Climate Change Segment on Sunday

Channel 9 had a segment about climate change on the Sunday show.

It featured Tim Flannery, author of "The Weather Makers", William Kininmonth, author of "Climate Change: A Natural Hazard", and Jennifer Marohasy from the Institute of Public Affairs.

I actually read "The Weather Makers" about two years ago on recommendation from an environmentally-inclined friend. As I didn't have a good grounding in the science, I was quite disappointed that it glossed over the theories and facts. Instead, it gave some examples of species going extinct, hypothesizing that it was caused by climate change. (Omitting any proof that such change was caused by humans.)

In this show, he stays true to form, and relies on a "consensus", rather than using any facts.

He says that his predictions are like predicting whether January is likely to be warmer than June. This is clearly absurd, as long-term temperature records show that earth's temperature has been rising and falling (e.g. ice ages, rising and falling sea levels), while we know that summer is predictably warmer than winter due to the earth's tilt exposing the respective hemispheres to the sun. He's predicting that January in ten years (or even fifty years) will be so many degrees hotter than this January, which is quite a different thing.

He also makes a ridiculous analogy about seeing a doctor who says he's 99% certain you have terminal cancer. The most well known advocate of man-made climate change is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Their latest report says there is a 9 out of 10 certainty that humans are at least partly responsible for global warming. So it's really more like a doctor telling you there's a 90% chance you'll get cancer if you eat meat, without telling you what your chances are of getting cancer if you stop eating meat. And 90% isn't 99%. That's a blatant exaggeration.

Maybe there's some proof out there, but the fact that Tim Flannery gets so much promotion suggests there's some definite bias in the media, and that a little more debate could be a good thing.

Noisy New PC

I finally "bit the bullet" and bought a new PC last month.

I had been planning to buy a new home computer for the past two or so years, but I had never been able to justify it to myself. The last computer I bought was the Athlon XP system that I bought in late 2003, and it was still running fine, but my parents said they wanted me to have a new computer for my last semester of uni. How could I say no!?

About a year ago I had decided my system would be based on an Athlon 64 3600+. It was dual-core, much newer so presumably faster than my current system, and was supposed to have a very low power consumption (I think it was 45 watts, which is less than most light bulbs!).

The other question was Windows XP or Windows Vista. I had read several articles about Windows Vista, particularly on Paul Thurrot's SuperSite, and the general agreement was that Vista was OK, but that you should get the 32-bit version rather than the 64-bit version to ensure driver compatibility. (Some peeple had also advised waiting until service pack 1. I would have done that and put off my purchase until about November, but I was cashed up and wanted a computer now!)

When I went to buy the computer, the Athlon 3600 was practically impossible to get, and the 3800 was under $100. I also discovered that the current Athlons all consumed at least 65 watts, so I went for the 4000 as the best value for money option at $79. (More info about Athlon power consumption at the Athlon 64 Wikipedia entry)

I bought the computer from CPL in Melbourne, who had very good prices and had assured me that all the parts I wanted were in stock. On arriving there, I was told my preferred case, the Antec NSK 6500 was out of stock. I had wanted this model as it was the cheapest good-looking case that also had front audio and USB ports. As well as this, Antec are known for making good quality low-noise cases. The salesman advised that I should get an ASUS TA 88 instead.

ASUS TA 88

This turned out to be a bad choice. The system was terribly noisy. I traced it to three things: the extra rear fan, the power supply, and the disk drive bays.

As the first obvious things to do, I removed any unnecessary clamps and ensured the drive screws were firm, and unplugged the rear fan. This helped a little, but the system was still quite noisy. I decided to tolerate it until it was clear what to do.

Otherwise, the system ran well, and Vista turned out to be fine on balance (no issues with drivers or software compatibility), but it's not much faster than my four-year-old computer. I guess each core runs about as fast as my old computer, so my new computer will only shine when running two intensive applications at the same time, or when more applications are multi-threaded (Firefox is the worst culprit). It gets 4.8 on the Windows Vista performance tool, with the processor being the slowest component. Given my time again, I would buy a faster processor, perhaps something like an Athlon 64 4800 after checking out the benchmarks.

Today, I thought I had discovered a solution to my noise issues. I found out Antec had released a new affordable, quiet, energy efficient power supply in Australia called the Antec EarthWatts 380. After reading some favorable reviews at Silent PC Review and Overclockers Australia, I decided to go out and buy one.

My system is now barely audible, except for the minor rattle of the disk drives. The Antec NSK 6500 also had rubber drive grommets, so ideally I would have waited and bought that one instead, but oh well.

Item	Price
Athlon 64 X2 4000+ CPU	$89
ASUS M2A-VM mainboard	$99
Corsair 2 GB PC 5300 DDR 2 RAM	$128
Seagate 80 GB SATA hard disk	N/A
Lite-On DVD reader/writer	N/A
ASUS TA 881 case	$69
Antec EarthWatts 380 power supply	$79
ASUS GeForce 8600 GT SILENT video card	$187
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit	$159
Total	$810

Voluntary Vegetarianism

I started back at Monash Uni last week.

On Wensday, there was an orientation carnival, with most of the clubs and societies setting up stalls.

I signed up for several language and political clubs, including the German Club, the Spanish and Latin American Club, the Labor Club, and the Amnesty Club. (The Monash IT Society and The Monash Greens were noticeably absent.)

There was also a stall for a vegetarian restaurant on campus called Wholefoods. The idea is to volunteer in the kitchen for an hour and get a free meal. This was a revelation to me, as I'd been at Monash for two years, and never knew about Wholefoods. (It's upstairs in the campus centre.)

As I'd scored 3.5 planets on the Ecological Footprint Calculator, eating more vegetarian meals seemed like a good idea, so I signed up and went along to the training session later that day. Knowing I'd be at uni on Mondays, I signed up to do lunch on Mondays.

This week I helped out in the kitchen for two hours. When I started at 12 o'clock, there was already a long line of people waiting for us to start serving. I started serving people, but soon some more staff appeared, so I spent most of the time going back and forth between the kitchen and the front counter topping up the bain-maries.

I met some really great people, including Jay and Lance, who had been working at Wholefoods for ten years. Also met Ollie Bennett, who I knew from The Greens back in 2001, and served Jeremy and Alia who I met on the training.

When I did serve meals, it was really good. The people I served were all quite frendly, and I got a couple of big smiles and compliments. I think we must have served nearly 200 people! :-)

The other highlight was trying the food. I stopped around two o'clock to grab lunch, and had a bit of the spaghetti napolitana and a bit of the dahl. The spaghetti was nice, rather like spaghetti bolognese without the meat, but the dahl was surprisingly good.

I am now looking for any good dahl recipes, so if you know any, please let me know!