Election day – 2007 NSW election

Election day is nearly over – there’s only another five minutes or so of voting. Who knows what the result will be – although the polls indicate that Labor will win overall, you never know – anything could happen!

My guess is that Labor will win the election and Clover Moore will win the state seat of Sydney, although there could be an upset (a lot of people were taking Greens HTV). (I’ve previously posted on what I think about Clover’s performance as an MP.)

It was a very hot day – I wilted when handing out HTV in the middle of the day, and enjoyed my second stint of handing out HTV in the shade of a tree. There was a cool change about 40 minutes ago and then it started bucketing down!

Evidence of the earliest plate tectonics in Greenland

A very interesting story is on the BBC web-site:
Sea floor records ancient Earth. I love the para: “You can actually recognise features that formed in a couple of minutes, 3.8 billion years ago – a quarter of all time – and you can actually go and touch them with your hand,” said Professor Rosing.

Imagine that, touching something that is 3.8 billion years old! Of course, we are all made of atoms many of which resulted from a supernova about 4.55 billion years ago, not to mention matter that appeared about 13 billion years ago. All of us, 13 billion years old! Extraordinary!

The little girl giant-playing in the park

Playing on Youtube, I found this video: The little girl giant-playing in the park, which is really quite enchanting. Watch it. The doll is very expressive.

Latest Earth Policy Institute eco-economy update

I receive the eco-economy updates from the Earth Policy Institute, and thought I’d put the latest one on my blog. I find it difficult to evaluate these updates, but they sound interesting when I read through them nonetheless.

Earth Policy Institute
Eco-Economy Update 2007-3
For Immediate Release
March 21, 2007

MASSIVE DIVERSION OF U.S. GRAIN TO FUEL CARS IS RAISING WORLD FOOD PRICES

http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/2007/Update65.htm

Lester R. Brown

If you think you are spending more each week at the supermarket, you may be right. The escalating share of the U.S. grain harvest going to ethanol distilleries is driving up food prices worldwide.

While curiosity killed the cat…

Just a personal thing. I’ve worked full-time for a bit over two years and two months now, and I’ve realised that I’m happiest when I’m finding things out and being creative. I get very unhappy when I’m just a cog in a machine or doing just procedural things.

While curiosity might have killed the cat, it’s long been one of the my driving forces.

I invite readers to comment on the aspects of their personality that they think have been driving forces in their lives.

“Clover Moore ‘a hypocrite’ on donations from developers”

Here’s a very interesting story by Imre Salusinszky in The Oz:

QUESTIONS have been raised about independent MP Clover Moore’s source of electioneering funds, with a former campaign insider accusing her of hypocrisy over donations from property developers.
Norman Thompson, who volunteered three days a week as Ms Moore’s office manager during her successful 2004 campaign to become Lord Mayor of Sydney – a role she holds alongside her state parliamentary duties – said he became concerned at a $30,000 donation from a group called Living Sydney.

Living Sydney, a registered political party that has backed a number of independent candidates for Sydney city council, is financially supported by about 15 large property firms, including Mirvac, Meriton, Leighton, Westfield, Transfield and Lendlease.

The group reported $139,000 in donations from developers in 1999 alone.

Santo Santoro to resign from the Senate

According to this story on the SMH web-site, Senator Santo Santoro is going to shortly resign from the Senate:

“I will make that advice formal at the close of these current two-week sittings, giving both the Queensland Liberal Party and the Queensland parliament time to appoint my replacement before the commonwealth parliament again meets.”

The modelling Bussie!

Now for a nice personal story – our bussie loves to model. Here she is modelling on a circular Ikea carpet – she loves this particular carpet as it matches her eye colour:

TREC – Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation

Via a comment at LP, I just became aware of the Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation (TREC), the work of which may have quite a bit of relevance to Australia given the amount of desert on the Australian mainland. The best way to describe TREC is to merely copy the contents of that webpage: