Luck and Morality

It's Friday evening. A young man is driving home from work in his car. He's exchanging texts with his friends while he drives, even though he knows it's not a very safe thing to do. He gets too engrossed in reading a particularly funny response from one of his mates, doesn't notice the lights up ahead change to red, and he shoots through the intersection. Lucky for him, no one was coming along the crossroad at the time. However, a police car happened to be waiting at the intersection to go the other way. The police catch him and arrest him. He gets charged with running a red light, perhaps negligence, or whatever the current crime is called in that state for using your phone whilst driving. He probably gets a fine, maybe loses his license.

Now, let's rewind and have the exact same situation take place again. But this time, a husband and wife and their 4 month old daughter are crossing the road at the time the car goes through. He hits them and kills the mother and daughter, with the father being seriously injured and ending up paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life. This time, the police arrest him with far more serious charges: multiple counts of manslaughter perhaps, grievous bodily harm, etc. This time he almost certainly goes to jail for a number of years.

The interesting thing here is not that the law responds differently in these two cases, but that we more or less universally agree that the man deserves much harsher punishment in the second case than in the first one.

What is actually different, though? The man's actions are identical in both situations. His intentions are identical. The differences are entirely due to luck, something outside of his control. In one case he got lucky that no one was in the path of his car. In the other case, chance conspired to have people in the path of the car, and a much more grim outcome resulted.

So why does it seem fair to us to punish a person more harshly based on bad luck? We like to think that we have a consistent, logical moral code that we base our sense of right and wrong on, but is that actually the case? Can we justify our moral judgement on this issue, or is this a case of hardwired instincts developed over millions of years of evolution leading us astray?

You might say that we punish the man in the manslaughter case as a deterrent, to set an example for other people and make them more likely not to repeat the man's actions. But if this were true, then wouldn't the deterrent reasoning apply whether or not the man actually hit someone?

What about the argument that the family of the victims needs a harsh punishment to occur in order to feel some sort of closure, or a sense that justice has been served? This is probably getting closer to the truth. Certainly in the case when a person deliberately hits another person with a car and kills them, we can understand why the family of the victims, and to an extent society as a whole, needs to see the perpetrator suffer some kind of punishment. It's not hard to look at our evolutionary, tribal origins to see why this kind of retribution instinct would evolve in humans and have reproductive benefit.

I would argue that we didn't evolve an ability to properly distinguish, on an emotional level, between deliberate and accidental injury caused to us or our loved ones by others, and as a result, even when we logically can see the difference, we can't override the deep emotional reactions that we evolved as a response to these events.

The interesting point about all of this is that even if we can come up with a perfectly logical system of moral reasoning that allows us to determine right and wrong behaviour in any situation, if we have evolved logically inconsistent emotional reactions that warp our sense of right and wrong in certain situations, then we will never fully accept such a moral system. We therefore have to accept that whatever moral system we use as the basis of our justice system, there will be situations where some parties will feel that justice has not been adequately served, no matter how fair and consistent that system is.

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Inspired by a chapter from the book Everything is Obvious (Once You Know the Answer) by Duncan Watts, which I read a couple of years ago and that chapter in particular has stuck with me ever since.

photo credit (based on): Яick Harris via photopin cc

Being a huge fan of Sam Harris' book, The Moral Landscape, I was intrigued when he announced a contest for people to try and disprove the central argument of his book. You can see the contest details here: http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-moral-landscape-challenge1

Given that this is a topic I care greatly about, I spent some time thinking through his arguments along with various ideas on the science of morality that I've been pondering for a while now, and found that I actually had some objections to his thesis after all. So I decided to write an entry in the competition, which I've reproduced below.

I'd love to hear opinions, critiques, or any other feedback from anyone who has read the Moral Landscape. Of course I'm happy to hear from anyone, but this essay probably won't have much meaning if you're not familiar with the book.

The Moral Landscape – A Response

The main flaw that I can see with the central argument of The Moral Landscape is not the concept of using science to uncover truths about how to maximize well-being of conscious creatures, but the extension of this to science being able to give definitive answers, even in principle, about what we ought to do. The reason why I see this as a problem is because it doesn’t seem possible to provide a single, obviously correct definition of what it is that we’re trying to optimize.

Using the Moral Landscape metaphor, in order to work out which peaks are higher than others, or how any two positions on the landscape relate to each other, we need to define what this ‘altitude’ axis actually represents. Since we’re talking about the collective well-being of all conscious creatures, we need some way to aggregate the individual suffering and flourishing of each conscious creature into a single value that can be compared with any other possible state on the moral landscape.

