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.