Q: Why is the Pope holding mass at Randwick Race Course?

A: It’s the only place you can throw your leg over a 3 year old and get away with it.

Good news! Last night the Federal Court overturned the ridiculous law which could have seen people being fined up to $5500 for ‘annoying’ World Youth Day participants. The law, granted to police and emergency services, potentially allowed them to fine people for handing out condoms, or wearing t-shirts deemed offensive to Catholic sensibilites, and was widely criticised as being totally over-the-top, and a violation of civil rights.

RACHEL EVANS and Amber Pike handed out condoms on the steps of Sydney’s Federal Court yesterday - flushed with a ruling that struck out a World Youth Day law that made it a crime to annoy participants in the Catholic event. The NoToPope Coalition protesters object to several Catholic moral teachings and Ms Evans - emboldened by the court triumph - immediately went and handed more condoms to Catholic pilgrims posing for photographs outside a nearby church.

Wearing an anti-Pope T-shirt, for which she might previously have been fined as much as $5500, Ms Evans called it a “major victory for the protest movement”.

A full bench of the court, comprising Robert French, Catherine Branson and Margaret Stone, had ruled that part of the World Youth Day Act, passed by the NSW Parliament to keep order during this week’s events, “should not be interpreted as conferring powers that are repugnant to fundamental rights and freedoms at common law in the absence of clear authority from Parliament”.

The court struck the words “annoyance or” out of World Youth Day regulations, which originally referred to “conduct that causes annoyance or inconvenience to participants in a World Youth Day event”.

Well so much for the running going well. Last week was an easy week, so I was refreshed and ready to get back into it on Monday, but I woke up with a sore throat. Since the schedule called for an easy 6km I went ahead and ran anyway and felt pretty good.

Tuesday called for 9km, and I opted to follow the advice of it being OK to train with a head cold, but not OK to train when the illness is in your chest. Since my chest was clear, I ran the 9km and felt great, posting the fastest time for my normal route without too much effort.

Sadly, for me anyway, by Wednesday I was coughing occasionally, so, playing it safe, I havne’t been able to run since. I’m almost recovered, so I might get another 9km in tomorrow morning, though I’ll wait until I wake up to see how I feel.

Scientists at MIT have announced the development of organic dyes which, when applied to a pane of glass, can catch solar energy and direct it to the edge of the glass for collection by photo-voltaic cells. The Guardian has the details…

Sunlight is concentrated in existing solar power devices using large, mobile mirrors that track the sun as it moves across the sky. But these can be expensive to deploy and maintain. In the MIT device, called an “organic solar concentrator” and described in the latest issue of Science, the researchers painted a mixture of organic dyes onto the surface of a pane of glass. The dyes trap different wavelengths of sunlight and then guide the energy along the glass towards the PV cells at the edges.

“The point of all this is to get away with using far fewer solar cells,” said Marc Baldo, an electrical engineer at MIT. “The concentrator collects light over its whole front surface, but the solar cells need only cover the area of the edges.”

As the edges of a glass panel can often be 100 times smaller in area than the surface itself, he added, solar panels would need 100 times fewer PV cells to collect the same energy. “So we can save money. Since industry can’t produce enough solar cells to satisfy demand, this might also be a good way to stretch production.”

I noticed this amazing photo at the Big Picture, a blog about the day’s photo images from the news wires. The first of a series of 17 images covering the Californian bushfires, it was taken by David McNew of Getty Images.

My running has been going really well lately. I’ve been running consistently for the last 11 weeks or so, with every third week being a rest week. Last week was my biggest week so far at 37.4km and I’m enjoying my rest week this week.

Since I’ve no running history, consistency if the key for me rather than doing speed work or hills, so I’ve been trying to run 5 days a week. My basic weeks looks like:

From now on I’ll try increasing the length of my long run on Saturday, but the rest of the runs will pretty much stay as they are. I just head out and settle into a comfortable pace, which usually turns out to be a HR around 155bpm, or roughly 75% of MaxHR. Right now, that has me covering in the region of 11.5km per hour, but that’s up from 10.5km/h 7 weeks ago, so I expect to continue to get faster as the weeks go by, due to fitness increases and also technique improvements.

Also, my new shoes arrived yesterday, 5 days after ordering them from the US. That’s service!