This may sound like a problem in practice rather than in principle, but I would argue that it is very much a problem in principle. I'm not talking about how we would go about, in practice, calculating the well-being of each individual creature in order to arrive at some collective well-being value. The problem is how to define a formula for collective well-being that is clearly correct, and is not just one of many possible ways to define collective well-being. If there is no single, obviously correct way to define the collective well-being of all conscious creatures, then we have multiple ways to compare different states of collective well-being that will result in different answers, and therefore no valid, scientific way that we could say one is better than the other.

Assuming that we can devise some way to measure the well-being of an individual creature, what then? Do we take the average of all creatures and assign ‘heights’ on the moral landscape based on this average, thus making the goal be the highest average well-being of all creatures? Or do we add up all the individual well-being values and simply go for the highest total score? How can we decide, even in principle, which is the more valid way to measure collective well-being?

Further, how do we account for deviation from the mean? Say we have two different states with the same average well-being for all conscious creatures, but in one case, all creatures have the exact same value, i.e. the average value, while in the other one, some are much higher, while some are much lower, but they average out? Should these be equivalent peaks on the moral landscape? Is each as good as the other? How can you scientifically determine that answer, even in principle?

The other major problem here is how to account for creatures with different ‘levels’ of consciousness. How much should we value the well-being of a dog compared to a human? How does our aggregate value of well-being weight the individual values of every type of creature that has some form of consciousness? If we only cared about the well-being of humans we could get away with weighting each creature equally, but it seems reasonable that creatures with the capacity to suffer more and/or the capacity to have more profound positive experiences, should somehow be weighted greater in the global well-being equation than those that do not.

How many puppies should suffer before it’s preferable for a human to suffer? Should human beings intervene in the predator/prey relationships in nature, and the subsequent suffering that these relationships cause to prey? Nature has evolved some truly horrible behaviours that various conscious animals have to endure, and all of this suffering and flourishing needs to be taken into account, along with humans and the animals we choose to look after as pets.

We need to remember that well-being is often a zero sum game. Many choices that affect well-being positively for some creatures, will affect it negatively for others. This is what makes moral science a very different thing to other areas of science such as health. Imagine if, whenever a person took actions that increased their life expectancy by one year, some other person would have theirs reduced by one year? How would the science of health look then? It would suddenly look a lot more like moral science, where we would need to justify exactly what it is we were trying to maximize, and a single definition of health would suddenly become much more important.

Moral science is the study of collective well-being. We can discover all kinds of truths about how to maximize specific aspects of well-being. But there does not appear to be any single, unassailable definition of collective well-being of all conscious creatures, and without this, we cannot rely on moral science to tell us what we ought to do, because moral science can’t tell us what definition of collective well-being we must use.

Best and Worst of 2013

Once again it's time for me to look back over the movies, games, and books I've consumed during the last year and ramble a bit about the ones that stood out for me as particularly good or bad. There are plenty more I could talk about than the ones I mention here, but these are the ones that, looking back at this point in time, stand out the most in my mind for one reason or another.

Movies

Best

1. Django Unchained
   First with Inglourious Basterds, and now with this movie, Tarantino has shown an impressive ability to take sensitive subject material and show it in a way that feels fresh and irreverent, while still somehow being respectful. The mix of very serious, even hard to watch scenes on one hand, and clever humour on the other, can't be an easy one to pull off successfully, but I think this movie does it, and does it well.
2. Cloud Atlas
   A really ambitious movie idea, funded mostly independently since the Wachowski's couldn't get a studio to back it, and they totally pulled it off. Shame that the lack of publicity pretty much killed it, certainly here in Australia. Some people don't like the use of actors in multiple roles with exotic makeup, but I thought it was a great idea, and perfectly suited to the subject matter of this movie in particular. And in a way it's almost more ambitious than the book, since not only does it follow six stories across six different time periods, but it switches between them constantly in a way that ties the individual narratives together even more closely, and makes the set of stories properly feel like one big intertwined narrative.
3. The World's End
   (If you haven't seen this movie, there are SPOILERS below. Stop now and just go see it!)
   Being a fan of all Edgar Wright's movies, I went into this one knowing absolutely nothing about it. I was assuming it would be something related to an apocalypse, but then we get into the movie and it appears that it's going to be a comedy drama about friends helping their friend move on from the past and overcome his addiction problem. It went just long enough to have me totally convinced that this is what the movie was going to be about.
   And then the scene in the pub bathroom happened.
   I was shocked, and initially my thought was that Gary had actually just killed someone and was hallucinating the head popping off and the blue blood as some sort of addict coping mechanism. Then the excellent first fight happens, I realize it's going to be a body snatchers comedy action movie after all, and it was awesome.
   One of the best surprises I've had while watching a movie, and a great movie in it's own right.

