Both myself and Jacqui have been considering getting new laptops for a while - her because her iBook G4 is ancient and she has worn all the letters off the keys, and me because the maximum 2GB RAM my Macbook Pro just isn't enough when I'm working.

I had planned to buy a few months ago, but knew Apple were doing an update, so decided to wait until the new versions came out to see what was on offer. Unfortunately, a week or two before the new machines were announced, the Aussie dollar started a slide from US0.98 to US0.63, so the new machines ended up being priced a few hundred dollars more expensive than the old ones. I'd now need $4300 for a new laptop, and Jacqui would need another $1800 for hers. Given that we're saving for an apartment, $6100 was a bit too much to shell out, so upgrade plans went on the back-burner.

Late last week I realised that since I work from home while Jacqui's in the office, we could get an iMac between us, and I could keep my laptop for those occasions when Jacqui needs to work at home as well. She agreed, so it was onto the Apple Store to get a 24" 2.8GHz iMac. I noticed also that Apple had a refurbished version for $1979, so I went for that instead. I ordered it at 6:35am yesterday morning, got an email at 2:27pm saying it had shipped, and it arrived on my doorstep at 10am this morning.

I'd also ordered 2 x 2GB DIMMs from epowermac.com to upgrade the RAM to 4GB and they arrived this morning shortly after the iMac. It's midday now and I'm typing this on the new machine, having already migrated all my data and installed the new RAM, all for a bargain price of $2145.50, saving nearly $4000. Gotta be happy with that!

The Guardian has a really interesting article on organ donation which interviews everyone involved in the donor trail, from the mother who chose to donate her son's organs, to the recipient, the transplant surgeon and on up to the top transplant person in the Department of Health.

It's an enlightening read, revealing all sides of the debate on increasing the availability of organs for transplant, which is currently going on in the UK. The government is in favour of an opt-out system where you are assumed by default to be an organ donor unless you specifically choose not to be, though that has the potential to be extremely hard on grieving family members.

A preferable system, which gets a mention in the article, is the one employed here in Australia. When you apply for, or renew, a driving licence, you are given the option of ticking a box assenting to the donation of your organs. You're also given the option of choosing to only donate certain organs.

Ticking this box results in your licence stating that you are an organ donor, and is legally binding in the event of your death, overriding the wishes of your family. It seems a far more sensible solution as the wishes of the deceased are upheld, which is infinitely preferable than having a bureaucratic decision foist upon a grieving family.

I ticked the box. Might as well, I certainly won't be needing my organs after death.

Australia has switched its position and voted against Israel on two resolutions which it had previously supported. Howard spent his term voting in lockstep with the US, but some common sense has now prevailed and we are starting to take a more principled stand.

In the weekend vote in New York, Australia supported a resolution calling on Israel to stop establishing settlements in the Palestinian territories and a resolution calling for the Geneva Conventions to apply in the Palestinian territories.

The resolutions on the Middle East peace process are held annually and the Howard government had backed both from 1996 to 2002 but in 2003 began to vote against or abstain. It was a move that aligned Australia with only the US, Israel, the US Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau and Micronesia and put the country at odds with Britain, Canada, New Zealand and France.

Australian officials told the UN the Government had changed its position because it supported a two-state resolution of the conflict to deliver a secure Israel living beside a viable Palestinian state and that Australia believed both sides should abide by their obligations under the Road Map for Peace.

The Guardian has a piece on Seymour Hersh in which he intimates that there's a whole can of worms waiting to be exposed once Bush leaves office...

A Democrat who truly despises the Bush regime, he is reluctant to make predictions about exactly what is going to happen in the forthcoming election on the grounds that he might 'jinx it'. The unknown quantity of voter racism apart, however, he is hopeful that Obama will pull it off, and if he does, for Hersh this will be a starting gun. 'You cannot believe how many people have told me to call them on 20 January [the date of the next president's inauguration],' he says, with relish. '[They say:] "You wanna know about abuses and violations? Call me then." So that is what I'll do, so long as nothing awful happens before the inauguration.' He plans to write a book about the neocons and, though it won't change anything - 'They've got away with it, categorically; anyone who talks about prosecuting Bush and Cheney [for war crimes] is kidding themselves' - it will reveal how the White House 'set out to sabotage the system... It wasn't that they found ways to manipulate Congressional oversight; they had conversations about ending the right of Congress to intervene.'

Should be interesting.

This morning I headed out the door at 6:30 for my weekly long run and 17.5km later I was finished. The sole aim of the run was to put miles into my legs, to get them used to longer distances, and most definitely not to run fast, so with that in mind I kep to a very conservative pace, ensuring that I never felt out of breath the whole way, and my only discomfort was my quads getting a bit tired in the final 2-3km or so.

I ran the 17.5km in 1:33:21 at an average HR of 144 which I was pretty happy with. I've since looked up my old training records and realised that that's the third-longest run I've ever done, with the longest ever being the time I did a half-marathon. I looked at my HR data from the half-marathon and noted that while my time was 1:51:59, my average HR was 169.

Doing a quick bit of maths on this morning's run reveals that this I was running at a pace which would have yielded a 1:52:30 half-marathon, i.e: only 30secs slower than my best, yet my HR was a full 24bpm slower!

Looks like the training is paying off.

