It's the Balance duh

When raising children, there is so many competing obsessions related to the child's well being that it really is a minefield. eg:

Food health - obsess that foods they eat are the healthiest possible.
Fitness health - make sure these kids get enough excercise.
Dental health - make sure that teeth are brushed, water is fluoridated etc.
Sun safety - sun exposure between birth and 20 yo means high risk for melanoma.
Money management - kids must learn to manage money early so they don't risk debt traps etc.
Social learning - obsess with kids able to interact one on one and in group situations.
Stranger danger - recognise dangers with strangers.
Abusive relationships - recognise dangers with non-strangers.
Academic learning - achieve as well as possible academically.
Clean room - learn how to manage one's own space tidily and usefully.
Smoking/drugs - Avoid the trap of getting hooked and counter peer pressure with solid knowledge.
Alcohol - moderation.
Disease - Up to date immunizations and good hygene.
Road safety - Bike helmets, seat belts, alertness.
Swimming safety - avoid the toddler killer of drownings.

So often one sees children of parents obsessing in one (say academia) and so obviously has ignored another (say, weight gain). The examples I have seen are endless, and some such as fitness are notoriously hard to balance with others such as sun safety for instance. It is quite easy to see as an outsider of the failures of these obsessions, often with some being overdone and others seemingly completely ignored. I urge everyone to aim for the balance - see which ones your children are weak in and concentrate on those for a while. Are we spending too much effort on diminishing returns? Walk the fine line, dear friends.

Life lessons

When I was young but starting to control my own food choices, I used to have a great time teasing my mother by choosing foods with artificial colours (flavours etc.)She was one for believing all artificial substances in foods should be considered "bad" and to be avoided, even if all available research pointed to them being 100% safe. I would be into jelly, cordial, soft-drink, lollies and all those things that I was deprived of as a young child. This extended into my own children, where it would give me pleasure to feed them froot loops just to annoy my mother. That was until Zac came along. We were quite sure some foods were making him hyper-active. The before and after drinking creaming soda at Sizzler was quite stark. He liked banana lollies, so we moved towards using them as "bribes" like we did for the other children to help control behaviour. Lo and behold, his behaviour got distinctively worse when we tried that tactic. Then one day we had fed all the kids froot loops, and Zac too since he would have been jealous if he had missed out. Not long after he started being particularly loud and got cranky at the slightest provocation. We were having a party later that day (he was about 2 and a half years old then) but he refused to get dressed, insisting he stay naked. He wasn't much into clothes and we had a lot to do, so we moved on after a half an hour of screaming. When relatives arrived for the party they mostly felt his nakedness to be unacceptable, which led to another round of screaming for 30 minutes at a time as various relatives thought they knew Zac behaviour and felt they could convince him otherwise. The behaviour, if anything, intensified and the screaming started happening with any interaction. The party was a complete disaster, but Zac hadn't quite finished with us. The screaming and hyperactivity kept going and going through the evening. It stopped only when Zac crashed to the ground in complete exhaustion and fell asleep suddenly. As can be expected, the froot loops hit the bin. We converted to the all natural confectionary company, which has been a bit of a godsend. We made a mental note of every single food-stuff which triggered hyperactivity, to determine the additives and commercial foodstuffs to avoid. Things like artificial banana flavour, bright blue and red food colouring, some preservatives. Confectionary is a minefield of probable triggers. At home we stock only the all-natural lollies and that is working quite well. There are a raft of complications outside of home, with friends, teachers, parents etc. casually unaware of the risks.
It is easy to generalise, and put the blame of other's hyperactivity on artificial additives, but it is a lot more complicated than that. That said, additives are a significant contributing factor to a scary proportion of diagnosed hyperactive and autistic cases. It is impossibly hard to narrow down triggers when they are different for every individual, and behaviour profiles are often a lot more subtle and there are time delays, and for some behaviours, diet can have a residual effect that lasts weeks, and is not necessarily isolated to artificial substances. One rule of thumb is that it isn't the sugar that gives a sugar high, but the artificial stuff that goes with it. Zac can have sugar all day and still be in control.
Suffice it to say that this issue has gone full circle for me, and now I obsessively check every food we buy for additives. We avoid them for the whole family. If they have this much effect on Zac, surely they can't be that good for the rest of us either!

Insanity sauce video

videovideo

No! It is nothing like New Orleans!

Re: Australian outback alcoholism, child abuse in remote communities.
The comment by the prime minister is quite irresponsible. Let's see, Sending the army and police whom know little about the regional culture, don't really know which are the worst criminals because most crimes have been done in high secrecy; The problems are not amenable to "one-off" surge of interest, intrusion and intervention. Really, the only hope of "fixing" the problem would take 35 years and billions of dollars. This is more like IRAQ than New Orleans! I guess the political technique is, move out after a few months, claim victory, then re-bury our heads in the sand.

