The Scientific American has an intriguing article about the origin of cats, when they first arrived at the human hearth, and why they show such a small amount of genetic diversity.

Without windows and doors, early humans were unable to keep their domestic cats from interbreeding as they chose. And in so doing, the cat was able to mate back to local wildcats, so the population did not have any intense selection mechanism to encourage a symbiotic relationship with humans. Also….

“The Truth about Cats and Dogs

Unlike dogs, which exhibit a huge range of sizes, shapes and temperaments, house cats are relatively homogeneous, differing mostly in the characteristics of their coats. The reason for the relative lack of variability in cats is simple: humans have long bred dogs to assist with particular tasks, such as hunting or sled pulling, but cats, which lack any inclination for performing most tasks that would be useful to humans, experienced no such selective breeding pressures.”

Freeloaders from the beginning, cats.

Ultimately from Metafilter.

This is a photograph of Adam Elliott with the Oscar he won for Harvie Krumpet, with Melanie Coombs as producer. He was a graduate of the animation program in the Victorian College of the Arts Film and Television School, taught by the likes of Sarah Watt, an internationally respected animator who has gone on to make Look Both Ways and My Year Without Sex. Melanie Coombs was trained as a producer at the Australian Film Television and Radio School, and the two have recently launched their feature, Mary and Max onto the world stage.

Alumni of the same school, both at Swinburne and VCA, include Gillian Armstrong, Jonathan Shiff, Richard Lowenstein, Geoffrey Wright, Robert Luketic, Andrew Domenik and Jamie Blanks.

Pretty good little hotbed of creativity, you might think. A veritable cultural ferment. Promise of the future, all that sort of thing.

As of now, the VCA no longer exists, and has been absorbed into Melbourne University like an oyster grazed by a starfish. Teeth take muscle, worn out by subtle, implacable pressure. Whatever the logic, this is a dreadful outcome, as far as I am concerned.
Read the rest of this entry »

Straight from a Crooked Timber comment: the horror show that is the British economy, with wit and clarity.

John Lanchester.

And the equivalent piece on the Australian economy is…. where?

(blatant copyright theft here: the image comes from a lovely photostream of The Labours of the Months, a fresco cycle in the Swiss village of Ronco sopra Ascona).

The Ida Missing Link story, whch is creating a certain media excitement at the moment, is an evolutionary fable of a different kind for the television industry. Driven by Darwinian competition, television companies have evolved a bizarre hybrid in which documentary networks pump resources into scientific research, which are arranged as sparkly stories. These in turn entice an audience rather like some species of bird decorating its nest to attract a mate. All that matters is the display, which has evolved past its original function, so the science is present only as a kind of vestigial organ.

On Wednesday, we ran a piece on Screen Hub about the controversy, which I will integrate with some later information. Next Monday night in the US, Discovery Channel will broadcast the whole two hour awe-fest, and the response will show us whether the rumblings about intellectual integrity damage the product. I am not holding my breath, but I am hoping that the world-wide science filmmaking gang might decide this is an evolutionary dead end, to live out its solitary life in some enclosure behind a sign which says “Don’t Go Here Again!”.

Here is the article:
Read the rest of this entry »

(image from Lars Klove for The New York Times)

Last Tuesday night, the Federal government relieved the besieged fortress of Australian public broadcasting with a modest wagon train of supplies. This moment will remembered for a long time, alongside the Fraser razor gang attack on the ABC, the creation of SBS, the first Howard budget of 1996, and the pulse of money from Keating’s Creative Nation that set up SBSi.

For the ABC, the news is great but not terrific, but SBS will be left to lick its wounds, and find somewhere quiet to heal. What will come out of the cave, is at the moment unknown. The ABC pulled off a coup which has been a long time in the making, while SBS was left with its pleas and schemes in the dustbin of history.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Chagossians are one of those multicultural communities that accrete from enterprising survivors of colonial labour, which swept up indigenous people, convicts, slaves, traders, travellers, pirates, fugitives and mercenaries. They have a romantic story, since they ended up in a remote paradise - the Chagos Islands, ribs of land between lagoon and sea which barely stand above the ocean’s surface, somewhere between Mauritius and India.
Read the rest of this entry »

ABC Innovation has published a broadband site about Gallipoli, which I wrote about for Screen Hub. Here we go….