Worst

1. RIPD
   Honestly, what did I expect? A shameless rip off of Men in Black, but not as good. And none of the MIB movies are that good to begin with. Not even Jeff Bridges could save this one.
2. Star Trek Into Darkness
   Okay, this certainly isn't a bad movie. It's watchable and there's plenty of action and great visuals. But it's such a disappointment. It takes a lot of balls to remake the best of the original Star Trek movies, and you damn well want to be sure you know how to do it right. If they had just tried to make this an original story, and not shoehorn Khan into it (it really wasn't necessary to the main story, and added nothing), it would probably have been on par with the first Star Trek reboot.
   There were so many little things that just didn't work in this movie, and I think it was because they tried to take iconic scenes and ideas from Wrath of Khan and spice them up (with a twist!), but it meant nothing to new audiences, and just pissed off old audiences. It reminded me a bit of the problems that Prometheus suffered because Ridley Scott took a movie that was not originally meant to be set in the Alien universe, and then shoehorned it in, poorly, pissing off Alien fans, and confusing everyone else.
   Go see Star Trek Into Darkness, but then call JJ Abrams bad names afterwards.

Games

Best

1. The Last of Us
   Easily the best game of the year for me, and quite possibly the best game of this console generation. I was always a fan of the technical and artistic aspects of Naughty Dog's Uncharted series, but found the story and gameplay lacking in various ways. This game changes all of that. Story, gameplay, characters, visuals, sound, everything was damn near flawless in this game. Stealth and survival gameplay where you don't feel forced to avoid fights, but feel that it's a genuine option, and one that you actually can take without feeling like a pussy or that you're missing out on important things. Plus it actually succeeded in making zombies interesting to me, which is a feat in itself!
2. Assassin's Creed IV
   I've enjoyed all of the Assassin's Creed games to various degrees, but this one feels like they finally nailed the formula. Despite having uninteresting characters and storyline, there was just such a good variety of gameplay here, with the open world format that lets you choose what you want to do. Addition of the sea battles, with exploration of islands, diving wrecks, butchering poor innocent whales, was a nice complement to the standard hand to hand combat and assassination gameplay. All the real world stuff set in the games company was quite funny and meta, and thankfully didn't overstay its welcome.
3. Grand Theft Auto V
   Possibly the most visually impressive game I've seen on a console, certainly in the open world genre. I was stunned at the amount of detail they were able to pack on to the screen, and how seamless (within reason of course) the detail transitions when flying, skydiving, or just moving between areas.
   The ability to switch between three different characters was a great mechanic, and makes sense in an open world game. Would have been better if there were stronger differences between the characters that made a bigger difference as to which one you were currently exploring the world with.
   The game definitely has flaws, such as a lot of repetitive and unimaginative story missions, though there are still some good ones, and the heists are fun. The side activities are also a bit lacking, with crap like tennis, darts, yoga, that just aren't very interesting. I also found their retro HUD annoying, particularly the lack of good indication of low health, which caught me out way too many times. Not being able to easily store and retrieve cars was a stupid move, and ends up making you just stick with default cars most of the time. Since games like Sleeping Dogs have shown how to do car storage right, Rockstar has no excuse for not figuring this out.

Worst

1. Remember Me
   This wasn't a terrible game so much as a bait and switch, or at least so it felt. We bought it solely on the strength of watching a video of the cool looking memory remixing gameplay that the game features. Unfortunately, this ends up only being a very small part of the game, with the majority being a fairly generic beat-em-up style of play. It was done well enough, and the visuals and atmosphere were nice, but they needed to put in a lot more of the gameplay that represented the only really unique aspect of this game.
2. Call of Duty: Ghosts
   It makes me happy to see that these chest-thumping, America Fuck Yeah style first person shooters are finally started to be rejected by mainstream audiences. I played this one as a rental over Christmas break, and it was pretty much as uninspired and boring as I was expecting. I've been a sucker for FPSes for quite a few years now, but there's only so many times you can have the same gameplay, fighting the same types of enemies, using the same types of weapons. And like with the deplorable Medal of Honor: Warfighter, the attempts to depict the American military as any kind of underdog have gone past being on the nose in these games, and are now just straight shameful.

Books

Best

1. The Psychopath Test
   A very entertaining and interesting book by author/journalist Jon Ronson, that looks into psychopathy and the diagnosis of mental illness in general. I know it sounds bleak, but Ronson has an extremely compelling writing style that makes all of his books enjoyable. I listened to the audio version of the book, narrated by Ronson himself, and that was fantastic. If you don't have time to read the book, then this talk he did at the Sydney Opera House is a neat summary and highly entertaining in itself: Psychopaths Make the World Go Round
2. Quiet
   A fascinating book about introversion and how the modern office workplace is poorly designed for introverts. As an introvert myself I obviously had a personal interest in this book, but I think it's an interesting book for anyone to read, particularly people in management roles since they're probably managing more introverts than they realize (especially in IT), and almost certainly creating an environment that is far from optimal for them.

