In the US, the death of Anna Nicole Smith received more news coverage than any single country other than the US and Iraq.

Watch the video at the article. This man loses the last 2-3cm of his finger and after sprinkling some special powder on it, the finger grows back and you can’t even tell it was originally severed.

Check out this press release from the Royal Society of Chemistry:

Pressure from those with vested interests, including farmers and biofuel manufacturers, plus muddled planning by decision-makers, threaten to take the country down an energy supply dead-end, said the chief executive of the Royal Society of Chemistry today.

Richard Pike called for restraint on the promotion of biofuel as the simple answer to Britain’s future fuel demands and urged clear debate and sounder legislation to make sure that the right answers are found to the challenges ahead.

“Future historians may ultimately see the biofuels of the early twenty-first century as a technological dead-end,” said Dr Pike.

“We have to bear in mind that the 80 tonnes of kerosene used for a one-way commercial flight to New York is equivalent to the annual biofuel yield from an area of approximately 30 football pitches.“

(emphasis mine)

It should come as little or no surprise that:

The UN’s new top adviser on food has urged a freeze on biofuel investment, saying the blind pursuit of the policy is “irresponsible”.

Article

(yes, I get my news from Colbert)

Well according to the newspaper that supported it, Earth Hour was a success. The figures they are citing are:

EnergyAustralia last night reported a drop between seven and 12 per cent in energy consumption in Sydney’s CBD during Earth Hour. On a typical Saturday night the city would use 231.8 megawatts of electricity. Last night’s figure was 212.4 megawatts.

Which sounds like an amazing feat but there’s more to it than meets the eye. My first doubts come from when I saw the following graph here after last year’s event.

Notice the massive peak before the actual hour. I’m assuming people went and used all their appliances ahead of time so they could turn them off during the actual hour and then actually ended up using more power in total than on previous Saturdays.

Now let me start on one of the caveats of using this publicly available data. Firstly, the above graph is for the state of NSW as a whole. It doesn’t isolate the CBD’s power consumption (something which energy utilities are obviously in a much better position to do). What it does show is how, despite looking pretty, the CBD’s contribution to Earth Hour doesn’t have much of an effect on the power usage of the whole state.

I have prepared graphs for the 2008 event showing a state-by-state breakdown and a total figure.

NSW:

QLD:

SA:

VIC:

Total:

There does seem to be a creeping up of power usage in preparation for the hour, just as the 2007 data suggests. This isn’t a strong statistical correlation because we only have two Earth Hours worth of data, but by the same token I find it hard to believe people can be so sure that it succeeded when there are simply so many variables to power usage.

Here’s some more notes (and caveats).

* I’ve added comparisons to previous Saturdays in March of this year. In my mind there is absolutely no point in comparing energy usage to the previous days in the week (as some people are doing) due to them being weekdays.

* The data is sourced from NEMMCO, the National Electricity Market Management Company. You can find the data I used here, although if you’re reading this more than two months after Earth Hour then you’ll find the data here.

* There isn’t much information with the NEMMCO data so I have no idea what the unit is on the demand figure. I’m guessing Megawatt-hours but I could be wrong.

* If you look at the raw data they quote ‘periods’ not time of the day. The discrete points on my graphs are the average demand for the previous 30 minutes.

* Due to NSW/VIC, QLD and SA all being in three different timezones I’ve normalised all of them to local time (thanks for pointing that out Berry/Dana). This is why the x-axis of the total curve is shorter than for the other graphs (because there’s fewer time periods when I have data for all states).

* I haven’t started the y-axes at zero to exaggerate the fluctuations during the day (i.e. I’m trying to make the fluctuations look larger than they actually are, which inflates the opposite point of view to mine. Hey, they need some help!).

* The vast differences in the SA figures between the first two and last two weeks is due to the maximum temperature in Adelaide being 40 an 38 degrees for the 8th and 15th, compared with 23 and 18 degrees on the following two Saturdays. It just goes to show that having a hot (or really cold) day has far more effect on power consumption than people intentionally minimising their power usage.

* I have no idea what happened in NSW and VIC on the 15th of March to cause usage to be so much higher than the other three Saturdays.

* I can’t do WA because I don’t have the data. I didn’t do Tasmania out of choice.

* The spreadsheet I used can be found here.

