RoHS Complaint

[For the uninitiated: RoHS stands for "Restriction of Hazardous Substances" and is an initiative to reduce the use of stuff like lead and cadmium in electronic devices. And, yes, there is a typo on the label above which has deliberately been replicated in the title of this post.]

One thing that puzzles me about a lot of technical people - that is to say, people with a trade/technician/engineer background - is that they seem to hold an extreme faith in the ability of science and technology to overcome any and every problem, yet they can at the same time be intensely resistant to technological change when it comes to environmental issues.

A specific example of this is lead-free solder.

Lead is a problematic substance. As a solid metal, it's fairly inert and arguably tolerable for some applications, but under the right (or should I say wrong) conditions it can be converted to soluble salts which are really bad news. It's a cumulative poison and toxic to just about every living thing. Consequently, you don't want to go pumping lead into the environment unnecessarily.

Now these days, there are an extraordinary number of short-lived consumer electronic devices available. Many are specifically designed to last only a short time and virtually none are repairable in any way. Regardless, pretty much all become superseded within a very few years.

The old units need to be disposed of. You're meant to take them to special recycling centres, but they're few and far between in many parts of the world. I'd say that well over half end up in landfill.

To say, as some do, that "no one has ever died from lead pollution caused by consumer electronics" is most probably wrong but in any case is disingenuous. It's a cumulative poison - by the time that there's enough of it floating around in the environment that people start dying, we are already totally screwed.

It therefore makes sense to eliminate lead (and similar toxic materials) from electronic devices where possible. Lead-free solder has been in use for many years now and works successfully in all sorts of increasingly complicated devices.

I use lead-free solder.

A quick guide to soldering: The most important thing with soldering is to have the items you wish to join clean, but a close second is to use the right amount of heat. Too much and you burn flux, melt insulation, lift PCB pads and damage components (in roughly that order). Too little and the solder doesn't wet the metal properly. The usual beginner error is to have things too cold.

Lead-free solder makes this process more difficult because it melts at a significantly higher temperature than lead/tin solder, meaning there's a smaller temperature window to operate in.

However, the difference isn't really that great. If you can solder properly using leaded solder, you'll also be fine with lead-free. To use a car analogy: the level of difficulty in moving from one to the other is not like moving from an automatic transmission to a manual; it's more like parking a sedan when you've previously only had to park a mini. That is to say, the same problems apply and you still use the same technique, but there's less margin for error.

For soldering components onto a PCB the difference is barely noticeable. For soldering difficult items the difference is greater; you will for instance have to go to a higher temperature setting (or get out the propane torch) sooner when soldering thicker wire; but it's still fair to say that anything that gives trouble with lead-free solder will also give trouble with the leaded variety.

Now I have had an electrician, who had never used lead-free solder, rant to me about stuff. His attitude was like that of a radio shock jock who'd just been kicked in the groin by an unemployed Muslim asylum seeker.

He told me of the horror of "tin whiskers" (an effect only seen with some very early tin-only solders) and that lead-free solder was the primary cause of the (non-existent) plague of unreliable electronics that supposedly now besets us.

As proof of his point, he mentioned a computer monitor he had purchased which had failed. He had opened it up and found the cause was a defective electrolytic capacitor.

:Sigh: Anyone who has repaired electrical equipment will be aware that electrolytic capacitors are notoriously one of the least reliable electronic components. They have been consistently so ever since they were first invented - decades before lead-free solder had been heard of - and this is due to the electrolyte they contain, which tends to dry up over time. The current ones don't even use solder internally. Blaming the failure of an electrolytic capacitor on lead-free solder is not merely akin to blaming a road accident on the use of unleaded petrol, but doing so when the vehicles involved were both diesels.

The guy must have known this, yet his visceral loathing of lead-free solder was such that he felt justified in telling a flat-out lie to bolster his position.

So it would seem that in the minds of some, lead/tin solder - a substance unchanged since Roman times - is the be-all and end-all of solder and it is not possible for modern technology to improve on it.

But on the other hand, technology can apparently overcome every other possible problem. Permanent manned base on Mars? Fusion power? Tsiolkovsky tower? No problem! The only thing holding us back is the lack of political will.

Anyway...

