We are now officially living in the future as Apple have finally released a tablet. The name made many people cringe, as it kind of sounds like something that belongs inside women’s underwear when it is that time of the month.

Anyway, it looks fantastic and I’m sure it will be a success. Everybody will want to use the iPad to read ebooks. Ebooks are not available on iTunes instead you need to download the iBooks application and buy ebooks through that. Alternatively you could still buy ebooks online from Fictionwise or somewhere like that. This is a minor irritation compared to the fact that due to geographical restrictions the vast majority of ebooks aren’t available in Australia.

I want my ebook

According to the Fictionwise website ebooks are not available in Australia due to the way the book publishing industry works. The publishing industry has always worked on the idea that the rights of books could be sold to publishers according to geographical region. This idea is basically incompatible with the idea of the Internet, but these contracts still apply to ebooks. Publishers are legally obliged to make sure their ebooks adhere to these contracts.

The result is different publishers produce the same titles in different countries and each individual publisher needs to release ebooks in the different countries before they can become available.

Even if a company wants to sell all ebooks to Australians they can’t. That is correct: I can’t buy ebooks because I’m Australian.

Legally that is

This forces many e-book fans to download ebooks illegally using filesharing networks. I personally do not feel comfortable doing this and would much rather be able to buy ebooks legally.

There is also the choice of buying them illegally by using a foreign friend’s credit card or using IP masking techniques.

Why me?

The inability to buy ebooks is an irritation for most people, but there are many people who can’t physically read a book. Someone with muscular dystrophy such as myself can have great difficulty holding a book and turning the pages. With an ebook all you need do is press a button or click a mouse. There are mechanical page turners available, but they are very expensive and don’t work so well. I am also not a fan of audio books as it tends to go in one ear and out the other and what about people who can’t hear.

E-book crusade

I am hoping that the release of the iPad will increase the number of Australians wanting to read ebooks and this will force the hand of publishers to be more ebook friendly.

I also plan on finding out as much as I can about the reasons why ebooks are not available in Australia and to fight for the rights of Australians to read ebooks.

That elephant that everybody has been harping on about over the past two years has finally given birth… to some kind of creature.

More pictures here (brace yourself).

It is supposed to be a baby elephant, but why did it have to be so God damn ugly. Melbourne is no longer going to be known for its lovely gardens or its incredibly bad weather, but for being the ugly elephant capital of the world.

They haven’t even named the creature yet calling it, “baby.” Of course they will have the obligatory naming contest. Somehow, I don’t think they will like my suggestion.

I’m sorry, but call me a hypocrite I’m in denial… that is not an elephant it has hair for Christ’s sake. Maybe it could be some kind of mammoth throwback… come to think of it, it does look a little like Ray Romano.

I was surfing the net today to find some blogs to add to LMB and I came across a money making scheme so dastardly you could pin a tail on it and call it a Nigerian. It is a creation of long-suffering website developer Leon Bumcrack Bambrick or something similar and is known simply as CreditCardOlogy.

Make sure you check it out, but keep your wallet firmly in your back pocket. Enjoy

Andrew Bolt continues to use a certain graph to confirm his hypothesis that there is no such thing as global warming.

Much to the great frustration and amusement of many people who are far more knowledgeable than me the graph does not show what Andrew Bolt believes it does.

Even blind Freddy can see the overall trend of this graph is positive. I would use this graph as proof of global warming. Using it as proof against global warming is frankly… bizarre to say the least.

“But the graph shows the world has got cooler since 2001…” Anyone that did statistics at high school would know to look at the trend not at the peaks and troughs.

In the sport of diving they remove by the highest and lowest scores for determining the average in an effort to eliminate bias. I’m not saying the peaks and troughs should be ignored, but when viewing the graph people should understand that there is a natural variance from year to year and just like biased judges they will be far higher or lower than average.

Recently Andrew Bolt has been caught fudging the figures and blatantly misrepresenting the data. He needs to be held to account just like any journalist would be for peddling lies, but instead he continually gets held up as a representation of the conservative viewpoint.

I would find this funny if it wasn’t such a serious issue. Anyway, I will make sure I keep my calculator handy in case I run into Andrew Bolt.

I have added four new blogs to the Log My Blog website, my first for 2010!

Danger Room

Author: group blog
Web Address: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/

If you can put your sense of moral outrage on hold, this is a great interesting blog. Many of the technologies that we use every day were originally developed for military use such as the Internet. If you wish to get a look at what future technology may look like this is the blog for you.

Many of these technologies sound ridiculous such as psychic soldiers and the authors really know how to play to this sense of the ridiculous with a great deal of humour.

