Cunning stunt

Julie Bishop jumps ship from Wild Oats at the start of the Sydney Hobart saying no political metaphor was intended.
Meanwhile, as Paul Karp reported in The Guardian, that Scott Morrison’s latest poll slump mirrors Julia Gillard’s before she was replaced by Kevin Rudd in 2013.
"The Morrison government has recorded its third successive 10-point deficit in the latest Newspoll, leaving itself a monumental task to recover before the 2019 election."

As Paul Karp reported that The Guardian, Scott Morrison’s slump mirrors Julia Gillard’s before she was replaced by Kevin Rudd in 2013"The Morrison government has recorded its third successive 10-point deficit in the latest Newspoll, leaving itself a monumental task to recover before the 2019 election."Paul Karp reported that The Guardian, Scott Morrison’s slump mirrors Julia Gillard’s before she was replaced by Kevin Rudd in 2013"The Morrison government has recorded its third successive 10-point deficit in the latest Newspoll, leaving itself a monumental task to recover before the 2019 election."

Green New Deal?

It may not last but the "Green New Deal" appears to have a lot of traction in the US.
This is because, at the moment, it is seen as a non-partisan project to face the facts of climate change. 

Support is, of course, higher among "progressives" and non-skeptics in both the Republican and the Democrats. 

Here is the best fleshing out of the idea that I have found

Here are some of the proposed aims which seem to have widespread agreement if you leave aside the Trumpists:

✔ 100% Clean and Renewable Electricity by 2035 
✔ Zero Net Emissions from Energy by 2050
✔ 100% Net-Zero Building Energy Standards by 2030
✔ 100% Zero Emission Passenger Vehicles by 2030
✔ 100% Fossil-Free Transportation by 2050
✔ National Clean Air Attainment
✔ Cut Methane Leakage 50% by 2025
✔ National Lead Pipe Replacement & Infrastructure Upgrades
✔ Guarantee Access to Affordable Drinking Water
✔ Protect Two Million New Miles of Waterways
✔ Reforest 40 Million Acres of Public and Private Land by 2035
✔ Restore 5 Million Acres of Wetlands by 2040
✔ Expand Sustainable Farming and Soil Practices to 30% of Agricultural Land by 2030 and 70% by 2050
✔ Cleanup Brownfields and All Hazardous Sites
✔ Establish a National Fund for Urban and Rural Resilience
✔ Expand Public Green Space and Recreational Lands and Waters
✔ Modernize Urban Mobility and Mass Transit
✔ Zero Waste by 2040
✔ Capture 50% of Wasted Methane by 2040

Ironically whether it dies or not will depend on less enthusiasm by the traditional Left. If it is too heavily sponsored by the Left, the Rightwingers will be suspicious and the fragile cooperation based on the reality of climate change will be destroyed. Fancy footwork is required.

Duopoly

I don't know how I missed this but the ACCC's recommendations two weeks ago into Digital Platforms ( read: "the Google and Facebook domination") are really good news. 

...we are at a critical point in considering the impact of digital platforms on society. While the ACCC recognises their significant benefits to consumers and businesses, there are important questions to be asked about the role the global digital platforms play in the supply of news and journalism in Australia, what responsibility they should hold as gateways to information and business, and the extent to which they should be accountable for their influence.

I find it hard to believe that such a careful set of recommendations for the long-term benefit was sponsored by the current shambolic Australian Government that seems to have the attention span of a gnat.

Unfortunately, at 370 pages, the preliminary report does not lend itself to a quick summary but the 18 page "Executive Summary" is all you really need to read.  

Of that Summary, the most important section is of the 11 recommendations which, according to the better informed and thoughtful press, are gaining a lot of traction in the English-speaking world as the basis for a coordinated governmental approach.  

Full report will be out in the middle of next year which gives plenty of time for other Governments and both Google and Facebook, to make comment.

Bloody socialists!

Snapping the past

The Leica Camera is an icon.

 Yes, so recognisable that it can be used in software as an icon signifying taking a photograph.