Worst

I didn't read any books worth singling out as bad in 2013. Yay!

Gender Roles in Movies and the Bechdel Test

I recently watched this TED talk:

It's a short and interesting discussion on the roles that males and females play in movies, particularly kid's movies, and how much influence the behaviour of the protagonists might be having on children and their view of the world. One big example is the typical hero's journey story, where the male protagonist must embark on a journey and fight to eventually achieve some goal, which will often be a female depicted as a prize or reward to be 'won' by the hero (or at least whose affections must be 'won' through heroism).

Not wanting to digress into the topic of objectification of women in movies, what I want to talk about here is an interesting test that the speaker in the above talk made me aware of, one that acts as a basic but surprisingly effective gauge of just how well women are being represented in movies. It's called the Bechdel test.

The Bechdel Test

Simply stated, a movie passes the Bechdel test if it can meet the following criteria:

1. It has to have at least two women in it,
2. who talk to each other,
3. about something besides a man.

Sounds like a pretty low bar, right? And it certainly should be. The test is far from bulletproof, but it serves as a rough guide as to whether women are actually being represented as fleshed out characters, or if they only exist as love interests to the male characters, or to support them rather than having any independent story of their own.

Now, it's certainly true that some movies may fail the test for non-sexist reasons, such as In The Name of the Rose, which is set in a monastery, or Gravity, which clearly has a strong female protagonist, but simply not enough characters to pass the test. I won't single out any of these kinds of movies here.

So, here are some popular and well known movies that fail the test (that you might otherwise expect them not to):

• The entire Star Wars original trilogy
• The entire Lord of the Rings trilogy
• All Indiana Jones movies
• Avatar
• The Avengers
• Total Recall (both versions, and even with the remake having both Jessica Biel and Kate Beckinsale in major roles, plenty of men talk to each other about stuff, but no two women do the same)

And some big movies just from the last year that all fail the test:

• Star Trek into Darkness
• The Great Gatsby
• The Internship
• The Lone Ranger
• Grown-Ups 2
• Hangover 3
• Gangster Squad
• Jack the Giant Slayer
• Pacific Rim
• Pain and Gain
• Planes
• Riddick
• RIPD
• This is the End
• The World's End
• Warm Bodies
• White House Down
• Olympus Has Fallen

Now, you might complain and say that some of the movies listed above are clearly 'guy' movies, such as Hangover 3. But I think part of the point is that so many of our movies, and most of the biggest budget ones, are 'guy' movies, and maybe that's a problem.


Looking at the IMDB top 10 movies, only 4 of the movies pass the test:

• The Godfather Part 2
• Pulp Fiction
• The Dark Knight
• Schindler's List

Though it should be noted that both Pulp Fiction and The Dark Knight barely pass the test and it's a bit questionable if they should be included.

Now, being positive, here are a few big movies from the last year that actually do pass the test:

• World War Z
• Elysium
• Despicable Me 2
• Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters
• The Heat
• Fast and Furious 6
• Iron Man 3
• Man of Steel
• Red 2
• The Smurfs 2
• We're the Millers

Again, it should be noted that some of these just barely scrape by (e.g. World War Z, Iron Man 3, man of Steel), so they shouldn't exactly start patting themselves on the back or anything!

An interesting resource that has categorization of thousands of movies with discussion as to why they pass or fail the test can be found here: http://bechdeltest.com

The Male Bechdel Test

As an alternative to the Bechdel test, I thought of a test that, for want of a better name, I call the Male Bechdel test. It's basically taking the same rules as the Bechdel test, and applying them to men. Given the number of big movies that don't have two women speaking to each other about something other than a man, I think it would be really interesting to know how many movies don't have at least two men talking to each other about something other than a woman.

I'm betting the list will be pretty small, if we again don't count movies where there aren't enough characters to pass or if the setting makes it reasonable not to have men there. Though interestingly, Gravity, which fails the Bechdel test despite being almost entirely centered on Sandra Bullock's character, still passes the Male Bechdel test, with George Clooney's character talking to both the other male astronaut at the start of the movie, and the male mission control character!

I haven't been able to find any online references that look at something like the Male Bechdel test, and I can't think of any movies off the top of my head that definitely fail it, though there are probably various romantic comedies and female-centered dramas that will fail. However, I have a suspicion that a surprising number of them would still pass.

