Let’s end the lies

10 week ultrasoundWe’re now telling people something we were denying before – that we’re expecting a baby. Kate’s 17 weeks pregnant, in fact. And the baby’s due around 10th September.

It’s a relief to no longer have to cover it up, and it’s exciting to be able to announce it to people. However, it’s a bit odd that something so positive is typically hidden from friends for several months before being suddenly sprung on them.

Ironically, the friends often already know, or at least are pretty suspicious. The signs are everywhere, and good friends tend to notice. Even if there is no morning sickness or change in body shape, the dietary hints are pretty clear. They wonder why a glass of wine, normally happily accepted, is now sadly refused. They ponder why the brie and proscuitto goes uneaten, and perhaps even why the seafood option isn’t chosen from the menu (although that’s never an option for us anyway). And particularly, “women of a certain age” are well attuned to these signs in their friends, but in the end are too polite to ask.

So, those people who we find it so painful to hide the news from are the very people that know anyway. Both parties (us and them) engage in a comedic farce where we all pretend nothing is going on at all, while desperately wanting to speak about it to the other.

But now, released from that cultural prison, I can tell you that I am very pleased (although a bit terrified) about the idea of becoming a dad.

Oils Aint Oils

I hadn’t heard much about this film prior to seeing it. It sounded like it might give me an insight into the American oil boom and the life of wildcatters. Yes, I got that much, but I think I would’ve been better off reading about it in a book.

There Will Be Blood

Promises blood and delivers malevolence.

This film is beautiful. This film is well acted. It is a piece of art, but one I couldn’t manage to enjoy. Although I wanted to, as it had an interesting topic (the early days of the American oil boom and how prospectors built their empires), interesting themes (such as asking what is the price of ambition, and how do commerce and faith work together), and good actors (Daniel Day-Lewis was particularly brilliant).

However, there wasn’t a single important character that I could like, the sound track was mostly irritating, and the film seemed unnecessarily long. In fact, the film could have stopped around 20 minutes earlier and been a better work, I think.

So, I was clearly disappointed. The malevolent character Daniel Plainview, played by Day-Lewis, was so nasty and brutal that it is difficult to believe such a person would have existed and been so successful, casting doubt on the otherwise amazing historical authenticity of the movie. Just not the film for me, I guess.

My rating: 2.0 stars
**

Earth Hour vs. Daylight Savings

Next weekend the world will follow an Australian initiative called Earth Hour. At 8pm, on March 29, many cities (including Australia’s mainland capitals) will turn off lights in order to raise awareness for energy conservation. An hour’s worth of energy will be saved.

Ironically, the following weekend, most of those same mainland capitals (including Melbourne) will follow a world initiative called Daylight Savings. At 3am, on April 6, the same hour will be repeated. An hour’s worth of extra energy will be spent.

Of course, different hours equate to different amounts of energy, but Earth Hour is primarily a symbolic activity. It’s about sending “a powerful message about the the need for action on global warming”.

I think it’s a nice gesture, and encourages candlelight dining, which improves the taste of food. But the timing is delicious also.

Rock the Vote

2020 Summit logoPerhaps I’m naive about what can really be achieved, but I felt the need to provide a submission to Kevin Rudd’s Australia 2020 Summit. Here’s what I wrote:

Over a quarter of a million Australian citizens work for the betterment of this country, but are denied the right to participate in our democracy.

According to the ATO, in 2004-05 there were 280,325 people under the age of 18 years who submitted tax returns. These people earn tax dollars for the government, and yet have no say in how it is spent.

In 1973, the voting age was lowered from 21 years to 18 years. It is time to lower it again, and directly connect our government to the youth of today and the future.

“No taxation without representation” was a political catch-cry in 18th century America, and was the philosophical basis for the American colony to reject the rule of their country from the disconnected British parliament. Here in Australia, we have a section of our population who still do not have that representation, over 200 years later.

Although around 4% of the Australian population is aged between 15 and 17 (according to the 2006 Census), many more than the entire state of Tasmania, they cannot influence the election of governments that directly impact their lives through:

  • Funding of schools
  • Educational curriculum
  • Driving age restrictions
  • Smoking/drinking age restrictions
  • Youth wages and working restrictions
  • Entertainment classifications
  • Juvenile justice system
  • in addition to laws, policies and taxation rules that apply equally to all Australians.

This is essentially a moral question: is it right for the voting population’s government to impose rules on productive, yet non-voting, Australians?

This is particularly relevant in the context of the Australia 2020 summit, where it is the younger Australians who are inheriting the consequences of the decisions made today. Decisions made by elected officials that they did not have a say in the election of.

It is true that the constituency of a democracy is only those who vote. We have given the vote to Aboriginals, and Australia led the way in giving the vote to women. How can it be just to with-hold the vote from other productive citizens?

In the last couple of decades, as trading hour restrictions have been loosened, and the cost of living has increased, youths in this country have increasingly taken up jobs in establishments such as supermarkets, fast-food outlets and service stations. This is clearly different to 1950s Australia, and requires different laws that recognise the importance of our younger citizens.