And like other icons like the Coca-Cola bottle and the Harley Davidson Electroglide. It is spoken off with a hushed reverence.
Here is a homage (and a reasonable explanation) by a sensible Hong Kong vlogger Kai Man Wong. He starts out by describing a Leica M3 as "Camera Porn" but does a more than reasonable job of explaining why this camera was, and still has a special status

Leica has not been slow to capitalize on this legend. Descendents of the M3 are hideously expensive.
The latest in a long line of such tributes is an entire feature movie, called Kodachrome based on a short New York Times article mourning the closure of the first last development lab for Kodachrome.

​As you can see from the poster a Leica M3 had equal billing with the rest of the stars of the movie released in May.
Unfortunately, the film wasn't nearly as good as it should have been: great actors but a poor script that didn't do justice to the original idea spark
The camera is never really explained except that we see it being cleaned, fondled, loaded and one memorable moment when a single photo is taken.
It also didn't explain the Leica heydays were those when black and white images were in most demand for the dominant newspaper media.
Even today, the best photographers note that the best photos they have taken with the Leica M series tend to be monochrome because precise focus that you can get with the Leica's rangefinder is so important
The final titles of the feature film showed some of the best of the Kodachrome photos featured in National Geographic but most where not snapped with a Leica.
Here is my favourite Kodachrome photos that didn't appear and should have: Steve McCurry in 1985. of an angry Afgan girl.

 McCurry also claims to have shot the final roll of Kodachrome and published the result on his website. However, the camera used was the next generation's iconic camera more suited to colour the Nikon F a single lens reflex that allowed photographers to see exactly what they were shooting.

Vanishing 1990s New York

Neil's Coffee Shop, as featured in the film Can You Ever Forgive Me is still an operating restaurant

"a quality hold-out from the old city.
"On Lexington and 70th, Neil's has been here for half a century--and it's got the signage to prove it, from the brilliant pink neon sign to the all-caps COFFEE SHOP on the front, to the cursive Neil's suspended on a white cloud around the side.

But it is one of the few from the 1990s still around. Variety reported

... director Marielle Heller and her production team had to re-create New York City in the 1990s on a shoestring budget. A few destinations, such as the Greenwhich Village gay bar Julius or the cavernous Upper West Side food emporium Zabar’s, are vestiges of that period. But in more cases than not, the crew had to avoid CitiBike racks and unearth the few remaining phone booths. It was a race against time.

“We were trying to shoot in bookstores, but they kept shutting down,” says Heller on a recent September afternoon, after debuting her film at the Toronto Film Festival. “We found this great store during pre-production, but it closed before we could shoot in it.”

But some of the sites used, such as the gay bar, Julius',  have been granted Heritage status. Heller told The New Yorker

 “I always feel like I missed this perfect moment in New York, this interesting, grittier, more artist-driven time,” 

“This movie is sort of as that was ending and New York was shifting and artists were getting pushed out. In so many ways I related to what that must have been like for somebody like Lee, to feel their city changing. And to feel like there was no place for her anymore

Chickens slaughter

A group of 50 Animal Liberation Queensland protesters invaded the Golden Cockerel slaughterhouse on Friday, shutting down the Christmas production line.

They took photos of the production line before police arrived.

A further 30 vegan campaigners protested outside with placards

According to the group, it wanted 'to bring awareness to the 664 million chickens slaughtered every year in Australia and to tell their stories'.

For more on the ethics of how we treat animals see this recent article

Cold War 2.0

Covert surveillance is a valuable tool of espionage.
During WWII, Britain's spy organizations went to extraordinary lengths to ensure the breaking of the enigma code was kept secret...not just to the Germans but to its allies.
Apart from the careful calculation of when to use the ultra-secret information to win the Battle of the Atlantic, British intelligence created a fictional MI6 master spy, Boniface, who controlled a fictional series of agents throughout Germany. Information obtained through code-breaking was often attributed to the human intelligence from the Boniface network.
Such counterintelligence skills have only become more sophisticated in the last 60 years.

Front page panic in The Weekend Australian on China espionage

Mark Gregory is an associate professor in network engineering at RMIT in Melbourne. He has written a string of interesting tech articles in the sensible academically-inclined webzine The Conversation.
He was asked his thoughts on the gathering China-US Cold War over Huawei and ZTE in a New Daily article by John Elder.
After outlining the push on Huawei by the security agencies, Gregory said there have been no publicly revealed documents showing evidence of Huawei engaged in espionage.
“The only public documents are the Snowden papers, and they showed that it was American agencies that have used telcos to spy on people,” he said.
“The NSA has been doing the same thing that Huawei is being accused of. But there are no pubic (evidence) that shows that Huawei has been a conduit for the Chinese government.

