I don't know who the people are who keep sending me phishing messages, trying to get me to divulge my account details, but it is obvious that there is a list out there which includes two copies of my email.  They always come in pairs, probably from a CD of email addresses.

If they but knew, sending such a request to me is bad for business, because I understand their weak point.

Take the standard 'Nigerian letter', the sort that suggests a victimless crime where you get a cut for helping to move money that is lying dormant. The address that the email supposedly comes from is faked, but they cannot fake the address that you reply to. I check my mail fairly often, so I see those as they come in.  I view my emails as text only, so I see through the camouflage.

I send a high priority message to the ISP, using the form abuse@ followed by the ISP name, and I paste in all of the headers, pointing out that they are harbouring an account that is being used to harvest suckers.  That means all of the crooks' efforts are cut off.

Today, Westpac wrote to me, which is odd, since I don't bank with them.  It sounded good, and said "we are so confident of our security, we guarantee your money".   Which is fine, except that I could see where they really wanted me to go, because I am old-fashioned and view the email as text.

I have a contact email at my own bank -- within two minutes of it arriving, it was in their hands, with all headers, along with a request that they pass it to their colleagues at Westpac to nail the URL where the nasty stuff is buried.  It looks to me as though a genuine website has been hacked, and the naughty software buried in a nested set of folders.  If I am right, the banks now have a lead that can be followed, if I am wrong, well, that is up to them to sort it.  There is something not right and now the alarm has been rung.

Even if you don't know how to view headers, you can undo all the hard work of a scammer, just by belly-aching to hotmail or yahoo, or whoever else they are using.  Take away the account where they collect replies, and they are dead.

Go thou and do likewise.  I may be an OB, but I'm a helpful OB!

Remember the old yarn about the frog, placed in a billy of cold water, and slowly heated to boiling point? Frogs are poikilothermic -- cold-blooded in the vernacular, so they develop the same temperature as their surroundings, and so, runs the argument, they will never notice if the water is raised to boiling.

I would have thought they would notice the odd bump, but I suppose they would be dead by then. I don't approve of this, even as a thought-experiment, but it is an interesting idea. We put up with slowly growing traffic congestion (congealing might be a better word), simply because it is a gradual growth. Many, many bad things are able to creep up on us in stealth: pollution, global warming among them, but like the frog's billy, they may kill us in the end.

Good things that come from technology also creep up on us. I thought of this quite early this morning when I checked my email. For about eight years, I have been part of a group of worshippers of Erudite, the little-known goddess of smarty-pantses in something that used to be called STUMPERS-L, where the members referred to themselves as wombats, apparently because they burrowed for information. (My suggestion that we should be Dead Wombats, because we keep an ear to the ground, was howled down.)

Anyhow, a while back, we had to restructure and became Project Wombat. We aren't the people who know the answers, we are people who know where to look for answers, but like many other serious Internet groups, there is a back-list where chatter can occur, a safe haven for bloggers, punsters, jokers, poets and other riff-raff. Needless to say, I always join such groups.

So when I heard two members of 'The Wombats' sing the 'Postman Pat' theme in Norwegian on Spicks and Specks last night, I thought of the Talking Wombats, because it includes a Norwegian and a retired English librarian. By the date stamps, within minutes of my posting that and going to bed, the English member had posted the Youtube version of Postman Pat for all to have a new ear-worm, and soon after, she found the Norwegian version by the Wombats, and soon after, our Norwegian member was able to comment on the performance

It started well, but fell away, he said, though conceding that he had heard inebriated Norwegian bands do worse.

Just think how new technology has changed our lives, creeping up on us like the frog's water temperature. How long is it since the whole idea would have been ridiculous?

Some 15 years ago, I was involved in running an Internet science poetry competition, and I thought it was pretty neat when somebody in Philadelphia and I were both in our offices at the same hour, and able to correspond almost in real time. About 12 years ago, I thought it rather amazing that I could look up a Danish university library's computer catalogue, but I was doing so mainly because I could. Today, I have been making suggestions about chemical education to a teacher in Mauritius, because I care about chemical education. I do it because I can, but the sense of can is different.

I think the water must be close to boiling, but maybe that is just my perspective.

I started messing with computers in 1963, I taught computing for some years, I have generally stayed ahead of the mark, but when I listen to Bright Young Things talking about Interactive White Boards. I have refused to get involved with VOIP, partly because I suspect that the Telstra lines are substandard around my house (suspect is a polite word for having had a look, but I'm saying nothing), and partly because I am having too much fun with other things. I have an MP3 player loaded with classical music (so why was I watching Spicks and Specks? I thought John Amis might have been on), I use a digital camera, but VOIP and Skype are in the too-hard basket.

But I suspect that even if the technology is getting a bit beyond me in places, as Plug'n'Pray becomes truly Plug'n'Play, many of the newer changes will pick me up and carry me gently along, oblivious to the growth that is happening, all around me.

