In Eureka Street (26 Mar 10), Sarah McKenzie laments wasteful light pollution that hides from us the glory of the night sky. "When", she asks, "was it decided that the replacement of our night sky with a near-blank canvas was acceptable? Bit by bit, every year, a few more of Shakespeare's 'blessed candles of the night' are extinguished by the ever-brightening domes that hang over our cities."

The International Astronomical Union estimates that 30 per cent of the world's population cannot see the Milky Way. "And as the view is obscured" writes McKenzie, "so too is that powerful reminder that we are part of something much grander, an insignificant dot in a vast and expanding universe. Our love of all things light and bright has killed our access to true darkness. "

So much of the light that our cities pour into the sky is wasteful and unnecessary. It’s never truly dark, and rarely is it truly quiet. Deceived by light, the birds begin their morning noise far too early.

McKenzie knows that "If you travel away from the city lights, it's hard not to be awe-struck by the scale and vastness of the twinkling lights in the sky. On a moonless night they shine so brightly that it seems impossible we could have ever wiped them from our city skies, let alone wiped them from our minds and our children's imaginations. "

The British Astronomical Association has a Campaign for Dark Skies. This is not just for astronomers, but all who would look at the heavens to learn and wonder—or simply sleep better, whether human or animal.

The heavens are telling the glory of God;
and the firmament proclaims God's handiwork.
Day to day pours forth speech,
and night to night declares knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words;
their voice is not heard;
yet their voice goes out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world. Psalm 19.

Bronwyn Watson writes in the Weekend Australian review (20-21 Mar 10, p. 11) about this work, The tea table : (L'heure de thé) by Kate O'Connor, c.1928. [Mixed media, 78.5 x 98cm, Art Gallery of Western Australia]

I like it very much. It's complex and finely composed, yet restful and intimate, a simple scene, yet with so much to delight the eye.

Letter from Jean-François Julliard, Secretary-General of Reporters Without Borders to the Hon Kevin Michael Rudd MP, Prime Minister of Australia.

Paris, 18 December 2009

Dear Prime Minister,

Reporters Without Borders, an organisation that defends free expression worldwide, would like to share with you its concern about your government's plan to introduce a mandatory Internet filtering system. While it is essential to combat child sex abuse, pursuing this draconian filtering project is not the solution. If Australia were to introduce systematic online content filtering, with a relatively broad definition of the content targeted, it would be joining an Internet censors club that includes such countries as China, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Communications minister Stephen Conroy announced on 15 December that, after a year of testing in partnership with Australian Internet service providers (ISPs), your government intended to introduce legislation imposing mandatory filtering of websites with pornographic, paedophile or particularly violent content.

Reporters Without Borders would like to draw your attention to the risks that this plan entails for freedom of expression.

Firstly, the decision to block access to an "inappropriate" website would be taken not by a judge but by a government agency, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). Such a procedure, without a court decision, does not satisfy the requirements of the rule of law. The ACMA classifies content secretly, compiling a website blacklist by means of unilateral and arbitrary administrative decision-making. Other procedures are being considered but none of them would involve a judge.

Secondly, the criteria that the proposed law would use are too vague. Filtering would be applied to all content considered "inappropriate," a very slippery term that could be interpreted very differently by different people. In all probability, filtering would target "refused classification" (RC) sites, a category that is extremely controversial as it is being applied to content that is completely unrelated to efforts to combat child sex abuse and sexual violence, representing a dangerous censorship option. Subjects such as abortion, anorexia, aborigines and legislation on the sale of marijuana would all risk being filtered, as would media reports on these subjects.

The choice of filtering techniques has not been clearly defined. Would it be filtering by key-words, URL text or something else? And what about the ISPs that are supposed to carry out the filtering at the government’s request? Will they be blamed, will they be accused of complicity in child sex abuse if the filtering proves to be ineffective, as it almost certainly will?

Your government claims that the filtering will be 100 per cent effective but this is clearly impossible. Experts all over the world agree that no filtering system is effective at combating this kind of content. On the one hand, such a system filters sites that should not be affected (such as sites about the psychology of child sexuality or paedophile crime news). And on the other, it fails to filter targeted sites because their URLs contain key-words that are completely unrelated to their content, or because their content (photo and text) is registered under completely neutral terms. Furthermore, people who are determined to visit such sites will know how to avoid the filtering by, for example, using proxy servers or censorship circumvention software or both.
The Wikileaks website highlighted the limitations of such as system when it revealed that the ACMA blacklist of already banned websites contained many with nothing reprehensible in their content. According to Wikileaks, the blacklist included the Abortion TV website, some of the pages of Wikileaks itself, online poker sites, gay networks, sites dealing with euthanasia, Christian sites, a tour operator's site and even a Queensland dentist's site.

