China's Green Dam Youth Escort Program has all the porn busting power you need!

China's Green Dam Youth Escort Program has all the porn busting power you need to keep your country safe from the internet! With 3D monitor technology just around the corner, can you really afford to be unprotected and have something unexpectedly come through your computer screen and poke your eye out? But porn busting is not all it does! Green Dam Youth Escort Program limits the amount of time youth can stay on instant messaging and social networking sites to prevent addiction! Forcing them to go out on the streets and spend time with their compatriots such as Pigdog and Spider and their magic bags of white powder that chemically sooth the pain of internet withdrawal! And, in addition, as an extra bonus, Green Dam Youth Escort Program now contains a historical whitewash feature that removes all references to the Tian An Men square protests or the Fulun Gong crackdown. But for those of you who like mystically based martial arts protest movements, you can have all the Boxer Rebellion you like!

And what's more, this great new program will come completely free with every new computer sold in China after July the first! But wait, there's still more! It isn't even compulsory! You don't actually have to install it! Although it might be a good idea if you do, you know, for protection. You want to be protected, don't you? The internet's a dangerous place. Who knows what could happen to you if you went around unprotected. For example, a truncheon could fly out of your monitor and hit you in the kidneys when you have your back turned.

I recently spoke with the Chinese Minister of Industry and Information Technology, Li Ziying, who really isn’t anything at all like Joseph Goebbles:

ME: How do you respond to accusations that Green Dam Youth Escort program is part of a historical whitewash of the Tien an Men Square protests?

MINSTER: We don't. And we certainly don't put people who make such accusations under house arrest.

ME: I see.

MINISTER: And we don't approve of the term historical whitewash. When activated Green Dam will eliminate it from existence.

ME: Well the term certainly seems more appropriate when used in an Australian context. But what of allegations that the porn filter which detects skin colour is defective and blocks pictures of Garfield the cat while allowing pornographic images of people with black skin to get through? Isn't this likely to lead to the development of some interesting fetishes among the population that will boost African tourism?

MINISTER: Yes, but we believe the slight decrease in furries will make it all worthwhile.

ME: And what of reports that parts of the program were stolen from a US internet nanny program?

MINISTER: Lies spread by paper hyenas. And anyway, there wouldn't be any USA if we hadn't invented gunpowder, so they should cut us some fricking slack.

ME: And how do you respond to those who say that the program is just one more example of ham fisted government censorship?

MINISTER: We totally disagree with the term ham fisted censorship, as it is insulting to our Muslim minorities. Beef-fisted is a much more accurate term. However, in order to maintain good relations with India, the official term is now chicken fisted. The term ham fisted will be eradicated upon Green Dam's first update.


And there you have it. No doubt Green Dam Youth Escort Program will have many interesting economic effects. I for one am selling my Chinese language furry orientated web site and I'm starting a Chinese language Nigerian based mail order bride business.

Morgan Spurlock Discovers the Magical Olive Trees of Copious Oil!

Once again, to satisfy my urge to walk through airport security while carrying a book with a picture of an internationally wanted criminal mastermind on the back cover, I picked up Morgan Spurlock's, "Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?" again and discovered the route cause of all Middle-Eastern conflict. They are fighting over the magical Palestinian olive trees. How do I know that these Palestinian olive trees are magical? Well, on page 142 Ahmed explains to Morgan Spurlock that six or seven trees should yield enough olives to make about make 20 kiloliters of olive oil. And as everyone knows, a kilogram of olives contains under a fifth of a litre of oil, so each olive tree is producing something like 15 tons of olives. This is truly magical. And, as everyone also knows, since olive trees are typically grown at a density of about one per 34 square metres, this means that these magical olive trees produce about 90 litres of oil per square metre. That's better than a Saudi Arabian oil field. No wonder people are fighting over the land.

Or is it possible that there was some sort of mistake in translation and Ahmed actually said 20 kilograms of oil and not 20 kilolitres? I suppose such a mistake could have happened, but what are the chances that Morgan or his editor wouldn't have picked up on it? Not very high I’d wager. No, it seems much more likely that Morgan Spurlock has discovered magical olive trees of copious oil in the middle-east and I’m sure the rest of his book describes a Harry Potteresque adventure where the trees play an integral roll in the plot. I shall eagerly read on to see if Osama Bin Laden turns out to be an irredeemably evil wizard, or if it’s all some big misunderstanding and everyone has scones and tea together at the end.