* I’ve probably missed something else. Please tell me (catchwa[at]gmail[dot]com) if I have.

There are reports of swarms of people driving their cars (which of course burn fossil fuels) to the city in order to see the spectacle of a lack of light. Ironic (or rather, moronic)? People who light candles during Earth Hour are quite likely just as misguided, judging by this back of the envelope calculation. Finally, even if we reduced the demand for electricity to zero for a whole hour the power stations would still burn oil/coal/gas/unicorns because you can’t simply shut down a power station for an hour and kick it back up again at 8:59.

So if there isn’t any positive environmental impact from Earth Hour what does it achieve? Publicity for the environment? Was a Nobel Prize and and every other news story from the past few years not enough? Can we give it a rest, please?

There’s some more severely anti-Earth Hour articles here and here.

I didn’t realise Western Europe had it so bad.

Link

We are in the home stretch now of what has been a marathon Presidential campaign. The end of the Primary season is in sight, with 11 Republican and Democratic primaries to go. Here are some random thoughts.

The S stands for stupid

At the moment, Obama is in the lead when you consider his total delegate count. The ’superdelegate’ count (individual notable Democrats that could theoretically swing either way) favours Clinton at the moment. You do have to wonder what the Democratic party is trying to achieve with the whole concept. A few days ago, when appearing on The Daily Show, Senator Tom Daschle outlined the only rational reason I could possibly think of.

Daschle: (in creating the Superdelegate concept) they worried that somebody like Colbert could actually become the nominee. They wanted to veto that possiblity

Stewart: And that would be bad…..why?

Stewart has a point. Afterall, it’s the people that elect the president, not a handful of special Democrats. A comedian who thinks he knows something about politics might be better than a politican who thinks he knows something about comedy (cite: any of Bush’s ‘jokes’ that you’ve seen on Letterman over the past 6 or so years).

There is one redeeming (although slightly confusing) feature of the Superdelegate process. From the same interview with Obama-supporting Daschle:

Daschle: We ought to let the elected delegates make the decision who the nominee is and we ought to support the elected delegates.
Stewart: So, whoever is infront in the delegates…
Daschle: Exactly
Stewart: So, if Hilary Clinton is infront in the delegates, you’ll switch to her
Daschle: Absolutely, you’ll have to

I say confusing because if the Superdelegates are only going to vote for the candidate with the most popularly-elected delegates then what is the point in having Superdelegates in the first place? This isn’t a series of Lost, people want a result as soon as possible so they can get behind their favoured candidate (or have time to make up their minds about which party they are going to go with).

Uncle Fester

The Republicans don’t have the same problem as the Democrats in that their nominee has been decided for a few weeks now. John McCain, the presumptive nominee, is a mixed bag of issues and is far more centrist than Huckabee or Romney. He now faces the dilemma as to whether stick with the Republicans who got him the nomination or to push towards the Right, with the lure of Evangelical votes on offer. If he pursues the latter option doing so might risk his more liberal supporters switching to Obama or simply staying home and not voting at all.

It must be said that he takes a brave stance on some issues. When running against Mitt “We ought to double Guantanamo” Romney, he advocated closing it and expediting the judicial proceedings of its prisoners.

What’s wrong with the good old feather?

I find his stance on torture confusing. On the one hand McCain was tortured over a period of more than five years during the Vietnam War. He considers waterboarding to be torture. On the other hand he voted against banning the CIA from using such methods in the interrogation of prisoners.

Let’s define torture here so we have a baseline (from the UN):

any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

The Bush stance on torture seems to be that it’s ok so long as there is the ‘ticking bomb scenario’ in play. This isn’t something that McCain is opposing (in public at least). The ticking bomb situation is where the authorities have detained a suspect and they believe that a ticking bomb of nuclear/high explosive/puppies/rainbows capability is about to go off but they have no idea where. The argument is that when lives are directly at stake that torturing the prisoner is acceptable.

There are, of course problems with this.
* It involves breaking of, or at best sidestepping the Geneva Convention (defining prisoners as enemy combatants, not prisoners of war, for example).

* The prisoner in question may in fact be innocent in which case there is probably no sum on money that could compensate someone for the mental or physical aftermath (McCain, incidentally, cannot raise his arms above shoulder-level due to his years as a prisoner in Vietnam).

