From Melbourne to Atlanta

International fugitive Nai Yin Xue, made infamous in Australia for abandoning his daughter at Melbourne's Southern Cross Station after allegedly murdering is wife in New Zealand, was finally apprehended in my hometown of Atlanta. Nai Yin Xue was taken into custody after being captured and restrained by five Chinese nationals doing their "duty".

As the write-up in the Sydney Morning Herald reported,

"Police were not too concerned at establishing how much force had been used to put him face down with hands and feet bound".

Deep Thought

According to MxNews (Melbourne's highest quality 'news' publication):

"An eight-year experiment to discover the secret of life collapsed yesterday.

A $30 million computer capable of a trillion calculations a second has finally conceded it is stumped.

Edinburgh University physicists said they had been trying to confirm the Standard Model Theory to explain the behaviour of all matter and energy but failed to incorporate the law of gravity into it.

The plan echoes 'The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy', in which a computer found the answer to "Life, the Universe, and Everything" is 42."

Garnaut Review: Coming Attraction

Prof Garnaut let some early bits of thinking out of the bag last week with an interim report on his review of the costs and benefits of greenhouse gas mitigation in Australia.

Once you read through the thirty odd pages that dance around the specifics and glance at the various illustrative figures that lack any numbers on the axes, one finds the punchline in the way of recommendations:

"First, Australia should be committing within the timetable of the Bali roadmap to emissions reductions for 2020 and 2050 that are fully comparable in terms of adjustment effort to commitments being made by other developed countries. The State and Commonwealth Government commitments to 60 per cent reduction in year 2000 emissions by 2050, with corresponding interim targets, may be shown to be appropriate in that context. Second, the recent developments in the science summarised earlier in this Interim Report, and the work of the Review on current and prospective emissions scenarios in the absence of major policy changes, suggests that ambitions for mitigation will need to rise way beyond those embodied in the Bali roadmap if high probabilities of damaging climate change are to be avoided."

Well, that's a pretty clear preview of what the final report is likely to communicate. Now if folks can figure out how to actually pull off such reductions. . .

Sorry

It was an historic day in Australia, as Prime Minister Kevin Rudd issued an apology on behalf of the Australian government to the nation's stolen generation. The U.S. is still trying to come to terms with its own shady history regarding native Americans and slavery (both causes championed by Senator Brownback). But apparently such things are quite politically controversial.

Case-in-point, the response of Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson to Rudd's apology, which basically amounted to the diplomatic equivalent of "wasn't me" and/or "hey, we meant well". Needless to say, his comments were not well-received.

London

I spent the end of last week in London attending the Adaptation 2008 conference. I stuck around over the weekend to hang out with the Strachan family. Dropped in on St. Paul's Cathedral and the Tate Modern (and it's signature crack). We also took in a play at the National Theatre - entitled The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other, it was a something equivalent to theatrical waterboarding. For amusing reviews, check out this or this.

On the long flights to and from, I managed to catch-up on my movie watching, cruising through the followng:

Beowulf
Elizabeth: The Global Age
Superbad
The Bourne Ultimatum
The Brave One
The Assassination of Jesse James
3:10 to Yuma
Invasion
Blues Brothers
The Jammed
In the Valley of Elah
Michael Clayton

Oh, and just for the heck of it, check out this list of songs about London - impressive.

The Lost Photos of the Australian Open

After several weeks, the many photos obtained at the Australian Open have surfaced including on-court action as well as some of Uta's glimpses behind the scenes (if you look hard, you'll find some poorly lit, dodgy photos of Novak Djokovic).