The Steam Pumpkin

 This Halloween the evil steampunk inventor emerged from his lair.

The Evil Steampunk Inventor [photo by Xesce]

Another Pestilent Halloween

 The plague is still with us this Halloween.

The Plague Doctor [photo by Xesce]

A Pestilent Halloween

Bushfires v Nuclear War

As usual, my writing keeps getting overtaken by events. I was working on the next part of my "Preparing for Nuclear War" series but this was further put off when Australia suffered something that was comparable to a nuclear war in its effects - at least in terms of the country's wildlife. I decided to write about this, but before I could post anything a freaking new plague descended on us.

I think it would be a pity to let what I'd written go to waste, so here it is. It's no longer topical, but I suppose it will at least be in time for next bushfire season. Climate Change is not going away.

Fear the Reaper

This Halloween the Grim Reaper paid a visit.

[click for larger image] Photo by Xesce

Preparing for Nuclear War - Units of Radiation Dose

Before we can discuss the effects of nuclear radiation, it's necessary to get a handle on the units used to describe it. There are a whole lot of weird ones out there; you can be probably guess that a Curie is a measure of radiation of some sort, but what's a Sievert? It sounds like a type of cat. And what about a Becquerel - that sounds like a cute little marsupial. A REM? Is this something to do with sleeping?

Today's lesson is a basic guide to the two most important quantities that we will be discussing; Radiation Dose and Radiation Dose Rate. To keep this post a manageable length, I will only write about the units used to describe these quantities and won't go into how to measure them or what the effects of various doses are. (BTW, while I will mention various specific doses and dose rates for the purposes of illustration below, you can ignore the actual numbers for the time being.)

Preparing for Nuclear War - Answers to the Quiz Questions

Here are the answers to the questions I posed last time.

I should point out that this information doesn't really come under the heading of "Preparing for Nuclear War", as it's not especially relevant to the sort of things you'll have to deal with after the bomb goes off.

The intent of bringing this up was to illustrate that the sort of nuclear physics you get taught at high-school can potentially lead you astray, and, more importantly, it shows why seemingly knowledgeable people pontificating on the subject on the net are more often than not talking complete bollocks. This stuff is harder than it seems and it's easy to think that you know more than you do.

Preparing for Nuclear War - An Introduction

"The most important thing is that when things get really bad and the world looks its darkest, you just have to throw up your hands and say well, all right! 'cause it's probably going to get a whole hell of a lot worse."

Cannibal! The Musical 1993

In 2017 I posted a rant where I complained to the effect that politically and environmentally, there has been such a continuous stream of horrific calamities befalling the world that whenever I start to write a post commenting on one disaster it gets overshadowed by something even worse before I can finish. I promised to do better but the disasters starting coming at an even faster rate.

So I decided to write about nuclear war - it's one of the few bad things that haven't happened yet and maybe I'll be able to post about it before it happens.

Ron Cobb cartoon from 1966 [source]

Praising by Faint Damnation

Recently I received an election leaflet in the mail; it was purportedly explaining why we should not vote for Peter Dutton.



I am shocked at these allegations.

Hippie Halloween

From a political and environmental perspective (which was meant to be the main focus of this blog), this year has so far been such a horrific nightmare that any attempt at a scary Halloween theme would have seemed pitiful by comparison.

So instead, just to be different, this year's Halloween was Hippie themed - although I suppose that here in the heart of Peter Dutton's electorate the concepts of peace, love, tolerance and compassion might well be considered to be terrifying to some.

Trippy Yeti (She Asks Me Why, I'm Just a Hairy Guy) [Photo by Xesce]

Peace Pumpkin 2018

Now The Acid Is Really Starting To Kick In [Photo by Blinky]

We will do more than just tread on you!

[click for larger image]

The photo of the mother possum extracting her baby from the coils of a python is from this story.

Preparing for nuclear war - Review of a cheap eBay Geiger counter

[I was going to preface this review with a brief description of units of radiation dosage, how Geiger counters operate and other related information. However it turned out not to be possible to keep this brief and I am therefore excluding this information from the review. I will try to post this information later. For the time being, the FAQ on my Radiation Monitoring site contains some useful information.]

Here is a cheap Geiger counter I purchased from eBay some time ago.

#BringYourGuillotine To Work

Some time ago I was talked into signing up to LinkedIn. I haven't used my account virtually at all; the last time I remember logging in was to change my password after they got hacked. However I still regularly get their spam.

Normally their emails go straight to dev/null, however recently one caught my eye. It went as follows:

#BringYourWholeSelf

Kids don't have the same inhibitions as adults — so, imagine the possibilities if you could tap your inner child and #BringYourWholeSelf to work. Watch this video in which we ask kids "What does it mean to be yourself?”

Now, your community would love to hear your thoughts on how you #BringYourWholeSelf to work.

So, in these days when corporate profits are at record levels, when wages are being cut and hard-won rights are being wound back and when workers are in general considered to be disposable and treated like shit, they are expecting us to Bring Our Whole Selves to work. To, of our own accord, throw our Whole Selves into our work, with the enthusiasm of a naive child, in order to make even more money for people  who would quite probably harvest our organs for profit if they could get away with it

Go get absolutely fucked!

Preparing for nuclear war - Launching my radiation monitoring station

Today is Remembrance Day. The day when we're meant to celebrate the end of the first world war and to remember those killed and maimed in that conflict. The message was meant to be that even at best war is a necessary evil, but it is always an evil and we need to exert ourselves to prevent it from happening again.

Subsequent history has shown how well that message has been taken on board, and today I celebrate this date by publicly launching my Radiation Monitoring Station in anticipation of a possible nuclear conflict.

You can view radiation readings from the station at this link

The Radiation Monitoring Station

The Abominable Snow Monster

This Halloween a seven foot tall Abominable Snow Monster visited.




His home in the Arctic had melted due to climate change and he was here searching for those responsible.


 I also carved a pumpkin.

Halloween Pumpkin 2017

Be kind to Bots - Part 2

When I wrote the first Be Kind to Bots post, I had initially intended to continue on with a discussion about Artificial Intelligence and whether a machine could be thought of as being conscious. I ended up not doing this because it wasn't immediately relevant to the point I was making. It would simply have diluted the message while making the post harder to read.

Source and they want me to link:
Technology image created by Kjpargeter - Freepik.com

The tl;dr version is that I believe:

a) Machines are (to a very small degree) conscious; in so far as that term can reasonably be defined.

b) There is no reason to believe that machines are not inherently capable of being made mentally equivalent to human beings.

c) However, the concept of robots rebelling against humanity as a consequence of having "gained consciousness" is not something we need fear.

The Delusion Of Gainful Employment

Since this will be a long post, I'll briefly outline the points that I'm trying to make:

1) Criticism of unemployed people on the basis of not contributing to society, or being in some way a burden, is unjustified and irrational; even if considered on a purely economic rationalist basis.

2) Many jobs are deliberately structured to be inefficient and unproductive and this is at least partly a consequence of how the system works.

3) Creating or maintaining a harmful industry in order to "create jobs" is not a legitimate thing to do as the level of employment is regulated by others factors.

4) An age of leisure, where people can live in comfort while working only short hours or none at all, will never happen with the current system, regardless of how far automation progresses. If fact, we have already had the technical capability to make this happen for a considerable time.

A Rant

There are a number of things I have intended to post about on this blog, but it seems that every time I get close to finishing something, I'm overtaken by events.

The main thrust of the blog was intended to be shining a light on things that one takes for granted and showing that there is more to the story than it may appear. Something to challenge people's assumptions, make them uncomfortable, and hopefully make them think.

Not to say that I have any profound wisdom to impart, or that I'm necessarily even right, but if I can at least make people think, that's surely a good thing.

The difficulty I face is that every day I see so much outright idiocy, and jaw-droppingly evil decisions being made, that I don't know where to start or what approach to use. Ideally, I would like to construct robust logical arguments, with carefully selected references, and illustrated with relevant examples, but this approach is just simply not valid when I'm faced with things that are plainly ludicrous to anyone capable of thinking.

What sort of logic works when people are not only claiming that 1 + 1 = 3, but are going around and beating up anyone who says otherwise?

What can you do other than point out that it's stupid?

Let's just look (in no particular order) at some of the things going on at the moment:

1) We have the ongoing Centrelink Robodebt lunacy. I would have thought that since this malicious and disastrous policy was so plainly exposed, the Coalition would at the very least have thrown some scapegoat (probably the unfortunate intern who coded the logic [and BTW, I take back my suggestion they used COBOL, more likely it was something like Brainfuck to save on using all those expensive letters and numbers]) under the bus. Instead, they're not only defending it, but seeking to expand it to aged pensions.

The whole Robodebt business is like the punch-line of a joke which begins "Franz Kafka, Joseph Heller and George Orwell walk into a bar...", and the fact that it's one of the lesser evils we face just shows how bad things have become.