The specifics of the changes to the Commonwealth Electoral Act are for the political process to decide on. The specifics will include the precise age, whether voting should be voluntary, and whether it should be connected to the employment situation.

I trust that the above has made a compelling case that we are doing wrong by a significant fraction of our population, and that our democratic government is all the poorer for it. Fortunately, the solution is simple: lower the voting age.

“Taxation without representation is Tyranny” – James Otis (1725-1783)

Goals aren’t all that

Netscape Navigator 2.02 LogoI’m wondering what I’ve been doing that I hadn’t come across Marc Andreesson’s blog before. A friend even recommended it to me, but it went onto the list, and I only got to it now. However, I’m going to have to read through the back issues, as what I’ve read so far is fascinating. Oh.. and if the name’s only slightly familiar, this is the guy who kicked off Web 1.0 by releasing Netscape. (Sort of ironic, as Netscape has just been discontinued.)

However, what’s prompting this post is that he is the first person I’ve read who appears to agree with my anti goal-setting philosophy. I’ve been espousing this since high school, that goal-setting as a theory only works if you’re both omniscient and omnipotent, so it’s probably not for anyone you’ve met outside of Hollywood.

What do I mean by goal-setting? Let’s get that clear. This is where someone says “I’m going to be a fireman when I grow up” or “I’m going to retire by the time I’m 40” or “I’m going to marry Nicole Kidman”. This is not where someone says “I’m going to the shops for some milk”. Goal-setting is committing yourself to some outcome in the medium to long-term future. And it’s ridiculously egotistical to think you can do it, and frankly pretty stupid to commit yourself to something that you don’t fully understand the implications of. But, as Marc puts it in his post on Career Planning:

 You can’t plan your career because you have no idea what’s going to happen in the future. … Trying to plan your career is an exercise in futility that will only serve to frustrate you, and to blind you to the really significant opportunities that life will throw your way.

Hear! Hear!

Although I don’t agree with everything that follows, it is insightful. For example, as he goes on to talk about a differing appetite for risk as you move through life, he neglects to mention the time aspect. You’ve got different amounts of time to devote to work at different phases of your life. A professional who is freshly graduated and single can typically throw more time into building their career than someone who has just had a baby, for example.

Since the best investment you’ll ever find is probably yourself, managing the time and risk aspects only makes sense. I’m thinking back to my previous post on the three aspects of money: the amount, risk, and time.

Anyway, it’s always nice to find someone who agrees with you, after spending years being stared at strangely. :)

Where have all the people gone?

It turns out they’ve all gone to Queensland.

The above is from the ABS Year Book Australia, 2008 and, sucker for stats that I am, I’ve been checking it out. This diagram actually refers to the interstate migration from 2005-06, and so it shows some of the migration to W.A. that drove the property boom that happened around that time.

Amusingly, every state is sending a significant number of people to Queensland (in particular, NSW). But there isn’t a significant number of people moving to NSW from anywhere. If people weren’t having babies, or migrating to NSW from overseas, it would be going backwards.

Cheesecake Recipe

Last piece of cheesecakeIs it “cheesecake” or “cheese cake”? The former looks like it has an “e” too many, and the latter looks as bizarre as “salad pudding”. But you know what I mean.

I made this.. uhh.. cake for the first time on the weekend, from Donna Hay’s Modern Classics Book 2. Again, this book has come through for me, and I’ve rewarded it by almost completely plagiarising the recipe below (although she calls it the “classic baked cheesecake”). It was much simpler than other recipes I’ve made before that used a water bath, and at least as tasty.

Ingredients

125g Arnotts Nice (or equivalent) biscuits, i.e. half a 250g pack (for base)
2/3 cup almond meal (for base)
60g butter (for base)
1.5 tablespoons cornflour
1.5 tablespoons water
330g softened cream cheese (do not buy Philadelphia spread – buy the stuff in a rectangular box!)
360g fresh ricotta cheese
4 eggs
1 1/3 cups white sugar
1 medium lemon (or specifically, the juice and finely grated rind from one)

Method

If you haven’t yet, get the cream cheese out of the fridge and let it soften.

Crush the biscuits in a food processor (or like me, grind up in a mixing bowl mortar-and-pestle style using the end of a rolling pin). Melt the butter, then add in the almond meal and melted butter, processing (or stirring) until nicely combined.

Grease a 22cm springform tin, line the base with greaseproof paper, and press the biscuit mix into the bottom to form the base. Put it in the fridge while we make the filling. You can probably get the oven going at 150 degrees celcius, too.

If you haven’t yet, grate the lemon to produce about a tablespoon of rind, then juice it to produce about 60 ml of juice.

Mix the cornflour with the water in a medium-large mixing bowl, until blended. Ensure your cream cheese is softened, cut it up into small pieces and drop into mixing bowl. Stir together until it forgets its original shape.

Add in the ricotta cheese (and stir), the eggs (and stir), the sugar (and stir), the lemon rind (and stir), the lemon juice (and stir). Stir until smooth. Or forget all this stirring and just put it in your food processor.