A Twit in Iran

10:04 - Iranian Police have confiscated my camera equipment. Attempting to film protests using mobile phone.

10:07 - Iranian Police officer complains that my camera doesn't work. I tell him you have to push on the battery pack. He says his cousin can fix it.

10:09 - I realize my mobile phone doesn't have a camera. In retrospect I should have realized sometime in the past four years that my phone doesn't have one. The colourless grey liquid crystal display should also have been a give away. Never bothered to replace it because if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

10:10 - Iranian police clubbed my mobile out of my hand and it's swelling up and turning purple. My hand that is, not the mobile phone. (Although a mobile phone that swelled up and turned purple would be cool.) Huzzuh! I now have an excuse to buy a new phone!

10:13 - Crap! I fixed my phone. Probably stuck with it for another four years now. Hand has returned to normal colour. The purple started fading after I stopped squeezing my wrist so hard.

10:17 - Have found a ten year old with a mobile phone that has a camera. I am now holding him above the crowd so he can take photos for me.

10:22 - Police didn't appreciate me using a ten year old to take photos and smashed his mobile phone. Fortunately I suffered no injuries this time as I had a convenient shield.

10:26 - Other ten year olds reluctant to work for me despite promise of delicious candy. I am going to try to get through the police cordon and ask the people lying on the street bleeding how they feel.

10:32 - Plan to get through police line by disguising myself as a pinata unsuccessful. Supplies of delicous candy running low. Fortunately I still have adequate quantities of teeth.

10:39 - Plan to get through police line disguised as pig also unsucessful. Attempt to curry good will by handing out curried pork and other pork products did not go down well for some reason.

10:42 - Have successfully bribed a police officer with my remaining delicious candy and two pounds of revolting candy. Passing though police line now.

10:43 - I kneel down before an injured protestor. He cries out in pain. I take my knee off his groin.

10:44 - "Hello," I say. The injured man looks up at me and says in perfect English, "As you can see, the Iranian people are in a desperate struggle for democracy..." I cut him off.

10:45 - "No long speeches. As a result of constant exposure to modern media we no longer have the attention span to... Wow! Look at that guy get beat up! Excuse me..."

$134.5 Billion in Smuggled US Treasury Bills equals 12.4 sandwiches in North Korea

Two Japanese people were caught by Italian police trying to smuggle $134.5 billion in US Treasury bills into Switzerland in a false bottom compartment in a suitcase. Apparently this is illegal. But while it certainly does seem suspicious, perhaps we shouldn't jumping to conclusions and assume that an intentional misdeed was performed here. After all, this could just be a cutural misunderstanding. You see, people in Japan have a habit of leaving large amounts of cash lying around. I know that when I was in Japan I'd often have $15,000 in yen piled up on my dresser. Perhaps some Japanese person just happened to keep $134.5 billion in US T-bills in their suitcase, equal to one fifth of the total amount of US debt held by Japan, and then forgot all about it when they decided to fly to Switzerland for the annual cuckoo clock festival?

On the other other hand, when I think if counterfeiting and Japan, I think North Korea. I know North Korean submariners would often turn up on Himi beach and offer to trade US dollars, Euros, bearer bonds, treasury bills, the Mona Lisa and so on in return for a sandwich. If you couldn't get a stack of greasy crayola greenbacks at least an inch high in return for a sandwich you'd been ripped off. Now $134.5 billion in US treasury bills, some of them with a face value of $500 million, is a kind of stupid thing to counterfiet, as people are unlikely to simply take your word that they are fair dinkum and not check the serial numbers, for the days when the local corner store would accept a $500 million T-bill at face value are long gone. But nothing has stopped our friends north of the 38th parallel from counterfieting strange things in the past, and when the boss says counterfeit $134.5 billion in treasury bills you counterfeit $134.5 billion in treasury bills without mentioning that they are impossible to pass off because a bullet in the head tomorrow is better than a bullet in the head today. (Not that too many forgers get shot, usually it's more a case that the forgers pretend to forge and the secret police pretend to shoot them.) And anyway, maybe they were hoping they could find someone very trusting with a spare $500 million who didn't feel the need to verify them. And who knows, maybe the two Japanese people caught with the bonds handed over a huge stack of sandwiches for them.

