Trapped!

Kim and I are now officially criminals. For our trip to Vietnam we stocked up on plenty of presents for Kim's family, including a bread maker so I could introduce Vegemite sandwiches to the heathens (a universal thumbs down by the way Dave, they preferred Nuttella). In addition to this, we bought eight enormous tins of baby milk powder for Kim's friend who's baby has gone off breast milk. We were beginning to think we might be a tad over the aircraft's weight limit, but still we kept packing gallantly. As part of our continuing program of East-West cultural exchange, we decided also to take two of those collapsible foot scooters that were once all the rage during the dot-com boom. Now, we thought, we really ARE over the limit. Singapore airlines allows up to twenty kilograms of checked luggage, and seven kilograms of carry-on per person, or fifty four kilos between us, and we had the feeling we had shot way through that.
So we turned up to the airport, checked in, and sure enough, our checked luggage was ten kilos over. This turned out to be no big deal, Kim has a very sweet smile, and my dumb, naive first time traveller impersonation exhibits an approximation to sincerity that only reflexive relationships can. We were waved right through.
At this stage we thought the danger had passed. Upon passing through the customs X-ray
check however, our carry-on was treacherously weighed! From an allowable fourteen kilos we came in at a whopping forty! Of course, the Aussie customs guy was as unsmiling and cold as any Stalinist bureaucrat, and he wrote "Excess Weight twenty six kg*$30=$780" at the top of our boarding passes. The bastard wouldn't even let us go out of the departure lounge to dump our stuff and come back in. Well, I thought, that's our holiday gone. Kim however, is not to be trifled with. She made the rather insightful observation that the guy made no entries into his computer and that in fact, the only record of our crime was in our possession. Furthermore, we had printed out our own boarding passes from home (a relatively recent advance in e-ticketing for which all criminal opportunities have evidently, not yet been exposed). Who was to say then, that our boarding passes had to be an A4 page? What if, for example, they had a few inches at the top shaved off? Of course, my pocket-knife scissors were stowed away, but Kim, ever resourceful, used her laminated bakers delight rewards card as a makeshift paper knife, and calmly eviscerated our little problem. Not a very big change to the universe. The only difference was that instead of two sheets of paper we now had two sheets and two little strips. Now, at this point, I admit I was a little worried. I am pretty sure that the penalty for trying to avoid paying $780 is even more than $780, but we were committed now. Splitting up to avoid detection we lined up to board, Kim with 10 kilos, and me with 30, trying to look as though we were each carrying 7. My thinking though, was that the people checking our passes are bored, more worried about drugs than illicit Higgs boson surpluses, and, at 11:45pm, starting to get tired. Remembering my CIA days (or at least Jack Ryan's), I attempted with nonchalance to blend in with the all-Asian-Businessman crowd as much as possible.
Of course, you know how this ends. If we had gotten caught you would not now be reading this smug, self-congratulatory post. Of course we got through, without a further hassle, and I have to take my hat to my beautiful partner in crime. Kim is a genius at counter-counter-espionage. Perhaps the difference between her and me is that while I have grown up believing that surveillance bureaucracy is implacable, unreasonable, and omni-cognisant, Kim's experience is that they are implacable, unreasonable, dysfunctional, half-paralysed, and spasming. Thus, she is possibly better trained to spot loopholes in the system.
I'd like to end this post with a question posed to my readers (of which I'm sure there are none, given my appallingly long absence from this blog); Do you believe that Kim and I, weighing vastly less than the average passenger, should feel guilty about overloading the plane, even though our combined human-luggage weight is still less than normal? Should obese people be charged excess baggage? Has Sam read too many Tom Clancy novels? These are questions, I think, for us all to ponder as we go about our daily lives.
Until next time, Ye Hasera, and goodnight.

Micalef is back!

The title says it all.

S.O.A.P.