What I think is quite revealing is that there is nowhere near this level of hatred directed towards surface mount components. Surface mount components are at best diabolically difficult, and at worst impossible, to solder by hand. To continue with the motor vehicle analogies; if using lead-free solder is like parking a sedan as opposed to a mini, then hand-soldering SMDs - even with your beloved lead/tin solder - is like trying to reverse a three-unit road train into a parking space.

Although I expect this will have precisely zero effect on anyone, I would suggest to anyone in the anti-lead-free solder camp to have a good hard look at yourself: Are you being manipulated into an "environment = bad" mindset by those who have a vested interest in being allowed to pollute? Or is it just that you don't know how to solder?

Blinky the Three-eyed Pumpkin

Halloween 2016 [click for larger image]

This Halloween, the house became a nuclear waste dump, complete with a mutant three-eyed pumpkin. Kids were scanned with a Geiger counter and given the antidote (chocolate) when found to be contaminated.

Circuits by Dronny Darko (Neuroplasticity album) was played as background music.

As I've mentioned before, even if Halloween is being introduced into Australia for all of the wrong reasons, it's still a good opportunity to be creative and have fun. Maybe it says something about me, but it's a celebration than comes much more naturally to me than Christmas or Easter.

And if anyone is interested, I based the design for the fake Geiger counter on this instructables post, and I've posted details of what I built under the comments section.

The Emperor's New Doughnut

Yesterday I decided to check out a store that has recently opened at a nearby shopping centre. Doughnut Time it was called. It was a cool hole-in-the-wall with a retro neon sign above and music playing. It was surrounded by a crowd of young adults and was obviously very popular with them.

They were selling doughnuts at six dollars a piece.

I purchased a doughnut with the somewhat witty name of "Ferrero No Share". It looked pretty good. On the doughnut was a thick chocolate topping which I had assumed was something like a ganache, with some crumbled hazelnut and topped with a Ferrero Rocher chocolate.

 

It tasted horrible. It was amazing how bad it was.

The doughnut itself was a moderately good yeast doughnut, but it was completely ruined by the topping. Rather than the beautiful creamy chocolate it appeared to be, it was instead a tasteless, sickly-sweet glaze which for some unknown reason had an unpleasant gritty texture as well. How they managed this I have no idea. The Ferrero Rocher on top was stale (and they go like chocolate flavoured cardboard when this happens), but still managed to taste good by contrast.

It was less good than a 50¢ Coles doughnut.

The name certainly made sense; you wouldn't want to share it - at least not with anyone you liked.

 

The packaging of this thing contained hip references to trendy stuff such as Snapchat and so I thought I'd check out the hashtag on Twitter. I had always thought that Twitter had a high proportion of cynical people eager to skewer pretentious nonsense like this and I anticipated pages of witty one-liners lampooning this textbook example of style over substance.

But instead it was full of people glorying in the delicious worderfulness of these decadent treats with not a negative voice to be heard. People were bragging (with photographic evidence) about how they were treating themselves to a six-pack of the nauseating things; which is a quantity I have difficulty in imagining any human being able to ingest in a sitting.

Have the marketers (they are certainly not cooks) running the company employed an army of paid trolls to overwhelm the social media or are people really such sheep?

Seemingly the latter: This business has supposedly expanded from a single store last year to over twenty at the moment. Obviously they're very popular and certainly the local store was. The kids were mobbing the place - something I have never seen at the local bakery which has mud-cake slices that are a thousand times better for half the price.

Still, this is in the electorate that recently reelected Peter Dutton (albeit by a very narrow margin), so the qualities of independent thought and good taste are obviously in short supply.

The Great Toilet Paper Scandal

Consider this: Paper made from fresh wood is higher quality than that made from recycled paper. [My understanding is that the fibres get broken down into shorter lengths during the recycling process, thus making the texture worse, and in addition, contaminants (dyes etc.) get introduced, further reducing the quality of the product.] Recycled paper made from paper that had previously been recycled is presumably going to be lower quality again.

Since there is no possibility of recycling toilet paper after use, it would surely make sense to make it out of 100% recycled paper, thus removing lower quality paper from the recycling stream. Virgin paper - whether made from responsibly sourced wood or not - should be preserved for uses where its higher quality is really needed, and where it can be recycled afterwards.

Surely, in these days where pretty much every product claims to be Green in some way or other, we should be able to find toilet paper made from 100% recycled paper.

Here is some.