Face it blowing shit up is cool.

A word of warning for all wired sites is the advertising. Some ads creep across the screen in the most annoying manner.

Blog-rank: 8 / 10

Flying Solo

Author: group blog
Web Address: http://www.flyingsolo.com.au/

This is a website dedicated to solo and freelance business people - people who run a business from home with a staff of one. The blog is only one facet of this website with users encouraged to visit the flying solo forums. Most posts are about ideas and techniques to improve your business and your business life. It is a very busy website with lots of ads and nagging links, but the website is still worth a look for solo and small business owners.

The content of this blog is good, but the package frankly gives me a headache. Everything could be spaced out a bit more and the advertising could be a little more subtle.

This could be excused by the quality of the content. I am a little biased as I really don’t like the latest fashion of packing the maximum amount of things in the smallest amount of space. With increases in monitor size there is really no excuse for this.

Rating: 5 / 10

Defamer

Author: group blog
Web Address: http://defamer.gawker.com/

This is an American gossip blog featuring snarky commentary about various global celebrities, TV shows, movies and music. If you are into gossip magazines this is the site for you. A word of warning this is a very busy site with lots of links to and content shared with other closely affiliated blogs.

This is an interesting blog with lots of info about celebrities and their more shady activities.

It also provides insights into TV shows and movies that you don’t usually see.

Rating: 7 / 10

Personal Development for Polymaths

Author: Hunter Nuttall
Web Address: http://hunternuttall.com/blog/

Personal Development for Polymaths is a terribly boring name for an interesting site. A polymath is intelligent person with a broad range of skills and interests. As you would expect the author writes about a broad range of topics from artificial intelligence to finance and literature. His posts are very philosophical long and detailed. If you are interested in science, technology and finance this blog is worth a look.

This is a good blog for somebody interested in science or science fiction. The author writes long and detailed posts in an easy to read essay style. His posts focus on the more philosophical aspects of scientific development such as artificial intelligence.

It is a thought-provoking blog which is well worth a look for any thinking intelligent being.

Rating: 7 / 10

Yesterday, I went to the family doctor for a checkup and some scripts. On the way out I asked the doctor if the swine flu vaccine will be combined with the seasonal flu vaccine, when it comes out later this year. He said he didn’t think so, but he was reminded that my brother and I haven’t had the swine flu vaccine and we had to go back into his office and get the jab.

So an innocent question backfires in such a way that I have to have an injection - typical.

That night I was telling a friend of mine about the unfortunate incident and I got into a discussion about whether vaccinations do more harm than good.

Obviously I believe in vaccinations, but there is a lot of so-called evidence suggesting that vaccination, in particular the combined measles mumps rubella (MMR) vaccine, could result in disabilities such as autism and even attention deficit disorder.

All this started in 1998 from a now discredited study of 12 children originally published in the British medical journal The Lancet that found that the MMR vaccine could be responsible for giving autism to children. It was later discovered that the author of the study was receiving funding from lawyers involved in a lawsuit against the manufacturers of the MMR vaccine.

Many British parents panicked and started failing to immunise their children causing a measles epidemic years later.

So far science has been unable to prove a link. My personal opinion is that there is no link. Even if there is something to the link it must be very tenuous for a not to be picked up. An un vaccinated child is still many times more likely to suffer death or disease than the one in 1 million chance of being disabled by the vaccine.

Many vaccination opponents will point to their children and say they have never been sick even though they haven’t been vaccinated. The only reason why these children do not get sick is because they are protected by all the children around them who are vaccinated - this is called herd immunity. The only reason vaccination opponents have a viable choice not to vaccinate their children is because the majority of the population is vaccinated.

Vaccination definitely makes the world a better place. Before vaccination parents could expect to lose more than 50% of their children to disease. People also forget the polio epidemic that would render people totally paralysed, almost like a type of muscular dystrophy you could catch. Luckily this disease is almost eliminated due to mass vaccination programmes. If enough people fail to immunise their children some of these epidemics could return.

Don’t let a bunch of discredited science stop you from doing what is best for your child.

All over the TV yesterday was the announcement of Mary McKillop’s second miracle - an important step on the long road to sainthood.

One thing you will know just about many miracles is they tend to exhibit people recovering from cancer.

The interesting thing about cancer, which makes it different from many other diseases, is that spontaneous remission can occur at any time. A person could be a week away from death and they can suddenly start getting better for no readily explainable reason.