Slide from an NSA presentation on "Google Cloud Exploitation"
 exposed in the Snowden Papers; the sketch shows
 where the Public Internet meets the Google Cloud.

"That’s not to say day there isn’t a concern or something going on.”
Dr Gregory said that Cold War 2.0 prophesied 15 years ago, when the intellectual property and technology transfer methodologies being used by China were identified, and concerns have been growing since this time.

As he has in other articles, Gregory then points out that Australia should "have a whole-of-life security assurance capability to ensure that all equipment and systems used in the telecommunications networks are safe to use”

Kingston Shores

Tradition is everything

A hundred years ago, the London Underground decided to adopt an American invention known as the "escalator" for the Earl's Court Station.

Must be true because they have a depiction
 in the London Transport Museum)

Unlike modern comb type, these escalators had a shunt mechanism ending with a diagonal (see pic): it finished sooner for the right foot than for the left. People were asked to stand to the right to allow others to pass
On the first day, a one-legged man was said to have been employed to ride it and demonstrate its safety.
Unlike other places where the escalator rules follows the side of the road people drive, the London convention of walking on the left on elevators was set so Londoners, still stand to the right.
You can read more about the introduction of various forms of moving walkways to London here.
If you are wondering the word ‘escalator’ was coined by one of the device's American inventors, Charles Seeberger, in 1895. He combined ‘elevator’, already a known term, and ‘scala’ the latin for steps – hence ‘rising steps’.

In Dad We Trust

Low Res photo from a much larger colour version. Heavy cropping made a larger photo not very pretty.

The perils of driverless cars

No, driverless cars won't solve traffic problems. They could, in fact, make them worse as this elegant video explains(10 minutes..the last minute is an ad). The real solution is to intensify cities so that much more is within walking distance and we do without much of the highway and parking lots that now dominate our landscapes.

But the politicians are, in the main, not listening because they want to be elected short term. Long-term, counter-intuitive solutions rarely figure.

So instead we are seeing big investment into driverless cars that will, like wider roads only be a short term relief. If you are skeptical that such a tech will actually happen, here is a list of 48 major corporations who are betting it will.

With share vehicles, here is what they are promising  

 

Okay, if you have got that, how close are we to getting actual driverless vehicles roaming the streets? The bad publicity from two driveless car deaths earlier this year have slowed the rush but didn't stop it.

One of the pioneers, WayMo, has the rubber hitting the road 
Originally a Google "moonshot" project, the company has been working way longer than anyone else on the solution.
Now it is being very tentative and low-profile with an employee "monitoring" from the driver's seat each of the the test cabs in Phoenix, Arizona.
The price set by Waymo is just as tentative, being about the same as competing share services Uber and Lyft, driven by real people.
On the upside, if the acceptance hurdle is cleared and the cars do lose their "monitors", Waymo says the price of rides will drop dramatically.

Here is a nice video summary by the Verge that gives you a look at the cabs in action.

Nice, but just remember, if you choose to travel this way motion sickness doesn't magically disappear. if you decide to read, watch a movie or sit backwards to face others while talking in the vehicle expect nausea just like in a normal car.

Things on a walk

Water fountains at Dickson College

Tactical water store and cans atop Majura heights ready for a summer bushfire

Canberra's bike n coffee culture

First weekend of Summer and, while our former home in Queensland is under threat of bushfire, we enjoy sandal-weather in Canberra. 

The Canberra bike n coffee culture continues to blossom in the inner North. Each suburb seems to have its own favourite cafe...some two. Families in the neighbourhood, often arrive on their pushies

One of the latest places to reach full flower is Ganggang in the otherwise sleepy, nondescript suburb of Downer. Losing its only food shop a few years back was instant euthanasia.

But now, thanks to the generous spirit of the ex-South American owners of the cafe, life, including a regular accordianist, has returned. On a Sunday, finding a place to park your bike is becoming an issue.