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Walking to Marrickville Metro just after 8pm last night, Monday 3 March 2008, and all the street lights went out. Houses too. Well most of them as, interestingly, the odd house’s lights stayed on. Must have been on a different grid?

For around 45 minutes between 8 and 9 pm there was a blackout in parts of Enmore and Marrickville. I later found out from the local 7 Eleven that it affected their store in Petersham too.

So, not a small thing, but looking at online new papers and none of them seem to have picked it up as a story. Must not be very interesting. And the Energy Australia site is quite useless if you want to find out about blackouts or other faults.

Or, maybe it was just my imagination? It never actually happened?

I think Woolworths Marrickville Metro would have something to say about that. With main power out Woolworths was surviving on generators designed to power it for 20 minutes. Only important things had power, the registers and half the lights.

As you can see from the picture below, they were manually closing all the doors as they tried to speed all the customers through the checkouts and close the store.

It is disappointing that, while the blackout in the inner west last July got a reasonable amount of coverage, this one has received none at all (that I can find).

Building Lego ducks for my child I ran out of appropriate blocks. Desperate to complete the project, as any Lego mad scientist would do, I chose to opt for a hybrid animal.

Using pieces from the farm set, cow genes were combined with the existing duck, resulting in the transgenic (cow)duck.

But how far should one take playing God?
Is it ethical to create GMO Lego?
And are we warping our children’s imagination?

In related news:
(of a more serious nature)

• GM canola gets go-ahead in NSW and Vic (SMH, 27 Nov 2007)

There is a law that electronic advertising for elections in Australia must cease 3 days before the election, the last TV ads ran last night, but this law doesn’t apply to the internet. So expect to see lots of adverts on your favourite news and social sites.

For example, off at the Sydney Morning Herald you get to see lots of Flash driven political advertising. Like this Flash version of the interest rate fud ad. Saying ‘interest rates have risen to more than 10%’ for each previous Labor government.

I’m interested to know where they got their figures. I though by the time Keating was in the rates were on the way down. If you look at the graph on this site, or even the figures from the RBA site, you can see that 12% was on the way down.

Ok, they may have gone back up to 10.2% during the ‘recession we had to have‘, but not 12%.

On another note it is interesting to see that both the Liberals and the Greens got in trouble for forgetting to put the name and address of the authorising agent on their Facebook ads. The Greens have fixed the problem, but the Liberal party just pulled the ads.

While talking about social networks it is nice so see that the Federal Election ‘07 flickr group I setup now has 111 photos. Few of these are from the Liberal party, most being from Labor, the Greens and other minor groups. I did go looking for photos from all parties to invite.

Maybe the Liberals aren’t interested in flickr? Though I suspect many photos from all sides are not tagged well, making them all hard to find and invite.

On Sunday Japan sent a whaling fleet off to hunt in the Antarctic. They say that the hunt is being conducted “purely for scientific purposes“. With an expected haul of 1000 whales I ask, why do they need to catch so many for scientific research?

They wish to measure gender and age distribution of whales. But isn’t this Heisenberg whale counting? Don’t you affect the result by your study?

Sea Shepherd, a radical environmental group, has decided to take matters into their own hands. They intend to “directly intervene and put an end to this criminal behaviour”. And if absolutely necessary will ram whaling vessels.

Is really necessary? Sea Shepard seem to have decided that Japan will not listen to reason, so drastic actions are needed.

What are other people saying:

• Japanese whaling outrage (20 Nov 2007)
• Japanese Whale Researchers Conclude Humpback Still Delicious with Soy Sauce and a Little Wasabi…. (20 Nov 2007)
• Japan takes the Hump (19 Nov 2007)

Other articles:

• Govt could have prevented Japan’s whale hunt: researcher (ABC, 20 Nov 2007)
• US joins critics of Japan whaling (19 Nov 2007)

While looking for information for my Japanese anti-grope phone application post I came across the article Slow Life, Slow Sex: Pregnancy in middle age far from inconceivable on a Japanese news site. It seems to be a article giving medical advice, but if you read between the lines it gives an insight into ethics of contraception in Japan.

The article starts off by talking about how women should be careful to use contraception so as not to get pregnant. That it is still possible to get pregnant until they reach menopause somewhere between 45 and 56.

The article advises using the pill, and/or an IUD. And if you really don’t want to get pregnant consider sterilization.

