Southern Sydney is going to the dogs at the moment. After two lifeguards were bashed by a gang of young Lebanese in Cronulla two weeks ago community tension was high. Last weekend almost 5,000 showed up to protest, but it quickly got out of hand and turned into a race riot. Most of those taking part were under 25 and there was a smattering of neo-nazis there to stir things up further, so it’s not exactly representative of the local community. Alcohol, not surprisingly, had a massive role to play, and the protest devolved into running battles with the police & any poor unfortunate who happened to look remotely Middle Eastern.

I’m supposed to be staying in a hotel there this weekend in preparation for my first triathlon around the corner on the Sunday morning, but there’s rumours going around of revenge attacks this weekend so Jacqui doesn’t want to go anywhere near the place. We’ll have to wait and see how things pan out later in the week.

Chris (Kamahl from Transitions) decided to enter a team into the Canberra Half Ironman at the weekend as he wanted to do the bike leg. I volunteered for the swim and Michelle plumped for the run. It was the first triathlon I had been to and I had a great time. I got the easy option and was only doing the swim. Chris lent me his wetsuit for my first time swimming in a wettie and it’s unbelievable how buoyant they are! I’d done a 2km swim during the week in a reasonably comfortable 29:30, so I figured I’d manage around 28ish for the 1.9km assuming there were no navigation errors.

The teams started in the last wave with the M35-39 group, so I got up front right from the gun and settled into a nice rhythm with one or two other guys. There was a group of about 5 ahead of us, but they were going much faster than I wanted to, so I let them go. Swimming in a full wettie was quite tough. My shoulders got tired fairly quickly, so when I buy my own one I reckon I’ll go the long john style to give me some freedom around the shoulders.

Water was fully brown, so couldn’t see a thing around me, but all went well and I managed to stay upright once I hit the ramp to exit the lake. Forgot to stop my watch, figuring that the 500m or so run to transition counted as part of my swim time, but I did look down shortly after leaving the water to see 25:36 on the clock, so I reckon I swam around 25:15 or so. Was pretty happy with that given that I was aiming for around 28! Average HR was 174!! Didn’t feel that hard though, but the run to tranisiton nearly killed me! I was bloody delighted to hand over to Chris, thinking to myself “how can these guys be heading off for 90km bike & a half marathon” and “I need to do more than 4km swimming a week”

Chris’s bike computer didn’t start, but we reckon he rode around 2:25. He said it was a very tough course. Constantly up and down, with no flats to settle into. Everyone else seems to agree. Michelle ran about 2:20 which she was happy with.

While everyone else was doing the hard work I farted around taking pictures.

Back into training this week for my first full triathlon at the weekend.

S: 5200m

Great article on the lack of rationality attached to religious faith. Includes the scary fact that only 22% of Americans believe in evolution!!

It is perfectly absurd for religious moderates to suggest that a rational human being can believe in God simply because this belief makes him happy, relieves his fear of death or gives his life meaning. The absurdity becomes obvious the moment we swap the notion of God for some other consoling proposition: Imagine, for instance, that a man wants to believe that there is a diamond buried somewhere in his yard that is the size of a refrigerator. No doubt it would feel uncommonly good to believe this. Just imagine what would happen if he then followed the example of religious moderates and maintained this belief along pragmatic lines: When asked why he thinks that there is a diamond in his yard that is thousands of times larger than any yet discovered, he says things like, “This belief gives my life meaning,” or “My family and I enjoy digging for it on Sundays,” or “I wouldn’t want to live in a universe where there wasn’t a diamond buried in my backyard that is the size of a refrigerator.” Clearly these responses are inadequate. But they are worse than that. They are the responses of a madman or an idiot.

Mike the Mad Biologist covers a story from Nature in which it has been shown that bacteria can evolve resistance to defensins, the small proteins your body uses to defeat them, mainly deployed in yoru mouth, nose etc.

In people, natural bacteria-fighting compounds kill microbes in places such as the mouth, eyes and skin. More than 800 such compounds, dubbed antimicrobial peptides, have been identified in humans, plants, frogs and other organisms.

Several drugs based on antimicrobial peptides are being developed, in part because of the rising problem of antibiotic resistance to conventional drugs such as penicillin.

So 65 years after the introduction of Penicillin we have MRSA, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, commonly knowns as a ‘superbug’ because it’s resistant to both Penicillin and Methicillin. In another 50-60 years we’ll more than likely end up with a vast range of bacteria which is resistant to our bodies’ own frontline defenses. Not good.

Got a full swim session in yesterday and felt pretty good. It bore a remarkable similarity to Monday’s session and we did tell Kim she has to make more of an effort. Somehow I doubt it will make much difference though. I had planned to go for another short run when I got home, but it was starting to rain so I didn’t bother.