Conclusion

In the end, I think the main thing I learned from looking into the Bechdel test is how far we still are from having interesting female characters in movies that are considered mainstream movies (and not 'chick flicks'). There will always be gung-ho action movies that will be uninteresting to most women, and there will always be romance/relationship movies that will be uninteresting to most men, but it shouldn't be so rare to have interesting female characters in the vast array of general movies that are supposed to appeal to both sexes.

I recently watched the movie Brave for the first time, Pixar's first movie with a female protagonist. It's a shame that the movie wasn't really that good, due largely to having the director replaced half way through, because from what I heard, the original vision of the movie would have been one that people could point to as a positive example of a movie with a female protagonist. Instead, it may end up being used as an excuse by movie executives to say, "see, people don't want female protagonists. It doesn't sell."

Let's hope movie studios will continue trying to make movies with strong female characters, and that we, the consumers, reward those efforts so they keep on happening, rather than proving to the studios that they're right to think that people don't want to see a change in the status quo.

Shooting Guns

Diana and I went to an indoor shooting range and fired real guns for the first time. After years of using these things in computer games and seeing them in countless movies and TV shows, we decided it was finally time to go and see what it's like to fire a gun in real life.

The shooting range we went to has a setup that allows unlicensed people to come in and shoot with no training. The barrels of the guns are attached by wires and a metal post inside the shooting booth in such a way that you can have fairly free movement of the weapon but you can't rotate it around from facing downrange. This greatly increases the safety while not taking too much away from the experience, and I think it's a great compromise.

We decided to try a cross-section of different weapons to get a better feel for firing guns in general, so based on what they had available, we chose the following three weapons:

• .22 bolt action rifle with a 10 round magazine
• 9mm Glock 17 pistol with a 10 round magazine
• Double barrel shotgun (not sure what gauge)

The firing range instructor brought each weapon out one at a time, showed us how to load and fire, and then left us in the booth to fire our rounds before moving on to the next one. Overall it was a great experience. They were fast and efficient, explaining just enough to us so we didn't hurt ourselves, but not wasting too much time on excess details. It was also nice to see that they were professionals and didn't at all come across like gung-ho gun nuts or bogans. Can't say the same for most of the other people we saw coming in to the range to shoot, but when any asshole can walk in off the street and throw down $100 to fire a .44 Magnum, I guess that's not too surprising!

Based on our experience, here are the few things that stood out for me that I thought were particularly interesting (in no particular order):

•  I was impressed at how well the hearing protection blocks out sound, while still allowing you to talk to each other (if you speak very loudly). I felt like I could spend all day there and not be worried about my hearing.
• Eye protection is absolutely essential, at least in a confined space like a shooting booth. Those empty casings really like to fly around and smack you in the head!
• I was expecting it to be hard to aim, but was still surprised at just how hard it was. I found the pistol easier to aim than the rifle, but possibly because with the lighting in the range and wearing eye protection, even at only 10 metres I couldn't see where my shots were hitting the target with the tiny .22 ammo.
• .22 rifle feels like a kid's toy. No noticeable recoil and very lightweight.
• 9mm had a little more kick than I was expecting. I found it hard to control when I tried firing a few shots in quick succession, though I'm sure you improve a lot with practice.
• Shotgun had less recoil than I expected. Still hard to aim though.
• Loading bullets in magazines was harder than I expected. I didn't even think it would be an issue, but on the Glock in particular it was quite difficult. The magazine spring was quite stiff and I actually couldn't get the 10th round in. I'm hardly a weak person, so this was quite surprising to me. I suppose maybe there's a trick to doing it, but I certainly felt like I was putting a lot of force on the top bullet trying to force it down but I just couldn't get it low enough to get the last bullet in.
• Guns are really poorly represented in computer games. The idea that games teach you how to shoot guns now seems even more ridiculous to me than it did before. I've spent hundreds of hours firing weapons like these in games over the years, but I can't shoot a real gun for shit, at least not without a lot more practice on the real thing. Even at 10 metres there would be a reasonable chance I would miss a person with a rifle or pistol like the ones I fired. Particularly if you add in all the shakiness from adrenaline that you would have in real life.
• I think schools should take 15-16 year old students, particularly males, to ranges like these and get them to fire a gun for real. With all the shooting that teenagers do these days in games like Call of Duty, and the gung-ho shit-talking that it results in, I think the experience of firing a real weapon would be a reality check that might teach them something valuable, like just because they can own a hundred people online with a badass modded sniper rifle or dual wielded MP7s doesn't mean they know jack shit about fighting and violence in the real world.

All in all, it's an experience I would recommend to anyone who has never fired a gun. It's fun, it's a bit scary, and it will help calibrate your understanding of what guns can and can't do, what movies and computer games can and can't teach, and what place these tools should have in our society.