But it's got freaking pictures of frogs printed on it!  

Are they deliberately trying to take the piss out of us?

OK, what about this? Woolworths "Eco" brand. It says "100% Recycled Paper". Pretty unambiguous.

 

But look at the fine print. Mix? What does this mean?

  

The FSC site tells us:

 

OK, so it's really a mixture, and what is "Controlled Wood"? The FSC site goes on to say:

"FSC Controlled Wood is NOT FSC Certification. Its purpose is simply to ensure the avoidance of wood in FSC Certified sources that come from the following unacceptable sources:

• Illegally harvested wood
• Wood harvested in violation of traditional and civil rights
• Wood harvested from forests where High Conservation Values are threatened
• Wood harvested from forests being converted to plantations or non-forest uses
• Wood from forests in which genetically modified trees are planted

It does not provide the full suite of investigation that is provided for by FSC Certification such as ensuring economic viability of the company or other issues in the Principles & Criteria. It is simply to help companies to drive change up the supply chain and encourage Forest Managers to become FSC Certified while proving market demand for FSC material.

The market for Controlled Wood is limited by the reduced ability to label the final product. In a Mix label product, a maximum of 30% of the product can come from Controlled Wood. Controlled Wood is only for trade between Chain of Custody Certificates where they are mixing it with FSC Certified or FSC Recycled Material. For more information about Controlled Wood in Australia, see this page http://au.fsc.org/controlled-wood.207.htm"

So up to 30% of the wood in this product - which is labelled "100% recycled" - may in fact be sourced from timber that is not even fully FSC certified, let alone recycled.

There is a license code (FSC-C109337) on the certification, so let's look it up. Not much to see: there are no documents lodged and it doesn't even tell us what is in the product. But it does say the original manufacturer is Encore Tissue (Aust) Pty. Ltd. [Note: the Encore site is current off the air for some reason, but can be found on WayBack Machine at https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.encoretissue.com.au]

On their main page, Encore claim to be "passionate about saving our environment" and that "Someone has to “speak for the trees” before we have none left". Fine words, but a deeper look is revealing. It tells us:

"Encore Tissue’s SAFE®, ICARE™ and EARTHWISE™ Brands are the only tissue products endorsed by Planet Ark.

...

Planet Ark supports a limited range of 'greener' products. Planet Ark supports these products because they have met with certain environmental standards. They must offer a more environmentally responsible alternative to the commonly used products that are on the market, while still being a good, quality product."

So this is actually one of their "greener" products and not actually endorsed by Planet Ark. Yet again, we scratch the thin layer of Greenwash and a much less palatable truth is revealed underneath.

And it's not just Woolworths doing it, but Coles too.



And interestingly they're using the same license code as well.

 

What appears to be happening here is that:

a) The FSC are having their arms twisted to provide a pseudo-certification just so that retailers can put an FSC logo on their product without it being fully certified.

b) Encore are also having their arms twisted to provide the cheapest possible product that can have this label applied to it. [Either that or they're lying about their green credentials, but I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.]

c) But even this isn't enough for the major retailers and they have to further misrepresent the stuff as being "100% recycled".

What is scary here is that both Coles and Woolworths are so confident that they can get away with telling full-on lies, that they will do this as a matter of course even for minor, unimportant (to them) product lines. To what depths do you think they will descend when it comes to something that might seriously threaten their profits?

The nuclear-war-proof toilet

This piece of futuristic technology has appeared in a local park.



It is not an entrance to the underground bunker of some super-villain, or a teleporter to another dimension, but merely a humble thunderbox.

I think it would be accurate to say that it is over-engineered.

Look again at the photo above; the stainless steel door requires a total of five 8-inch-wide hinges to support its massive weight. Does it contain bullet-proof armour intended to withstand a siege?



Rather than a simple vacant/engaged flag on the door latch, there are three flashing LED indicators which signal the status of the toilet to everyone in the vicinity. At night, they are visible from the opposite side of the park.



The interior, which is the size of a small bedroom, is clad from floor to ceiling with stainless steel.



With the exception of the toilet seat, everything in it is stainless, including even the full-length mirror. It must have cost a fortune; the amount of stainless steel in the place would be enough to outfit three kitchens; with enough left over for a small meth lab.