* If you are being tortured and are in fact innocent then victims would have no choice but to make up a confession, possibly implicating other innocent people. Not only does this waste the time of the agency in question but when it turns out to be a false confession the people instituting the torture would most likely resume the torture, maybe with a newly instilled vigour.

* There is also the ‘if we do it to them then they will do it to us’ theory. If (generally) law-abiding entities decide that torture in some forms is permissible unlawful entities will take this far beyond the likes of government agencies.

* There is a slippery slope where the ticking time bomb scenario is concerned. The fact is that such situations are likely to be extremely rare. I’m sure that if a nuclear bomb was found and defused in New York that we would have heard about it. Officers, having such an incredibly powerful tool at their disposal could easily be tempted to beef up the claim in order to use torture as a tool to extract whatever they wish.

* Lastly, it portrays a hypocritical attitude towards the whole concept. After World War II, Japanese soldiers were convicted of war crimes because they waterboarded American and Allied prisoners of war. So what, you might say. But for the ticking bomb you only need to look at the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings to see that if Japan had a whiff of a massive bomb that they would be extremely interested in extracting the details in any way that they could.

XP

There is a lot of talk about experience in the race. Clinton promotes her own experience in contrast to Obama, who seems to exude hope more than experience. I’m going to argue that experience doesn’t really matter that much. There is simply no amount of experience that could possibly prepare you for job as the most powerful person in the world. The only exception to this is being an incumbent President, which neither party can produce this time. Hilary, being First Lady during her husband’s administration, will of course talk about her years in the White House but in reality the First Lady does not co-govern with the President. As was pointed out on Countdown recently Clinton’s campaigners cannot name one foreign policy moment where she has been ‘tested by crisis’ because only those in the Executive Office would be the ones to handle such issues. As First Lady, Clinton had no security clearance, no access to National Security Council meetings or White House Presidential security briefings and little or no involvement in the foreign policy flashpoints of the Clinton administration: Somalia, Haiti, Sudan or Afghanistan.

In other words, Clinton is now battling Obama on a basis of fear, which is incredibly disappointing, not only because she herself doesn’t have a leg to stand on on that topic but all she is doing is providing the Republicans with ammunition when (if?) Obama gets the nomination for the Democrats.

So if experience is irrelevant in this race then what should voters be looking for? I believe they should look for a subset of the nebulous umbrella of people skills.

They need to portray a strong public face for their country, a face that can inspire their own citizens but that can also be put on the world stage to do some much-needed fence mending. McCain is not the most charismatic speech-giver. Clinton is ok but by gosh Obama runs rings around both of them, hands down.

The second attribute required is the ability to judge character. The President has many advisers. If you think about the actual number of really hard decisions the President needs to make each day it’s not going to be many. Of those decisions all of them would be backed up by experts in their field. A President that surrounds themselves with people of a good character is going to be an excellent President. I don’t think that Clinton has done this. Her campaign has been about attacking Obama. Obama’s campaign, although often criticised for being little more than hot air, has been overly positive in its message. The fear-mongering only plays to the Republicans. Fear is more of a right-wing thing and the Democrats shouldn’t be playing that card.

Predictions

* Obama wins at the convention, after being ahead in the popular vote. The superdelegates follow popular opinion at the risk of destroying the party.

* John Edwards is the vice-presidential Democratic candidate. Obama has already ruled out running as the vice-presidential candidate. I think the Democrats might think that a Obama-Clinton ticket might be a pushing it a bit. Edwards is a polished white male and that will win them votes (sadly….).

* In order to capture the evangelical vote, McCain names a conservative running mate. I’m going to say Huckabee because he kept running and in doing so split the conservative vote away from Romney. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s been a deal in the works for a long time.

* In the general election the flashpoint is Iraq and Obama takes this debate point over McCain hands down. Even if a war is on the whole sucessful the public gets sick of seeing the bodies come home. This point and the murkiness over torture tip the balance to Obama, who wins.

Let’s see how I do.

Image Credits (Creative Commons):

Obama
http://flickr.com/photos/mountaineerpics/1218476612/

McCain
http://flickr.com/photos/soggydan/2252112316/

Clinton
http://flickr.com/photos/marcn/2114907227/

Sad but true…

(via Digg)