Following on from yesterday's post, The Institute of Physics has a paper summarising the results of various CO₂ reduction schemes based on running the scenarios through all of the best climate models around. The results are pretty interesting:

Using a scheme to emulate the range of state-of-the-art model results for climate feedback strength, including the modelled range of climate sensitivity and other key uncertainties, we analyse recent global targets. The G8 target of a 50% cut in emissions by 2050 leaves CO₂ concentrations rising rapidly, approaching 1000 ppm by 2300. The Stern Review's proposed 25% cut in emissions by 2050, continuing to an 80% cut, does in fact approach stabilization of CO₂ concentration on a policy-relevant (century) timescale, with most models projecting concentrations between 500 and 600 ppm by 2100. However concentrations continue to rise gradually. Long-term stabilization at 550 ppm CO₂ requires cuts in emissions of 81 to 90% by 2300, and more beyond as a portion of the CO₂ emitted persists for centuries to millennia. Reductions of other greenhouse gases cannot compensate for the long-term effects of emitting CO₂.

So if we want to avoid trashing the place, we need to reduce to less than 10% of today's emissions! That's more than most people realise. Thankfully we've got more than two hundred years to get there, which should be doable.

Yesterday saw a flurry of news regarding climate change, dominated by Treasury's assessment of the costs of implementing a carbon tax in Australia. Serious news outlets like SBS and the SMH reported the cost to the average household as $1/day, whereas the tabloid news on Ten went for the sensationalist approach with tag lines like "see how the carbon tax could cost you hundreds of dollars!"

The business associations are trying to get the Government to hold off on implementing the carbon tax now that the global economy is in freefall, spreading fear and doubt about loss of jobs, but Treasury's analysis correctly points out that there's massive opportunities for job creation in alternative energy fields and other areas which would be projected to grow significantly once polluters have to pay. The delayers also fail to realise that the longer we wait to start, the sharper the emissions drops we'll have to implement and therefore the greater the impact on the economy as a whole. Long, gradual change is going to do less damage to the economy than a short, sharp shock.

Elsewhere on TV, probably SBS again, I saw a news item about the increase in atmospheric methane levels which has recently been detected. Methane is 20 times more effective as an insulator than CO₂, and one of the side effects of a temperature increase is predicted to be that as permafrost melts, massive amounts of methane will be released. The scientists interviewed seemed to think that this year's increase was due to the record low in the extent of Arctic sea ice last year.

The final item was an interview with a professor who studies the Great Barrier Reef, specifically coral bleaching and its relationship to sea temperature and acidity. He claimed that if we continue at our current pace, the reef will be dead in 30 years. Given that our rate of CO₂ pollution is only increasing, that timeframe will probably prove optimistic.

That's just sad.

This week i finally got around to getting my triathlon life sorted out. I joined up with BRAT again, then got my TriNSW licence and finally entered the Canberra Half-Ironman which is on in eight weeks. A Half-Ironman is a 1.9km swim, then a 90km bike ride followed by a half-marathon, so I'll have my work cut out for me.

I entered this race in 2005 at the last minute, but I was only doing the swim that time as I was part of a team. The atmosphere was great and I decided there and then that one day I'd come back and do the whole thing. Given that my longest bike recent bike ride is 45km and my longest recent run is 12km I might have over-estimated my abilities, but my only aim is to finish so, with that in mind, I'll be sticking to a relatively easy pace. Still, a relatively easy pace for almost 6 hours will still leave me exhausted!

Ideally I'd like to finish as far under six hours as possible, but it all depends on the bike leg. Canberra is a hilly course as triathlons go, so there's a risk that my legs will be destroyed despite taking it relatively easy. The last triathlon I did was also in Canberra and, although its course omitted the hilly section, the 10km run after that ride was probably the worst physical thing I've done as my legs just never got into it and it was just pain the whole way.

My very tentative goals are:

• Swim: <30mins
• Bike: 3hrs
• Run: 2hrs

The swim is an easy target, but the others are just "pick a number" at this stage. I'll revise those closer to the event.

The New Yorker has an opinion piece wondering how anyone could still be undecided in the American election, which uses a wonderful analogy to point out the bleeding obvious.

Then you’ll see this man or woman— someone, I always think, who looks very happy to be on TV. “Well, Charlie,” they say, “I’ve gone back and forth on the issues and whatnot, but I just can’t seem to make up my mind!” Some insist that there’s very little difference between candidate A and candidate B. Others claim that they’re with A on defense and health care but are leaning toward B when it comes to the economy.

I look at these people and can’t quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention?

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked. I mean, really, what’s to be confused about?

Funny though it is, the time to be concerned about shit sandwiches was four years ago. If common sense had prevailed then, perhaps we could have avoided this:

The US government was today accused of "farce" after dropping all charges against a British resident held at Guantanamo Bay...

He was accused of planning an attack that included the use of radioactive material and chemical weapons.

But Mohamed insists he admitted to plotting the dirty bomb attack only after being tortured, which included having his penis cut with a razor.

Mr Stafford Smith said: "The Bush Administration will not even admit in public that they rendered Mr Mohamed to face torture in Morocco, let alone allow him a fair trial...

The US government has been accused of using a strategy of delay to avoid having to disclose the evidence that could support the torture allegations [until after the elections].

I'm pretty sure any man would confess to whatever you want once you start slicing his tackle with a razor blade.

Truth, Justice and The American Way!

Looks like Cuba has discovered oil, quite a bit of it in fact.

Friends and foes have called Cuba many things - a progressive beacon, a quixotic underdog, an oppressive tyranny - but no one has called it lucky, until now .

Mother nature, it emerged this week, appears to have blessed the island with enough oil reserves to vault it into the ranks of energy powers. The government announced there may be more than 20bn barrels of recoverable oil in offshore fields in Cuba's share of the Gulf of Mexico, more than twice the previous estimate.

If confirmed, it puts Cuba's reserves on par with those of the US and into the world's top 20. Drilling is expected to start next year by Cuba's state oil company Cubapetroleo, or Cupet.

I wonder how long it will be before the US normalises trade relations, or perhaps they'll just invade now.