 

On entering, an American voice announces that you are to press the button to lock the door and warns you that you may stay only a maximum of ten minutes. I'm not sure what happens after this period; maybe an ejector seat activates.

On pressing the door lock button, elevator music is then played at you.

On leaving, the voice - in a carefully calibrated neutral tone - thanks you for using the facility. I am sure that I've heard that very same voice, and possibly also those same words, in some dystopian science fiction film. "Thank you for visiting Soylent Corporation", or something like that.

[edit July 2017: After some research I think the quote I'm thinking of is "Welcome to Delos" and comes from the 1973 film Westworld, which I haven't actually seen. I came across it as a sample in a long forgotten song, probably by a short-lived 1980s Adelaide band. It is immediately followed by another sample in which a terrified voice exclaims "that's not supposed to happen!" ]

Why?

Why is it necessary to spend money on such a thing?

Everyone is crying poor these days, and the local council doesn't seem to have enough money to police developers who are breaking their regulations left and right. There is no money to put up nest boxes or wildlife bridges to cope with animals displaced by the aforesaid rapacious developers. Clearly the koalas and sugar gliders count for nothing in comparison to the glory of constructing a super-toilet.

I get that it looks cool and it's probably fairly vandal proof (at least until someone calculates the scrap value of all that stainless steel and gets at it with a crow-bar), but is it needed? Is it worth it?

Given that you could probably afford to completely replace a standard toilet a dozen times over for the cost of this thing, I don't see how it would ever pay for itself in terms of resistance to vandalism. I don't see how it provides any special security for the user either; sure you're invulnerable to anything short of heavy artillery when ensconced within this fortified enclosure, but as soon as you leave, the bad guys can grab you, then force you back inside where the massive construction will stifle your screams.

All in all, it's a piece of misapplied technology - the wrong solution to the wrong problem.

QANTAS Baggage Handlers Strike Again!

The QANTAS baggage handlers have got me again, and I have to say they did an impressive job this time.



They actually managed to destroy a hard hat - that is to say an item specifically designed to protect against impact - that was packed in my luggage.

The left side was cracked...

and the right side was cracked...

and they took a chunk out of the back as well.

You will notice that this hard hat looks otherwise unused, and this is indeed the case; it was newly purchased because Qantas had managed to break my previous one as well.

In the previous case, the damage was not so great; merely a small crack along one edge. It was just big enough to write the hat off. Obviously they counted this as a poor effort and vowed to do better next time.

I have made a damages claim. I admit this was bit petty, but I was waiting on the phone to complain about being overcharged for extra baggage, and in the hour and a half it took for them to answer I soothed my irritation by occupying myself with this task.

Needless to say the process of making a damages claim is unduly complex and laborious and also you won't be surprised to hear that this happened two weeks ago and they have yet to do anything more than send an automated reply. It seems that they don't exert themselves to reply promptly; their automated reply casually informed me:

We aim to respond to your feedback and make contact within the next 15 working days where possible.

So they might respond to me within three weeks, but don't make any promises; whereas a damages claim will be rejected if it isn't completed within three days.

I have to say that QANTAS pisses me off and I think that if they treat their employees as badly as their customers, it's no wonder they take out their frustration with baggage kicking competitions. 

Another Political Rant

My local "member" - Peter Dutton
[Click on image for the full horror]
source

I should probably give up speculating on politics because I'm not very good at it.

It looks like I grossly overestimated Malcolm Turnbull. I had thought that the ingenious way he had destroyed the NBN, while at the same time spinning his sabotage as improvements, and his well-timed and efficiently executed knifing of Abbott, were marks of some supreme Machiavellian intellect.

It appears that in reality these were the pinnacle of his achievements and beyond that he is nothing more than a pompous windbag with a gigantic ego. He thinks he knows everything but in fact he has no skills beyond telling lies, and does not even realise that any more skills than this are needed. I though he had an evil plan and, with his Saruman-like skills (and a little help from Sauron aka Rupert Murdoch), would entice the population down the road to some horrible corporatist dystopia. In fact, he seems to have no plan at all and considers it beneath him to even devise a plan.

I take back what I said about him deliberately splitting the vote in the 1999 Republic Referendum. There is a saying that goes "Do not attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.", which I think perfectly applies in this case.

He is no Lord Baelish. I can't think off-hand of any Game of Thrones character who combines such an inner feebleness and incompetence - a lack of both knowledge and skill that rivals even Tony Abbott - with the external veneer of a master manipulator.