400 FS
4 * 200 FS on 3:15 (2:55)
3 * {
    50 K,
    250 FS,
    100 BC } 1min rest
2 * 200 Pull on 3:15 (2:55)
Total: 2800m

S: 5000m – R: 3.2km

Billmon covers an L.A. Times story on U.S. propaganda in Iraq:

As part of an information offensive in Iraq, the U.S. military is secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq.

The articles, written by U.S. military “information operations” troops, are translated into Arabic and placed in Baghdad newspapers with the help of a . . . small Washington-based firm called Lincoln Group . . . The Lincoln Group’s Iraqi staff, or its subcontractors, sometimes pose as freelance reporters or advertising executives when they deliver the stories to Baghdad media outlets.

Now the thrust of the story — and of the outrage expressed by the anonymous Pentagon sources who passed out the paperwork on Lincoln’s little payola scheme — is the utter hypocrisy of preaching democracy and transparency while secretly bribing journalists to print government propaganda.

Malaria is one of mankind’s biggest killers, with an annual death toll in the region of 1.5 million. It has also been implicated in the prevalence of sickle-cell anaemia amongst blacks, and now also in the prevalence of alcoholism, again in blacks. Why blacks? Because Sub-Saharan Africa is plagued with malaria, and evolutionary adaptations to combat malaria have unintended side-effects.

From: The Loom

alaria wreaks colossal damage in many parts of the world. Today it kills over a million people a year, mostly children, and it has been plaguing our species for thousands of years. Carrying a single copy of the sickle-cell gene boosts the odds that people can have children in malaria-prone regions. Unfortunately, when two people who carry the gene have children together, there’s a one-in-four chance that each child will get both copies of the gene. Over many generations, the advantage of having one copy of the gene outweighs the disadvantage of having two—at least in populations that have endured centuries of malaria.

In the decades since the discovery of the sickle-cell trade-off, scientists have discovered that several other defenses to malaria have evolved where the disease is a high risk—in Africa, the Mediterranean, Southeast Asia, and New Guinea. And many of these adaptations come with drawbacks of their own. Now a new study offers evidence of yet another mixed blessing: one defense against malaria may make people prone to alcoholism.

I got back to exercising yesterday after finally getting rid of the remnants of the flu, or at least getting to the point where I was sick of sitting around waiting for them to disappear. Went for a swim at lunch and stayed in for most of the session. I had got the latest list of squad times and learned that there was a session on today as well, so I got out early yesterday with the intention of swimming today as well, only to be told that the brochure had it wrong and the Tuesday session didn’t exist.

400 FS
4 * 200 FS on 3:30 (2:52)
4 * 100 IM on 1:45 (1:30)
3 * 200 Pull on 3:30 (3:03)
Total: 2200m

I also went for a short run when I got home. I decided to just go 3.2km and leave it at that, and I was pretty glad I did. I could still feel a bit of crap in my lungs and, although my legs were OK, I didn’t want to overdo it this week. Feel OK this morning though, so I might do another short run this evening.

S: 2200m – R: 3.2km

Well we finally managed it. Billy held his inaugural poker night on Saturday after the previous attempt had been postponed. Myself, Kev, Tommy, Niall, Chantal, Billy and Lisa rocked up for our first night of gambling. Preparation had been fairly rushed once we had learned that Billy was playing online, but we still spent the first two hours deciding/explaining the Hold ‘Em rules we’d be playing under and organising food.

It was a strictly low stakes game, so it was decided that everyone would buy $25 worth of chips and away we went. Niall adopted the rube approach, pretending he had no idea while at the same time piling up the chips. Chantal was the same, having begun her deception, as soon as we’d collected her on the way to Billy’s, by saying that she’d be worried she’d giggle too much when she had good cards. She racked up a significant pile before admitting it was all a ruse and she was a bit of a shark. I did pretty well too, though since Billy and Tom took it upon themselves to occasionally bet without actually having looked at their cards it was possible to get by with only a rough idea of what to do.

It finished up after about four hours with Chantal making a $32 profit, me making $18 and Niall making $11. One other point to note is that the three of us who finished with the most amount of money were also the three supping on the beers. Food, or drink, for thought…

The Daily Mirror broke a story yesterday, picked up by the Sydney Morning Herald today, that Bush wanted to directly attack al-Jazeera’s headquarters but Blair managed to talk him out of it.

The US President, George Bush, planned to bomb the pan-Arab television broadcaster al-Jazeera, according to a British newspaper that cited a Downing Street memo marked “Top secret”.

The five-page transcript of a conversation between Mr Bush and the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, published in the Daily Mirror yesterday, reveals that Mr Blair talked Mr Bush out of launching a military strike on the station, unnamed sources told the newspaper.

