2012-05-19T16:11:23Z Wally Crocker Copyright 2012, Wally Crocker SPHPBLOG statistics lie, and northern Europeans love their freedom of choice more than their heads.

I've devised a thought experiment to demonstrate that helmets are indeed safe.
1. Imagine kidnapping someone who believes that helmets are not helpful.
2. Give them a choice between having their head smacked with a cricket bat:
a) without a helmet on, and
b) with a helmet on.

Does anyone go for a? Probably not. People are willing to see reason when it's smacking them in the face.

The helmet debate should not be one of safety, but of freedom of choice. The Swedes and some others in that region legally force helmets upon heads deemed too young to make intelligent decisions. It's just that our system (perhaps rightfully) doesn't deem anyone intelligent enough to make their own decisions.
]]> http://www.walradio.com/life/index.php?entry=entry100923-170432 2010-09-24T00:00:00Z 2010-09-24T00:00:00Z
It is not particularly surprising that they share similar fashion sense and hair styles and the like, but they also share physical traits.

At Woodford, the Sydney Festival opening night, and just generally on the street and in bars I've noticed quite a lot of girls hanging around together in groups of two or three who are close to the same height and build. Short girls with short girls, tall girls with tall girls, average girls with average girls, fat girls with fat girls.

Why?

Does the same happen with guys?
]]> http://www.walradio.com/life/index.php?entry=entry100111-042810 2010-01-11T00:00:00Z 2010-01-11T00:00:00Z Philosophy Bites she put forward an argument that you can't be rationally optimistic without believing in a higher power.

The argument goes a little like this:

1. There is evil in the world that people can't do anything about. Atrocities like the holocaust, Stalin's efforts, all the fun of the Balkans... It's not really looking like these things will ever stop happening, and it won't because people are neither smart enough or good enough to stop it.

Fair enough. I can dig that.

2. A higher power could stop it.

Again fair enough. I guess they could if they were a higher enough power.

3. If we are to believe these evils will ever cease, we must believe in a higher power.

And finally, fair enough. If I agree with the first two, which I suppose I do, then I must agree with the third. It turns out I agree with Marilyn McCord Adams' argument that you can't be rationally optimistic without believing in a higher power. Praise the Lord?

Not quite. Even though I agree with it, I've still got issues with this silly argument:
- it calls us to believe in something without any evidence of its existence,
- it doesn't help that God is able to stop the evil if he doesn't do so, and
- her definition of optimism.

The point of the argument is silly for starters. It is akin to saying there is something we can't stop with anything we know about, and to believe we can stop it means believing in something imaginary. I would much rather go along being a pessimist than believe in something that probably doesn't exist.

She says the value in this is that if you don't believe in God you can't be optimistic, and optimism helps you leader a fuller happier life. Bollocks! I might not be optimistic about major atrocities never happening again, but I'm optimistic about a hell of a lot of other things. She recognises that certain kinds of optimism can still be rational, but she's wrong in thinking that these kinds of optimism are not important.

Marilyn McCord Adams defines optimism as believing that things can be fixed which only a higher power can fix. Taking that definition it's impossible to disagree with her, but it should make the argument completely uninteresting. It is compelling that I am compelled to discuss it.
]]> http://www.walradio.com/life/index.php?entry=entry090909-051153 2009-09-09T00:00:00Z 2009-09-09T00:00:00Z
On the way back to Haulien we hitch hiked. We've done it before, but this time it was almost accidental. The next bus was in an hour or two and we were waiting for a taxi when a young Taiwanese couple just stopped and offered us a lift.

Hitch hiking sounds like a fairly scary activity to some, but Millerine and I have hitch hiked in Estonia, Wales and now Taiwan and it's nearly always been a breeze. Once we had a strange pot smoking born again christian pick us up in Estonia who worried me a little, but otherwise the people who have picked us up have been very friendly. The guy in Wales even took us on a tour of his town when we arrived (and told us his entire life story).

When we've hitched a ride it's always been over a short distance of about 10km - 30km. In every case we've been waiting at a bus stop. Buses are infrequent, and can take ages to cover what it will take a short distance in a car, so it can be a big time saver.]]> http://www.walradio.com/life/index.php?entry=entry090801-055400 2009-08-01T00:00:00Z 2009-08-01T00:00:00Z
We managed to find a bus to the mountain town of Rueili, about half way to Alishan. The bus trip was fairly epic. It took about three hours of winding up a steep mountain road, which didn't treat my hangover all that well. The view was great until it got dark, and then you could see lights all over the mountains.

