GetUp's Statement

From here:

Dear President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder:

We, as Australians, condemn calls for violence, including assassination, against Australian citizen and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, or for him to be labeled a terrorist, enemy combatant or be treated outside the ordinary course of justice in any way.

As Thomas Jefferson said, "information is the currency of democracy." Publishing leaked information in collaboration with major news outlets, as Wikileaks and Mr. Assange have done, is not a terrorist act.

Australia and the United States are the strongest of allies. Our soldiers serve side by side and we’ve experienced, and condemned, the consequences of terrorism together. To label Wikileaks a terrorist organisation is an insult to those Australians and Americans who have lost their lives to acts of terrorism and to terrorist forces.

If Wikileaks or their staff have broken international or national laws, let that case be heard in a just and fair court of law. At the moment, no such charges have been brought.

We are writing as Australians to say what our Government should have: all Australian citizens deserve to be free from persecution, threats of violence and detention without charge, especially from our friend and ally, the United States.

We call upon you to stand up for our shared democratic principles of the presumption of innocence and freedom of information.

Back to basics

In his blog post "Wikileaks and the Long Haul" Clay Shirky wrote:

"Human systems can’t stand pure transparency. For negotiation to work, people’s stated positions have to change, but change is seen, almost universally, as weakness."

Well maybe this is what precisely the problem is. Perhaps we should go back to the drawing board of Democracy and like ancient Athenians we should demand transparency and scrutiny of public at all times.

 
Only then people may gradually learn opinion change not as a sign of weakness but as a sign of healthy debate. Perhaps people should have the right to know when opinions change and why.

WikiLeaks thins out the line between what governments want to hide and what people want to know, is that necessarily a bad thing?

Mixed feelings

Another crisis our generation had to have, meet the new kid in the block, the ebook.

Will printed books survive?

Likely for a short while, unlikely in the long haul.

I now own a Kindle as I no longer have space left in our apartment to put new books in. Unfortunately the ebook has no personality but admittedly it is incredibly practical.

English is my second language so the online dictionary is a blessing, just point your cursor and there you go, the word is translated. Everything is so much easier, taking notes, bookmarks, searching, reading on the train, packing, unpacking, and the fact that I can sync with the Kindle desktop application on my Mac, these are all fantastic stuff. I can't tell you how much my reading efficiency increased. I can even read while I am standing in a crowded train as my ebook is extremely light and well designed to be held with one hand.

Alas I hate to see bookshops disappearing as for me a library or a bookshop is the warmest place on Earth. There is definitely an intimate sensation of proportionality tied between an author and its work when you touch and browse a printed book, certainly amiss in ebook form. And how we would come into terms of losing such a wonderful experience I don’t know but this is a reality we will have to live with I am afraid.

Evocom

I have been quiet for a while totally immersed myself into evolutionary computing.

I have developed a computer program named evocom to solve The Eight Queens Problem. I have also written a paper quantitively analysing and demonstrating fundamental aspects of biological evolution.

You can download evocom program and related paper at:

http://members.iinet.net.au/~coruh/evocom/

I have used great open source tools and free products in my work. Here they are:

• TextWrangler : A brilliant text editor for Mac. Simple, fast, reliable, user friendly, got syntax-coloring.
• Python: Mac comes with Python, free to download for Windows at http://www.python.org/
• LaTeX: LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting system; it includes features designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation. LaTeX is the de facto standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents.
• TeXShop: Award winning LaTeX editor for Mac, robust, simple, easy to use, reliable.

Al fresco lunch with my special tuscan penne marinara

Ok. Forget politics, worries of the world, economic downturn, religious terror, the social network or retirement plans. Today come with me to wonders of Italian cooking.

First of all you may not be an Italian but always remember this “you can pretend to be an Italian”. There is nothing in this Universe to prevent you from being childishly obsessively crazy about life, love, good food and good wine. Your choice.

The recipe I am going to disclose here is a variation using my favorite basic ingredients, pasta, tomato sauce, and prawns. You can experiment with various combinations of this terrific theme.

Your pasta can be penne, spaghetti, fusilli or fettucine. My personal preference would always be penne. Penne has this robust working class persona and embedded manhood which I find natural to express with my style.

The tomato sauce has to be cooked slowly with passion, full attention, and love. I learned how to cook a variation of tomato sauce from my Sicilian friend Mario. According to Mario tomato sauce is the heart and soul of a great Italian pasta dish. Cooking good tomato sauce deserves time, intellectual investment almost to the extent of exhaustion, and passion. You lack any of these and your dish will be ruined.

Prawns should be fully thawed, sexy, and marinated overnight with herbs and olive oil. Use your imagination on herbs. But they need to be Mediterranean herbs, such as basil, theme, or mint. Do not ever use Asian or even Moroccan herbs especially coriander (my personal enemy). Red chillies are OK.

Background:

Open yourself a good red (cabernet merlot or cabernet sauvignon). Air for few minutes, smell half deeply, feel human, and try enjoying the first sip around and under your tongue. You need to be happy while cooking Italian. Start rolling a Luciano Pavarotti or Cecilia Bartoli loud in the background.

Ingredients (for two):

Organic penne pasta 250g.
Largish fresh green prawns, full thawed, preferably marinated overnight with herbs 250g.
2 soft biggish, juicy trust tomatoes.
1 table spoonful of tomato paste.
Half a glass of your red wine.
Good olive oil (abundant).
2 pieces of large firm garlics.
half lemon juice, optionally its skin rendered in fine stripes.
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste.

Start with tomato sauce. Crush tomatoes in food processor, add one crushed garlic, crush a bit more and stop. In a saucepan put abundant olive oil to cover the base, add tomato garlic mixture, add red wine, start with high heat, but don’t stop watching.

Meanwhile start cooking your penne in abundant salty boiled water. You must aim firmness but penne should be swollen at the end about double of its original size. This process should take about 15 minutes with organic good brand pasta (you must count after you put your pasta in and after boiling starts again).

If your tomato sauce started sizzling add tomato paste, evenly combine with sauce, and wait until the sauce starts sizzling again. Then reduce heat. Keep it simmering for half an hour at least, lid open. Always remember to keep an eye in the sauce (don’t leave your kitchen or start your second glass;) It should be simmered and saturated slowly reaching to a dark lusty color at the end but it shouldn’t be too dry. Stir often enough with love and passion. Keep an eye on tiny bubbles. Keep lava bubbles popping like in the mouth of Mount Vesuvius.

Start cooking your prawns in the last 10 minutes. In a saucepan put some olive oil, add the remaining garlic piece crushed, add lemon juice, keep stirring and heating this sauce in high for a few minutes. Join prawns to the sauce, keep the heat high and keep stirring until lots of maddening fumes turn up (prawns got angry;) Reduce heat, cover the lid and leave it like that for another 5 minutes. Cook your prawns with their own steam (don't waste ocean's natural iodine flavour). But don’t overcook them otherwise they’ll be too firm.

Drain your pasta well (never ever run cold water through it, horrible Turkish tradition). Oil the base of a pan, put and stir your pasta back into the pan.

Make sure you topped up your and your partners’ glasses with red.

On beautiful white plates put some pasta. In the middle put about 2-3 full tablespoonful of tomato sauce. Finally pour over prawns and about a spoonful of juicy lemon flavored prawn sauce. Salt and ground black pepper to taste.

Finally I like stirring pasta with sauce thoroughly before eating (my wife doesn’t), the choice is yours.

Mamma mia! Buon appetito!