Trip to Southern Coast of WA

I recently did a 4 day driving trip with Diana and her parents, Tony and Olga, visiting various places along the southern coast of Western Australia. The intention was to see as many of the most interesting sights as possible in this area in the time available. There was definitely a lot more we could have seen and we would have liked more time at various places, but all in all, we were quite happy with our choices.

This blog is a run-through of where we went and what we did.

Trip Overview

Day 1 - Thursday 15th August

Busselton

Busselton Jetty

We started out at around 7am, heading down the freeway towards Busselton. The forecast was intermittent rain for the whole trip, but we were hoping for it to be clear at Busselton so we could walk along the jetty. It's almost 2km long, so you want about 45 minutes or so to go to the end and back.

Rain started to set in around 10 minutes out of Busselton, but it had cleared when we got there. Unfortunately the little train on the jetty was out of action, meaning Tony and Olga would have to walk it. But it turned out that the underwater observatory at the end was also closed for renovation. So we went to the cafe near the jetty and had breakfast.

After having breakfast and going into the jetty gift store, ominous clouds moved in from the east and the store got crowded as other tourists piled in to escape the rain. We stayed in there for about 20 minutes as the heavy wind and rain mostly passed, then went back to the car in the light rain that followed, having given up on the jetty walk at this point. No big deal since Diana and I have done it before.

We stopped in at the Simmo's ice cream shop and bought some giant decaf coffees (in milkshake cups!) and got back on the road.

Margaret River

Mammoth Cave

We drove down towards Margaret River, stopping in at some local producers along the way. First was a nut and grain shop, run by a South African couple. The guy was friendly and a little quirky, and sounded like Sharlto Copley's character Wikus in District 9. I wanted to ask him to say "fookin prawns", but thought he might get offended.

Next we went to a local silk producer and got a lesson on how their silk is made. After learning that the silk is grown locally but then shipped to Cambodia to have some poor bastards manually unreel the silk cocoons, and that it takes thousands of these to make a silk garment,  I was unsure whether to feel that this represented a fair work opportunity for them, or horrible exploitation. Either way, I think I'd have trouble buying silk clothes knowing the sheer amount of cheap human labour that goes into them.

Finally we stopped in at a dairy place and bought some awesome cheeses. We drove into Margaret River and stopped on the main street, where it was raining yet again. Quick visit to a hemp garment shop and lunch at a kebab/seafood/gozleme place, and we were on the road again.

We stopped at Mammoth Cave, one of the many caves in this region. This one allows for a self-guided tour, so we did that, and there were a lot of really interesting rock formations in the cave, as well as the bones of long extinct megafauna. The cave has two entrances, so we were able to exit into the middle of some forest and then work our way back to the carpark.

Augusta

At Cape Leeuwin Lighthouse

We drove down through Augusta and went to the Cape Leeuwin Lighthouse which is a little bit further along and is the most southwestern point of Australia. Wind had picked up to a ridiculous level here along with some rain, so we just saw it from the car. Diana and I have been here before so that was okay. We then headed back to Augusta and checked in to our rather excellent apartment for the evening. Quick trip to IGA for supplies and we were done for the day.

Day 2 - Friday 16th August

Pemberton

The excellent Millhouse Cafe in Pemberton

Old Railway Station

We headed over to Pemberton, an old logging town with a lot of history. Two things we were most excited about here were the tram ride and climbing the Gloucester Tree, a 60 metre high tree originally used as a lookout point for fires, that you climb via metal bars that have been jammed into the tree to form climbing rungs.

When we got to the Pemberton information centre and museum, we were told that the tree was closed for climbing due to the rain. After looking around a bit it was now about 11am so we headed over to the one nice looking cafe in town to get some lunch and kill a bit of time before the tram ride at 2pm. The cafe was great, given the cold, rainy weather outside. We sat on sofas next to the fire place and enjoyed meals, cake and coffee.

After being warned that the tram ride would get quite cold, we rugged up and got on board. It went for almost two hours and was quite interesting, with the driver giving information along the way. But the most interesting part was when a branch got stuck in the wheels and the driver couldn't dislodge it, so he pulled out a chainsaw, opened a panel on the floor, and sawed it in half! It was pretty hardcore, and the woman sitting in the seat next to the floor panel looked a little concerned.

It turned out that the tram ride didn't go as far as it normally would have, due to some flooding damage on one of the bridges a couple of years ago. We got back and headed over to the Gloucester Tree. There were various signs up warning about climbing the tree during dangerous conditions, but nothing actually stopped you from climbing if you wanted to. We tested our shoes on the rungs to be sure that they had traction, and decided to go for it.

