Christos time

Xmas time again. Useless information for the day: the X in Xmas is really the Greek letter Chi  'ch' as in Christos. This is where a simple blog entry about Xmas became more complex. I thought, fool that I am, if it's Greek letter, why not put the Greek letter in? Then I realised I didn't know how. So I had to learn how to insert a non standard symbol into Blogger.

A bit of Googling later and I discover that I really ought to be using Unicode characters rather than symbol fonts like Symbol, let alone Wingdings or Webdings. I had forgotten that typography gets some people really cross and very strong opinions are held.

So, the easiest way is to type an ampersand (&) and then the Capitalised or uncapitalised Greek letter name we want (like Alpha, beta, gamma, delta etc) and then a semi colon (;) without leaving any spaces. Or we can type & followed immediately by hash (#)  and then a special number that corresponds to the character you want followed immediately by a semi colon. Unless you happen to be Rain Man I suggest this is not the easy way.

Or if all you want is an upper case Chi you can just use an upper case X if we want to cheat because it looks much the same in this font. Which makes it a pretty poor choice for a demonstration. If we did it in lower case it would be χ but that would be incorrect for a proper name or title but would look way more impressive.

Just to check, Psi should be Ψ and Phi should be Φ. But they wont display immediately. I find that if I change my editing mode to HTML and then back to Compose, Blogger updates the screen with the Greek letter.

Let's try some more: ζ, Γ, Δ, δ, β, Ω ω, ρ. Yeah, that's pretty cool if you happen to know your Greek alphabet. Anyway, having typeset a single character to my satisfaction, I've pretty much forgotten what I was going to say.

So, Merry Typography and a Happy Unicode.

TK – Kitten Escapologist

Our kitten TK (stands for That Kitten) is a skinny ginger tom with big feet and an extremely long tail. He looks a bit like a feral meerkat.

Not TK

‘Feisty’ isn’t a strong enough term to describe him – we suspect he has small cat syndrome. He’s a very free spirit in the sense that we can’t keep him in the house if he doesn’t want to be there.

We bought one of those cool cat doors that have multiple settings: no cats in or out, cats out but not in, cats in but not out or cats in and out. The cats have to wear a little magnet on their collars to activate the door. TK learnt very quickly. Our venerable ten year old ginger tom Tiger didn’t much like the new fangledness and preferred one of his human staff to just open a door when he asked but eventually got the hang of it. Tiger doesn’t understand what he did wrong for us to foist TK on him in his twilight years.

Despite all this marvellous technology we kept finding TK where he shouldn’t be if the door was working properly. A bit of sneaking around observing TK (not an easy thing to do) showed us the problem: TK was using his head. Literally. He was butting the cat door until the magnet that closed it vibrated to a new setting and then he’d just push through.

Technology defeated we resorted to a brute force approach. We put a box in front of the cat door at night. Too easy for TK. He’d wedge his pointy muzzle in between the door frame and the box and gradually edge his way in. Once he’d got his body between the box and cat door he’d revert to head banging. A very motivated kitten this one - possibly with a headache. This might help explain his general demeanour.

OK, time for a different approach. We now place a twenty kilo bag of sand against the cat door on the outside every night. So far he hasn’t found a way around this one but I’ve noticed him checking out the insect screens on the windows and doors. Come summer I expect he’ll be applying his head to those problems as well. 

The science of faith. Really.

Just finished J Anderson Thomson's little book why we believe in god(s): a concise guide to the science of faith.

The God's Eye nebula. Who's watching you baby?

A very nice pulling together of current scientific explanations of why human have religion - a good starting point for working out what we can do about religion's many negative effects and part of the way forward for secular morality. All good stuff. For those who are puzzled why religion persists in the light of reason. Not ideal reading if you think Richard Dawkins is the Antichrist (or even a naughty little boy).

Easter Eggs

Who doesn't love them? Especially digital ones.

I was of two minds whether to post this for any VCE students out there wasting time before exams Caitlin but since I was fairly sure I wouldn't remember to post it later, here it is.

You may wish to type 'do a barrel roll' in a Google search box. Then 'askew'. Then 'anagram'. Then 'ascii art'. All without the quotation marks please. You may then wish to go to this PC Mag article for further time wasting.

New wind turbine design

A new Australian design for wind turbines is described in this article in Gizmag.