But the Japanese smugglers where fools from trying to get the bonds into Switzerland. They should have gone straight to where the real money is with North Korean forgeries. Selling them on ebay.

Ha! I did it! I smuggled a chunk of Spurlock through Airport Security!

I did it! I smuggled a chunk of Morgan Spurlock through airport security! I am such a smooth operator. Which chunk of Morgan Spurlock you ask? The chunk of his thoughts, fears and humour he codified into the book, "Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?" The airport security person at the screening station did do a double take when he saw the picture of Osama Bin Laden on the back cover but didn't try to stop me. This could be because he was too terrified of my threatening presence to do anything or maybe I got through because he was a terrorist himself and a member of Osama's punk the American lickspittles club. Or maybe, just maybe, Australian domestic airport security actually has a modicum of common sense. (But I doubt it. It's much more likely my terrifying visage filled his heart with a surfeit of fear that quelled his courage in my opinon.)

It's a good thing I don't live in a free country. If I did I'd probably still be sitting in an airport interrogation chamber being questioned about what they'd discovered after performing an exhaustive "search" of my person:

AIRPORT SECURITY: And what is this?

ME: That's my breakfast.

AIRPORT SECURITY: And what is this?

ME: That's yesterday's breakfast.

AIRPORT SECURITY: If that's the case then perhaps you'd care to explain how it is we found today's breakfast prior to yesterday's breakfast?

ME: I'm very talented. And sometimes I have trouble letting go. Yesterday's breakfast is the only thing I have to remember my lungfish by.

AIRPORT SECURITY: Your lungfish?

ME: Yes, he drowned. But at least he died doing what he loved. Kind of like David Carradine in that respect. And what he loved was lying motionless at the bottom of his tank. So he was kind of also like a Tien an Men Square protester. But he did not die in vain. Just before he drowned we were able to perfect the technology required to upload lungfish into electronic form. We released the resulting cyber lungfish onto the internet where he went viral and he now lies motionless at the bottom of aquarium screen savers across the world. And he tasted kind of muddy.

AIRPORT SECURITY: Enough of your lies! You will now provide us with a list of your associates who may be planning to engage in harmless activity in airports so that we can stomp down on them as part of a magic ritual to appease the gods of terrorism so they won't send their suicide bombers against us!

ME: Well, my friend has a Megatron t-shirt and it's possible he could wear it to an airport and thereby blatently terrorise passangers with fictional autobot CGI extremism.

AIRPORT SECURITY: Excellent, excellent, tell me more!

ME: My grandmother constantly smuggles weapons grade titanium in her hip joint.

AIRPORT SECURITY: Good, good, go on.

ME: Every year I'm visted by a man who violates international airspace, along with his team of 12 caribou.

AIRPORT SECURITY: Yes, yes, don't stop.

ME: The guy next door has 27 guns, watches westling all day and has written a manifesto on why god wants him to hijack a plane and use it to penetrate the holo shroud that evil scientists use to hide heaven from the masses so people will believe in evolution. Here's a pamphlet he wrote called, "Why God Wants Me to Hijack a Plane and use it to Penetrate the Holo Shroud."

AIRPORT SECURITY: No, that information might actually be useful. We're more interested in pointless fear mongering through over reacting to inconsequential nonsense. Go back to telling me about the guy with the megatron t-shirt.

Finding Love Through Bioengineering or Possibly Lycanthropy.

PETER: Hello, I don't believe we've met. My name is Peter.

OWL WOMAN: Who?

PETER: Peter Green. My father owns the bakery.

OWL WOMAN: Who?

PETER: His name is Tyrone Green. Perhaps you know my brother?

OWL WOMAN: Who?

PETER: His name is Andrew.

OWL WOMAN: Who?

PETER: My brother, Andrew Green. But perhaps you could tell me your name?

OWL WOMAN: Who?

PETER: You!

OWL WOMAN: Who who.

PETER: Your name is Who Who? You're not from around these parts, are you?

OWL WOMAN: Who?

PETER: You!

OWL WOMAN: Who?

PETER: Oh, now you're just making fun of me.

OWL WOMAN: Who?