The online documentary has had a chequered history in Australia. Is it an insane idea, a bastard child of television, the future of the medium, or a bunch of pointless toys for lonely losers? The ABC reaches back to Gallipoli to find the digital future.

The ABC unveiled its new Gallipoli website last week, though there are many pieces still to be added.

From the outside, it looks like a major response to Anzac Day, which satisfies some sort of informal obligation to mark the event which has crept across the government broadcasters.

In fact, as Sam Doust, the creative director of ABC Innovation, told Screen Hub, “It was organic rather than necessarily intentional… we wanted to explore the 3D web per se, partly as a move towards Web 3.0…”
Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a technology problem. I have been using a Palm Tungsten, bluetoothed to a 3G Nokia, to run my work phone stuff. All hotsynched to my computer, where I use the Palm desktop to track my contacts. A bit clumsy, because the Palm stylus system tends to be iffy as my little friend ages.

Now I have a brand new Blackberry Bold. As far as I can tell it simply won’t import my contacts and calendar from the Palm, even though it has a Wizard specifically to do it; it won’t record phone calls; and it has a much smaller screen than the Tungsten, though the keyboard is a better interface.

The calendar and contacts software on the phone seems to have less categories than the Palm, and is less searchable. The Blackberry seems to run off Outlook, which is less useful as well.

I gain something important - for less than $120/month I have unlimited mobile phone calls inside Australia, with bluetooth so I can work handsfree and type as I call. With that kind of deal, individuals can dump the Telstra landline, which means this arrangement is cheaper than copper + mobile for heavy users who depend on the phone.

But, it seems that my system has gone downhill, and all I get from the vaunted Blackberry is emails pushed at me away from the computer, which is intrusive, with a reasonably good keyboard on the phone. And slow access to the internet on a weeny screen, which is not part of the phone deal and can run out of control.

Am I missing something? Do we have to put the Blackberry Enterprise software on our server to enter a new, golden universe? (There are work reasons for not using the iPhone; Palm Pre is not around yet, and it seems to have surrendered to Outlook as well).

My real problem is at the computer end. I’ve never found a really good piece of software that enables me to build the accessible, detailed database of contacts I need for quick phone-based journalism. Which in turn links to the damn phone.

And when will “intent to confuse a customer” become a crime. No service allows me to check my usage online, unlike my ISP.

(click on image for better version)

Now that Howard’s cultural agenda no longer has the force of government, what is happening to Anzac Day? The government broadcasters take some trouble over it - SBS ran Paper Dolls: Australian Pin-ups of World War 2 on the eve of the day at 7.30 for maximum family impact. Written and directed by Angela Buckingham, produced by Yvonne Collins, it is supported by a useful SBS website, from which you can find the whole episode.

The ABC has launched a website about the first day at Gallipoli. Last year, Auntie ran Gallipoli Submarine, following up on the two part series, Revealing Gallipoli, broadcast for Anzac Day 2005.

Meanwhile, the bus tours keep descending on Gallipoli, and the younger generation of World War 2, all past eighty, are dying faster than they did in uniform. My father’s place at the parade is empty this year, and my partner has just reminded me that today is the anniversary of her father’s death. As they pass, there is less to interrupt the polishing of Anzac into a cross between Trafalgar and Thermopylae, in a topsy-turvy world where human folly becomes the proof of glory.

But I like to think that we can see the Australian Defence Forces as something more than a tired copy of a politicised myth valorising our own brand of exceptionalism.

This photograph comes from the work of the army in the recent fires. I reckon it speaks volumes. And if we could somehow show it to those men who were demobbed in 1919, full of memories and longing for home, I reckon they would say it is pretty good, too.

They would certainly understand this -

Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a ghastly example of a simple principle of social organisation: it is not the scale of terror which stops citizens from resisting tyranny, it is the completeness of the constructed world.

Colonia Dignidad was close to the ultimate cult. Ensnared by a megalomaniacal paedophile, Paul Schaefer, a few hundred Germans formed a fiercely anti-Communist Evangelical Lutheran conregation in the traumatic post-war years. Some members were fugitives from East Germany. By 1961, the police were interested in Schaefer’s sexual activities, and he moved the group to a remote farm in Chile.

Terrified by his religious zeal, isolated into same-sex platoons, cowed by fake newsreels of world collapse, his worshippers enacted daily rituals of forced confession and mutual betrayal. Deviants were isolated, beaten, drugged and given electroshock treatment.
Read the rest of this entry »