Brisbane's Renewable Energy Solutions Australia (RESA) recently unveiled the first working installation of what is claimed to be the world's quietest wind turbine. The Eco Whisper Turbine is capable of producing 20kW of electricity despite being about half the height and having half the blade diameter of more familiar three-bladed solutions, and is able to automatically adjust the position of the blades to maximize wind capture.

The video show it coming into the wind and accellerating. You can tell it's an Australian corporate production because no money has been spent on it whatsoever but it tells you what you need to know. If it had been US produced there would have been grand music underneath and a Yank narrating everything you are seeing while dot points popup all over the place. Instead, no sound, just a few titles. I like it but it won't go down well overseas I'm afraid. I especially like the guys just wandering around in the foreground, presumably while the MD takes a hand held video he then edits on his laptop. Want one.The wind turbine, not the MD.

Being exceptionally quiet, it might overcome the noise if not vibratiuon complaints that our so called government used to effectively ban wind farms from being anywhere near populations (i.e. the people who would use the electricity generated). They note that birds might even see these things. Any bird that doesn't say to itself when sighting these things 'WTF! I'm out of here!' probably deserves to go extinct. I can't work out what they remind me of though. Tea strainers?

Drive

Saw the mighty Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad) in Drive last Sunday at the Gold Class. Quikflix has an interview with him in which it appears there is only one more year to go for Walter White. Probably just as well since he's been looking more and more evil in the promo pictures and any more might break his face.

I could get used to (have got used to) the comfy lay back chairs, intimate cinemas and flunkies bringing food and drink at Gold Class. Good film too. Four stars. Supposedly Ryan Gosling plays the lead, very quietly, and Cranston plays a supporting role but pretty much makes the film for me. The plot:

A Hollywood stunt performer who moonlights as a wheelman discovers that a contract has been put on him after a heist gone wrong.

Very calm overall with lashings of sudden graphic violence.

One of the major hoods is played by the very distinctive Ron Perlman who I last remember as the less than attractive Salvatore in Name of the Rose which is a worry since that was 1986 and he's been working all that time since. He was also Hellboy apparently. Perhaps I haven't been paying attention?

Should I mention that Umberto Eco wrote TNOTR and is such an erudite writer he makes my head explode in desperation at my own ignorance? Probably not. But also a good film, especially for medieval mystery and Sean Connnery buffs (he plays Brother Baskerville from England - a little homage to Sherlock Holmes there).

Get it right chaps!

Guy Rundle provides some clarification for anglophiles today in Stars & Swipes. A few tidbits:

While Britain swapped its manufacturing sector for financial ''services'', and the US swapped production for consumption, Germany, Sweden and others used manufacturing as a base to develop high-tech industry, value-added by free higher education. The results are obvious - exports account for up to a third of national output for such countries, while Britain and the US run trade deficits that average 5 per cent of GDP.

Poverty rates in these parts of Europe range from 5 to 11 per cent, whereas they are north of 20 per cent in Britain and the US. Household savings rates are stable, at about 12 per cent, more than triple that of the Anglosphere, which is dependent on breakneck consumer spending to keep the wheels moving. Medical coverage is universal, affordable public housing is widespread, yet budgets are -balanced (save for Germany's, whose deficit is nevertheless a fifth the size of the US).

Now admittedly Ireland, Greece, Spain and Italy are likely to default, causing vast financial confusion. And admittedly the cheap money that caused this problem (by offering cheap loans to businesses that could not pay it back with or without interest) came from France and Germany with quite a lot of help from the US and Britain. But I don't see the US and Britain doing much to bail these countries out.

So ... instead of sucking up to China and Japan and attempting to emulate the US and Britain, wouldn't it make more sense to learn from Europe? Imagine: we could rebuild a manufacturing sector and, gasp, value add our enormous natural resources. We could try educating our population again, just like we said we would back at Federation and again when we were supposed to become the clever country. Since all the smart money is on things getting very difficult (what with all that climate change stuff), this may actually be a good idea!