I suppose it’s not that shocking really, given what we now know about Bush and his cronies, and given that The Mirror has been gagged by the Official Secrets Act, it’s obviously on to something.

I got fed up still being congested post-flu and not exercising as a result, so I decided I’d get back in the pool and see what happened. Either the water would help clear things up once and for all, or I’d suffer a relapse. James, the fast swimmer, was back for good now that he’s managed to get himself a working visa for Australia so there was no slacking off. He’s about 10secs/100m faster than me which is good as it will force me to do a bit more work in future, and give me someone to drag off.

400 FS
200 Pull
100/200/300/200 FS, 15s rest
Total: 1400m

The sessions have been getting increasingly predictable since our coach doesn’t really have a clue. I’d made the mistake of giving her a few ideas of different sets a month or two ago thinking it would encourage her to experiment a bit, but she just uses the same set over and over. The 100/200/300/200/100 is mine, and I originally suggested it as an alternative warn-up, but now we keep getting it as a main set. I told her she’d have to start coming up with more varied sessions and that she should talk to the morning coach and get some ideas from him. Hopefully things will improve shortly.

S: 1400m

An excellent article on Surveillance and Oversight by Bruce Schneier illustrating the differing approaches of US and Dutch law enforcement when faced with a need to obtain information. It’s particularly relevant since Australia seems to be heading down the US path towards secrecy and underhandedness.

These differences illustrate four principles that should guide our use of personal information by the police. The first is oversight: In order to obtain personal information, the police should be required to show probable cause, and convince a judge to issue a warrant for the specific information needed. Second, minimization: The police should only get the specific information they need, and not any more. Nor should they be allowed to collect large blocks of information in order to go on “fishing expeditions,” looking for suspicious behavior. The third is transparency: The public should know, if not immediately then eventually, what information the police are getting and how it is being used. And fourth, destruction. Any data the police obtains should be destroyed immediately after its court-authorized purpose is achieved. The police should not be able to hold on to it, just in case it might become useful at some future date.

The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal has a great article entitled Intelligent Design or ‘No Model’ Creationism: A Total Fraud And A Scam – Why It Can’t Qualify As Even A Pseudoscience, which, you might correctly surmise, demolishes the whole ID argument. It’s a long read, but it does make the effort to point out the difference between the dictionary definition of ‘theory’ and what the word means in a scientific context, a distinction often overlooked and which makes the ‘debate’ possible in the first place.

Most people tend to think of the word “theory” as meaning pretty much the same thing as their concept of “hypothesis”—namely, a guess or surmise. A “theory” is thought of as a very tentative proposition. This is only natural, because that is the “ordinary English” meaning of the word outside of scientific contexts, and our citizens’ educational experiences have rarely done anything to disabuse them of this notion. As I define “scientific theory,” it is a great, overarching, explanatory scheme which explains a vast number of phenomena; which makes connections between phenomena that would otherwise be perceived as having nothing to do with each other; which makes wild, off-the-wall predictions which nonetheless turn out as forecast; which is supported by an overwhelming amount of evidence and has been tested countless times in countless ways without being falsified; shows consilience to a truly remarkable extent; and which is, for all practical purposes, universally accepted by the scientific community. A scientific theory has content, in spades. By this definition (and powerful arguments can be made against any other) there are only about a dozen scientific theories that I can think of right off the bat, and no scientific theories have ever existed which are not currently accepted. Examples would be the modern atomic theory, theory of plate tectonics, Einstein’s theories of relativity, the microbe theory of disease, the heliocentric theory, the modern synthetic theory of evolution, the gene/chromosome/DNA/RNA theory of inheritance/protein synthesis.

Watched Australia beat Uruguay last night at the Beach Road, to qualify for the World Cup for the first time since 1974. Being 1-0 down from the first leg, they had to win last night to have any chance, and if Urugauy scored they’d be in real trouble. The game took about 10 minutes to settle down and Australia were on the back foot initially. Uruguay had one or two shots which came close enough but weren’t on target. Kewell was brought on after 30mins and he changed the game as the Uruguayans couldn’t cope with him down the wing. He fluffed a shot on goal, but it fell to Bresciano who knocked it in.

The second half was pretty tense, but the Aussies maintained the upper hand and spent most of the time trying to break down the Uruguayan defence to no avail. It stayed 1-0 at full time, and the same after extra time so it was all down to the penalty shootout. Kewell fired home the first, followed by a save from Schwarzer and the Aussies had the upper hand. The advantage was squandered by Mark Viduka of all people when he dragged his penalty wide, but Schwarzer came to the rescue again with a second excellent save and it was all over.