I have also underestimated Peter Dutton. I had thought of him as being of the intellectual calibre of Hordor, with the difference that instead of being a good-natured giant fulfilling an important role, he was a nasty and useless weakling.

While this is all still true, I underestimated his sheer brutality. Maybe his extreme stupidity renders him insensitive to the suffering of others. If only he were merely useless, and didn't have the power of life and death over people!

Seriously! A refugee under his "care" attempts suicide by self-immolation - which is quite possibly the most painful way it's possible to die - and all he cares about is censoring an "unflattering" photo of himself. As if it's possible for a mere photo to make him look any worse than he actually is!

I will be doing everything I can to make sure this loathsome scumbag loses his seat in the forthcoming election, but I would really prefer to see him shipped off to rot in one of his own concentration camps.

And, yes, that most likely is the shadow of a swastika on his forehead in the photo.

Where the Mutton-head deserves to be.
Source

Synthetic Food for Valentines Day

This is a coconut and white chocolate panna cotta made with agar.

The cherry at the bottom is not a cherry at all, but a pearl created by reverse spherification, filled with hibiscus syrup.

At the very bottom is a single synthetic caviar sphere produced by normal spherification. See my post from last year on this subject.

It was all delicious - if I do say so myself.

This dessert was based on a recipe on the Flavor Bender site.

With the panna cotta I followed the recipe fairly closely. I halved the quantities, substituted thickened cream for the half-and-half and agar for the gelatin. I used 0.75 g of agar powder, which is the bare minimum needed to hold the panna cotta together. Apparently this is how a panna cotta is meant to be, but it makes it really difficult to work with. You need to turn it out really gently on the plate and you can't move it around afterwards. Here's a photo of the same recipe using twice as much agar (1.5 g). The panna cotta still tasted good and was firmer and easier to work with, but the softer textured one was definitely better.

For the pearls, I used the syrup from a jar of Wild Hibiscus Flowers in Syrup instead of brewing an hibiscus tea, but otherwise followed the recipe closely. These Wild Hibiscus Flowers, by the way, are intended for dropping into a glass of sparkling (aka champagne) and if you haven't had these before I'd highly recommended trying them.

When I made the synthetic caviar (I made a whole lot more than the single ball shown), I used calcium lactate instead of calcium chloride in the setting bath just to see what it was like. You need to use twice the quantity (by weight) and it's a little more difficult to dissolve, but it makes a noticeable improvement to the flavour and I'll be using it from now on. With the calcium chloride, the caviar has to be washed thoroughly to remove the salty flavour imparted by the chloride, and often some saltiness remains. The lactate, by contrast, is virtually flavourless.

In defence of Australian Animals

A typical fierce Australian animal, ready to hurl itself at an unsuspecting victim.

I don't think Terry Pratchett started the myth that the Australian continent is packed with deadly creatures, but he must surely share some of the blame for popularising this idea.

Death held out a hand, I WANT, he said, A BOOK ABOUT THE DANGEROUS CREATURES OF FOURECKS—

Albert looked up and dived for cover, receiving only mild bruising because he had the foresight to curl into a ball.

After a while Death, his voice a little muffled, said: ALBERT, I WOULD BE SO GRATEFUL IF YOU COULD GIVE ME A HAND HERE.

Albert scrambled up and pulled at some of the huge volumes, finally dislodging enough of them to allow his master to clamber free.

HMM . . . Death picked up a book at random and read the cover. DANGEROUS MAMMALS, REPTILES, AMPHIBIANS, BIRDS, FISH, JELLYFISH, INSECTS, SPIDERS, CRUSTACEANS, GRASSES, TREES, MOSSES, AND LICHENS OF TERROR INCOGNITA, he read. His gaze moved down the spine. VOLUME 29C, he added. OH. PART THREE, I SEE.

He glanced up at the listening shelves. POSSIBLY IT WOULD BE SIMPLER IF I ASKED FOR A LIST OF THE HARMLESS CREATURES OF THE AFORESAID CONTINENT?

They waited.

IT WOULD APPEAR THAT—

'No, wait, master. Here it comes.'

Albert pointed to something white zigzagging lazily through the air. Finally Death reached up and caught the single sheet of paper. He read it carefully and then turned it over briefly just in case anything was written on the other side.