However, do we have the cultural characteristics found in northern Europe? Characteristics based in the harsher climate? I remember driving through Sweden marvelling at how neat all the farms looked - how extremely well maintained and compared them to Oz farms where junk has been an art form.  The I realised that when you get ten feet of snow for several months of the year everything had better be well maintained because if something fails no one will be coming to fix it. But I reckon we have a case of the Southern Europe's here: it's a lovely day, crack another tube. Doesn't auger well. I suppose country Australians have the resilience born of drought and flood but city Ozzers are living in fantasy land.

FTA with Japan and China? FFS!

More sensible advice for Mr Abbott from Ian Porter at the Age Market Porkies. My favourite quotes are:

"Under a free trade agreement (FTA) with China, Australian companies would have to face competition from government-owned enterprises, with all that entails in terms of subsidies and the ability to operate at sub-economic prices for long periods, long enough to drive the opposition out of business." That's assuming we don't just sell everything in Australia to Japan and Chine outright.

"The lack of effective trade unions or company unions means that all Chinese goods are unfairly priced, because the labour that goes into them is unfairly priced." Perhaps Mr A believes this is how things should be in Oz?

"Trade unions are banned in China. Yes, there is an official "trade union" run by Beijing, but there are no freely organised, independent unions that are allowed to stand up against enterprises and agitate for a fair share of the earnings. That's why 14 Foxconn employees had to resort to suicide in 2010 to make their point about unfair wages and conditions. The company's profit margins were so huge that Foxconn - contract manufacturer for Apple, Dell, Sony and Nokia, among others - was magically able to offer a 66 per cent pay rise, although there were conditions attached." Makes you feel good to be a consumer, doesn't it?

"As for (Japan being) a pluralist democracy, it is true that the Liberal Democratic Party did lose office in 2009 after almost 54 continuous years in power." 'Twould make Menzies and Howard proud.

"... the Japanese government has been manipulating its currency for decades, just like the communists across the East China Sea, if not in the same heavy-handed way."

"Japan does have a market economy, but you will find it much easier to find a distributor and a retailer for your product if you are a Japanese manufacturer." Not racism (on the part of the author), simple fact borne out by years of disappointment - see the sad story of Australian rice.

Midday in Melbong

Just went to see Woody Allen's new movie Midnight in Paris with my lovely wife and duaghters and actually enjoyed it. Admittedly we were in a comfy Gold Class cinema with flunkies bringing us delectible food as the movie progressed. It's a tough life.

I'm not normally an Owen Wilson fan but having him channelling Woody was a better choice than Woody playing the romantic lead himself (those days have gone, if they were ever there). All the usual New York left wing pseudo intellectual jokes were there along with a fair amount of spoken French (which I do not speak) rather than Spanish (which I do not speak) as in Vicky Cristina Barcelona.  Is this a pattern? I don't think Woody will be heading to Germany or the real Russia (after what he did to Russian literature in Love and Death I doubt if Putin would let him in, or if he got in, out) so I suppose it will be Italy next (probably Venice - very romantic you know - it's Woody's shtick since his early, funny movies).

I've always been a fan of time travel stories so it was a delight to have a present day movie also containing (spoiler alert) Cole Porter, F Scott Fitzgerald, Dali, Picasso, Gertrude Stein (who would have punched Woody in the mouth) and many other luminaries. So bravo Woody - may you live long enough to get all that reprocessed reading out again in cinematic form.

This optimism thing

For years I have been called a pessimist - always focussing on the negative and discounting the positive. I claim to be a realist - weighing the available information and acting according to that assessment but most people say 'nah!'. Now it finally turns out that optimists are optimistic because their brains filter out 'negative' information: which I assume means information our pre-rational brain regards as unhelpful in the survival and reproduction biz. See: BBC News.

Dr Chris Chambers, neuroscientist from the University of Cardiff, said: "It's very cool, a very elegant piece of work and fascinating.
"For me, this work highlights something that is becoming increasingly apparent in neuroscience, that a major part of brain function in decision-making is the testing of predictions against reality - in essence all people are 'scientists'.
"And despite how sophisticated these neural networks are, it is illuminating to see how the brain sometimes comes up with wrong and overly optimistic answers despite the evidence."
Optimism seem to be good for your health. A study on nearly 100,000 women showed a lower risk of heart disease and lower death rate in optimists.
But as Dr Sharot points out: "The negative aspect is that we underestimate risks."

While this is very helpful in explaining quite a lot of human behaviour which seems totally irrational (because it is) this is all a bit of a worry as well.