PETER: Me! Oh, look out! A mouse!

OWL WOMAN: MUNCH MUNCH

PETER: Oh, now that's disgusting! On the other hand I find your large eyes very attractive and I also find the way you can rotate your head 180 degrees alluring. Would you like to come to my place for dinner? You can meet my father and brother.

OWL WOMAN: Who?

PETER: Let's not go into that again.

Will the Rebound Effect increase the use of fossil fuels?

Tonight on the Ronald Brak Discussion Hour we will be debating the rebound effect as it applies to fossil fuels. To start us off, perhaps you could tell us just what the rebound effect is, Ronald?

RONALD: Well, to put it simply, the rebound effect results from people using fossil fuels more efficiently and as a direct result they are able to afford to use more fossil fuels. For example, if someone who can only afford to heat one room in their house gets insulation installed, then instead of reducing the amount of fossil fuel they burn, they might continue to use the same amount and heat two or three rooms instead. However, this effect is something that only really occurs to a large extent in the developing world and isn’t something that people in richer nations need to be too concerned about, especially where carbon trading schemes are in effect as this should reduce the rebound effect to around 10%. I’m sure Mr Brak will agree with me on this.

BRAK: I couldn’t disagree more. Indeed, the force of my disagreement is psychically radiating from my cerebral cortex with the force of a billon exploding suns. If any of you had even the slightest amount of residual telepathic ability your heads would not only have exploded but also imploded so rapidly they would have come out of the other side and exploded again. You are so very, very wrong.

RONALD: Would you care to elaborate?

BRAK: Certainly. The force of my disagreement roils the sea of troubles and dashes it to vapour, driving a rain of squalling pandemonium before its contentious fury to lash the recalcitrant fools who have the audacity to…

RONALD: No, I meant could you elaborate on why you disagree, rather than elaborating on your disagreement itself?

BRAK: Oh. Well, I disagree because common everyday experience refutes what you say with such force a roll of thunder is heard across the land. Speaking from my own common everyday experience, I know that when I replaced my personal car, a V8 interceptor, I replaced it with two hybrids which I drove by standing with one foot on each car roof while using the controls via a marionette operated by each hand through specially installed sunroofs. Then, when I discovered that I was still only using half the amount of fuel that my V8 did, I bought two more hybrids, hitched all four to a chariot and had them drag me through the streets as I lashed those hybrid beasts most cruelly with a whip. Actually the hard part was modifying them so they could feel pain.
Furthermore, after I had my house insulated, rather than use less heating oil I instead was finally able to heat my house to a pleasant 140 degrees celsius. It was quite comfortable, as long as the dehumidifiers were operating and it was filled with the pleasant smell of crispy bacon whenever visitors came around and touched anything metal.
And now, after building that one gig capacity wind farm, the 230 megawatt solar thermal plant and those six gigawatts of dry rock geothermal power, I now heat my house by burying it in 30,000 tons of coal every day and setting it on fire. And it’s simply absurd not to expect people to do the same out of some namby-pamby sense of environmental responsibility.

RONALD: So you’d be in favour of some sort of regulation to prevent this then?

BRAK: Normally I’d say no, but having to use an asbestos covered mole machine powered and cooled by a torrent of externally supplied liquid nitrogen every time I want to go from the living room to the kitchen to get a snack is becoming rather tiresome.

RONALD: And I’m afraid that’s all we have time for tonight.

BRAK: I want a mole machine that’s cooled by the latent heat of vaporizing human souls. Now THAT would be cool…

Where in the world is Osama Bin Laden? Where in the world is basic maths?

I've started reading Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? by Morgan Spurlock. I'm up to page three. Now I'm sure it's a good book. It has a picture of an amusing looking camel on the front and I don't think you are allowed to put pictures of amusing camels on the front of books that aren't good. But I've had to temporarily stop at page three because Morgan Spurlock puts these three sentences right next to each other, "In 2002, a representative year, almost 43,000 Americans died in car accidents. That same year, only 600 Americans died in aircraft crashes. Your chances of dying in an aircraft are around one in 10 million, versus one in 7,000 in a car."