It has been my thesis for about 20 years now that technologies take fifty years to show their true colours and to be integrated into society. The first twenty years are for the engineers, the next ten are for early adapters, then the idea becomes more and more accepted, and all the unpredictable effects begin to flow, so that after 50 years, it is all taken for granted.

And another frog-boiler: have you noticed how older people don't really look old, the way they used to? It's taken me the best part of fifty years to come to grips with that -- and I can, for the price of a beer or five, show you why that is no coincidence. Of course, if you have the first fifty safely under your belt, maybe you can work it out without having to fork out.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Peter Macinnis has three children who live under the opprobrium of having both their father and their mother as their friends on Facebook.

Some many years ago, as a biology teacher, I honed my skills in one particular area, human evolution. I worked at the Australian Museum, using a variety of real material and incredibly accurate casts to show Year 12 students how we could deduce things from small hints.

The articulated fingers of a human hand could be taken in the future as evidence that our kind did not 'knuckle-walk' like gorillas or chimps, but many other characteristics tell the same story, from the angle of the lower end of our thigh-bone to the shape of the pelvis, to the position of the foramen magnum, the hole where the spinal cord enters the skull.

Most fossils are partial, so it was important to understand that when the marrow-free end of a femur was ignored by scavengers, or when teeth survived in a mandible (lower jaw), palaeontologists have to be ready to seize on that evidence.

On the other hand, any sort of palaeontology, and human palaeo-anthropology, the study of us and our near relatives, has always been, and always will be, a battleground. The practitioners may be conveniently divided into two groups, the lumpers and the splitters. When lumpers see a new find, they demand that it be slotted in under an existing species name, while splitters want every find to be a new species.

Some of them are less extreme, but that is the basic picture. More importantly, once people have adopted a philosophical stance, they rarely shift from it. They take up the cudgels and fight with all the ferocity of the man-apes at the start of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I was not a professional, so I did not have to take sides, but I was able to talk with a number of them and read their works, and there was reason on both sides.

That brings us to Homo floresiensis, the so-called 'hobbit' of Flores, which the splitters have hailed as a new species, and the lumpers have dismissed as some sort of deformed cretin. The individual had a small brain, and probably could neither speak nor build boats, but now similar dwarves have been found on the island of Palau. For those who are interested, the article is available from the Public Library of Science.

I have been a bit out of circulation for a bit, so I don't know if this has hit the news much this week, and I need to read the work in more detail, but there appears to have been some serious skulduggery by the lumpers in the Flores case, though they would probably say that the skulduggery came in the form of allegations by the splitters -- it really is that serious to them.

Just be aware that the comments you see will be coloured by the stance taken by individual commentators. Everybody wants his (or her) fossil to be important and unique — and I suspect that sometimes the victim is science.

The main point is that the dwarfed individuals from Palau show modern human characteristics as well.  Their evolution may parallel that of the 'hobbits', but might also be the same group, in which case, the hobbits must be fully moder, or derived from modern stock. That does not make sense, given the small brain size.  I will need to watch this one.

Some 15 years ago, I worked in the Australian Museum, where one of my colleagues was employed to introduce children to Aboriginal art styles. We shared an office, and so I often met activists and artists in a social setting. From time to time, we nattered, as humans do.

One morning over coffee, my colleague told me about her experiences as a child. Growing up, she was fair of skin, not because she was "part white", but because some Aboriginal people have fair skin. Why not? Some Caucasians have dark skin, she explained, but there was a stereotype that because northern Aborigines are almost coal black, then all "pure" Aborigines should be very black.

She was about my age, but she told me about how her grandfather kept a small hole in the ground with a piece of corrugated iron over it, and how he taught her to hide in there, every time "the Welfare" came around. And so she stayed with her family. Her cunning old grandfather saved her from being stolen.

Some years later but some years ago, I was one of 400,000 Sydneysiders who walked over the Sydney Harbour Bridge as my own way of saying sorry. I am still sorry. Not for genocide (there were murders and massacres, but no genocide), not for bastardry (it happened, but that is not what I am discussing). The people who stole the kids really thought they were doing the right thing. I am too steeped in 19th century literature not to recall the Victorian social Darwinism which said the blackfella was dying, and we should gently ease his passing.

I am sorry for the blind stupidity of those people who acted for good motives and did so much harm. There is not a lot we can do to undo the harm, but we can at least have the decency to admit that mistakes were made. My mob have been here since the 1820s, so it is quite likely that one or more of my ancestors caused direct harm or dispossession to Aboriginal people, but I have no way of knowing that for sure. I know it happened, and see http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/syd/quotes.htm#indig for some evidence of past attitudes,

But I do know that up until 1967, I had no idea of the way we were short-changing Aboriginal people. I should have done, as I had a strand of political science under my belt, but it had escaped me. By then, I had enough training in genetics to know that race is a ridiculous concept: the thing that defines us and differentiates us is culture. Over time, culture changes, and I now have little left of the culture that shaped the thinking of my great grandparents (and Amen to that, for they were voracious and dour Calvinists!), but there has always been a culture there.