The climb was fairly straightforward and a lot of fun, though you can easily get disoriented if you look through the rungs and focus on distant objects while climbing. Coming down was a bit trickier for me because it had started to rain and the rungs were slippery, and my shoes weren't very grippy. So I really held on hard with my hands while descending so I wouldn't slip off and kill myself, so my forearms were actually quite tired by the end. Diana has these Reebok zig-zag soled shoes that nicely locked on to the rungs so she was quite comfortable descending.

We finally left Pemberton at around 5pm and drove on some fun, windy roads in the rain to get to Denmark. I think I scared the others a little bit with my driving, but our Mazda 3 SP25 sticks to the road really nicely so it was a great couple of hours of driving for me.

Day 3 - Saturday 17th August

Treetop Walk

40 metres above the ground!

We had to head back west about 50km to return to the treetop walk, which we had passed the previous day on our trip from Pemberton to Denmark. The previous two days had been a lot of fun driving because it was during the week and with all the rain, not many people were out being tourists. Now, being Saturday, the roads were a little busier, but still with plenty of bad weather it wasn't too bad.

The treetop walk is quite impressive. Big steel walkways suspended 40 metres in the air at the tallest point, but with gradual slope from the ground so that even someone in a wheelchair could traverse it. It feels a little odd that this structure has been built in the middle of nowhere, but it's well made and maintained, so I'm sure it attracts plenty of tourists. We got stuck in some rain back on the ground and ended up having to wait inside the base of a giant tree for it to pass. Tony and Olga were smart and brought rain jackets, so they were able to laugh at me and Diana and keep on walking :)

Denmark

Elephant Rocks

We headed back towards Denmark and wanted to check out a winery that also made and sold cheese and fudge. Only some of the roads are sealed around this area, and we ended up driving quite a distance on a badly chosen dirt road, which took some time because we didn't want to hit any of the large potholes in the Mazda 3. It was worth the effort though, as the winery was quite nice, and we stopped there for coffee and cake.

Getting back in to town, we went down Ocean Beach Road to take a look at where the Wilson Inlet meets the ocean. There is a big beach/sandbar here that blocks the two from actually connecting, and looks really cool. We would have liked to have gone walking along it if we had more time, but there were too many other things to see.

By this point we were all getting hungry so we went in to town to look for somewhere nice to eat. Unfortunately, some of the cafes had already closed for the day at this point, and nothing was really jumping out at us. We were all feeling like some seafood, and were disappointed to not find a single fish and chip shop in the town. The local service station sold fish and chips, but we weren't that desperate.

After almost giving up, we found a nice little bistro next to the river that we had completely missed earlier on, which had great food, including some really nice seafood platters. So that was lunch sorted out. We dropped Tony and Olga off at the chalets we were staying in, and Diana and I headed off to check out some of the cool beaches in the area.

The most interesting beachy thing to see in Denmark is Elephant Rocks. This is a group of huge, smoothed rocks sitting on the water's edge, and they're quite impressive to see. We walked around these and then decided to continue walking along the rocks and beaches. Then we noticed that some heavy rain was moving in from the west, and it seemed unlikely that we'd get back to the car before it reached us.

This area was quite exposed with no natural caves or overhangs nearby that we could shelter in. Luckily I had some disposable rain ponchos stashed in my backpack, so we found a comfortable rock we could crouch down against and covered ourselves with the ponchos. Because of the high wind pushing the rain against the back of the rock we were behind, the rain mostly blew over the top of us rather than coming straight down, so we were actually fairly well sheltered.

Once the rain eased up a bit we headed back to the car and then back to the chalet for the evening.

Day 4 - Sunday 18th August

Albany

Natural Bridge

Heading out to Albany, we first stopped in for breakfast at a place called Cosy Corner, because how could you not stop in at a place called Cosy Corner? It was a pretty nice place and the food was good. We then continued on to Albany and our first stop, Whale World.

Whale World is an old whale processing facility that is now a museum. It looked quite interesting but we didn't really have the time to do a tour of it, so we continued on to check out some of the natural formations nearby. The most interesting was The Gap and Natural Bridge. This is two side-by-side formations, one being a big gap in the rocks about 20 metres high that has some powerful waves crashing into it, looking very impressive. The natural bridge is a large natural arch with water coming in underneath it. It all looks very cool and you can walk around on it as much as you want.

After this we went to the Princess Royal Fortress, an old military installation on a hill in Albany. There isn't much to see there, certainly nothing 'fortressy', just some old gun emplacements and barracks and a few other buildings. It was interesting, but less impressive than I had hoped.

We drove through Albany and got some lunch, then began the trip home, via Porongurup.