Now I admit that I am completely unaware of Morgan Spurlock ever claiming to be exceptionally mathematically skilled. In fact his skills seem to lie in writing, directing, producing and consuming vast amounts of junk food. However, I would have hoped that an editor or someone would have noticed that if 2002 is a representative year, then Americans are 72 times more likely to die in car accidents than plane crashes, while if they have around a, "...one in 10 million chance of dying in an aircraft versus one in 7,000 of dying in a car," then Americans are 1,429 times more likely to die in a car than an airplane. So which one is it? Seventy-two times more likely or 1,429 times more likely? Because it's quite a difference.

I'm afraid that mistakes like this will continue to happen as long as people continue to fail to get me to check their work before it's published. It's the only sure way for people to have their mistakes removed and my own inserted. So I invite Morgan to send me his next book so I can go over it before it's printed.

Done Fu!

David Carradine, the actor who single handedly beat Bruce Lee in a battle to see who looked the least Asian has died. Apparently from sexual hijinks in a hotel room in Bangcock, which is exactly how my friend Benedict has always wanted to go. Now for some strange reason people have been saying that the way he died is bad for his posterity. I don't see why. If he had died from a heart attack, two years from now if someone mentioned his name I'd go, "David who?" But now I'll go, "Oh yeah, isn't he the guy who..." His immortality is assured, and this is true regardless of what actually happened in that hotel room. The internet has already done its work. He will live on in our hearts and minds, and for some people with over active imaginations, our closets.

Edwin Hubble versus Fred Hoyle Celebrity Deathmatch! ('Cause they're both dead.)

So last night the neighbour started channelling Edward Hubble and got into a drunken fight with the ghost of Fred Hoyle. "You want a big bang? I'll give you a big bang!" cried Hoyle before spurting ecoplasm everywhere. (Who you gonna call? A good drycleaner, that's who.) Anyway, I was on the phone to Satoshi Tajiri at the time discussing beetles and the sound of the ruckus next door inspired me to pitch an idea to him about putting stars in the ring and getting them to fight. He said this had already been done with Celebrity Deathmatch and I said, "No, stars as in actual immense balls of flaming hydrogen. The neat thing is the stars will be the stars!" Satoshi fell silent for a minute, I could tell he was astounded by my idea, and then he said he'd get back to me. I have a feeling this could be as big as Pokemon:

RED DWARF: I may be small, but my FLARE POWER shall defeat him!

MANAGER: Take it easy Red Dee. You've got the stamina to go the full 15 billion years, just keep your distance in the first round or BLUE HYPERGIANT will catch you with his SUPERNOVA STRIKE. But if you are at apogee when he lets loose you can take it and then just circle around him for the next 14 billion years and win on points. But whatever you do, don't get cocky and stay the hell away from his event horizon.

That's odd. I could have sworn Tolsty was standing next to Lenin in this photograph (instead of on all fours by Stalin and wearing a gimp suit).

Perhaps I should go back and update some of my old blog posts now that I is a year smarterer? After all, I have all these tins of historical white wash John Howard gave me. You get three tins each time you hand in a black armband.

The Pirates of the Caribbean Computer Game Partakes of Perspiration from a Deceased Pirates Cannon Shot

I tried playing a computer game recently. It was a big mistake. I tried to play the Pirates of the Caribbean game because it was made by a company with a great reputation. However, this game proved that in the software world it is obviously possible to redeem yourself no matter how heinous the quality of the crud you produced in the past. I began to suspect that it was a bad game when I felt as though I needed an introductory tutorial to get through the introductory tutorial. Things didn't get any better when I found out that sword fighting consisted for the most part of holding your sword in front of your face while your opponents, instead of trying to hit you, would just swing at the sword. Every now and then they'd slow down giving you a chance to strike them, and they would eventually go down, probably gasping as they choked on their own blood about how you cheated by striking them instead of their sword.

But while the swordplay was boring, the pistol shooting was just disturbing. Your game character, Nathaniel Hawke, has a flintlock pistol, so you would think he would only be able to fire it once without reloading it. However, after firing his pistol he immediately puts it back in his pants and then when he pulls it out again eight seconds later it is fully reloaded. It makes me wonder just how is he managing to reload it while it is in his pants without using his hands? I think Nathaniel Hawke must be a very talented man, but his field of specialty does not lie in piracy. I think there are some bar owners in Thailand who would be quite interested in employing his services.