'May I?' said Albert. Death handed him the paper.

' "Some of the sheep," ' Albert read aloud.

From Discworld 22 - The Last Continent [Terry Pratchett, 1998].

Australians promote this fiction probably because it implies they are a hardy breed of Crocodile Dundees, contemptuously shrugging off fearsome beasts daily. In actual fact, Australians are by and large a bunch of spoilt wimps* liable to run away in fear from a tiny sugar glider.

[* = I exclude from this criticism Aboriginal people living in the Top End who share swimming holes with salt-water crocodiles.]

Let us have a look at what the continent has to offer.

Consider Dorothy's fearful exclamation in the Wizard of (ironically) OZ; "Lions and Tigers and Bears! Oh My!".

Australia has no lions or tigers or bears - or even any other large carnivores that are in any way comparable.

Every other continent, with the exception of Antarctica (and even that has leopard seals), has more in the way of large carnivores. In addition to the lions and tigers and bears, other continents also have cheetahs, leopards, jaguars, mountain-lions, wolves, hyenas and so on; a whole assortment of large and dangerous meat-eaters you wouldn't want to meet on a dark night.. Even an animal like a baboon could make a mess of someone. There are also megafauna; elephants, rhinos, hippos and so forth, which, although vegetarian, are quite willing and able to kill a person.

By contrast, Australia has only one single animal in this category; the salt water crocodile. They don't even grow as big as Nile crocodiles and they mostly inhabit remote places where comparatively few people go. A bear is smart and can actively hunt a person, whereas a crocodile has a brain that would easily fit into a matchbox and is a creature of instinct. Getting chomped by a crocodile is like falling into a hole in the ground or walking onto a road and getting hit by a truck; it's largely your own fault for incautiously going somewhere you shouldn't be.

There are dingos. Dingos are just dogs, and smaller and less dangerous than many domestic breeds. A starving dingo may under exceptional circumstances take an unprotected baby, but a rottweiler can easily kill an adult human. And there's no rabies here to worry about either.

We're even under-represented when it comes to small carnivores. What do we have to match a honey badger or a wolverine, or even a ferret? At best we have a Quoll; less dangerous than a cat and teetering on the edge of extinction.

Tasmanian devils sound fierce enough (both in terms of the name and the actual sound they make), but are primarily scavengers that these days mostly eat road-kill. I suppose one could give you a good biting if you tried to pick it up, but so could a poodle.

Supposedly a Cassowary can kill you. Total death toll by cassowary: one 14 year-old boy who was trying to club the bird to death and got kicked in the neck for his troubles, severing a carotid artery. I'm not sure it's fair to brand the bird a killer when it was acting in self-defence.

An emu can peck and scratch, but is smaller and less aggressive than an African ostrich. Ostriches kill many people a year in Africa.

Obviously you can still be bitten by a wombat or a koala and even a sugar glider can draw blood, but it's stretching it to say that they are in any way dangerous.

What about the nasty, toxic, creepy-crawlies?

Native wasps are less dangerous than the European wasp and pale in comparison to monsters like the Japanese Giant Hornet.

Native bees don't even have stings and are harmless. Other places have to contend with Africanized "killer" bees.

We have large bull-ants which can hurt when they bite, but nothing like army ants that attack in the millions and can strip you to a skeleton.

Native scorpions are small and only weakly venomous. Only one person has ever died from the sting of an Australian scorpion, and that was a baby who was only assumed to have been stung - no scorpion was actually found.

No native amphibians are noticeably toxic. There's the introduced cane toad, which I'm not sure should really count, but that's only a threat to native animals and in no way dangerous to humans (unless you literally milk the venom and eat it). We don't have specimens as toxic as the poison dart frog, nor can we boast a creature like the Horror Frog, which breaks the bones in its feet to form claws for defence.

What about Snakes? Surely we've got a lot of venomous snakes!

In terms of venom toxicity, Australian snakes are indeed considered to be the most toxic in the world. I think this is to a degree an artifact of the testing process. Snake venom toxicity is determined by testing on rats and mice. Most Australian snakes prey on small mammals like rats and mice, and it would make sense that their venom is more toxic to creatures of this type.

But whatever the truth, being more toxic does not make them more dangerous. After all, botulism toxin (botox) is the most toxic chemical known, but people happily inject it into their faces.

