Each year the Sydney Peace foundation recognises those people who promote peace and justice in Australia with their annual peace prize. Since they were formed in 1998 they have also issued gold medals to those individuals whose efforts are considered to be exceptional. The presenting of one of these gold medals is fairly rare with only Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, and Daisaku Ikeda having received them prior to this year.

The Foundation has announced that a fourth person – Julian Assange – is to receive a gold medal for “exceptional courage and initiative in pursuit of human rights”. Congratulations Julian.

• Just because two of the hotest years on record (not that we have any significant records for this) were in the past ten years doesn’t mean that the average temperature over those ten years can’t have fallen.
• I have been reading about climate change since the early 1970s. Back then they claimed that if nothing was done then we wouldn’t survive to see 2000. Obviously they were wrong.
• The only difference between the climate change situation in the early 1970s and now is that now those involved have political support.
• We don’t have enough billions of years of data to make any meaningful prediction of the effects of climate change and chaos theory says that we couldn’t make a meaningful prediction even if we did have the data.
• There are predictions that if the average temperature climbs just a couple more degrees that certain ocean currents will change triggering an ice age.
• Some people believe that it is only the warming effects of industry that have deferred an ice age (somewhat arrogant of them given that a few thousand years isn’t significant in predictions of when the next ice age will start and we certainly haven’t been industrialised that long).
• Even if man does succeed in changing the environment enough to make it incapable of supporting human life that still will not affect over 90% of the life that is on Earth.
• The climate on Earth has changed significantly in the past. When plants started pumping deadly poison into the air, animal life adapted to make use of that poison and now some animals (including us) can’t live without it. (Oxygen is one of the most deadly poisons that exists in nature). I have seen predictions that if CO₂ levels rise significantly then we will adapt to need it and would then not be able to survive without it.
• Just because there is nothing that hamanity can do to significantly change the planet doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do many of the things that are suggested to prevent climate change. Even though whatever we do will have no significant impact on the planet, it may still have a significant impact on humanity itself. For example cutting down on carbon emissions will give us cleaner air to breath.

In the 18th century canals were one of the essential means of communications. In the 19th Century trains displaced the canals and in the 20th Century the car displaced trains. In the 21st century the internet is in the process of displacing the car.

For this process to work requires high speed internet connections to as big a portion of the population as possible and it needs to be absolutely reliable. In Australia this absolutely critical infrastructure to move the country properly into the 21st century is called the National Broadband Network (or NBN).

Unfortunately construction of the NBN is at a very early stage of development. Because it wasn’t already in place the Queensland floods ended up far worse in the damage they caused and in loss of life than almost certainly would have been the case had the NBN been there beforehand. One example which I saw referenced today relates to dozens of doctors in the affected area who due to the NBN not being in place have lost all of their patient records – that’s the paper copies and computer copies and the offsite backups all gone. Had the NBN been in place they could have had backups of this essential information now lost backed up to “the cloud” where it would have been safe. So who knows how many people will now have major medical issues due to the loss of these records which the NBN could have prevented.

The most obvious way in which the NBN would have helped had it been in place before the floods would have been in providing more warning to those affected. Perhaps a minute or two extra notice would have saved the lives of some of those who died and more accurate real time information as to what was happening with flood waters would have enabled some people to save more of their property.

Communications is the most critical thing when it comes to disasters such as this. Of course the opposition in parliament have made a complete mockery of the whole thing by suggesting that the NBN be abandoned to pay for repairing the flood damage. The only possible suggestion that they could have made that would have been as stupid would have been if they suggested that Australia stop importing food to pay for the reconstruction (considering how much of Australia’s food supply was destroyed by the floods).

It is absolutely essential that the NBN be fully implemented before the next such disaster.

Why are so many people still referring to “global warming”. That term officially replaced some time ago with the term “climate change” when it was realised that the average world temperature has actually fallen by 0.7 degrees over the last ten years. Perhaps they should refer to it as “global cooling” if they specifically want to refer to the temperature.

To start with daylight saving doesn’t actually add any daylight hours to the day and so all those stories about fading curtains and so on are nothing more than stories. What daylight saving does is to move the daylight hours so that they represent a slightly different part of the day.

Consider the situation in the morning when you get up. It is either still dark or there is daylight. Similarly when you go to bed it is either still daylight or it is dark. Daylight saving is only useful when one of these combinations occurs – where it is light when you get up and dark when you go to bed.

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I must have junked several dozen emails that mention “Black Friday” in the last couple of weeks. There always seem to be lots of such emails around this time of year regardless of when the last black Friday was or when the next will be and so there is presumably some local event somewhere called black Friday that those people think should be of far greater significance than it really is. As if we don’t have enough black Fridays in the year already.

Of course they may just be giving six months notice of something that they will be doing for Friday 13th May 2011 (which is the next black Friday) but if that’s the case then I’ll wait for a reminder much closer to the event itself. Alternatively their emails are several months late if the black Friday they are referring to was Friday 13th August 2010 (which was the last black Friday).

