And yet, what if his forceful opinion on this is contrary to the findings of Raijin, the fastest, most powerful supercomputer in the southern hemisphere, with a peak performance of 1.2 petaflops (one thousand trillion calculations per second), with 160 terabytes of main memory and filesystems that run at up to 150 gigabytes a second? Which of them, Tony Abbott (a man yet to achieve a petaflop) or Raijin, are we to believe?

While readers agonise over this difficult choice we press on to report that supercomputer Raijin, housed at the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) at the ANU is one year old this week. He is about to have a first birthday party (hence the party hat and party decorations).

Director Professor Lindsay Botten laughed that "over a beer at a conference" it was thought a brilliant idea to name the wondrous thing after Raijin, the very manly Japanese Shinto god of thunder, lightning and storms.

Beer drinking doesn't always lead to good decisions but in this case it seems to, the professor thinks, since after all the computer is Japanese-made and had always been imagined and was in large part funded as a powerful tool "for weather and climate science". Weather is the god Raiji's area of expertise and influence.

Not that, the professor points out, weather and climate are Raijin's only interests. He's used by more than 3000 Australian researchers, government agencies and by industry. In his first year he's helped discover the oldest known star in the universe.

But his climate science work (and what a shame it will be if Tony Abbott is right and Raijin is wrong and is wasting his petaflops on a belief that's "crap"?) is important. So for example NCI points to how, in his first year, he's helped to show why Australia is now having so many more droughts than before.

Using Raijin Dr Steven Phipps from UNSW discovered that greenhouse gases have disrupted the winds that deliver rain to southern Australia, pushing them towards Antarctica instead.

Lead researcher Dr Nerilie Abram from ANU has said that “With greenhouse warming, Antarctica is actually stealing more of Australia’s rainfall ... I ran a whole suite of climate model simulations to evaluate how different climate drivers might have played a role in the trends we’ve seen in the Southern Ocean winds. I found that prior to the 20th century, the system is dominated by natural variations. But during the 20th century, human emissions of greenhouse gases start to take over and then become the dominate driver. And that’s the trend that led to the southward shift in the westerly winds that’s led to the drying out of southern Australia.”

With his understandable interest in the subject Raijin flung himself into this work and Dr Phipps said NCI played a fundamental role in the research as "the only facility in Australia that’s got the capacity for us to do something like this ... NCI made it possible to run 13 different experiments so we could break the story down and isolate a specific climate driver".

This columnist, imagining that Raijin the supercomputer barely makes a whisper while he works, had planned to write a smart-arse sentence about what a contrast he makes with the very noisy god he's named after. Temple statues of Raijin (like the one pictured) show him raging and banging on a whole percussion section of drums to create the thunder for which he's famous. But we were thwarted by the truth.

"No, it's very loud. If you get up close to it it's not easy to conduct a conversation. It's the fans," Professor Botten reports.

It's because at work the supercomputer is a ravenous consumer of electricity and generates so much heat ("In the central aisle of the computer its 45C, it's like being in Dubai") that it has to contain battalions of little and larger cooling fans to keep it from overheating.

"Imagine the noise made by the fan in your car [magnified many many times]. It's quite a din."

Professor Botten is very proud of Raijin and talks about the birthday boy as an essential tool, a best friend, of the whole nation. He thinks a modern nation without Raijinesque supercomputers will be a struggler, a battler in today's competitive world. But "to outcompute [our rivals] is to outcompete them".

Blush. Raptor porn.

We continue our occasional series of pictures of Nature as the wild and sometimes shocking thing it actually is, this time with Kym Bradley's picture of a very recent lust-driven encounter of two local Wedge-tailed Eagles.

Bradley took and I have seen, blushing, a whole series of before, during and after photographs of this wild interface and asks us to notice how the female never once lets go of the remains of the rabbit she's enjoying. Yes, any love-minded man who has ever found the female object of his affections more interested in her Mars Bar (or her book, or in what she's watching on TV) than in him will identify with this scenario.