And as the game is called Pirates of the Caribbean, there is of course lots of daring action on the high seas, right? No, not right. There’s lots of deadly boring action, as dying repeatedly is boring. Sailing in the game went like this: Leave port, get attacked by someone, pirates maybe I don’t know, sink and drown. Reload, leave port again, run into storm and sink and drown. Reload again, leave port again, run into another storm and sink and drown again. Stupidly and against all reason, reload again, get to port on neighbouring island, run into dock while attempting to moor and sink and drown in port.

And what is it with games and loading times? And I don't mean having to wait for loading after you have completed an hour or two of play, I mean constantly having to wait for loading every three minutes or so:

ME: I walk from the docks to the town.

GODBOX: Loading town.

ME: What to you mean, loading town? There's nowhere flipping else for me to go, so why couldn't you have loaded the town while I was walking up that pointless beach?

GODBOX: Sheesh, it's only a minute. Keep your shirt on......Here you go, here's the town.

ME: I go to the tavern.

GODBOX: Loading tavern.

ME: Oh Christ on a stick...

GODBOX: .......................................................................
.................................Tavern loaded......no wait.……..okay, it's loaded now, honest.

ME: I buy a bottle of rum.

GODBOX: You can't do that. It's a tavern.

ME: What?

GODBOX: Taverns are for hiring sailors. They have nothing to do with rum. You have to go to the town store for that.

ME: Sheesh, who does a pirate have to kill to get a drink around here? What am I supposed to do? Sing Yo Ho Ho and a bottle of tea? Okay, I go to the town store then.

GODBOX: Loading town.

ME: What do you mean, loading town? I was there only a second ago. How could you have forgotten what the town was like in that time? I was in a fricking one room tavern! How much of your fricking memory does that take up?

GODBOX: I'm sorry, but the universe is uncertain about the state of the town. It's quantum.

ME: Arrghhh!

GODBOX: Town loaded.

ME: I go to the store!

GODBOX: Loading store.

Me: Arrrrrrrrrrg!

GODBOX: Store loaded.

ME: I buy some rum!

GODBOX: Rum bought.

ME: I drink the rum and sing a pirate song.

GODBOX: Drinking rum is not permitted here. You will have to go to the tavern.

ME: ARRRRRGHHHH! (Pulls out pistol, shoots store owner dead.)

GODBOX: Would you like to reload the game?

ME: No, wait... Reloading my pistol feels kind of good.

.

You can have my memory engram when you pry it from my cold stiff cerebral cortex

Just to avoid any possible confusion, I'll point out that I don't want my memory of naked Uhura removed.

The Top Five Star Trek Movies

Here's what I think are the top five Star Trek movies. Now I realize that most fans consider The Wrath of Khan to be the best Star Trek movie, but there is one that just manages to beat it in my opinon.

1. Galaxy Quest
2. The Wrath of Khan
3. The Voyage Home
4. The undiscovered Country
5. Blur - Which is what all the other movies are to me. (Except the part where Uhura gets naked. That is seared into my memory and I may need a scalpel to get it out.)

Star Trekking across a really insignificant portion of the universe when you think about it. Oh, and um spoilers. Look out for them.

STAR FLEET DIRECTIVE 104-SPOILER: The following blog post contains a summary of events that occured in the latest Star Trek movie. If you are a Star Trek fan and haven't seen the movie yet, stop reading now. If you are a Star Trek fan and you do manage to stop reading, you are obviously not completely human. Report to Star Fleet headquarters at once to have that alien parasite removed from your brainstem.

I would have placed the following under a fold, but unfortunately, due to a HTML error, attempting to put a fold in a Blogger page results in a fold in the space time continuum. I asked Scotty about the situation and he said, "She canne take it anymore! She's gonna blow!" Unfortunately I didn't know if he was talking about the internet, the Enterprise or Kirk's latest girlfriend.


SPOILER ALERT! -- SPOILER ALERT! -- SPOILER ALERT!


STARFLEET: James T. Kirk, could you tell us in your own words how you saved Earth?

