Hiatus

Off to Natcon in Adelaide. I'll keep y'all posted when I can. Aeroplanes, swine 'flu, rabid SF fans... I've got so much to look forward to!

Well, At Least Some Of The Future Happened

I know. We're not living with jetpacks, flying cars, starships, anti-gravity, or any of that other cool stuff they promised us. And it sucks. But it turns out that at least some of the groovy future is with us at last. Check this article:

http://www.unsw.edu.au/news/pad/articles/2009/may/Blind_stemcells.html

No shit! Fine work from an Australian university -- and more importantly, a huge forkin' stride in The Right Direction for stem cell research, human health and well-being, and me not needing to get glasses any time soon. (Full disclosure: I seem to have inherited my eyesight from my father. So far, I'm still 20/20 or better.)

It's nice to get some good news once in a while, eh?

Then there's this:

Vale David Eddings

What can I say? I never liked the man's work. From the outset, I found it terribly derivative, heavily manufactured, and clumsy. But I know that he made a lot of people very happy with his fiction -- and so, I'll make a liar of Marc Antony here. Let the evil be interr'd with the man's bones, and the good live after. Eddings seemed to be a decent bloke, and didn't have any pretensions about the quality of his writing. He had a good innings.

School Holidays

The etymology of the word 'holiday' is intriguing, to say the least. It derives from the term 'holy day', of course -- any of the umpteen zillion days selected by the Most Catholic Church to commemorate the appallingly hideous deaths of a roster of saints expanding so rapidly that several popes have died in the effort to bring the thing under some semblance of control, and at least one new branch of mathematics has been conceived purely to estimate the length of time it will take before pretty much everyone in the world has been martyred.

The point of all these holy days was, in theory, rest. That and giving lots of money to the Church, naturally. If you were a medieval peasant, and it happened to be St Tenesmus' Day (St Tenesmus of the Molten Lead Enema, patron saint of lower-bowel dysfunction, whose name is still remembered in medical jargon through the term 'Tenesmus', meaning 'painful and ineffective straining of bowels') you could legitimately tell your feudal overlord to get fucked, because your immortal soul required you to sit around on your arse all day, praying that someone else would come along to do the fieldwork. Or something.

Flash forward a couple hundred years. Or so. And now we come to the concept of 'school holidays'.

Where's the idea of 'rest' now? For us medieval peons, things have gone way the fuck downhill. Dad's don't 'rest' during school holidays. We scheme. We manipulate. We control. We cook, clean, and most of all, we entertain. At length. Regardless of health, sanity, fiscal position, or any other concern, when the dreaded School Holidays come, we Must Be Dad no matter what the cost.

I can hear them outside my study right now. The boys are trying to capture their pet rats, who use their ridiculously large cage to steer clear of the brutes as far as possible. And the Mau-Mau has found the little button accordion Natalie bought for Christmas a couple years back... she's serenading the rat-catching effort at the top of her lungs. What are they planning to do with their now-very-nervous rats once captured? Does it have anything to do with the new lot of cardboard-box "army tanks" being built? Where do the underpants they put on the cat fit into this equation? (And in the name of God, why did the cat sit still for that?)

Most importantly: how can I get out of here without them noticing?

Gearing Up For Swine Fear

So. In not too long, I'll be off for a couple days to the mainland. National SF con time. And of course, that means airplanes, and airports, and lots of close contact and recycled air breathed by people who've been hanging around people who've been gettin' close to people who've got The Dreaded Swine Flu.

Can't really say I'm looking forward to that. Particularly as -- lucky me! -- I seem to have already caught my mandatory pre-Con Upper Respiratory Tract infection. Mild sore throat last night, felt vaguely like unwiped shit all day, increasingly irresistible and imperative cough happening now.

Well, fuck.

At least I'll have an excuse to buy a couple of those goofy masks from the pharma folk to wear on the 'planes and round the airports. I probably ought to get one and wear it whether or not I'm unwell... but if I'm coughing, people will be glad to see I've got a facefull of filter paper, I guess.

Blah.

In other news, Kate the Westralian Medical Student has come a-visiting once more. She's part of a programme that seeds med students out to rural medical practices around Australia for short periods, and this is her third and final trek to Scottsdale. It's a shame, really. Kate's a sweetie. She's gone to the pub with Nat this evening to be part of the music scene - and she's even taken along the Mau-Mau, which is great. Natalie still gets to play, the Mau-Mau gets to dig on the music, and I don't have to contend with herding three increasingly boisterous kids around the pub until something goes bwoinnggg! and the wheels fall off.

Yay for Kate! Actually, all the medical students we've had come a-visiting have been great. The programme in question is called the John Flynn Scholarship Programme, and if you know any medical students, you might recommend it to 'em. They get paid to do a couple weeks in rural posts, accommodation included. They see some really interesting medicine, hang out in places they might not go otherwise, and maybe get a feel for doctoring in the bush. Good gear!

Kind Of Suspected As Much...

This is an excerpt from the abstract of an article published in the latest volume of the journal Intelligence -- which is precisely what it sounds like: a scientific journal for publication of articles on research into the nature of intelligence. It's a real-live peer-reviewed scientific journal, and has a pretty reasonable reputation from what I can glean.

The excerpt:

Conservatism and cognitive ability are negatively correlated. The evidence is based on 1254 community college students and 1600 foreign students seeking entry to United States' universities. At the individual level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with SAT, Vocabulary, and Analogy test scores. At the national level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with measures of education (e.g., gross enrollment at primary, secondary, and tertiary levels) and performance on mathematics and reading assessments from the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) project.