While our ancestors were evolving, always looking on the bright side of life might have helped them get through some pretty awful situations, like high infant mortality and high death rate generally, seasonal starvation and so on. But the world is different now (at the moment): it was recently suggested that we are now in the Anthropocene - the period of earth's history where the behaviour of our species actually changes the processes on the earth. So what we do counts big time, especially for our descendants.

If what we do follows from what we can think (some options having been weeded out by our optimistic brain before we even get to consciously consider them), then we may well be missing some important options. This is especially so when we consider that the human brain evolved to maximise our chances to stay alive and successfully reproduce - not to handle complex systems that interact with billions of other humans and the rest of the living world (and the atmoshpere and hydrospher for that matter as well).

The obvious points to be made are that all those optimists out there may be seriously underestimating some pretty serious risks, like their diet, the effectiveness of their political processes and social organisations, and just how bad things could get with climate change. How bad could it get? Pretty bad. How hard is it to get people to see these unpleasant things? Very hard. How long does it take to change people's minds and their systems? Too long.

Also, while our brain may test predictions against reality (or at least our previous experience of reality somewhat conditioned by our pre-existing tendancy to optimism), scientists have their work peer reviewed. Now that's a scary thought. What if climate scientists are optimists?

Fat, fatter, fattest, fatist, fatista

As a person who thinks of himself as 'fat' (because I am seriously overweight and all the excess fat is the part I'd rather dispose of rather than say, muscle, organs or bones - insert 'lose 40 pounds of ugly fat joke here) I have a few thoughts on the matter. I was sent an email offering me, as a special incentive to purchase some financial training courses (reputable ones I should add), a free copy of the book Sweet Poison: Why Sugar Makes Us Fat ( http://sweetpoison.com.au/). I immediately put a note on my Facebook where I said: 

Sounds like me. Might even read this, but we shouldn't discount low GI diets because they can be bent by industry (low GI chocolate for fuck's sake (FFS)). Also, the purpose of low GI diets is to reduce the amount of sugar we eat, having already reduced the amount of fat we eat. Since many processed foods contain lots of sugars (and some are worse than others) we need to be careful what we eat. And many unprocessed foods have surprising GI ratings as well. As for evolutionary considerations - that's for the blog I think.

So here it is.

I suppose journalist and traders tend towards being overweight because they tend to sit still in front of computers much of the time, so this was a good offer. When visiting the site and reading an extract I found something of a parallel life, though I am pleased not to have six children including twins rather having only three. Anyway, there was discussion of the Darwinian explanation for some of our bodily behaviour and it occurred to me for the very first time that I have been suckered, again. I am not a bad, self indulgent slob apparently: I  have a highly efficient body that does what it was adapted to do some tens of thousands of years ago when we were all hunter gatherers. All you skinnys out there: clearly you are mutants and come the inevitable ecological reckoning, I know who is going to starve. Sorry, years of suffering fatist prejudice came to the surface there, please ignore. So what do I mean?

Let's talk about fruit - we all know that it's good for you and that it's seasonal. While we were evolving we didn't have international transport of food or refrigeration. You ate the fruit when it was available. You ate as much as you could because you knew winter was coming (or at least your body knew and wasn't fussed by that newfangled self awareness that was wasting resources in your brain).  Your brain knew you would be starving for a while later on and the only thing that would get you through to the next spring would be if you could convert as much of that food as possible into fat. So some of our ancestors did. The ones who didn't didn't make it and neither did their kids. That's how natural selection works. Pretty grim really - not a good bed time story but one the kids have to learn at some stage unless they come from a place where the government feels they can legislate against reality (see US southern states in particular and possibly the Australian Liberal Party).

Now we have agriculture, transport, refrigeration and other forms of food storage so the selection pressure of winter (or monsoon - hello Thailand - or drought - hello Africa - or other periods when food would be unavailable) has receded. Good-oh. It's just that our brain and body is extremely conservative (in a good way) so it keeps urging us to eat more and convert that to fat for the bad times it just knows are just around the next bend. Not only that, we now have a super abundance of food. And not only good food, really terrible food as well. So we keep eating and we get fat because the selection pressure doesn't force our bodies to use the fat. But if we stop eating our bodies think the bad times have arrived and will only use as little fat as possible to try to keep us alive and meanwhile make us absolutely bloody ravenous and steps up the old fat conversion of any food we do happen to eat.