Public vs Private - MILITARY

It is surprising that in all my years, I haven't seen an Economist article debating whether defence forces should be privatised and to what extent. Klaus Rohde touches an aspect in Private wars. In my own experience the first time I really thought about was after reading "Green Mars" (Kim Stanley Robertson) a future history novel in which the security arms of multinational companies became huge private armies. Two questions I ask myself are
- What examples of private armies in the world have been shown to be more effective than the standard sort? and
- Should we presume that privatised armies will allocate resources more efficiently, and therefore be more cost effective, or even decisive in situations where resources are subject to extensive competition?

The standard analogical analysis by the Economist leads one to believe that it is more efficient to list those things which shouldn't be privatised because it is a very short list.

As an answer to my first question, a small army of terrorists (these are almost exclusively privately run but funded by sponsoring Governments) can often "defeat" (ie. send packing to go home) a much larger, modern conventional army. I would expect that private "security" companies may have greater success at sticking out a long protracted conflict, and at a much smaller cost in say Iraq.

As an answer to my second question, there is extensive competition for human resources in a conflict situation. These are allocated much more efficiently in a terrorist organisation than in conventional armies. Western world organisations don't seem to be in the market for humans who will readily give up their life to kill for political reasons, but perhaps private security organisations from those countries are recruiting from the same pool of "brave fanatics".

Vote Labor???

We need a higher unemployment rate. It's not just that I like Kevin Rudd somewhat, and that the economic action is concentrated in water trading (and carbon trading). I am being selfish in this instance because a higher unemployment rate is good for small business owners. Ok, so it's not so good for the country as a whole, nor for the newly unemployed, but quite frankly, that's their problem. Kevin Rudd's IR policies are not laid down in stone, but the noises are in the direction of winding back selected workchoice legislation. What would be typical in Australian election campaigns is that the wind back is "minimalised" by the policy wonks. This is a strategy to maximise votes. Why advertise a complete windback when any windback more than the Liberals are promising will achieve the vote of the interested individual.
The "Labour supply shortfall" is an illusion based on the "lump of labour" fallacy. Low unemployment rates have the tendency to give that illusion. The difficulty in finding employees is real, and scaring (all the other) employers away from hiring is the only realistic avenue to making it easier. The unfair dismissal legislation is the obvious choice for a minimalist windback. This will scare the bejeepers out of most small businesses from employing (or even to dismissing while it is still legal) while my own analysis shows these fears to be somewhat overplayed or irrational. This is why on balance it would play in my individual favour.

Environmentally friendly power cable fault??!!

It took three months for me to discover a serious intermittent fault on a cable supplying power to our Linux mail server. The really strange thing was that it never once was off when we opened on a weekday morning, never turned off during a work day, but turned off (without exception again) every single night, and most sundays during the day! The first inkling was when somebody noted that emails weren't working when they came in on a Sunday. When I checked the log graphs of the server it became clear that it was turning off most nights and during the weekend. The "inexact" nature of the timing, and the "it turning off when nobody was expected to need it" factors seemed to point to human interference. Not so. Power fluctuations seemed to trigger on/off switching of the cable supplying the UPS. During the day, there was more on than off and the UPS remained charged. At low activity times it was more off than on, and when the UPS ran out of charge it turned off the server. Every morning (6:30) some kind of activity triggered the power back on and the server would reboot and stay on.

Lightbulbs - It's a scam

(re Australia's phase-out of incandescent lightbulbs) Ok, So there are no apparent victims, but it is the principle that matters the most. Intelligent citizens of democracies should always regard popular policies with very high degrees of suspicion. After all things like import quotas, tarriffs etc. are popular, but intelligent people know that they are basically scams. This scam is similar to our "Water-Wise" advertising scam. In this scam, local governments advertise how everyone should be saving water through the summer. Then, about a week after a severe downpour they advertise how little water everyone's been using and claim their water-wise campaign a huge success. Similarly, the government could have said they are phasing out film-type cameras (perhaps citing the energy intensive nature of producing the silver required in them or something) in favour of less polluting digital cameras. They could then advertise how little film is being used in Australia and claim their phase-out a raging success. Similarly with CRT TV's and LCD type ones. I guess the nature of this scam will be demonstrated by the comparison of incandescent lightbulb usage in Australia compared to a country that didn't advertise a phase-out. News items that feature a popular law change should be given the same regard as emails that tell you that you have won a prize. If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is just good politics/marketing.

My Children

Teenager
Water Rating : *
Energy Rating: *

Long, Hot showers + obsessive with having clothes cleaned, ironed (by others). Uses more water and energy than the average adult.

Pre-Teens
Water Rating : * * * * *
Energy Rating: *

Water: They never flush the toilet, wash their hands, they have a bath once a month at the most, they care little whether they play on green grass or bare dirt, they even get most of their fluids from fruit.

Energy: They like computers but don't like shutting them down (takes too long to restart their games), they watch DVD's and videos but never turn them or the TV off (Not much point those devices having low standby power usage if they don't switch to standby). They love airconditioning, especially for when they get home. They either have a light, fan, air conditioner, cd player, computer (or combination) on in their room all night.

