The Slightly Disgruntled Scientist

Over the last few years I have insisted on doing the conscientious thing with electronic waste — refusing to discard it with the other household rubbish, keeping it instead for recycling at our local tip. Of course, the rather predictable result of this was that we accumulated boxes upon boxes of batteries, compact fluorescent bulbs, dead mobile phones, old televisions and computers, and the occasional piece of old scientific equipment.

We finally got around to getting rid of it all yesterday, and amongst the pieces of useless garbage were two things I found difficult to part with.

The first was an old, yellowing (yes, yellowing) PC — the first one I ever bought with my own money. I named it Brad, and Brad dual-booted RedHat Linux 5 (yes, back when the community desktop release was actually still called RedHat) along with Windows 2000. This was also my first foray into using Linux. I had to hand-tweak the LILO command-line to get it to boot RedHat off an Ultra-ATA/66 hard drive and the kernel crashed hard every time I used a dodgy USB drive but I was okay with that because I wanted to see what I could do with it! (As it turned out, very little, because come on... RedHat FIVE. I later installed 6.1, which allowed me to curse RedHat's package management and play Globulation.)

The second was a laptop that I bought while doing honours in physics. The most satisfying thing I ever did with it was also the first thing I did with it — erasing every byte of the Windows XP installation and installing Debian Woody (3.0). (I also completed my physics honours project, engineering final year project and a bunch of other stuff on it, but whatever.) I won't tell you what I named it though.

Perhaps it's strange that I would get so attached to these things, since I'm an electronic engineer. It'd be like a carpenter getting sentimental about offcuts, or a surgeon feeling empathy for humans. But my desire to keep these objects — objects that moved house several times and outlasted relationships — is also coupled with an innate desire to not see them wasted (or running Microsoft code).

I later refurbished Brad and used it as a computational server for the number crunching needed for my engineering project. The laptop was also occasionally repurposed as a wireless-to-ethernet NAT router. I've taken both of them apart at times to recover or wipe data from old hard drives. It occurred to me that this is the first time since I've owned either of them that they've sat unused for more than a few months.

But that aw... not yet feeling I got every time I moved house wasn't just my MacGuyver-league ingenuity and resourceful nature speaking up. It really did make me truly sad to think of these marvels of tech going unused before they were actually useless. We take weird kinds of rocks, give them performance enhancing chemicals and then they can add up, take direction from our hands, and field system calls from RedHat's frickin' useless package manager. Those two machines were with me throughout some of the most emotionally tumultuous blah blah blah monumentally important blah blah blah entire life, and they just didn't quit.

They're gone now though. Hard drives erased and dropped respectfully into a multiskip. Brad, «laptop hostname redacted»… I'll miss you.

I've been involved with political parties of one kind or another for almost ten years now — on and off, as my sanity ran out or was replenished. To help those who might be thinking of making a foray into the world of politics, I've made this handy chart.

The Sun comes up*, Australian journalists speculate endlessly about the Australian Labor Party leadership. Or, in fact, repeatedly fail to find fuel for the story.

Journalists can write whatever they want, really. But one bit of rhetoric in particular is really starting to aggravate me, a spooky, sinister incantation, reminiscent of Miyazaki's more sinister creations: The Faceless Men.

Who — or what — are the Faceless Men? This amorphous group of unidentifiable entities were, of course, the ones behind the 2010 leadership spill that saw the ALP substitute one Prime Minister for another without even telling any journalists at all, not even the ones that stood around outside parliament house every morning for days and days, where it's really frickin' cold you know and WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL US THIS WAS GOING TO GO DOWN GUYS?

The funny thing is, it took only a cursory effort on my part to find out that these people do, in fact, have faces. Yes, a whole one each! Identities too, and careers, and for all that they might plot and scheme and conspire... they do so within systems that have these very well documented rules that basically anyone can get a copy of to read at their leisure. Amazing!

I don't deny that changing the Prime Minister mid-term was a bit of a poor move. Not because it was innately controversial, but a lot of people do actually vote for one member of parliament because they're being led by another, and we all know that, and in many ways it's quite a reasonable thing to do. But there seems to be this idea that since party powerbrokers don't engage with the media cycle — since they don't put out press releases, or make bombastic remarks about their colleagues, or get caught «verb»ing with «noun»s in a bunny costume... there's this idea that this gives them powers of invisibility.

Conniving as the Kaonashi may be, they possess very few supernatural powers and invisibility is not amongst them. It's journalists who want to treat politicians like celebrities instead of civil servants. Presumably it sells more papers (although I don't see how they'd know this having never tried it the other way). But this template doesn't work when you try to apply it to committee processes, standing orders, internal party procedures, or, y'know, the entire Westminster system. That's boring. The men were faceless not because they'd had an encounter with the spirit Koh, but because they were not interesting enough to give press time to, just like the almost-two-hundred pieces of legislation that have been passed through parliament since August 2010 (come on, name twenty, I bet you can't).

Journalists call them "faceless men" because most Australian voters were never really aware of their existence until this spill took place. But then, whose job is it to keep Australian voters informed? For me, the most direct translation of the phrase "faceless men" is simply, we were looking the other way when this thing happened, and now no-one really has the spine to say that this is not the story you think it is.

This is a modified cross post from the WA Democrats' site. I posted it here because it's a nearly-perfect snapshot of my own state of mind at various points over the last ten years. It encapsulates all of the frustration I felt when I decided to re-engage with politics. So it might be a little out of context here, but if you know me at all, you should read it.

A version of this article was originally published in the June 2011 edition of the Australian Democrats' National Journal as a call for us to create a new science and technology policy. I am now the National Policy Coordinator for Science and Technology, and will be running public forums on science and politics to get input from the people closest to these issues.

In early March this year a rumour emerged regarding possible budget cuts of up to $400 million to medical research. It was one rumour out of several floating around; it was not part of a call to arms or outraged opinion piece, just another party leak that made it into the news cycle.

But the response from the community was phenomenal.

Within days, the Discoveries Need Dollars campaign was launched. Soon it was all over Facebook and Twitter, there were pieces written about it on Crikey and ABC's The Drum, and eventually there appeared editorials and human interest articles in the Australian and most state papers. More than 12000 people turned up to rallies in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Canberra, Perth, Darwin and Brisbane — not just scientists, but administrators, scientific support staff, survivors of diseases made treatable by Australian research, and relatives of those whose lives were lost to disease but still improved by medical science. Central business districts became a sea of white coats, orange signs, business attire, petitions, clipboards and cameras.

All over science.

If this proves anything, it's that although science is not a high profile issue, and it's certainly not as well funded as most scientists would like, Australia does not take it for granted. Not always, anyway.

Inspired by Graham Young's conflation of criticism with suppression of dissent, and also by John Quiggin's response, I have written this handy guide so that everyone knows where they stand when arguing with something presented in The Australian.

Hope that helps. If you want to be further silenced and oppressed, I'm afraid can't help you without a national newspaper in which to publish your misguided ranting.