2) We have the government proposing laws to weaken encryption so that it can gather even more confidential data on its citizens, at the very same time as their Medicare records were found to have been hacked. This on top of the still-unresolved Census debacle of last year.

It gets worse though; in the process of proudly announcing these proposed laws, our prime-minister claims that that the laws of Australia override the laws of mathematics.

For FUCK sake, this is literally a scene out of 1984.

3) And what the HELL is going on with the Carmichael Mine?

Here we have a corrupt foreign billionaire seeking to open one of the biggest coal mines in the world. This at a time when we've just had two consecutive massive coral bleaching events on the Great Barrier Reef, and at the same time as an ice shelf larger than Kangaroo Island has just broken off Antarctica.

The mine is not even economically viable; they're going to give Adani a billion dollar handout, not even collect royalties for decades and give them unlimited free water, at the expense of farmers.

The only justification given for this is "jobs". Now I want to write more about this in future since it's wrong on a number of levels, but for the moment I'll just say that the intention is to automate the mine to the max. We will probably have trucks driven by remote control from India, by people paid 50c/hr. There might be a bit over a thousand local jobs. If it were simply about jobs, then it's a ludicrously inefficient use of money; it's costing us nearly a million dollars per job, which is more than the people involved will ever earn back.

It's also amazing that a racist/xenophobic place like Australia isn't upset that Adani is an Indian. Seemingly, being a billionaire makes you an honorary White Man or something.

If it were just to Coalition supporting the mine, that would be understandable - they are after all irredeemably corrupt and evil (we're taking about people wearing hi-vis shirts in parliament; no longer even trying to hide their corrupt ties to the mining industry, but flaunting them) - but both the state and federal Labor Party are behind this. Why?

What are the Greens doing about this? Busy falling on their swords, one after another. First the hissy fit with the NSW branch, then Scott Ludlum and now Larissa Waters gone. They are the closest thing we have to a sensible political party and their very best people are abandoning their posts one after another, just at the time they're needed the most.

It's heart-breaking, and makes me not a little suspicious that something underhand is going on.

4) And let's not get started on fracking and Coal Seam Gas. The phrase "fugitive methane emissions" should in itself be enough for anyone with a brain to demand that it be banned outright.

5) Now we have the terrifying prospect of a massive new paramilitary police force; merging the incompetent ASIO, the politically motivated AFP, the Nazi thugs from Border Farce, and more, all under the control of the worst possible person to wield such power: my nemesis, the anti-Possum Dreaming; Peter Dutton.

What's going on? Even in banana republics, an aspiring dictator would have to be smart enough to sweet-talk the colonels into staging a coup d'etat. Dutton is far too stupid to do this, but somehow he just gets handed the power on a plate, while sitting there like a useless potato.

We can only hope that he's too incompetent to wield such power effectively, but this is a very thin straw to grasp at; like giving a toddler a machine-gun and hoping he's not a very good shot.

6) When considering ludicrous idiots getting handed extraordinary power, one's mind is naturally drawn to the clown that the United States has seen fit to elect to its highest office.

There is no excuse for this in a country which claims to be a democracy.

The guy is outright corrupt, he is ridiculously incompetent at everything he does and he has a particularly obnoxious personality. For FUCK sake, the guy is a fucking rapist, which should in itself be enough to disqualify him from leading any civilised country - and should surely disqualify him a hundred times over in a prudish country like the US where they pretty much crucified Bill Clinton for much less. Trump's personal "qualities" have been known for a long time. Here is a page from a Robert Crumb comic from 1989:

HUP No. 3, page 20 
[click for readable image]

So nearly thirty years ago he was widely considered to be "one of the most evil men alive".

No one can say they didn't known what he was like, and don't give me that rubbish about "The Russians Done It" either. Do you think that the vast array of US spy agencies, with almost unlimited money and power at their disposal, would allow a country, that had traditionally been their mortal enemy - a threat they had been specifically built to counter - to interfere with such a critical process as a presidential election and do nothing about it?

The only possible argument you could give for voting in such a person would be that you believed The System to be so irredeemably bad that the only alternative is to wreck it as quickly and thoroughly as possible. But this would be a desperately dangerous game to play. Who knows what the outcome would be: Handmaid's Tale territory? Nuclear war?

What is worse is that Trump is only a symptom of a much more fundamental problem. Like Tony Abbott, he is just the most prominent pustule on the face of a plague victim.  Getting rid of him (and don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen) might reduce the chance of some immediate disaster caused by extreme stupidity, but won't really fix anything.