Freakonomics analysis of Swimming sportsmen

The book analysed extensively the level of corruption in Sumo-wrestling, a high profile Japanese sport. So why not a high profile Australian sport. I shall resist naming names, but there are times when I am suspicious given the incentives.

1) Selection trials often get in the way of "tapering" the training regime. ie, faster times would be more likely at big meets, if one could avoid having to swim hard to qualify, rather than sticking to a training regime.

2) This is more of a problem in longer races eg. 550m or 1320 meter races, for instance, and not so much for the 90m and 180m type distances.

3) The general public doesn't really know the qualifying rules, while top swimmers would know if there was a way to get into an event without swimming in the qualifying final.

4) A casual, pre-race gentleman's agreement between swimmers is unlikely if they are coached by different coaches.

5) In certain races, it is very easy to predict the places each swimmer will get, in advance, if there is considerable difference between them.

6) It is quite easy to fake a false start.

7) If you are going to false start, better it be in the first heat, rather than the final, so that you didn't waste that energy qualifying for the final for nothing.

8) How does a swimmer get a jaw injury that requires surgery, and how come his mouth can open so wide afterwards.

No more mr. pigeonhole on climate change

Browsing through Realclimate I have found a pigeon-holeing term for people like me and dr. clam. "Action-denialist" being someone who believes there is GW and it is anthropogenic but need take no remedial action (with our own marginal differences{*} ). Also there is plenty of blogs which are following up on the jumps the GW conformists are asking us to take such as: ten questions. I would like to nuance my stance lest I be pigeon-holed as an action denier or be accused of attacking the fringes; by putting aside that I believe no remedial action is necessary, take it as given that people and countries are going to take some sort of action, and convincing people that some actions are worse than useless and expensive, while other actions are virtually free (and with the proviso that any change has winners and losers) that there will be more winners than losers given certain actions. There is a vaccuum out there being filled by GW ideologues, and my ideologies should be sucked into it in its place!

* - The difference being that Dr.Clam will not talk as if he believes action should be taken, while I don't care if casual observers get that impression.

Where has that month gone

I've been so meaning to write things so often in the last few weeks, but I am having trouble keeping sane enough (if that makes any sense). Once, I did a whole post, proofread it and thought *What am I thinking; I can't write that!*. If you are interested, it was somewhat about the benefits of importing bananas to the local banana farmers, the benefits of eliminating tariffs on clothing for local manufacturers, and the necessity to marginal employees of banning unfair dismissal lawsuits.

Basically, in North Queensland, it is taboo to say that banana imports can lead to anything other than unmitigated disaster.

It is taboo also within the clothing industry, to say that there should be no protection from imports.

It is also taboo to think that unfair dismissal lawsuits hurt most the people it is designed to protect.

It is highly foolish of me to think I can make any headway into relaxing these taboos.

The sentient beings of Proxima Centauri are laughing at us

In their Hydrogen powered 'lighter than air' aircraft while we here start to worry about
Aircraft Emmissions of the CO2 sort. We are constantly thinking of ways to use Hydrogen on the ground, but still have the taboo against Hydrogen power+levitation of the air. This is singularly attributable to the Hindenberg. Similarly, Hydro power is also taboo at least for green groups that spent decades fighting against them. What green group would suddenly turn araound and say, gee.. if we consider the carbon credits, maybe Gordon-Franklin wasn't such a bad idea! If the first hydrogen powered bus crashed and burst into flames, would we never consider hydrogen power for road vehicles again?

When I sent my daughter to a Catholic school

I didn't think that I would have to help her research information on the Big Bang theory.

I Blog because nobody listens

I just want to say what a great game of beach volleyball I had on thursday. It was the third last game that I will have for a long time. It has been over 6 years that me and Sandor have been faithfully playing week after week. This last game we had some very memorable rallies, including one "Impossible" hit that I made on the third shot after a second that hit the net and fell straight down. Somehow, I punched it with some topspin and it curved over the net beautifully from practically ground level with a dive. We lost the point eventually, but I feel our fighting spirit demoralised them.

Dismal scientific world view

It was useful to my own self-analysis to compare a scientific world view to a religious world view. I tend to slip into an Economic world view often enough to confuse any philosophical argument. Economics is often labelled (even by economists) the "dismal science" in the sense that broad approximations have to be made with any model, and this leaves it open to the type of criticisms which just wouldn't fly with any other science. The more complex the model, the more useful it can be, but the less likely a lay person can understand it enough to agree with it. Thus people's concept of an economy in some circumstances, can be completely wrong because of the model used.

Thus the same concept I have for a world view. Religions as various models describe reality imperfectly but usefully. So what of my (non)belief in God? What, if not God is tracking the absolute morality which I believe exists regardless of people believing it exists? Well, an all-seeing God is useful but imperfect model therefore.