Consider the "number one most venomous snake in the world", the Inland Taipan: Yes its venom is 50 times (or whatever the figure is) as powerful as that of a cobra, but this snake has never killed a single person.

Australia has between 2 and 4 snake bite deaths per year. This is less than any other continent (barring, as usual, Antarctica), and pales into insignificance against India where over 10,000 people die from snake-bite per year.

There are pythons. They can grow fairly big and occasionally someone's chihuahua gets eaten. I suppose a really big one might be a threat to a child. However, we don't have the big reticulated pythons of Southeast Asia or the anacondas of South America that can eat an adult human. Total human fatalities by python in Australia: zero.

Yes, there was the YouTube video a couple of years back of a python eating a crocodile near Mt Isa. What wasn't obvious was that it was only a 1 m fresh-water crocodile, and even then the snake took several hours to subdue it. Hardly a battle of the titans.

Other reptiles? A thorny devil looks a little scary, but is totally harmless (although I suppose it might hurt if you stepped on one with bare feet). By contrast, the equivalent American creature, the Horned Toad can squirt blood at you from its eyes.

A big goanna can hurt if it bites, but is nothing compared with the Indonesian Komodo Dragon, which weighs as much as a person and eats goats.

[BTW, that's enough with the links; you can type names into Wikipedia as easily as I can.]

Spiders?

Australia is supposedly overrun with huge, deadly spiders, but this too is a myth.

The largest (by weight) spider in the world is the Goliath Bird-Eating spider. This is a South American spider.

The largest (by size) is the Giant Huntsman, which comes from Laos.

The most deadly is the Brazilian Wandering Spider, which, naturally enough, comes from Brazil.

None of these are found in Australia.

Of the ten largest species of spiders, only one or arguably two, is found in Australia. There is the Golden Orb Weaver - one of the least scary looking spiders - and (arguably) the Huntsman. I believe that top-ten lists which include the Huntsman are in fact referring to the Giant Huntsman, and not the comparatively smaller species which live in Australia.

In terms of scariness, I suppose it's more subjective, but you'd be hard pressed to beat the Camel Spider (do a Google Image search if you dare). These abominations are found on every continent except Australia and (yet again) Antarctica.

Of the ten most dangerous species of spider, only two are found in Australia.

There's the redback; it's the same thing as the American Black Widow, and there is also an equivalent species found in Europe (the Mediterranean black widow), so it's not unique to Australia. It's a shy and retiring creature and only weakly poisonous. Most people bitten don't even require treatment. How many people have been killed by a redback? They say no one has died since an anti-venom was developed in the 1950s, but I have been unable to find any evidence of deaths even prior to that date.

Then there's the Funnelweb. It certainly looks scary and it's more toxic than the redback, yet the chance of death from even an untreated bite is estimated at much less than 1%. Note the word "estimated"; in reality no one has died from a bite in so long that it's difficult to determine.

Sea Creatures?

Certainly there are plenty of dangerous animals in the ocean, but none of these are unique to Australia. Box jellyfish, stone fish, sea snakes, stingrays etc. are found right through the tropics. Blue-ringed octopuses are found as far away as Japan. Everywhere that has coastline has sharks.

Anything else?

Do we have anything like a piranha? Nothing close, not even a Snapping Turtle.

Vampire bat? Nope.

Electric eel? No way.

There's the platypus, the male of which has venomous spurs on his hind legs. The venom appears to be formulated to cause pain to an attacker rather than kill prey, and is not considered to be lethal to humans. Most Australians have probably not even seen a platypus outside of a zoo, so getting spiked by a platypus is hardly a common hazard.

A kangaroo can kick you. Some kangaroos are very large and they obviously have very strong legs, so a kick could no-doubt injure a person, but your average farm animal can do much worse. A good kick in the head from a horse can easily kill a person, and I believe horses cause more fatalities per year in Australia than any other animal.

In conclusion:

• There are whole categories of deadly animal which are not found in Australia.

• For every deadly animal that is found in Australia, there's something at least as bad, and usually much worse, elsewhere in the world.

• The number of deaths by (non-human) animal in Australia are extremely low compared to most other countries.

• Most Australians go years at a time without even seeing a dangerous native animal.

This "everything'll kill ya, mate" business is a great big lie.