7) And this disease has seemingly spread everywhere. The UK is in chaos with Brexit and a minority government dependent on religious extremists. The Middle East is an ongoing disaster area that's been getting steadily worse for the last two decades. Turkey is rapidly falling into dictatorship...

.   .   .

Anyway.

The point of this rant is not so much that everything is hopeless and we should all slash our wrists, or that we need to rise up in revolt at once, but more to give an excuse as to why I haven't been posting so much. Things keep happening which make me feel that what I'm writing is lame and irrelevant and I get discouraged.

I'll try to do better in future.

Bargain!

You can get some wonderful bargains if you shop around.

What is 2 x 7.95?

Here you see two bottles of wine on offer for ... twice the price of one bottle of wine.

Dispatches from the War on the Environment

Recently we have been treated to the spectacle of members of the government front bench joyfully fondling a lump of coal, with Deputy Prime Minster Barnaby Joyce displaying an expression of such manic lust that your first instinct is to check that there are no sharp objects within his reach.

But while big attacks on the environment like this grab our attention, a termite-like army of smaller attacks quietly undermine us.

Here are some that have recently come to my attention:

Battery Bullshit

At first glance one would think these were the "World's First Recycled Batteries". (In itself a strange claim since lead-acid batteries have been recycled since approximately forever.)



but read the fine print...

 

Energizer are presumably claiming a dubious World First in producing alkaline batteries with an incredible "4% of total weight" being made from recycled ingredients. Can you contain your excitement?

Bear in mind here that a large portion of the world's steel production is (and always was) from recycled steel, as it's much cheaper to melt down scrap steel than smelt it from ore. So it's possible the metal casing and end caps of the battery already contribute a substantial amount towards this 4%.

Toilet Paper Scandal Redux

On reading a recent article in Choice Magazine, it turns out that I was too generous in my post "The Great Toilet Paper Scandal"

I had assumed that the paper labelled as "made from 100% recycled paper" did contain at least contain 30% of recycled paper as per the FSC certification.

It turns out that even this not necessarily true; the 30% requirement actually applies to the entire production run (of an unstated but probably fairly large number of products) covered by the FSC certificate. It is actually possible that the paper itself contains no recycled paper, as long as other products in the same line contained proportionally more.

I know many people don't think this is important ("who gives a shit" is one of the extraordinarily witty comments I've heard), but this is a product that everyone uses every day and none of it can be recycled. There are 24M people in Australia, if a toilet roll lasts a person 6 days on average, that's 4M rolls being flushed daily. Which is a lot of trees.

Garbage Bag Garbage

It would be fair to assume that recycled plastic, like recycled paper, is of lower quality than the virgin article. Since a garbage bag is intentionally something that's going to be disposed of in landfill, it's surely something we want to make out of the lowest quality of recycled materials, or out of something that bio-degrades, or preferably both.

So how do the supermarkets respond to this challenge?



Coloured and Scented garbage bags of course!

Looking in one small suburban Coles, there were eight different types of these abominable things being sold.



Of course none were made from recycled materials and all were non-biodegradable. They were however apparently recyclable - which I'm sure is a useful property for something that is intended to be disposed of in landfill.

(Finally) A Reason to Fly QANTAS

Virgin, until now my second least favoured airline, are asking me to "Celebrate our new partnership with EnergyAustralia".

 

That name sounds familiar...

Apparently they're in the planet killing business:

"Energy Australia, responsible for the Yallourn coal-fired power station in Victoria, is the worst offender at number one with a 20.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent gases."

Congratulations, Virgin, you've regained the hotly contested place of my No. 1 least favoured airline by teaming up with Australia's equally hotly contested No.1 polluter.

Even Environmental Organisations Are At It

It is sad that even an organisation like the Australian Koala Foundation is willing to resort to Greenwash tactics. They are selling these signs.

And they write:

"Protect your trees for koalas!  Bright yellow to stand out, made of degradeable polypropylene - lasts for years but will eventually breakdown and return to the earth.  Attach to your tree with a small tack or nail, or tie it on."

"Degradable" is not the same as "biodegradable"! It just means the stuff breaks down into small pieces. Small particles of polypropylene are in fact a considerable environmental problem; they end up in the sea where they're ingested by plankton and enter the food-chain. Recently, cosmetics containing polypropylene micro-beads have been banned for this reason.

OK, these signs are few in number and will ultimately (probably) end up in landfill where they won't do much harm, but, really, an environmental organisation should know better than to be party to this sort of misinformation.

Also, it's not clear why the signs can't be recycled. Polypropylene (recycle code 5) is definitely recyclable.