It’s okay to have some small cream cheese “lumps” in the mixture, but squash any large lumps.

Get the base out of the fridge, and pour the filling in. Then put into the oven for at least 70 minutes (according to Donna).

Maybe our oven is stuffed, but after an hour we raised the temperature to 160 degrees, and kept cooking for another hour again. You can tell when it’s cooked because it will be browned a couple of inches from all the edges, and if you poke a skewer into the middle it will leave a hole when it’s removed.

Let the cake cool a little, and then put into the fridge until it is time to serve. Serve with thick cream.

Serves 8.

First speech of the year

Toastmasters has started up for 2008, and someone has it in for me, because I was in the line-up. I guess I’ve had a little break from it, so it was probably about time.

However, despite practicing it out loud, and it taking 5 minutes, on the actual night it took closer to 8 minutes. No idea what happened.

If you care to read it, it’s about what I’ve gotten out of sport. Frankly it’s a surprise to me that I got much, but it was enough to spin into a speech. The purpose of this, my fifth speech, was to include gestures, body language, movement, etc.

Too cute for words. Almost.

Every year, the book club I’m in takes a month out to watch a movie instead. Last year we went to see Babel, also known as the most bleak movie ever made. So, this year we wanted to see something a little more perky. Wish granted!

Juno

A very cute coming-of-age movie.

Canadian director Jason Reitman made the great mockumentary Thank You for Smoking, and has followed it up with this cute Canadian tale of a sassy teenager who is dealing with a personal issue. Ok, it’s not telling you anything you don’t find out within seconds of the credits finishing, but the personal issue is that she’s pregnant.

Fellow Canadian Ellen Philpotts-Page plays the eponymous heroine, part of a stellar cast who can do no wrong. They take Juno’s situation and spin it into a cute and quirky tale that explores the question of who makes a good parent. It is sensitive and witty, and the dialogue sparkles.

And did I mention it was cute?

My rating: 3.5 stars
***1/2

Can you wire me some money?

PayPal (now owned by eBay) has made a mint from mashing up the concepts of money and communications. Originally they were about allowing you to email currency to whoever you wished, debited out of your credit card. These days, they offer a large number of related payment services, similar to other financial companies. However, I find it interesting to consider how similar the businesses of finance and telecommunications are to each other.

Coming from a telecomms background, I am most aware of that side of the fence. Telcos (and cellcos and cablecos etc.) offer credit or store a monetary balance for customers, and support very large volumes of real-time transactions, settling amongst multiple similar companies both nationally and overseas. They also send out bill statements, take money on behalf of others (e.g. when you make a 1-900 call), are highly regulated, and for some reason, no one trusts them. But apart from the operational and customer interface aspects of telcos having similarities to financial companies, there is another important aspect.

Both financial companies and telcos have a facilitating role in society and the economy. If either the financial system or the telecommunication networks collapsed tomorrow, it would be no exaggeration to say that civilisation as we know it would be threatened. However, of themselves, both of these industries do not actually generate the basic goods and services that we consider to make up our civilisation, whether they are music, news stories, furniture, clothing, food, or housing (to name a few). Some may be as harsh as to call these industries parasitic rather than facilitating.

Financial companies have their business in money, while telcos have their business in communication. Each of these simple concepts can be broken down into three main sub-components.

Money is not merely the notes and coins in your wallet. A monetary transaction is a combination of an amount (measured in terms such as US dollars, or grams of gold), a time period (measured in anything from seconds to years), and a risk (which is often not easily measured at all). These sub-components are not independent, and may not even have a single value. For example, your brother may be giving you $10 next week, but he may turn out to only give you $5 and owe you another $5 for the week after, or perhaps the full $10 may never appear. If you’ve ever calculated a NPV (Net Present Value) then you have attempted to incorporate amount, time and risk into a single number, although it is difficult to do this accurately for any but the simplest scenarios.

Similarly, I see a communication having three components, being distance, latency and fidelity. (This differs from the standard theoretical approach to defining a communications channel according to bit-rate, error-rate and latency, but this is too narrow for my purposes here.) A telco enables you to engage in a communication with one or more people, where you get to share some message or receive them from others. You could do this without a telco or technological assistance, but it would need to be face-to-face with the others. So, the first thing a telco enables is communication at a distance, perhaps within your city, or perhaps overseas. Telcos also, by necessity, introduce a certain amount of latency, perhaps less than 1 second, or perhaps several days if you end up leaving your message on someone’s voicemail. Lastly, telcos will provide a different level of fidelity than your average face-to-face conversation, where the communication could be only one-direction at a time versus bi-directional, there may be drop-outs, or the quality of the communication could be impaired through loss of high-frequencies or introduction of noise artifacts. As with the sub-components of money, the sub-components of communication are not independent, e.g. if the communication is occurring on a digital channel, then the bandwidth of the channel will most likely affect both latency and fidelity.

So, both finance companies and telcos deal in complex, multi-dimensional products (money and communication). And both improve the quality of life we experience, facilitating many of the things we do in society.