Being an Australian Overseas
My interest was piqued when I saw the news on the ABC website about
a
Melbourne man being murdered in Jamaica. Mainly because I've
visited Jamaica and I wondered what had happened. The article's a
bit sparse on that actual detail of course - much more interesting
to talk about what kind of a fun-loving, innocent-abroad guy he was.
While I would have liked to know what had happened, I'm glad that
at least the ABC hasn't been reduced to making stuff up, baiting the
audience with pure conjecture.
But what I really took offence to was the step-mother's comments to trust no-one overseas. "You can't be an Aussie overseas," she says, and "they have a different value on life." Yes, folks, life is cheap in Jamaica and us cool, forgiving Aussies don't stand a chance against those naughty darkies. They have 'different' values, 'different' obviously implying 'inferior' here. Just stay home, be Australian in Australia, and thank your lucky stars that you were born in the Greatest Country On Earth and not some shithole like Jamaica.
It's jingoistic guff like this that makes me ashamed to be Australian.
I've been to Jamaica. The best time was watching big sweaty guys roast Jamaica Blue Mountains in a halved 44-gallon drum over an open fire, stirring with machetes and having a smoke. This stuff sells for $9 per cup in Japan. I laugh to think what the Japanese would make of their quality standards. I gladly paid the equivalent of about $30 per kilo for the coffee, knowing that 90% of this was going directly to the owners of the very farm I stood on. That was a great time.
The worst time was walking home one evening, by myself, from the local equivalent of KFC - serving the island's specialty, Jerk Chicken. ('Jerk' is a blend of spices including Jamaican Pepper (Allspice or Pimento) and as hot a ground chilli as you can get. Mmmmmmmmm!) About five metres from the door, a guy shook my hand and started walking with me the entire 200 metres (or, more accurately, 45 kilometres) back to the hotel gate. He was begging for money the entire time. As politely as I could, given that I was in a country where my very skin labelled me a foreigner, I declined. To know that generations of tourists have rooted the place over until the known best way of getting a quick buck is to beg it off tourists is a terrible thing that sits like a acid snowball in your gut. Once you read the Lonely Planet guide and realise there were months of anti-American and anti-Tourist rioting in the 1970s, you don't treat the place as just another bright, green countryside.
But, to put that in perspective, the entire time we were there that was the worst I ever suffered. Kate got one or two more suggestive comments until she learnt to wait for the bus inside the hotel's gated compound. No holdups, no drive-by shootings; and we walked from our hotel through Kingston about 1.5 kilometres to go to Devon House. The thing that impressed us was the total friendliness of the people there. We had one car stop and wait for us to cross the street that he was just about to turn down. Tooting the horn there means anything from "I've seen you, you can go in front of me" to "Just letting everyone know that I'm overtaking uphill on a blind corner so just slow down a bit." It all works perfectly, and our driver on our final tour to the coffee plantations was as nice a guy as ever I've met.
Yes, it's different there. They're still struggling to be a country without also being America's social dumping ground. There are places in Kingston that I would never enter without a local escort. Maybe Bryan Johnstone went to one of those places. There are people I'd never invite up to my hotel room. Maybe Bryan Johnstone got friendly with a local guy who he thought was just his bestest pal and had to show his collection of carved coconut shells. I don't know. It's entirely possible he just had a heart attack and died. We don't need some arrogant jingoistic woman telling everyone that the world is a naughty, naughty place and to only go places that you don't need a passport to enter.
So, yes, travel to Jamaica. Don't go there assuming that the streets are as safe as your own suburb, or that you can make jokes with the locals. Yes, tread carefully, and realise that there are still plenty of people who see travellers as a walking money dispenser, but don't let that stop you going and seeing and doing all those cool things you want to. And don't spread the fear.
(This also reminds me of that article in the YHA newsletter that
basically said that if you're over 30, then you can forget about
travelling altogether. All the cool people inhabit all the places
that you want to go and they don't want you there. Besides, your
slack elderly body can't cope with all the skiing, waveboarding and
other hijinks that only the young can apparently do without
embarrassment. To add insult to injury, there's the photographs
of the author beside it, this young 20-something girl who's been
all over the world and whose only concept of getting old seems to
consist of medicines, complete incapacity, and senility at 35. Way
to go, YHA, way to market yourselves.)
posted at: 17:52 | path: /society | permanent link to this entry
I Wonder Where That Came From?
I've now officially been riding to work for more than a year now. That,
however, isn't supposed to indicate that there's been any consistency to
this - I've ridden 56 times in 365 days. Like any good geek, I've been
noting my times and speeds and so forth, along with some little personal
notes like "Ugh. Unfit again. Stupid!" and "Good speed considering I
wasn't totally shagged out afterward :-)". It's little nuggets like that
that cheer one up, you know?