Contrast this with my own disease - Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD). No one with my disease has ever undergone a miracle and started walking again. Why do only people with cancer deserve to be saved by miracles? Maybe DMD is an evil disease like AIDS which only evil people suffer from. Why would God be so mean-spirited to cure some diseases and not others?

There are many documented cases of spontaneous remission in cancer and not all of them were religious. Some believe it could be a feature of the immune system suddenly finding the key to destroying cancer cells. Or maybe it is caused by changes in hormonal balance. Scientists may not fully understand the reason why some people undergo spontaneous remission, but this is not a reason to jump to conclusions and proclaim that it must be a miracle. Just because something is not understood does not mean that it must be God that is responsible.

We should not chalk up spontaneous remission under the rare unexplainable miracle banner. Instead we should study these cases in an effort to understand how they happen. The rate of spontaneous remission is probably many times larger than many people realise. There would be those who discover a lump in their breast and then a few months later at it spontaneously vanishes without them ever visiting a doctor.

If the medical profession worked out the reasons behind spontaneous remission we could provide these miracles to anybody with cancer.

Last night I was watching, Natural Mysteries: killer whale attack. I was absolutely dumbfounded by the stupidity of the commentary on the show. It was about a pod of killer whales in a particular bay in California. The killer whales would separate a gray whale mother from its calf and then kill and eat it. This apparently was unheard of behaviour.

What a bunch of fucking bullshit. They are called killer whales because like all other animals they need to eat and their choice of food is: other whales. Unfortunately, before a whale can be eaten it needs to be killed. It isn’t exactly a mystery when a killer whale kills and eats a whale. Or you can’t be bothered using your brain today it can be boiled down to 2 words: killer and (wait for it) whale.

This sort of thing really explains the ignorance of some young people these days. Kids who don’t know who Gandhi is or that the Lord of the Rings movies were based on a book (true story).

I guess you can’t expect an 18-year-old to know everything, but when a person has been through university, risen up the ranks, created their own documentary and are still not aware of the simplest fact, that is something else.

I laughed when a friend of mine said our civilisation was crumbling, but now I wonder…

I was wondering what it would look like if I switched all the u’s in English language with i’s and all the i’s with u’s. Would it sound similar to a New Zealand accent? Well the result is just as amusing. Merry Chrustmas and happy New Year!

U Wandered Lonely as a Cloid

U wandered lonely as a cloid
That floats on hugh o’er vales and hulls,
When all at once U saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffoduls;
Besude the lake, beneath the trees,
Flitterung and dancung un the breeze.

Contuniois as the stars that shune
And twunkle on the mulky way,
They stretched un never-endung lune
Along the margun of a bay:
Ten thoisand saw U at a glance,
Tossung theur heads un sprughtly dance.

The waves besude them danced; bit they
Oit-dud the sparklung waves un glee:
A poet coild not bit be gay,
Un sich a jocind company:
U gazed—and gazed—bit luttle thoight
What wealth the show to me had broight:

For oft, when on my coich U lue
Un vacant or un pensuve mood,
They flash ipon that unward eye
Whuch us the bluss of solutide;
And then my heart wuth pleasire fulls,
And dances wuth the daffoduls.

Wulluam Wordsworth and Chrustopher Fryer

There are a few things that pissed me off over the weekend.

I was thinking about donating some money to Wikipedia. They have that line graph that shows how many more millions of dollars they need on a banner ad at the top of the page. But then they started using guilt to induce people to give money, by changing that banner ad from the graph to a pleading, “I couldn’t ignore that banner at the top of the site any more… I use Wikipedia far too often to ignore the need!”

As if we need another fucking thing to feel guilty about. Starving kids in Africa, Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers, global warming, not having life insurance, not having funeral insurance, not having income insurance, not having health insurance the list goes on and on. And now Wikipedia decides to jump on the guilt train.

I believe I know why vampires are very popular at the moment. Vampirism is a surprisingly large part of our culture. What do you think those insurance ads are about? They make you feel guilty about something you don’t even need to think about. You fall under their spell they sink their teeth into your neck and suck all your money out.

What I want to know is how do the actors who do the, “imagine if you suddenly died,” ads sleep at night? I bet they go for the Nazi death camp guard excuse – “I’m only doing my job.” What really disturbs me is people that have lost someone close recently, every time they watch commercial television they are reminded of the death at every single ad break. It’s soul destroying. Its emotional and economic vampirism.

Why would you bother watching commercial TV if it hurts? And then the networks complain about people watching content they’ve downloaded legally.

Has anyone got examples of vampirism that doesn’t involve sucking blood? If so I’d love to hear about it in the comments.