KIRK: Certainly. After Vulcan was destroyed I disobeyed my comanding officer until he threw me off the ship. Then I reboarded the ship without permission and taunted the Captain about his dead mother until he had a mental breakdown. Then I took control of the ship. I can't believe I got away with that. Then, instead of beaming some nukes or photon torpedoes or our anti-matter filled reactor core over to the enemy Romulan ship, I beamed just myself and a guy who had just mental break down and had tried to kill me. I thought it would help us to bond. We shot a dozen Romulans and were able to evade the rest because Romulans have no concept of waste space. Then Spock stole a ship and got the Romulans to chase him away from the earth while I rescued Captain Pike. Fortunately we had enough time to do this as the Romulans didn't realize that a black hole on the surface of a planet will destroy it just as much as one in its core. Then all we had to do was crash a ship full of black hole juice into the Romulan ship and quite possibly cause it to get sucked through time again. Then Scotty ejected the warp core to propel us away from the black hole because going into orbit is for sissies. Scotty often uses a similar technique using a stick of dynamite to get his chevy into or out of difficult parking spaces. And that's about it.

STARFLEET: Kirk, you are a risk taking idiot who somehow managed to get lucky. As such, we have no problem handing over one of earth's few remaining starships to your command. We'll even let you choose as second in command a man who tried to strangle you to death on the bridge and who is having a relationship with a woman you have been stalking for three years. We forsee no possible negative consequences from this at all.

The Heritage Foundation is Lying About the Cost of the Waxman-Markey Carbon Trading Bill

The Heritage Foundation in the United States has produced a report saying that the carbon emission trading scheme currently under consideration, which will reduce CO2 emissions by about 1.8% annually, will cost the average American family $1,500 US a year, apparently for the next forty years.

This is a load of dingos' kidneys. I know that this is a load of dingos' kidneys because with $1,500 a year the average American family could afford to cut their CO2 emissions by a heck of a lot than 1.8% a year. For example they could buy insulation, install a geothermal heat pump, purchase a hybrid or a plug in hybrid when their old car needs replacing, install solar panels and or a micro wind turbine or fuel cell. Plant trees, add biochar and powdered olivine to the garden, etc. Note that most of these actions will actually save money and leave the family better off. But according to the Heritage Foundation a carbon trading scheme, which is a method of cutting carbon emissions at the lowest cost, will somehow end up costing families $1,500 a year with no benefit. These dingo’s kidneys are fetid. I’m astounded that the Heritage Foundation can still find people willing to gobble them up.

The Heritage Foundation is lying. They are not just stupid, otherwise I would expect their mistakes to be in random directions rather than always in the, “Carbon dioxide is fun and who needs icecaps anyway?” direction. It is not necessary to consciously lie to be a liar. All that is required when you are writing something you are passing off as an authoritative report is not to perform necessary intellectual hygiene. For example, do I have all the facts? Have I run this by someone who actually knows what they are talking about? Could some 12 your old with aspergers tear me a new one on this? And so on.

That's right! I used to have a blog.

Well, what do you know? The deep hypnosis combined with dropping acid worked. (That is, a 25 kilogram bag of tartaric acid dropping on my head.) I now recall the password to my blog.

Stupid Science Limricks written by me.

After his mind was let loose,
Steven Hawkings was soon to deduce,
An interesting fact,
That holes that are black,
Are really actually puce.


A women helped Watson and Crick,
Discover DNA's trick,
But she got in the way,
Of radiation they say,
And died before fame could stick.


Pascal enjoyed a bit of a wager,
But at logic he wasn't a major,
He should have known well,
That praying could send you to hell,
Instead of being the thing to save ya.


Doctor Spock saved children from tears,
By saying not to exploit their fears,
But it is such a shame,
That when I mention his name,
People think he should have pointy ears.


There was a young man named Teller,
Who was a strange sort of a feller,
A man's reputation was busted,
When he said Oppenheimer couldn't be trusted,
And implied he was both red and yeller.


Professer Haber was a Noble prize winner,
For his invention stops people getting thinner,
But many met their doom,
When used to make things that go boom,
And not just to grow food for dinner.


A lass thought Pythagoras cute,
And dated him just for a hoot,
Althoughs she thought he was nice,
Her passion soon turned to ice,
Because she didn't enjoy the square root.



Flemming discovered some mould,
That happened to be medical gold,
He said, "Patents are bunk!"
But his discovery sunk,
Until World War II took hold.