Now that Ireland didn’t make it, and since I’ll have my residency by the time the World Cup comes around, I’ll have a team to support after all ;-)

The ABC‘s 7.30 Report had a great interview with Chris Patten last night on his thoughts on the Iraq War which included the following snippet:

KERRY O’BRIEN: Why do you dislike Dick Cheney?

LORD PATTEN: I think he gives conservatism a bad name. I think he associates conservatism with making rich people even richer, with more perks for the corporate world, with the most assertive sorts of nationalism. If you look at things – the arguments at the moment, America 2001 had the huge sympathy of the world after the attacks on New York and Washington. Now, three years down the road, four years down the road, we see the Administration, particularly Vice-President Cheney, trying to prevent Senator McCain writing into American law the fact that Americans don’t torture people. So America is on the back foot on human rights issues. America, which stood for and argued for Helsinki and the sort of approach to human rights which eventually helped us sink the Soviet Union. How have they got themselves into this mess? They’ve got themselves into this mess because of that implaccable ultra-conservative presence at President Bush’s right hand and I think that it’s a pity that the President doesn’t listen more to his father and less to Vice-President Cheney.

I managed to pick up a nice dose of the flu at the weekend. Throat felt a bit scratchy late on Friday night, then woke up with just a sore throat on Saturday so thought that was it. By Saturday night I had a bit of a fever and it was downhill from there. Sunday & Monday were write-offs, yesterday was OK but decided to stay home from work just to be on the safe side.

It’s amazing how much it knocks back your lung capacity. Any sort of exertion is liable to produce a bout of coughing with all the gunk that brings with it. I definitely won’t be exercising for the rest of the week. On the plus side, lack of appetite coupled with body working overtime to deal with the infection sees me emerge a kilo lighter ;-)

With both the Catholic Church and the Dalai Lama admitting that science provides a better explanation of the origins of the world than religious texts, you’d think it would sound a death knell for ID proponents of ID.

OK, a bit to catch up on. Wednesday lunchtime saw me in the pool for another swim session. I can’t remember what the session was, but did my usual 2km. Went for another run on Wednesday evening, following the same protocol as Tuesday. Managed a total of 5.35km this time, though went out fractionally too fast on the first half and I was pretty tired too. Felt a bit harder that Tuesday’s run.

Laps:
4:30 – 145
4:43 – 153
4:44 – 156
1:58
4:51 – 156
4:51 – 159
4:46 – 161
HR @ 1min: 122

The short lap is from the end of the 3rd lap until 15mins, at which point I turn around and run back to the start of the lap and proceed as normal.

Cycled home from work today and did a couple of laps of Centennial Park. I’d been out for a few beers on Thursday with Kev, Lisa, Chantal and Franciska, having our Sydney-Gong reunion so wasn’t that keen to get on the bike, but I felt surprisingly good. Came home and went out for another run, same deal as Wednesday (5.45km). Felt great too.

Laps:
4:25 – 142
4:40 – 151
4:42 – 153
2:16
4:42 – 155
4:40 – 156
4:32 – 160
HR @ 1min: 121

S: 4000m – B: 69.3km – R: 16km

Oh how the mighty have fallen…

Certain binding legal principles, affirmed unanimously by the UN, emerged from the Nuremberg trials . . . It was made absolutely clear that law must apply equally to everyone. Putting the captive enemies on trial was seen by America’s Chief Prosecutor, Justice Robert Jackson, as “the greatest tribute that power has ever paid to reason.” His successor General Telford Taylor, my chief and later law partner, was more succinct: “Law is not a one-way street.”,1),
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Nuremberg Prosecutor Benjamin B. Ferencz

Remarks on the International Criminal Court

March 11, 2003

From billmon

After watching the whales last night I headed off for an evening run. I decided to head up to Christisson Park and just run for 30mins with the aim of keeping an even pace. I ran anti-clockwise for 15mins, then turned around and ran clockwise for another 15 and tried to cover the same distance. I managed a total of 5.25km quite comfortably without any complaints from my legs.

Laps:
4:39.6 – 142
4:45.4 – 150
4:49.8 – 152
1:20.5
4:47.8 – 152
4:57.3 – 152
4:49.0 – 155
HR @ 1min: 120

My CHO + PRO supplies had arrived, so when I got home I put my plan into action. Mixed up a bottle, drank half immediately then the other half 40mins later. Didn’t feel tired all night, and felt much better when I woke up this morning. It’s too early to tell from one sample, but the potential looks good.

Finally, jumped on the bike for a ride this morning and headed in to City Bike Depot who offer free coffee and croissants to cycle commuters on the second Wednesday of every month. Free breakfast – mmmmm!

S: 2000m – B: 31.1km – R: 5.25km