Stealing a generation was more than stealing children from their families, it was stealing a culture from those kids, throwing them into a cultural void. I can say sorry for that. Right now, I am listening to Charlie McMahon on dij — it's not really part of my culture, but I support it and hope to see fusion music grow. Anybody who wants can take up ownership of it, without ever taking away from my enjoyment.

Facebook is a cultural shift that has passed older people by. My children live under the opprobrium of having both their parents on Facebook — and not only that, their parents are among their Facebook friends.

As a consequence of that membership, I became aware today of a new group, "One Million Australians Feel Sorry".

So far, it only has 18,000 members, but it's a start, and I added to the momentum. I see that Young Kev is girding his loins to make a gesture of reconciliation, so maybe you think it doesn't matter, but if you feel a despairing sort of annoyance with the well-meaning do-gooders who did so much harm, who wasted do much talent, give joining that group a thought. Then invite all your friends to join.

As in so many social evils, the best way out of the mess is for people to agree that bad things have happened in the past, and they have to stop. That may not be a remedy, but it ends the heartache.

On both sides.

--------------------------------------------- 

Footnote: by February 15, there were 30. 573 members.

I have been silent too long in this space, but I have been finishing rather a lot of work, three books in fact. It's the old rule of buses, that they come in threes, because the front ones are slowed down while the third comes whizzing through.

The third of them, the whizz-through is a look at "the 100 Great Discoveries of Science", and I am still revising the second draft -- but I am starting to get a life again, and yesterday, a list acquaintance and I agreed to stage a debate on  the topic "That ecology is a fraud" on that list. The subject was my idea, and I am not sure why the topic sprang to what laughingly passes muster as my mind, though I have, just recently, been delving into the origins of ecology-the-science as one of the 100 Greats.

Ask most people, and they will guess that ecology started with Rachel Carson. As scientists understand the term, ecology dates back to Ernst Häckel in 1866, but in 1893, John Burdon-Sanderson was an experimental physiologist interested mainly in electrical changes in tissues. All the same, he stated in his Presidential Address to the BA, aka the British Association for the Advancement of Science that "oecology" was, along with physiology and morphology, one of the three great divisions of biology. He said Ernst Haeckel (the normal rendering of Häckel then) had coined the phrase "some twenty years" earlier, but now it had become one of the central tenets of biology.

He added that it was in some ways the most attractive of the three, because it came closest to the spirit of what had once been called the 'philosophy of living nature'. In other words, natural history was back again in a new and scientific suit of clothes. The accepted modern spelling of 'ecology' was used at the International Botanical Congress in the same year, and Eugenius Warming published the first textbook of ecology (he wrote in Danish and called it økologiske) in 1895. The 'Journal of Ecology' began in 1912, while the American journal 'Ecology' was first published in 1920.

When you look back further, there are signs of thinking about ecology, well before those dates. In 1801, a Prussian polymath called Alexander von Humboldt  was scrambling up the northern Andes with a French botanist, Aimé Bonpland, and unlike those who had gone before them, they detected changes in the types of plants which were seen at different levels: they had detected what we now call altitudinal zonation.  (Humboldt later wrote Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent , the tale of his travels. A fresh young graduate was inspired by it in 1831 as he was about to set out on travels of his own, on HMS Beagle. His name: Charles Darwin.)

All of that is legitimate science, but there are those who would seek to describe themselves as ecologists as they justify extremism in the name of conservation.  In my experience, these people lack any scientific training or insight, but seek to claim the high moral ground.  For all that they have high motives and mean well, I regard them as frauds, but then I cut my teeth doing pattern analysis on the bindii-ridden Botany Lawn, on my hands and knees.  These wounds I had on Crispian's day . . .

In the 1800s, there would still have been those anti-mathematical people, the same tribe who attacked William Harvey in the 1620s when (in their words) he "doffed the habit of the anatomist" and began measuring things like blood flow, but good science can only come from measurement and investigation. The results needed to be quantified. Even if much modern ecology is about quality, things need to be pinned down and analysed.

 I am sure the prissy 19th century gentlemen Luddites would have felt leery of people who did nature study with a tape measure or any equipment other than a Wardian case, a killing jar, a shotgun and a few gutta percha envelopes.  I believe they would have dismissed ecology as a fraud.

 Mind you, so would Rutherford, who opined that "there are two kinds of science: physics and stamp collecting", and "if your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment".  Ecology is all about statistics and careful analysis -- I suppose that is why I took to it.  It certainly wasn't the bindii.