I've discovered a few other things during that time. My cadence has sped up as I've realised that I can actually speed up your pedalling rate without going into a whirlwhind of thrashing pedals. (I still maintain that cadence is not a linear progression but more of a power function - after a certain point you put more effort into moving your legs at that speed than you put into moving the bike.) Headwinds seem to make a lot of difference. I like spring and autumn best, because your hands don't freeze off and you don't finish up covered in sweat.
But the weird one I discovered is that my times are always better when I pass (or get passed by) people. I've suddenly discovered a competitive urge in me that I didn't really know about. And, to tell the truth, I'm not that happy with it. I was the typical nerd at school who was hopeless at anything requiring gross motor skills but who was first at the door when the computer club opened every day. So why this sudden urge to be better than others? Or has it just lain dormant and affected everything else too subtly for me to really see?
Hmmmm.
posted at: 17:40 | path: /personal | permanent link to this entry
Where are you when we need you, Richard Feynman?
Working at the ANU has its perks. You get a pipe to the internet so big
that you can download an ISO image of a Linux distribution faster than
you can burn it to a CD. You get to work in a place where the gardens
are large and well cared for, and often you have a great view over them
as you work. Especially in the research labs, you get great flexibility
with when you work during the day. And (for me) it's close enough to
ride to, so I can get a little more exercise.
There's a downside, though - you work in an academic environment. Now, scientists hold themselves up as a model of rationality and reasonability. It's all about peer review, open publication, and building on the work on others. No-one's idea has any more weight than anyone else's unless it can be proven. Scientists say they abhor professions like marketing, where the only important things is spin and image and branding. Scientists are always happy to be proved wrong, often by newcomers to the field, because if the new theory holds up then the great cause of Science is advanced.
This, I'm here to tell you, is absolute crap. Scientists are the cliqueiest[1] people in the campus, and they've built a heirarchy of students, lecturers, professors, deans and chancellors to prove it. The indoctrination starts early, with undergrads being given the cold shoulder by many senior academics who only want to work with more prestigious PhD students. You don't write a paper if your professor doesn't already think it's a good idea. Who gets to sit on what boards, and what weight there opinions are given, is a closely guarded privelege - most of these are invitation only. No-one asks too many questions when the Dean of Science, who gets to approve research grants to do with bioinformatics, sits on the board of a Biotech company. It's "perks for the heads" all the way.
If you need any further proof, ask yourself why some journals are given more credence than others. Yes, they have higher standards of publication, but those are only applied to newcomers - reviewers know better than to question too closely the work of the established names in the field. In order to publish, you have to sign an agreement that you're not getting anyone else to publish the work as well - so if you get rejected and decide later to get your paper published in a 'lesser' journal, you've just wasted six months of review process from the first journal. This makes no sense if the aim of Science is to publish the truth. Who reviews what for which journal is another closely-held, fiercely competitive status credit: a reviewer for "Nature" holds great power and prestige and knows it. The idea of a journal that just takes any paper regardless of who else is publishing it is actively laughed at.
Reviewers themselves often work anonymously - which, if you think about it, makes no sense in a field which says it doesn't have any ego to puncture. Often, your paper is being reviewed by people who not only have an opposite theory to support but are getting a lot of money in funding and lecture talks and corporate sponsorship from it. You can bet that they don't hold back the criticism. The amount of planning we've gone through to present some of our ideas, which are pretty radical breaks from the established conventional areas of research in molecular biology, is phenomenal - simply because a reviewer that doesn't think we're on the "right track" (i.e. their own track) and will just dismiss it out of hand as being "technically flawed". Good luck publishing when that happens.
(Maybe I should state here that this is stuff that I've picked up from working with the people here. I haven't experienced any of it directly, thank Buddha. But you can tell the signs are there.)
The more I look at the Open Source software development model, the more I wonder how much we've gone down that path. What cults of personality are their already? Whose opinions do we listen to merely because they're that person rather than because their technical analysis is correct? This is especially damaging in areas where the person has no technical experience - me giving opinions on correct kernel module design, for instance. Why, to pick a favourite bugbear of mine, do so many people say "Oh, but you've got to have two GUI systems to get competition" but they don't support the same principle for having two Linux kernels, or two networking stacks, or two slightly-incompatible versions of the OpenGL standard? How can we make sure we value ideas and principles and tests rather than opinions and preferences and whims?
[1]: hey, I just
discovered another four-consecutive-vowel word!
posted at: 13:05 | path: /society/tech | permanent link to this entry
All posts licensed under the CC-BY-NC license. Author Paul Wayper.