So we try to reduce what we eat, select what we eat more carefully and take lots of exercise (ho, ho - when you are carrying 40+ kg of extra fat exercise is a form of torture). As explained in the video below (which is truly excellent and worth investing the time on - I know it's long) even when we as a society decided to go fat free, we kept gaining weight! This was mainly because of the use of various sugars in processed food (Danger Will Robinson!) but also because we have just too damn much good food (at the moment).

Sugar: The Bitter Truth

So in conclusion, not only have I been suckered by the food industry, I've been suckered by my own brain! The only good news is, so I'm told, that once you significantly reduce sugars in your diet (along with bad fats and high GI foods) your body stabilises and adjusts its tastes so that you are no longer addicted to sugar, find exercise possible, lose weight and get on with whatever the non rational part of your brain tells you to do (reproduce and seek high status). O joy.

Prog trawling

I've been trawling for prog this weekend and discovered a number of items including a video of Tony Kaye & Billy Sherwood during their Japan Tour 2011 Live From THE BOTTOM LINE NAGOYA - the whole concert here. I'm quite pleased with finding that.

 Also, Sherwood has another band called Circa with Tony Kaye and originally Alan White on drums (of course) and they have released three albums. Circa has a Youtube channel with samples of their stuff including parts of a 40 minute Yes retrospective - bits from every period of Yes's 40 year history including some less common music from Tormato as well as the new stuff. I also found that Sherwood is up to his fifth solo album (clearly I haven't been paying attention). The Youtube retrospective is to be found in its entirety on the Circa Live DVD (available on their website nowhere near you). Some of the Live music is available for download from the evil Apple iTunes people.

Then I discovered there is a live CD of the Yes album Union on amazon.co.uk.While I know many people think it appalling, I quite like bits of it. Also I regard it fondly because I remember coming across it in a huge Mall totally unexpectedly and it relieved my feeling that prog was dead.

And then I discovered there is something odd going on with Steve Hackett and Camino records and I have missed three CDs: Live Rails, Out of the Tunnel's Mouth with a bonus CD and the most recent Beyond the Shrouded Horizon a double CD. I am almost but not quite progged out.

Glass Hammer has a new CD coming out: Cor Cordium with the same crew as the last one. I may have to have a little rest now.

Everything's a critic

I was ripping an Enya CD when another program popped up to try and play it. The program whirred for a while and then announced 'No music found'. Not only is everyone a critic, now everything's a critic! 

 And now the technical writer annotated draft version of the same joke.

I was using Windows Media Player to rip my (legal) copy of Enya's The Memory of Trees onto my now venerable son derived PC (the PC is now venerable not my son, although there may be a small tribe somewhere in cyber space that venerates him for reasons I'd best not know) when the pre-installed Acer media player Acer Arcade Deluxe (ALWAYS beware of anything with the word 'Deluxe' in its name - it indicates a desire to make people believe the product is superior without the ability to make it so ['Make it so Number One.' How degrading is that naval terminology anyway, especially if you happen to be the Second Officer? And if that's how the third most important person is referred to, what must really be happening to the cabin boy? Arrrrr Jim lad. Sorry.] popped up to also try and play the CD. Naturally there was a resource conflict and much hanging of programs, whirring and such while I tried to terminate Arcade Reflux (with extreme prejudice) with no success. Eventually the message 'No music found' displayed on Arcade Deluxe's output panel. Not only is everyone a critic, now everything's a critic! But I still couldn't close Arcade Deluxe even using Task Manager until I manually closed all the individual processes which were using over 100M of memory to do absolutely nothing! I must delink this from autoplay, it's getting on my nerves. LOL. And another thing ...

Band names

I bought some CDs from Concert Live recently.

These fine souls record live gigs and have CDs of the performance ready for sale at the end of the performance. Apart from being a pretty cool use of technology you can choose between various performances and for people in the Antipodes like me get as close as possible to hearing bands live who are never going to tour here. We are So Far Away. Anyway they had an inserted ad for a mob called www.plastichead.com who sell 'official' rock merchandise.