The full article is not accessible without pay, and to be honest, I'm not that interested. The level of debate it might provoke is almost certain to dive down to subterranean levels within picoseconds. And certainly, without being able to read the article in full I have no idea what their definitions of 'Conservatism' include, nor the degree of negative correlation, nor the statistical approaches used.

I do note the sample size is pretty decent, and the use of college students and foreign-entry students pretty well rules out this being a sample of down-home Cletus the Yokel types. Of course, going through community colleges is an interesting choice, and naturally one has to wonder what kind of stats you'd get in the Ivy Leagues and so forth. Nevertheless, it's a bold, interesting statement -- all the more interesting since it appears to originate from notoriously-conservative Singapore.

I also wonder, naturally, what would happen if they broke the picture down to differentiate between fiscal conservatism and social conservatism. I certainly see a difference there, at any rate.

In any case, it's worth a laugh, eh? No doubt it's all part of that infamous world-wide conspiracy of left-wing acadaemia...

Formal Assessment

...and that was yesterday, right there. I had the Mau-Mau and the Elder Son, and we had to go to Launceston so Elder Son could have his 'Formal Assessment'.

That's when the kid sits down with a qualified individual appointed and authorised by the Ed Dept, and they go through a bunch of tests to decide where the kid falls on various curves, and what kind of oddball needs he might have to make school work better for him. This particular version takes a bit over three hours.

So we shunted Smaller Son down to the bus stop. Then we took off for Launceston, and managed to wriggle around through the back streets by the gorge until we found Trevallyn School. We were a bit early, which caused a minor fuss because nobody seemed to know about us -- but only five minutes after we arrived, the assessing officer turned up, and everything was under control. The Mau-Mau and I left Elder Son on the job, and we took off to do our own errands.

• New socks. What the fuck do children do with their socks? Is there an entire planetoid of abandoned socks drifting silently behind the moon, where we can't detect it?
  
• Another Wii remote: yeah, okay. Listen -- any of you lot with kids, the Rayman Raving Rabbids games are pretty damned funny. They consist of a loosely-connected series of mini-games which involve the fullest range of Wii-remote manipulations I've seen yet, and between the whacked-out animation and the happily twisted nature of the games themselves, they're pretty fabulous. But the sequel is actually better, because it includes a full 'party mode' in which up to four people can play these demented games against one another. Imagine four of us there, all trying to boogie along to the cues provided while the Wii thumps out "Jungle Boogie"...
  
• Dinner: I got some barramundi. And a squid tube. Just one. Plus some other stuff.
• New plants: some thornless blackberries -- getting more later, I think -- and a pair of kiwis. (Again, getting more.) The old kiwi vines were placed right next to the deck, which was unbelievably silly. Don't plant kiwi vines anywhere near your house, unless you feel like researching a sequel to "Day Of The Triffids".
• Books -- no trip to Launceston is complete without a buzz through the secondhand book places.
  

By the time we were done with everything (there was more, but I can't recall it offhand. Oh -- a long and fruitless search for some insulation material...) it was almost time to collect The Boy. The Mau-Mau and I grabbed some lunch, and picked up a few bits and pieces for Elder Son, and then the phone rocked on (my phone plays "Werewolves of London". Good thing I like the song, eh?) so we went back to Trevallyn.

Elder Son was tired and hungry, but apparently he enjoyed himself. And the assessment officer was really great -- we had a long talk about the whole edumacation thing. She's got a couple kids of her own who fall into the high-end category (possibly why she's doing what she does?) and had a lot of sympathy and insight.

We won't know the results of the assessment for a while, of course. There's another meeting to come with the school as well, naturally. But hopefully, hopefully this will see the Elder Son being officially recognised as having 'different needs', and give the school the opportunity to develop something appropriate for him.

The rest of the day? Ah, well. Natalie made it home a bit late. By that time, I'd already overseen the violin practice, the cello practice, and the typing practice. Loaded the firewood box. Brought in the laundry, put up some more. Stoked the fire. Cooked barramundi and calamari and baked potatoes and green salad. Organised the bathtime, etc.

Heh. The boys were pleased with my calamari -- because I stripped the tough outer membrane off the squid before I sliced it into rings. They were really interested in the membrane itself, and really delighted to discover that the Flinthart version of calamari isn't rubbery and stretchy. I've probably made a mess for myself in the future, though. Now they'll never be happy with cheap chippery calamari again, and I'll have to cook the stuff at home more often, and I can't buy it except in Launceston or Bridport...

The Most Amazingly Depressing Conversation I've Ever Had With A Child Of Any Age

It came from Younger Son, of course. We were riding the scenic chairlift over Cataract Gorge on the weekend. The conversation went like this:

"If you fell out of an aeroplane, would it be better to fall on land or water?"

"Well -- if you fall that far, it doesn't matter. You move so fast the water hasn't got time to get out of your way, and you just go splat!"

"Oh. What if the water was really deep?"

"Nope. Doesn't matter."

"Oh." Long pause. "If I died..."

"...I'd be really depressed. Please don't do that."

"Oh. If you died..."

"No, I'm trying to avoid that too. It's boring."

"Well, if you were going to die, would you want a quick death or a slow one?"

(Pause while I look at him in some horror.) "Uhh. I'll take the quick one, thanks."

"Me too. 'Cause if you died slowly, you'd have time to realise you were dying, and then you'd be sad."



Well. Fuck me. What else do you say to something like that? There are times when that little bugger scares me a little. What's he doing thinking about something like that at age six? And being so fearsomely rational about it? Yikes!

Dammit. Just thinking about that conversation makes me sad again!