An interesting article in today’s paper about how the world’s richest man who is currently visiting Australia has claimed that the $43 billion for the NBN is too expensive. Of course he’d say that given the industry that he has made all his money in.

By comparison a prior world’s richest man by the name of Bill Gates said all the way back when the internet was first created that it wouldn’t catch on until broadband speeds (by which he meant 1Gb+) were achieved as most of the potential applications of the internet wouldn’t be workable at slower speeds. From what he said about 20 years ago approximately 90% of what we will be able to do with the internet will only become possible once the NBN is completed.

Also heard on the radio this morning that the $43 billion figure is completely wrong and that based on what portion has already been done and how much that cost compared to its originally estimated cost that the final figure should be about $26 billion. A small price to pay for the technology that will revolutionise the world and which would leave Australia a long way behind the rest of the world if we don’t have it (if we wait until it becomes obvious to everyone that we need it – then it will be many more times as expensive to implement).

The time of the sinking of the Titanic was a time of change with the way ships operated. The distress call used up until then CDQ was in the process of being replaced with a new distress call SOS (the Titanic sent both being the first to actually use SOS).

It was also a time of change with the way the instructions for steering a ship worked. Most sailing ships used a tiller rather than a wheel to steer the ship and most steersmen of the time learnt on sailing ships before transferring to steamships. So the instruction to turn hard to starboard meant to push the tiller hard to the starboard resulting in the ship turning to port (and vice versa). The same still applied to those ships with a wheel even though the wheel needed to be turned the other way. Shortly after the Titanic sank the directions for the instructions were reversed so that the instruction would indicate the direction in which the ship (and not a tiller which by then few ships had) should turn.

So why did I decide to mention this now? Well I heard on the radio this morning that the Titanic sinking was actually caused by human error on the part of the steersman. He apparently got confused as to which way to turn the wheel when told to turn hard to starboard and actually turned the ship to starboard instead of to port thus turning the ship into the iceberg which they would apparently have missed completely had the ship not turned or been turned the way that was ordered. This was apparently known to second officer Lightoller (the most senior officer to survive) and he kept it secret for many years with the information only now being released to the public by his granddaughter. I had always been of the impression that the mistake was in trying to turn the ship at all and that hitting the iceberg head on would have saved many more lives since then only the front most compartment would have flooded and the ship was designed to withstand such an impact and remain afloat. If this steering mistake is right then if they hadn’t tried to turn they’d have missed the iceberg completely.

I was watching a six part series on DVD about the US space programme over the weekend and discovered a few things about it that I hadn’t known before. There were also a few comments that were made by prople in the series that didn’t make sense.

Things I didn’t know before include:

• That there were problems with the Gemini 6 launch that led to the engines being shut down again immediately after ignition and that it took three days to fix the problem and resume the launch – unfortunate given that was the launch that had the tightest launch window as Gemini 6 had to rendevous with Gemini 7 which had already launched.
• They made sure that Apollo 10 couldn’t land on the moon by deliberately underfilling the ascent stage tanks on Snoopy.
• That Columbia’s last mission was different from the prior series of missions in that it wasn’t carrying a part of the space station into orbit but was instead in a lower orbit carrying out science experiments.
• That the shuttle flights overcame the radio blackuot on reentry by bouncing the transmissions off of sattelites

There were also some things that I already knew thatwere mentioned in the series (as well as some things they didn’t mention.

• That the heat shield on the Mercury capsule Friendship 7 came loose and ground control had John Glenn override the retro pack ejection so as to use that to hold it on until air pressure would do the job and that they didn’t tell him why until after he landed. (I didn’t know that he didn’t hear the okay to release it due to the radio blackout).
• There was no mention made that the “Apollo 1″ fire wasn’t originally called Apollo 1 since officially the unmanned Apollo 3 test had already taken place and that is why the first unmanned test after the fire was Apollo 4.
• That Neil Armstrong flew Eagle horizontally looking for a place to land outside the boulder field and had just 17 seconds of fuel left in the descent stage when they finally landed.
• That the first manned fligfht to Skylab was delayed (which I knew at the time but had forgotten until seeing the DVD.

The main thing in the series thaugh that didn’t make sense is that there was the claim made that the Americans landed a man on the moon in the sixth decade of the 20th Century. If that were the case then why did they bother following that up with the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs in the seventh decade and why didn’t they broadcast the fact that they’d got to the moon before the Russians got a man into orbit. Finally, if they did land someone on the moon nine or more years before Armstrong and Aldrin then who was it?

Imagine if a political party were to decide that it is going to cost too much to upgrade the roads to allow for all the cars and trucks that will need to use them over the next few years. Instead they propose getting rid of all the cars and trucks and making everyone use a horse and cart instead. Then imagine that a stupid miscalculation means that there will be no budget for providing the carts and so everyone is going to have to scrap their cars and trucks and if they are really lucky they’ll get a horse to replace it with.

Can you imagine a political party proposing a policy like that for transport? Well one of the parties in Australia is running with an equivalent policy for communications in today’s election. If they win then Australia will be thrown back into the stone age in so far as communications is concerned.