, and have been supported through it, I’d really like to know these things. Comments. Go.

Yes, it’s true – today is Square Root Day.

Dust off the slide rules and recharge the calculators. Square Root Day is upon us.

The math-buffs’ holiday, which only occurs nine times each century, falls on Tuesday — 3/3/09 (for the mathematically challenged, three is the square root of nine).

“These days are like calendar comets, you wait and wait and wait for them, then they brighten up your day — and poof — they’re gone,” said Ron Gordon, a Redwood City teacher who started a contest meant to get people excited about the event.

The winner gets, of course, $339 for having the biggest Square Root Day event.

Gordon’s daughter even set up a Facebook page — one of a half-dozen or so dedicated to the holiday — and hundreds of people had signed up with plans to celebrate in some way.

Celebrations are as varied: Some cut root vegetables into squares, others make food in the shape of a square root symbol.

The last such day was five years ago, Feb. 2, 2004, which coincided with Groundhog Day. The next is seven years away, on April 4, 2016.

From SFGate

I have an alternative, very Australian suggestion. To an Australian, a root is… well, not a vegetable. And I am old enough to remember what a square is. I’m not quite old enough to remember that it’s hip to be square, but I hear it’s true again.

A square was a geek, back when you didn’t realise how much better geeks made your lives. So, what better way to celebrate square root day than to root a square. Everyone has a favourite geek – that guy that always knows where to buy a good computer despite your willingness to waste several hundred dollars at a department store, or that girl who never runs out of patience at your insistence to demonstrate your ineptitude with software, and fixes things up for you.

Square root day – make sweet passionate love to a geek.

But hurry up would you, the day’s almost gone, and there won’t be another until 2016.

No, really. Hurry. Geeks have less sex than everyone else. They need you. And you need us them us.

This is what happens when a Twitter user (@stilgherrian) throws down the gauntlet to a few bored geeks on a Saturday afternoon…

And then, in no time at all…

You can grab the full-size image here, my WordPress automatically trims it.

Hoorays! Number 1 at Twitscoop and at Twitter search! The system works people. But fisting works people hard.

The trend looked like this:

Which meant stilgherrian (read his blog here) made a little Twitter history.

Here’s the weirdest/coolest thing – the oldest entry (over a month ago – Jan 23!) when you search Twitter for #fisting…

Is @bluecardigan a psychic?

I have just finished reading the book of the same title, the third of what has become an annual www.edge.org publication.

Every year, the edge group asks a collection of the world’s leading scientists and thinkers a question and the essays written in response are collated and published.

The first in the series was “What do you believe but cannot prove?” The subsequent question was “What is your dangerous idea?”

Responses this year included a gleeful gaggle of geeks getting a hadron about the collider – and the return to experimental physics it heralds. There were also sociologists, web developers, psychiatrists, inventors, archaeologists…  It’s an absorbing and fascinating read. The essays are at most a few pages in length. Several are only a couple of paragraphs. Despite the sometimes technical subject matter, they’re all easily digestible – perfect for those times when your own digestive system is doing its dirty work.

This is my attempt to answer the edge question;

An overwhelming majority of people will have a global scope of concern within a generation.

Our earliest evolutionary ancestors were biologically programmed to care only for themselves. As these primates began to live in a more recognisable family, the scope of concern of each individual began to expand. The wellbeing of each member of the family was directly affected by the wellbeing of every other family member.

When early humans built the first communities, the benefits of living in a larger group necessitated that due consideration was given to the wellbeing of other individuals quite removed from the immediate family. These communities eventually gave rise to sub-sections of the community, and sub-cultures within them.

As human societies became more complex, an individual’s scope of concern could include people of the same religion, race, gender or other (now seemingly arbitrary) distinction.

Wars have been fought over nations – and later, groups of nations – ostensibly acting to preserve the well-being of the people within their scope of concern. If an individual understands that their own wellbeing is intrinsically tied to that of another, they will act. Whether it’s born from a primal sense of self preservation, or an enlightened benevolence, an individual will respond to the needs of another if they identify with them.

Television allowed unprecedented access to imagery from afar – confronting people in their living rooms with tragedy half a world away, increasing their scope of concern. Yet some detachment, some failure to empathise completely, remained. That sense of mutual benefit – the understanding that making this person’s life better will make my life better too – was not yet evident for many. But our parents still cared more about more people than their parents did.

The first decade of the 21^st century has seen humanity exchange information on a global scale, with startling immediacy and clarity. Communications technologies have allowed victims of oppression in Tibet to relay first-hand the shocking detail of their ordeals, at an intimate and personal level. The days of a nameless, ignorable emaciated child having her pleas for help ignored are rapidly coming to an end.

The personalising of an individual in circumstances vastly different from our own is capturing our attention, increasing our understanding and unstoppably expanding our scope of concern.

And when the current generation of web-savvy, interactivity-craving young people ascend to positions of influence within our society, observing alone will not satisfy them. They will seek to be an active part of the solution, having instantly and instinctively understood the benefit to themselves in doing so.

The enlightenment that comes with information will compel that generation to act. This understanding will lead them to rectify the failings of their predecessors, and will bring to an end the days of less fortunate people being left behind.