Castle Rock

View from the top of Castle Rock

We drove to the Porongurup Range and stopped at a place called Castle Rock. This is a big and impressive rock formation that has had a skywalk built on top of it which provides stunning views. It requires a 2km walk uphill to get to it, but is well worth the effort. We had set aside 2 hours for the return trip as per recommendations, but found that it only took about 1 hour 15 minutes. There were hardly any people there, so we could enjoy the view in peace.

There is a short climb up to the skywalk where they've added some big steel handholds to make it easier, but I was surprised that they didn't add a few extra ones in some key positions. It was no trouble for us, but they came so close to making it accessible for older and weaker people, so it was a bit odd that they didn't go to the extra effort.

After getting back to the car we began the 400km drive back along the Albany Highway to Perth. This was fairly uneventful, and we got back in to Perth at around 7:30pm.

All in all it was a great trip, and I think the cooler weather and rain actually added to the enjoyment. It made it a pleasure every time you went into a place that had a fireplace, and it was great to do lots of walking around without getting sweaty and uncomfortable, which tends to be the norm for me.

Manning, Snowden and Chilling Effects

There has been plenty of discussion in the media, amongst politicians and people in general over the actions of Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning, and whether, in each case, they deserve to be called 'whistleblower' or 'traitor'. People seem to be mostly willing to consider Snowden to be a whistleblower, and support his right to be protected with this status. Manning seems to have less support, and I think this is interesting.

The main negative arguments people can make against Snowden are:

• He broke his contract to the NSA by revealing classified information.
• He ran off to another country to escape 'justice', which makes him look like a traitor.
• We already knew everything that he revealed.

I don't think any of these arguments holds up. The first point is true for any whistleblower (i.e. they will typically be under some sort of contract forbidding them to release confidential information), which is precisely why the government needs to provide protection to whistleblowers. The second point is entiredly justified behaviour on his part, given the US government treatment of Manning, not to mention use of things such as extraordinary rendition for people who have been deemed 'enemies'. And the last point is certainly false, given each new document that the Guardian continues to publish. Plus, the reaction from politicians, the general public, and foreign countries (such as Germany) would make no sense if all of this information was already known.

All in all, it seems pretty clear that Snowden released important information about unconstitutional activities being performed by the US government, and that he deserves protection as a whistleblower for doing this service. Given the amount of key internet infrastructure that is based in the US, and the number of large US internet corporations that the whole world has become dependent on, and which have been compromised by the NSA, it is hard to overstate the importance of getting this information out to the world.

In the case of Manning, it gets complicated by two key factors:

• He is part of the military, which is subject to its own code of justice.
• He released a large, unfocused mass of information, rather than just documents that specifically showed illegal activity.

Many people have argued that Manning doesn't deserve to be considered a whistleblower because much of the content he released (such as diplomatic cables) had nothing to do with illegal activities and simply caused embarrassment to the US government and made it harder for it to perform its functions. While there is certainly truth to this, the important part that seems to be so often ignored is that he released evidence of illegal activities. He released, amongst other things, video of the US military killing innocent civilians in Iraq. While Manning has been charged with releasing these videos, no charges have been filed against the soldiers responsible for this.

So the response to all of this has been that Manning was held in solitary confinement for months, in conditions that have been called "cruel and inhuman" by the UN, and has subsequently been found guilty of a number of charges, which could lead to a sentence of over 100 years.

The big question is this: Imagine Bradley Manning had released only evidence of illegal activities, and no other documents. Would he have been treated differently by the US goverment? Would he not have been held in cruel and inhuman conditions, and would he have been acquitted of all charges, such as espionage? If the answer is no, which I think is almost certainly the case, then we have a fundamental problem, since in this case Manning would undoubtedly be a whistleblower, making the public aware of illegal activity covered up by the government. And we would have the government horribly punishing a whistleblower, which would have a massive chilling effect on anyone else thinking of doing the same thing.

In a time where the US public is forced to put a huge amount of trust in their government to not abuse all of the secrecy that they take advantage of, it's very important that there are massive penalties to the government for betraying this trust. We need an environment where the costs of performing and covering up illegal activities are so high that the government will never consider it to be a better option than coming clean.

My proposal is that whenever someone releases evidence of illegal activity covered up by the government, then they should be given a free pass on any other information that they also disclose. Yes, this could mean disclosure of all manner of secret and damaging information. And yes, this information might be a huge benefit to the country's enemies. And that's exactly why it would actually have a chance at having a deterrent effect.

The government will always have the option to protect itself from such a damaging disclosure, of course: don't perform illegal activities, and if you do, don't cover it up! In the same way that Wall Street investment banks continue to break the law because the fines that they receive are smaller than the benefits they get from it, the government will continue to cover up illegal activity if this seems to be less risky than coming clean. But if they knew that a whistleblower would be protected no matter what they revealed as long as they revealed the illegal activity, well, that might actually change something.