I know this may be the last post of mine that anybody reads, but this morning I watched Snakes on a Plane. I was originally only going to hire out Star Trek IV, V, and VI (so not nerdy at all then) , but between the 5 movies for $7 deal they had going, and the nudity warning on the front cover, I decided to go for it. Afterwards, I went here. In homage to the original reason I went to the video store, I wrote this post with a stilted, "William Shatner" style accent in mind. Out of respect for the brave men and women of the USS Enterprise I would appreciate it if the reader were to read aloud in just such a fashion.
For those of you who can't infer the plot from the title, hundreds of pheromone enhanced venomous snakes are set loose on a plane with the intention of murdering a witness to a gangland killing. This being a science student's blog, I have to show everyone how smart I am by criticizing the film's plot holes, of which I see two. The first is not too interesting; but if the mob could do this, surely they could plant a bomb on the plane and have done with it? The second though is the failure of our protagonists to utilize what is both a snake's natural enemy and an abundant resource at 40 000 ft, extreme cold. Outside the fuselage, air temperature hovers around -60 C. Being reptiles, exposure to any sub-freezing environment would render these slippery ophidians completely inactive- pheromones or no pheromones, and at around -20 C ( a temperature still survivable by humans who all huddled together with blankets) you can be pretty sure most of them would succumb. In short, if I was king of the world, my hero and namesake might well have shouted, "Lets start chillin' the motherfuckin' air on this motherfuckin' plane!"

Atheism

Sorry John Safran, but I'm not too stupid to be an atheist. It's true I haven't read "A Brief History of Time," I've been too busy writing a thesis on relativistic quantum mechanics, so yes, I think I could give a pretty good explanation on why the Big Bang is better than genesis as an explanation of cosmic origins. More to the point though, Christians are stupid not because we just now have scientific explanations of nature which are better than biblical ones, but because we've always had competing religious explanations which are at least no worse.

Thank you India

Suppose you were a juror at a murder trial. In his opening address, the defence lawyer says, "My client is not guilty of this crime. Certainly he pulled the trigger on a gun he knew to be working properly, loaded, chambered, and off safety. Yes, the gun was pointing directly at the victim at point blank range, but my client did not kill this man. The bullet did. In fact, it wasn't even the bullet, but rather a hole opening in the victim's head allowing his brains to dribble out onto the carpet. It is this hole-in-the-head who is the real perpetrator here, as such, the hole should be on trial."
This argument is of course completely nonsensical. If a person knows that effect Z will very very likely succeed cause A, and then proceeds with A, that person is morally responsible for Z, irrespective of how many other letters in the alphabet are involved in between. Why am I using this first blog entry to lecture on a simple and non-controversial point of basic morality?
Well, if the reader grows tired of hypothetical and abstract examples of this concept consider this. Suppose there was a country with vast uranium reserves, and a conviction that they should only be used for peaceful purposes. Let's for the sake of argument call this country "Australia." Suppose further there was another country with very limited reserves, and both an active nuclear weapons program, and a civil nuclear power program. Let us call this country "India." Now suppose India had publicly stated, on many occasions, that they would like to devote all of their domestic reserves to bomb making and rely on imported uranium for their civil program, in effect using the extra material to displace more of their original into military applications. Economists by the way, call this well studied process of resource displacement fungibility. Enter Australia's foreign minister (let's call him "Dame Edna"). Dame Edna says that Australia has decided to sell its uranium to India, on the condition that not one Australian atom becomes part of an Indian bomb, or even becomes involved in fission reactors on military warships. I assume that Dame Edna is aware of fungibility, and is not an idiot (actually not a foregone conclusion), but his justification of the new policy makes as much sense as the defence lawyer's "not guilty" plea. Any way you look at it, Australia is now actively supplying India with uranium for bombs.
Now, helping India acquire weapons of mass destruction is perhaps a defensible position. After all, India is a stable, liberal democracy, which has never been caught proliferating. It has justifiable concerns about its nuclear armed neighbor and semi-enemy Pakistan. Perhaps we should be having a debate about preferentially arming our good friends against our not-so-good friends, with weapons so terrible neither side dares to use them. I, like many before me, believe there is a reason this doctrine had the acronym MAD, but at least there is an argument to be made. What isn't acceptable however is the debate poisoning bile that passes for politics in this country, where our leaders try to convince us that 2 and 2 isn't 4, just because they add then subtract a 3 in the middle of the calculation.