The people at our Hotel were very friendly and fed us a good simple dinner and breakfast, but the bed was rock hard and there was a lot of noise. It was on the side of the mountain and the views reminded me a bit of Podolševa in Slovenia, except with more tea, bananas and bamboo. The town is between 1000m and 1200m altitude.

In the morning the hotel guy drove us to the trailhead for the Rueili-Fenchihu historic trail. It's a 7km walk, but the first 3km is quite a steep upwards climb. It was through a shady bamboo forest and the views were great, but I was sweating a lot and a bit worried that 1.2L of water was nowhere near enough. The trail leveled off and got easier by about halfway though.

Fenchihu itself was a nice but very touristy little mountain village (all local tourists I think - we were the only white people there). For NT$100 we got a good feed of soup and some rice and vegies (served by none other than Confucious himself), then jumped on the train to go back to Chiayi. This is a tourist attraction in itself. It's a tiny little narrow guage railway that ambles down the mountain through tunnels and over bridges. The mountain views are good but we were going through a fair bit of cloud so the visibility wasn't great.

From Chiayi we are taking the High Speed Rail to Taipei where we'll stay the night.]]> http://www.walradio.com/life/index.php?entry=entry090724-072802 2009-07-24T00:00:00Z 2009-07-24T00:00:00Z
A day or two before the tournament started I visited the main stadium to check out the facilities. It's a new 40,000 seat stadium, so a great place to have the tournament. We would be running everything from the control room, which is like a commentators box with a good view of the fields. We needed an internet connection to run our system, and there was no internet connection in the control room so it was lucky the wifi that was available in the stadium was also available (although a weak connection) in the control room.

Although the two days before the tournament were pretty busy for me, I managed to see a couple of sports. Canoe Polo was fairly exciting and we saw Australia beat Spain, but the softball was a pretty low scoring affair. All other sports we tried to get tickets to were sold out.

The frisbee started off with a bang. Australia went down to the US by two points, but showed they were pretty strong. The play was exciting and I think it proved the sport could be a crowd pleaser. The Chinese Taipei games particularly drew a large crowd in the thousands. They used line assistants who could help with only line calls and up/down calls if asked. Most importantly they signalled what any calls were to the scorers and the crowd so you could tell what was going on when a call was made.

The most exciting game of the tournament was on the second day, Australia vs Japan. Japan had showed they were strong and were a favourite to join US in the final, but Australia has the Dowle/Neild freakshow, and all our other guys were awesome. Katie Bradstock managed to shut down their pocket rocket girl, and it was pretty even. It was incredibly tense, with Australia winning by a point. I was in the crowd for that game, and it was absolutely electric. The first Japan/US game on the last day which Japan won by two points was also fantastic.

In the control room I was incredibly busy. The first morning in particular when I was still fixing bugs and fixing the schedule in the database while scoring the game was a tough one. But by the afternoon we had the site working well, with our media girls able to put up reports for each game, and a lot of people had started to watch the live scoreboard. Even though we had some trouble with it at the beginning there was a lot of positive feedback by the second day.

The website is probably still up at http://wg09.net. It started of as not much but grew over the three days. I'm happy I used Joomla, as it made it fairly easy to update content and menus as we went along. For things like team bios and the like it was obvious we needed to have that happening before the tournament though.

A few things I've taken out of the tournament:
- To be a great team you need to have no weak points.
- It's most important for girls to be quick and good defenders, then being able to make good decisions with the disc, cut well and take hard catches. Having them be awesome throwers is of course important, but less so than those other things.
- The only thing stopping ultimate from being a great spectator sport has nothing to do with refs. It's all about the quality of play. At Worlds and things like Australian Nationals there are still a lot of low level games which aren't great to watch, but at World Games all teams are great, so it really works as a crowd pleaser.
]]> http://www.walradio.com/life/index.php?entry=entry090723-073549 2009-07-23T00:00:00Z 2009-07-23T00:00:00Z World Games are being held. We're here to watch the frisbee, which I love. I love frisbee so much that I forget to not play when I shouldn't. The night before leaving I had to get my last frisbee fix for two weeks, and played with a bit of a cold. By the end of the night I was coughing uncontrollably and well on my way to being properly ill.