I first wrote of the effects of the Internet on disease/epidemic management in about 1995, describing the uses of that sort of technology in a small bubonic plague outbreak in India and in managing the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake (which is how I can date the piece — my memory swears it was several years earlier).

As is so often the case when you try to predict where technology will go, it is impossible to predict the advances that will come in the next decade, where the technology will lead. I saw only management after the event of a catastrophe, but one clever person gets an idea, and a whole new vista can open up.

Today, a friend in Florida, a retired librarian who knows my interests, forwarded an email to me that included a URL for a Web dialogue being conducted by the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. The idea is to inform the public about what will happen in the event of an influenza pandemic. There is going to be one: the only real question is how long will it hold off?

People who pay attention to these things are well aware that when the pandemic starts, there will be a delay while vaccines are prepared to counter the new strain, and then they will be available in limited amounts. At that point, cruel logic must take over: the people vaccinated first will not be the most vulnerable, but the most essential, mainly health-care people. In the long term, that choice will cost lives, but save far more in the longer term.

In the middle of a pandemic, the last thing health workers need is a bunch of selfish hysterical people trying to jump the queue, so if they can get people informed in advance, delivery will be improved. Of course, they don't say that up-front, but you can be sure that information like that will be included. And you can be sure that by doing so, CDC will save lives.

I could not foresee that sort of initiative -- and I never foresaw a shadowy web of information and informants, the science gossip that lies behind and around the official channels, which brought me into the loop. Looking at the provenance of the forwarded email, I can see how an email originating in New York went to a librarian list, and from there, through my Florida friend to me, and now to my readers.

I am fairly sure that the invitation is only to US citizens, but you can inform yourself by going to http://www.webdialogues.net/panflu/engage

Trabby, Berlin: A Trabant or Trabby, Berlin.

An American friend, discussing Australia, Canada and the US and their reactions to the Kyoto Protocol wrote on a list:

We're all in trouble when everyone in China starts driving.

This prompted me to reply, and now I am posting a somewhat edited version here.

Have you ever seen a Trabby? Above, there is a picture of one that I saw near Checkpoint Charlie in former East Berlin last July. Now a kitsch joke (note the number plate), these glorified lawnmowers sans blades were made of cardboard and stuff, and I think had a two-stroke motor, but they ran. And they were once East German status symbols.

My favourite Trabby shot, which I cannot immediately find, was a Trabant (to give it its proper name) with BMW badging. Once a status symbol, nobody loves them now. In India, entrepreneurs are looking at the $3000 car, with exports to China planned, or maybe manufacture in China and exports to India. All that stands between us and an Asian Carmageddon is a severe lack of infrastructure: roads, bridges and parking.

But most of my personal carbon footprint (apart from travel) comes from lifestyle: hot water for showers, lights, appliances that stay on standby, demands for steel, plastics and other stuff. In our house, we are now starting to adopt a switch-off policy, but many appliances lose their presets when they are turned off at the wall.

I already avoid driving when I can, using public transport, but like much of Sydney, the US cities largely lack a good service, so USians are forced to drive more (with honourable exceptions in certain cities like NY and San Francisco). It's a small start, but every little bit helps, as the old lady said, peeing in the ocean.

I think the next few years will see a growing swell of "act locally" campaigns. Here, it took a drought (which may have been heightened by global warming -- or not) to make Australia sit up and pay attention. The SOI or Southern Oscillation Index is now at 11 -- that is a value telling us we have switched from parching El Niño to drowning La Niña, and if we have switched, the American west coast, north AND south is in for a drought. On that projection, California is in for real trouble, and the Big Wake-up is about to arrive.

There is a paradigm shift coming in the way we westerners think: there just has to be one. It's that or extinction. Europe gets it, we still don't. A Dutch friend just sent this to a different list:

"At first I thought this was a April 1 joke, but they are serious!
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/20071119-1203-desertwaterpark.html

Developers plan massive water park in Arizona desert
Project would use 100M gallons a year
By Chris Kahn - ASSOCIATED PRESS "

Even if global warming were not a reality, marine CO2 levels are close to the point where marine organisms will find their shells dissolving. Take out the corals, the winkles, the clams, the oysters and such, and whole ecosystems will crash in a spectacular way.

When I wrote a book on poisons a few years back, it was a fall-back from my position that I should do a water book, because the wars of the next 50 years will be fought over water. The link was the arsenic-laced tube wells of Bangladesh -- my editor said poisons would sell better. I still want to do that water book, because the question remains important, especially where rivers like the Euphrates, the Mekong or the Brahmaputra cross international borders. Meanwhile, watch for stories of catastrophe looming around the Three Gorges Dam in China. The whole thing is a desperate gamble, as these links reveal:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7108646.stm

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/11/23/asia/china.php

When the BBC and the International Herald-Tribune say much the same thing, what are we to think?