The US company Google has also voiced strong reservations. Google Australia's head of policy, Iarla Flynn, said yesterday: "Moving to a mandatory ISP filtering regime with a scope that goes well beyond such material is heavy handed and can raise genuine questions about restrictions on access to information."

As regards paedophilia, the most dangerous places on the Internet are websites offering chat and email services. So if this project were taken to its logical conclusion, access to sites such as Gmail, Yahoo and Skype would also have to be blocked, which would of course be impossible.

There are more effective ways to combat child pornography, including tracking cyber-criminals online (by means of cookies, IP address comparison, and so on), combined with police investigation into suspects and their online habits. Why did your government end the programme launched by the previous government, which made free filtering systems available to Australian families? This procedure had the merit of being adapted to individual needs and gave each home the possibility of shielding its children from porn.

A real national debate is needed on this subject but your communications minister, Stephen Conroy, made such a debate very difficult by branding his critics as supporters of child pornography. An opportunity was lost for stimulating a constructive exchange of ideas.

We also regret the lack of transparency displayed by your government as regards the tests carried out in recent months using procedures that have been kept secret. Your government paid some 300,000 Australian dollars to ISPs to finance the tests. Australian taxpayers have a right to be given detailed information about the results.

Finally, you must be aware that this initiative is a source of a concern for your compatriots. In a recent Fairfax Media poll of 20,000 people, 96 per cent were strongly opposed to such a mandatory Internet filtering system, while around 120,000 Australians have signed a petition against Internet censorship launched by the online activist group GetUp. The withdrawal of this proposal would therefore satisfy public opinion as well as prevent a democratic country from introducing a system that threatens freedom of expression.

I thank you in advance for the consideration you give to our recommendations.

Sincerely,

Jean-François Julliard
Secretary-General

"I condemn the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem. The substance and timing of the announcement, particularly with the launching of proximity talks, is precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now and runs counter to the constructive discussions that I've had here in Israel. We must build an atmosphere to support negotiations, not complicate them. This announcement underscores the need to get negotiations under way that can resolve all the outstanding issues of the conflict. The United States recognizes that Jerusalem is a deeply important issue for Israelis and Palestinians and for Jews, Muslims and Christians. We believe that through good faith negotiations, the parties can mutually agree on an outcome that realizes the aspirations of both parties for Jerusalem and safeguards its status for people around the world. Unilateral action taken by either party cannot prejudge the outcome of negotiations on permanent status issues. As George Mitchell said in announcing the proximity talks, "we encourage the parties and all concerned to refrain from any statements or actions which may inflame tensions or prejudice the outcome of these talks.""

I don't mean in the least to diminish the terror and severity of the Chilean earthquake, but I have long enjoyed horological and geophysical trivia.

Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says that the earthquake that struck Chile a week ago may have shifted the Earth's axis by about 8cm and permanently shortened each day by about 1.26 microseconds. (That's about 46 hundredths of a second every 1,000 years!) A large quake shifts massive amounts of rock and alters the distribution of mass on the planet, changing the rate at which the planet rotates. And the rotation rate determines the length of a day.

The magnitude 9.1 Indian Ocean earthquake in December 2004 shortened the length of days by 6.8 microseconds. On the other hand if the Three Gorges reservoir in China were filled, it would hold 40 cubic km (40 billion tonnes) of water. The shift of mass would lengthen days by 0.06 microsecond.

The opening ceremony of the Vancouver Olympics had First Nation "welcome poles."

The welcome poles reminded me of sininggazanak that I knew about in when I was in Sabah decades ago, totemic wooden figures ceremonially placed in the field of a Kadazan who had died leaving no heirs. Besides commemorating the dead person, the sininggazanak asserted the claim of the person's blood-family to the land; a childless person's land is inherited by his or her siblings and their children. The spirits associated withthe figure protect the land. Found only in the Penampang / Putatan / Kinarut area sininggazanak are now rare as they have been overtaken by modern land title systems.

The most famous sininggazanak, a rare female one, was at Kampung Tampasak in Kinarut. It has has now been replaced by a stone replica and stored in the Sabah Museum for preservation.

Peter Whelan has written about the sininggazanak in: "Commemoration of a childless person: a custom among the Kadazans (Dusuns) of the Kinarut - Penampang - Putardan region" in Sabah Society Journal, 6(1):7-26, 1973-74, and Traditional stone and wood monuments of Sabah, ed. by K.M. Wong (Kota Kinabalu : Centre for Borneo Studies, Yayasan Sabah, 1997). ISBN 9839722034