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A few weeks ago I started building raised garden beds in the now mostly-cleared part of our property which will become our food garden. I’ll be progressively adding new beds over the next couple of years and eventually we’ll have probably 20 or more beds, so I decided a naming scheme was needed. As a gardener I need to be able to think “time to put some manure on bed x” or “these seedlings will go into bed y”.

Rather than numbering the beds, I decided to give them all names, in alphabetical order and honouring the great men and women of science and philosophy. With the help of my friend Kirsty I’ve got most of the letters of the alphabet covered, but there are some blanks. Any suggestions?

• Archimedes
• Babbage
• Copernicus
• Darwin
• Einstein
• Fibbonacci
• Galileo
• Hoffmann
• I
• Jung
• Kinsey
• Leonardo
• Marx
• Newton
• Orwell
• Plato
• Q
• Russell (Bertrand, not Jane)
• Sagan
• Turing
• U
• Von Bingen
• Wittgenstein
• Xenophon
• Y
• Zeno

Only Archimedes and Babbage have actually been built so far, so alternative suggestions for any of the others are also welcome.

A Liberal backbencher has called for Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson to double his promise to cut fuel excise from five cents a litre to 10 cents, reports ABC News.

Backbencher Christopher Pearce has suggested the federal opposition should promise to cut fuel excise in a desperate bid to capitalise on public concern about petrol prices and so lift the party’s stocks.

I say that neither Nelson nor Pearce have the answer: neither of them go far enough. I am calling for a cut in the fuel excise of 171.9 cents per litre, which would make petrol free. Free, as in beer. FREE PETROL FOR ALL!

Here’s how it’s done.

First, we end all imports of foreign oil. I for one am sick to death of Australian motorists’ dollars being sent to wealthy Saudi sheiks and Venezuelan socialist crackpots. MY PLAN will keep your petrol money in Australia.

Next, we nationalise the petroleum industry. Australia’s dwindling oil reserves rightly belong to Australian working families who are doing it tough, not to multinational oil drilling companies. MY PLAN will return all remaining oil to the people of Australia to use as they see fit. It will also create lots of jobs in the newly nationalised petroleum drilling and refining agency, the Federal Reserve Energy Exploitation (FREE) Authority. That’s FREE as in PETROL.

FREE PETROL.

Now, according to the most recently published figures from APPEA (the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association), in 2007 Australia produced 119.9 million barrels of crude oil. Professor Dick Plano of Rutgers University says that each barrel of crude produces 19.5 US gallons (73.8 litres) of petrol, plus other distillates. So that would give us 8.8 billion litres of unleaded to play with per year (this amount will obviously decline as our oil reserves are exhausted, but that won’t be before the next election so let’s not worry too much about that). Selling those other distillates will pay the operational costs of the exercise, giving us FREE PETROL AT NO COST TO THE TAXPAYER.

Those 8.8 billion litres will be allocated equally to all Australian citizens - that’s roughly 440 litres of petrol for every man, woman and child, enough to fill an average family car five times. MY PLAN will provide 440 litres of clean, high octane, Australian-made unleaded for every Australian TO DO WITH AS THEY WISH.

Obviously some people will need more than that, so I will also establish a simple online market where you can sell your petrol ration to the highest bidder if you wish. That’s right, if you’re prepared to take public transport, MY PLAN provides FREE PETROL you can SELL TO RICH PEOPLE FOR WHATEVER THEY WILL PAY.

MY PLAN is a tax cut, an industry policy, an employment initiative all in one. Plus, it will improve our balance of trade and stick it up the oil barons once and for all.

VOTE FOR ME. FREE PETROL FOR EVERYONE.

Above: San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom officiates at the marriage of Del Martin, 87, and Phyllis Lyon, 83, who have been together 56 years but are legally married only today.

Some moments speak for themselves. Anything I could say in commentary would only be fluff. And anyway, I have tears in my eyes.

Photo: AFP

• Wonderful name of Senegalese AIDS activist
  From and AFP story on Ban Ki-Moon’s call to end travel restrictions on people with HIV: “Innocent Laison, a member of the Senegalese NGO Africaso, denounced such restrictions…”
  (tags: hiv)

Mmm… kosher giraffe…

• Violet Blue has serious concerns when lawmakers get in bed with fundamentalists for a ‘money shot’
  I love Violet Blue’s column in the SF Chronicle.
  (tags: pornography taxation op-ed funny blue,violet politics california usa)

Please, Santa, I want an AIDS ring for Christmas…

Dontcha just love the way they highlighted the gp41 surface proteins in those darling little blue sapphires, and the single strand of RNA rubies is just gorgeous.

It certainly gives a whole new meaning to the expression “to die for”.

Link (via Boing Boing)

Here’s the presentation I gave last week to the AFAO HIV Educator’s Conference on the ‘Swiss Statement’ and our response to it.

The ‘Swiss Statement’ is the controversial position taken by a group of Swiss HIV clinicians who argue that HIV-positive people with completely suppressed viraemia (undetectable viral load) are essentially incapable of transmitting HIV sexually. It’s been the cause of some heated debate, as you’d imagine. I was asked to give this paper after presenting a similar argument to an ASHM event last month.

In a nutshell, my argument is that the Swiss Statement presents opportunities for HIV health promotion by emphasising the relevance of testing, treatments uptake, virological control and STI management as HIV prevention measures. I also argue that gay men are particularly adept at integrating complex scientific research into their sexual practice, and we should have faith in the capacity of that process to work in relation to this issue as it has in the past.

The paper was pretty well received at the conference, if a bit controversial. And of course my slides were a hit.

The Swiss Statement, gay men and safe sexual cultures: turning challenges into opportunities