Despite the .com PlasticHead is also in the UK so everything costs too much (damn those strong currencies) but I thought I'd go there and have a look. Little did I realise it was all a cover for Satanicness of the most heinous kind. Not really - they just flog lots of Satan rock it seems. But what I did discover was that band names have definitely moved on from the GOD (Good Old Days). Names like Anthrax are still there but there is a move towards the necrotic and offensive. Some new favourites: Skeletonwitch (not so much), Septic Flesh, Havok, Altar of Plagues and Discharge (which even my twenty year old son who savours all things offensive finds a bit off). But wait there is more: you can go to an A - Z of names which link to whatever they have to flog (which seems like a lot). Must go, I've just found a DVD of Emerson, Lake & Palmer's 40 year Anniversary concert (someone stop me).

Sweet, sweet Sarah. Wherefore dost thou goest?

Damn. Sarah Palin's not running for US President. NY Times.

Now some people may be singing Hallelujah and dancing for joy but think about it: Sarah has done the world a big service by exposing just how totally insane some Republicans are, most importantly to other Republicans (everyone else already knew). But by not running for POTUS (President Of The United States - ask the Secret Service - They Sure DO Like Acronyms) she will not be providing the biggest possible service - splitting the Republican vote and getting even the most apathetic non voters out to avoid the unthinkable (again - they may not have forgotten Bush/Cheney 1 & 2). Still, she's planning on being highly 'visible' so she may still have those effects though perhaps without the spine chilling frisson of horror that accompanies the idea of her becoming POTUS.

Wondering what it is about politicians of a religious bent that is so scary,  I think it is their certainty of the rightness of their decisions that I find most concerning. Certainty is really hard to come by in science and in the real world generally but if you happen to believe something hard enough, in the minds of these people somehow that supposedly gives you licence to make life or death decisions for other people.

And the ability to discount rational argument when presented by a sinner is handy too - logic is no longer independent.

Also, their belief in life after death gives them a 'Get Out Of Jail Free' card in their thinking. Basically: The Lord wouldn't really let us down but if we have to die BUT we (the saved) are at least bound for the light eternal (let's not worry about the sinners because they made their choice to renounce The Way)'. This sort of thinking really really shouldn't be there when making decisions for both the sinners and the saved because it allows for serious consideration of very extreme actions (let's bomb the Russkis).

But the really scary ones are the ones who are deeply religious but don't make a big deal of it. Until they are elected. So maybe I should be thanking Tony Abbott for his efforts a la Sarah Palin?

Mitigate, adapt, profit, cook

I keep seeing the Liberals and other climate change deniers talking about how it would be more profitable to have an ad hoc approach to the climate change that doesn't exist, in case it happens. Which it won't. But if it does, it would just require a bit of cleverness from business (their stock in trade) to come up with something extra cool that would solve the problem we don't really have) And then there would be profits for everyone (much like the underpants gnomes).


Which sort of misses the point a tad. Well, several points really. And several tads I suppose. What is a tad anyway? And is it in any way related to a chad or The Chad? These are the sorts of issues I think about. Pathetic really.

If these people have biological adaptation in mind, they need to be taken somewhere secure and quiet. Species adaptation to environment change is very slow and exceedingly brutal. Maybe we'll start seeing Foreign Legion hats with 'Adapt or Die' printed on them. They could have 'Mostly Die' on the back to save the sensibilities of tender hearted people.

Anyway, the more specialised a species is (requires a specific ecological niche) the more endangered it is likely to be when the environment changes, especially if it changes quickly. Also, species that rely on a network of other species for their survival, like all top predators, are particulalry at risk when the environment changes. Who would the top predators be in this world then? Lions, tigers, bears, sharks ... humans.

Most businesses only flourish during stable times. There's always the exceptions of arms dealing, pubs and brothels but your tender young entrepreneur tends not to go well when the excrement impacts the rotating air distribution device.I suppose I'm rambling towards the idea that managing climatre change (because we cefrtainly aren't showing any sign of stopping it) is unlikely to be achieved by clever entrepreneurs. Rather it is more likely to achieved by repressive war time bi-partisan bloody mindedness. But we can't see the problem creeping up on, because it's really creeping up on our kids and grandchildren.