After the three sector, two day trip to Taiwan I was in full fever mode, and they busted me with the heat detectors at the airport. They are paranoid about the flu here, and surgical masks are quite common. I now have quite a collection of them.

I visited the hospital which was fairly easy as the doctor spoke English. There aren't that many English speakers here, but it seems that anyone who does speak is willing to be helpful and interpret when it's needed.
]]> http://www.walradio.com/life/index.php?entry=entry090718-234251 2009-07-19T00:00:00Z 2009-07-19T00:00:00Z 1. Shit they're stopping and I'm going way to fast! I'm rooted.
2. Brake.
3. Why is my right hand not on the brake. There it is. Go right hand brake! (I'd probably just been indicating with my right hand or something).
4. Damn. Too much left hand (front) brake. Here we go.
5. That back windscreen was rather bouncy.

This probably happened in about half a second. I wasn't frightened or worried about injury or anything like that - just working on stopping, which is handy as that's what I needed to do. Hooray for reactions.

It was pretty lucky the way things worked out. My cleats came out, so when the bike flipped I somehow landed on my feet. There was still a lot of forward momentum, but instead of faceplanting into bitumen I had a reasonably soft landing against the back of the hatchback.

The total damage from the incident was a crack in my front light. I rode away without so much as a bruise, but my legs were a little wobbly after all the excitement.]]> http://www.walradio.com/life/index.php?entry=entry090608-053918 2009-06-08T00:00:00Z 2009-06-08T00:00:00Z
The interviewing bit I understand. Sometimes these people have interesting things to say about their art. I just don't get the red carpet and all the people watching. What about these people is worth going out of your way to look at from a distance? If they were aesthetically appealing enough to travel for then it would all be good, but they're not. They're just famous people.

The red carpet didn't bother me, as I could just walk past it to the bar. The half hour or so of speeches did a little. The traditional owners of the land were "recognised" too often to be interesting and the NSW minister for the arts proved herself to be either a bad public speaker or a dope. Three of the five speakers had something useful to say though.

Having said all that, it was a worthwhile event to go to. The film (Looking for Eric by Ken Loach) was entertaining. It's good to be watching a lightly humourous film in a crowd packed with beautiful people, all keen to laugh at any hint of a joke to demonstrate they understood it.

I'm struggling to not sound like a horrible cynic. In actuality I had a good time and really enjoyed the film. There are a bunch of other SFF films to look forward to over the next couple of weeks, and the opener has given me some confidence about them.
]]> http://www.walradio.com/life/index.php?entry=entry090604-003540 2009-06-04T00:00:00Z 2009-06-04T00:00:00Z back into homebrewing about half a year ago. I've made six batches since I started in October:
- Coopers Lager
- Coopers Real Ale with strawberries
- Coopers Lager with honey
- Coopers Stout with chocolate and cocoa
- Coopers European Lager
- Brewcraft Premium Belgian Ale

To make the flavoured beers I just added strawberries, honey, or melted chocolate and cocoa to the mix before adding the water. The Strawberry Ale and Honey Lager were both winners with a nice subtle flavour coming through, but the Chocolate Stout just tastes like a slightly bitter stout.

The European Lager and Belgian Stout are both a little more expensive to make (the Belgian being about twice the price of normal beer) but are better tasting. I've only had a preview of the Belgian because it's not quite ready, but it's going to be great.

None of them have been failures, but so far friends have only gotten excited about the European Lager, and that's the big test. The strawberry and honey beers also got a seal of approval, but others were not so popular. Millerine is happy to drink them, so they can't be too bad.

The main change I've made since starting is moving from 740ml plastic bottles to 330ml glass bottles. The plastic is much easier at bottling time, and I still use them when I have them, but not as sustainable, and I was just drinking too much beer. The glass bottles are free from friends and parties, are a more manageable everyday drinking size, and just seem nicer.

Anyway, at less than $10 a carton for a good to great beer, I'm not about to stop making it.]]> http://www.walradio.com/life/index.php?entry=entry090309-030246 2009-03-09T00:00:00Z 2009-03-09T00:00:00Z