There is no mention of condoms.

The article also touches the issue of abortion. The article says “I don’t blindly condemn abortion“, but that “until there is a 100 percent effective method of birth control, pregnancy is something that can happen“.

And the article doesn’t actually use the word contraception it refers to birth control.

If you read between the lines you will notice that there is no mention of men being involved with contraception. Birth control is emphasised as being the responsibility of the woman.

Do you think this is an ethical approach? Should men in Japan take more responsibility for contraception?

Do people in Australia take a similar approach? Is contraception still a woman’s responsibility here?

On a side note, abortion is one of the most commonly used ‘contraceptives’ in Japan.

In Japan there is a problem of women being groped by on trains. As a way to combat this an anti-grope application was written for mobile phones games developer Takahashi.

Released back in 2005, but only recently becoming popular, the application displays a series of warnings of increasing anger, from “Excuse me, did you just grope me?” up to “Shall we head to the police?” (all in Japanese of course). The idea behind the application is for women to “scare away perverts with minimum hassle and without attracting attention“.

An interesting idea, but when I went looking for the program in Google I came across lots of news sites with the same article [1, 2, 3, 4] and blogs [a, b, c, d, e, f, ] that reference it, but no actual download sites.

Thought, after some searching I managed to find this blog post with links to the application and another blog post that actually explained the background to the story.

Links to the aplication and reviews mentioned in the AP articles (all in Japanese of course):

• Application download page
• Spicy Soft Corp review
• Cellphone Application Rankings at Keitai Watch

And it would have been nice if the original article included these links. Though I wouldn’t have been able to complain about it if they had.

(Yes I’m referencing stuff posted about a week ago, I just haven’t had any spare time to write up this post)

We all know that the Australian federal election has been called for 24 November, but did you realise that the electoral role closes when the election is called?

You need to enroll if you have never been enrolled, or if your details have changed recently (eg name or address changed).

So, if you are enrolling for the first time your registration needs to be received by 8pm on Wednesday 17 (tomorrow). And if you are updating details you have till 8pm on Tuesday 23 October. See the AEC Close of Rolls page.

Don’t want to miss out on voting? Check the Australian Electoral Commission site for more info about enrolling. Or call the number to check your enrolment.

Australian Electoral Commission
13 23 26

Remember voting is not just a privilege, it is also a responsibility. Enroll to vote and make you voice heard.

Thank you to Disco Knitter for reminding me to do a post about this.

After 4 years there isn’t much to show for the $367 million Tcard contract with ERG. Both ERG and the NSW government bare some responsibility for the delay. And now they are thinking of making public transport more expensive when the system is introduced. Don’t you want more people to use public transport, be green and reduce traffic congestion?

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The APEC leaders wore Driza-Bones as the Australian national dress (silly shirt day). Not something I would have liked to do the in heat of the week before APEC, but quite good when the weather turned sour. I hope they also got matching Akubras, though I can see why you wouldn’t wear them during the photo shoot.

I wonder if they had two sets of shirts available? One for hot weather, as well as the Driza-Bones for the wet and cold weather?

Swimming costumes and thongs were discounted by the PM. Though there were comments that Australian beach wear, like Quicksilver, should be a feature. [1,2]

IMHO the APEC leaders should have all received a Mambo T-shirt with a Reg Mombassa design. Dogs farting APEC logos, or Jesus’ APEC on the beach. Something fun like that.

It has been pointed out to me though, that Mambo no longer does the arty t-shirts, moving more to surfy stuff. It was suggested that this was because the fancy Ts were worn more often by older people, rather than the youth market that the brand is trying to sell to [4].

References:

1. APEC attire creates fashion headache (ABC, 3 Sept 2007)
2. ‘Funny shirts’ photo-op at APEC summit keeps the fashion gurus guessing (The West Australian, 3 Sept 2007)
3. Mambo takeover (ABC, 6 Mar 2000)
4. Mambo ditches Mombassa for a younger cool (The Age, 17 June 2004)
5. Reg the rocker, Chris the artist (ABC, 10 Jan 2007)

In a move that could set a nasty precedent for Australian website operators and their users, a software firm is suing a community website over comments published on its message board. 2Clix is suing the owner of the popular broadband community site Whirlpool, Simon Wright, for “injurious falsehood”, asking for $150,000 in damages. (SMH, 12Sept2007)

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