Those quiet leafy suburbs

Ah those quiet leafy suburbs that will never be England, mainly because they are on the opposite side of the world! We lucky few who pretend to be in a green and pleasant land (for the definition of 'harsh' go stand on the top of Uluru). I don't know why I imagined it would be quiet here. We are a few blocks from Burke Road, one of the major north south roads of Melbong, and a few blocks more from the Eastern Freeway, an east west artery. Even though we are in a little gully, we aren't deep enough for the sounds to travel overhead. But the really noisy thing is, because this is a (relatively) nice place to live, lots of people want to live here, but not in old houses, in new houses. Sadly this requires demolition and then building, so there are always trucks and trucks and trucks and hammering and banging and electric tools screeching as another quiet mini mansion is hastily erected or someone's family home is scraped off the surface of a block.

Mind you, we did the same thing, so I can hardly expect my complaints to be taken too seriously. But the house we had removed was absolutely full of asbestos - a death trap, literally. So I like to think we did a good thing there, since to remove all the asbestos we would have had to remove all the inner walls and ceilings and there wouldn't have been much left. Better to build a new, energy efficient, green sort of a house. How easy was that! Not at all. Most of economic life is against it. To call it a conspiracy wold be too strong because that requires coordination and that's not the building industy's long suit (or possibly en suite). Rather, people are pushed towards using products that are cheapish and within the capability of the builders. And builders and other trades are usually way too busy to spend their time learning about new products or ways of doing things.

For example I nearly had to insist my builder sack his plumbers because they were so resistant to change. I wanted to put in plumbing to collect whole of house grey water. Talk about a commotion. Can't be done. Rules against it. Etc. Perhaps I was just before my time.

Mad Monk

I was trying to remember who Christopher, Lord Moncton reminded me of.

 

That's right!

The late, great Marty Feldman!

Stuff from 22 July 2009 Myspace

Current mood:annoyed

Not happy Jan. I just lost my first blog by accidentally moving off this page without saving. How about an auto save feature myspace?

So I'll do it all again.

The redoubtable Mr Stephen Fry has orated the Spectator Lecture, Royal Geographical Society, presented in London 30th April 2009 on America's Place In The World. The polymath Mr Fry is the Oscar Wilde of my generation, which is probably why he made the film Wilde - to embarrass people in case of his prosecution.




 Enough pleasantries. The US Police in Massachusetts have made a small mistake: Police arrest prominent black history scholar for breaking into own home. "Chief? There's a mister Obama on the phone who wants to talk to you ...".

Any media students out there might give the Guardian a look, since it's that rarest of beasts, an independent newspaper with a history of quality journalism.

Then there is climate change. For an excellent comment on Why do so many not accept climate change data? by David Mayne Reid who is a professor of biology at the university of Calgary (in Canada).

Finally for today, more kids in Geelong have suicided as a result of cyber bullying: Grieving mother issues warning to parents. Sadly, being mean is not a crime (actually it's probably just as well - the jails would be full). But cyber bullying is bullying on steroids 24/7. So turn off the phone/computer at night, install filtering software, tell someone, and tell the bullies they are pathetic scum sucking foreskin infections unworthy to inhale the steam from your excrement. And then move on whistling Jerusalem.

Thus endeth the missive.
Rzzr

Study shows forests have bigger role in slowing climate change

Here's some good news (for a change):

A major surprise was the finding that young regrowth forests in the tropics were far better at soaking up carbon than thought, absorbing nearly 6 billion tonnes of CO2 -- about the annual greenhouse gas emissions of the United States.

"This is huge and the relevance for REDD is here you have a huge sink that is bigger than the established tropical forests," said Canadell, referring to the U.N.-backed scheme reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation.

A good reason for the usually poorer tropical countries to stop clearing forests for wood and start reforesting for carbon credits which can be swapped for money. What it also implies is that if you were to selectively log re-established forests for high value woods (once they are mature), by replanting you would actually increase the carbon density of the forest. How's that for a change? Forest management would then become a significant, stable, renewable industry subsidised by first world carbon credits. This would be useful foreign aid (for another change).

I wonder if this applies to temperate forests? If so, Victoria and Tasmania might have a go as well. Yet another reason why Queensland land clearance not only has to stop but reverse.

For more:
Study shows forests have bigger role in slowing climate change

Interactive Movie - How the human brain works

Another fine graphic from New Scientist rendering a fairly straightforward picture of something horribly complex.

See: Interactive Movie - How the human brain works - New Scientist