I am optimistic that within my lifetime there won’t be anybody beyond the scope of concern of the vast majority, they will demand action, and won’t take no for an answer.

It’s instantaneous, merciless, and without fear or favour.

It requires ultra sharp reflexes, cat-like agility and thick skin.

The ABC published a great piece by teh Ludlam today (full text below) on the mandatory ISP level filter.

In this piece, he quite rightly extolls the virtue of Twitter as a campaign tool. The mainstream media has also been avalanched with stories of people using Twitter during the bushfires.

A source of amusement amongst all of the seriousness comes when the Twitter community discovers that somebody prominent, significant or just plain amusing does not have a Twitter identity. Twitter abhors a vacuum.

Not 30 minutes after the article was posted, a discussion about whether Ludlam has a Twitter account (he doesn’t – the Greens Senators all use @GreensMPs collectively) culminated in someone registering @scottludlam and putting on the profile simply “Fake Scott Ludlam”. He joins fake Stephen Conroy, and was shortly thereafter joined by fake Nick Minchin.

I find fake Andrew Bolt particularly entertaining.

Ludlam being well respected in the Twitterverse for his stance on the filter debacle was not reason enough to spare him from assimilation, because nobody is safe.

And it’s better that way – how else would we be treated to such delights as, “Did @stephenconroy even bother to check the timeline of a filtering trial with an Astrologer. What if Pluto is inconjunct with Jupiter?” and “If you want to smoke reefer while masturbating to Star Trek’s Picard and Riker, the Greens not only support you, we salute you.”

No clean feed indeed.

So, if you’re going to speak out about this issue – even if you’re one of the good guys – best be armed with a good sense of humour and a capacity to multi-task. And your own Twitter account – before somebody else claims it.

Net filter plan nurtures ‘open source government’

The campaign to prevent the mandatory internet filter in Australia has been like no other campaign before it. Though the subject matter naturally lends itself to the type of campaign we’re witnessing – and participating in as never before – it also offers a fascinating glimpse into the way more mainstream campaigns will be run in the future. We are witnessing what may come to be seen as the beginnings of open source government in this country.

Twitter – now among the 100 most visited sites on the internet – has been one of the primary conduits for these conversations. Such is the power of this medium that even with mainstream media focus squarely on stimulus packages and savage bushfires, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy’s announcement was met with an immediate response. The interwebs never sleep.

Senator Conroy is trapped by something akin to a virtual hydra – every time he “responds” to one piece of criticism, numerous other more refined, more powerful and more targeted arguments arise from all sides.

Perhaps as a result of this, perhaps just purely by coincidence, the minister recently revealed the first six internet service providers selected to trial the filter.

The three largest ISPs in Australia are conspicuously absent from the list. Of particular interest is iiNet, the company that declared their intent to participate in the trial, “to make sure the public, media and political players are well informed and realise that it is bad policy”.

Surely if the minister has confidence in the system – if he genuinely believes that the technical concerns raised can somehow be addressed – then it stands to reason that he’d welcome such intense scrutiny as an opportunity to silence detractors. Alternatively, if he wishes to improve the system, then the feedback provided by a dedicated and highly tech-literate naysayer would be invaluable.

The ISPs selected are for the most part business providers. This could be taken to suggest that this trial is an opportunistic attempt to salvage some credibility by the Government. They could proclaim ’success’ without ever testing the filter in a scenario remotely typical of the circumstances it is designed for.

Notably, these enterprise-focussed ISPs are very unlikely to be used by many of the more vocal opponents of this scheme, and thus the Government can mask the deficiencies a little while longer. Some critics are attempting to acquire the services of one of the nominated ISPs, to experience first-hand the impacts – such as speed degradation and “false positives” which the system will almost certainly deliver.

The diversity of people campaigning on this issue has meant that every one of the numerous flaws of this proposal has been exposed – from the numerous technical shortcomings highlighted by a range of experts in the field, to the dubious and perennially secret contents of the expanding ACMA blacklist, from the assault on free speech that the filter represents, to the ineffectiveness of such a system in addressing genuine and valid concerns about internet safety.

With one unified voice this campaign polyglot has resoundingly denounced the mandatory internet filter. They have also, universally, condemned Senator Conroy and his few supporters for their attempts to equate critics with advocates of child pornography.

But most encouraging of all is the agreement that concerns about internet safety are absolutely justified, and warrant concerted action. And therein hopefully lies the next stage of the debate. We’re all in vociferous agreement about what won’t work. But what will? Can this enormously empowered campaign speak with one cogent voice about what we’re for?

How do we empower parents to make the best choices for their families, and law enforcement agencies to prosecute the creators and distributors of the worst material trafficked over the internet?

Is there a way to adequately prepare children to understand other threats such as cyber-bullying, without asphyxiating the greatest information sharing tool in history?

Can we directly challenge the epidemic of sexualised violence against women and children in this country and place the online tip of the iceberg into its proper context?

I believe that most people involved in this debate – including, I suspect, many in the Government – would rather see these issues tackled head-on than pursuing the disturbing and expensive distraction of internet censorship.

Posted at abc.net.au