The Spanish parliament has taken the first step towards granting basic ‘human’ rights to apes. This is an idea we’ll hear more of in the years to come. After all, the great apes are our closest relatives and we are ourselves apes. In fact, there is an argument that the only reason we have our own taxonomical group is due to vanity, and that we don’t warrant it scientifically. Still, it’s pretty obvious that apes are self-aware and suffer similar emotions to us and therefore have the greatest claim to an extension of basic rights which up to now have been regarded as our exclusive preserve.

Great apes should have the right to life and freedom, according to a resolution passed in the Spanish parliament, in what could become landmark legislation to enshrine human rights for chimpanzees, gorillas, orang-utans and bonobos.

The environmental committee in the Spanish parliament has approved resolutions urging the country to comply with the Great Apes Project, founded in 1993, which argues that “non-human hominids” should enjoy the right to life, freedom and not to be tortured.

See Also: The Great Ape Project

Have you ever wondered what life is like as an asylum seeker? Award-winning novelist Mark Haddon wrote an article for The Observer on documenting just that.

I start by asking why she had to leave Uganda and I regret it immediately. It’s a horrible story and she has to stop several times because she is crying. I tell her we can talk about something else, but she insists.

I realise later what a stupid question it is. It’s the one every refugee gets asked when they apply for asylum. It’s the one asked in every newspaper article about the subject, every television report, every radio programme. Is this person’s claim justified? Did these things really happen to them?

You couldn’t spend five minutes with Sergey, or Mariam, or Margaret without believing their stories. But to ask whether they might be lying is to miss the point. The point is this… Imagine what it must be like to live this kind of life, to leave everything behind, your job, your family, your home. To travel to Stuttgart in the back of a truck. Or Oslo. Or Rotterdam. Any place where you don’t speak the language. You have no friends. You sleep in the street, or share a house with strangers who speak yet another language. Imagine living on £35 of Asda vouchers a week. Imagine not being able to see your family. Then ask yourself what kind of experience would make this kind of life preferable to going home?

It’s pretty sad to think that one of the things that Australia exports to the world is how to treat refugees like scum and shirk your responsibilities towards them.

The Independent has an article on the ingenuity of a local Gaza man who has built his own electric car to get around the fuel shortages caused by Israeli blockades. He converted a Peugeot 205 to electric power, with the ability to plug it in to a wall charger to recharge the batteries.

It took them just three months to crack the technical problems. You might think Mr Khazendar had more pressing – and local – worries than the future of the planet. But he closely followed the saga of General Motors’ EV1 electric car programme, which was cancelled in 2003 and which he believes was the victim of pressure from the major oil companies. He is conscious that, having surged above $130 a barrel, the high price of oil could still help to make his proposition a commercial one, if and when fuel flows normally into Gaza again. “After 100 years we will have no petrol,” he adds. “We should start now to try and deal with that, not wait until it happens.”

The electric car is ideal for the Gaza Strip, a flat coastal territory which is about 45 kilometres long and eight kilometres wide. Not surprisingly, there has been brisk demand from Gazans – about 400 so far – seeking similar conversions at an average estimated cost of $2,500, depending on the size of vehicle. The men behind the innovation argue that the initial outlay is swiftly recoverable because of the lower running costs. The two friends are confident they can make similar conversions of lorries and buses. They say that an Italian non-governmental organisation which provides school transport in Gaza has already registered interest in having its buses electrified.

Football in Australia has always been the poor cousin of the ‘native’ codes, Australian Football (AFL) and Rugby League (NRL), generally gaining very little air time and being seen as a game for immigrants, or Wogs, Sheilas and Poofters as the title of Johnny Warren’s auto-biography suggests. The old National Soccer League was disbanded a few years ago, and relaunched after a year’s break as the A-League, an 8-team competition spread across the country.

Sydney FC became my local team, as their home stadium is about 3km from my house, and I’d always considered becoming a member, but never got around to it. That all changed today, when myself, Darrell & Monique bought our season passes for the upcoming season, due to start in August. We now have our own seats for all the home games, and preferential access to tickets for non-league games involving the club.

This will be the 4th season of the A-League, and it’s going from strength to strength. When the national side qualified for the 2006 World Cup, the country really woke up to football and the contrast with AFL & League was stark, neither of which have an international series (League does, but only a handful of countries play and Australia usually wins). The sport has managed to build on that foothold and average spectator numbers are rising every season. NRL, which I always thought was massive, turns out to be an ugly duckling, with the A-League already matching it in terms of average attendance. In fact, most of the NRL teams have dismal attendances, and the average is only as high as it is due to the Broncos and the Titans. Roll on next season and we can relegate them to third place!