The Solution to Quite a Few of the World's Problems!

Global temperatures are rising, oil supplies are dwindling, Presidents are getting people killed. What do all these problems have in common? They can all be solved through my simple solution to make the world a better place. My plan is simple. It involves reintroducing the codpiece as a fashion statement. Just think, if codpieces became fashionable again, no one would ever have to buy an SUV. They could just go and buy a huge, honking, chrome plated codpiece and get exactly the same amount of satisfaction from it as from driving one of those enormous, 4-wheel-drive, continental siege machines. No one would ever feel the need to buy a gas-guzzler again, provided the dash of the Honda Civic was modified to allow larger sized codpieces to fit. And the entire Iraq invasion could have been avoided if only George Bush had been permitted to wear the world’s largest codpiece - sixty foot long, matt black and made of carbon fiber. Sure it might take a squad of young men running alongside to support its weight, but it’s better for a young man to strain his back to supporting the Presidental penis then it is for a young man to get shot because of the lack of Presidential penis.

Signs of the Singularity

When computers are easy to use, the singularity will have arrived.

Converesly, computers say that when humans are easy to use the singularity will have arrived.

The movie 300 - So bad it's good.

Hi! I’m in a good mood today. I just went and saw a cartoon at the movies. Not an actual animated cartoon, but a live action one. Frank Miller’s movie 300 about the Spartans at the battle of Thermopylae.

It's a weird movie. Apparently Spartan men went bare-chested while Spartan women didn’t. And when I say Spartan men went bare-chested, I mean they went bare-chested always, even in the middle of battle, which is a big no-no. Even the most tactically inept person knows it’s not a good idea to go into battle sans clobber, unless your enemy has a pathological fear of nudity. The screen is filled with so much beefcake it made me wish I could take a pill to turn me gay for a couple of hours so I’d enjoy it more. There is a scene which shows King Leonidas having sex with his wife, which I guess is some pathetic attempt to establish that he’s not gay. Let’s just say it’s not successful. A non-gay king would insist his soldiers wear armour.

And damn, but the Spartans were short in that movie. At the start there is a wolf that is much larger than King Leonidas and Emporer Xerces simply towers over him. But that’s what happens when you abuse your children by sending them out to survive in the wilderness as part of the traditional Agoge instead of actually, you know, feeding them and maybe training them in how to survive instead of just expecting them to work it out by themselves. Imagine how tough the Spartans would have been if they'd actually fed their children and hadn’t all been midgets.

In the movie’s first battle I thought we might see a demonstration of what happens when disorganized warriors run up against a disciplined, well drilled army. However, despite King Leonidas giving a lecture to Mickey the Mutant on the art of phalanx fighting earlier on, it turns out that that Spartans aren’t really into forming ranks and holding position, and are actually iron age Jedi and fight best when surrounded by enemies and spinning like violent gyroscopes. After seeing his son killed, one character is described as breaking ranks. What ranks? The Spartans were standing wherever they would look the coolest, not where they had a tactical advantage. And I can only assume that the son who was killed was extremely good at lip-reading because only a severely deaf person would let a galloping horse sneak up on them.

As for historical accuracy, there is none. Basically, if it’s in the movie, it’s wrong. Although I suppose it is remotely possible that Xerces the Great had a goat that could play musical instruments. However, the movie never gives the impression that it’s trying to be historically accurate. It gives the impression that it’s a live action cartoon, which is a good thing, otherwise I’d have to point out how humorous it is to hear the slave owning Spartans saying they are fighting for freedom.

KING LEONIDAS: We are fighting for freedom!

HELOT: Does this mean we are no longer slaves and can now own the fruits of our own labour and no longer have to kiss your arses?

KING LEONIDAS: I’m not talking about that sort of freedom!

But then I suppose freedom might be especially dear to people who can see how poorly they treat their own slaves everyday. And I’d also have to mention that it wasn't really the Spartans but their rivals the Athenians who defeated Xerces, but now I’m just quibbling over minor details. Basically, people who know anything at all about ancient history will realise the movie is not accurate and the people who go into the movie knowing nothing will come out knowing nothing, so no harm done.

So, all up, a bad movie, but an excellent cartoon.

Ray Kurzweil can snap most people's limbs like dry twigs

Picking on Ray Kurzweil is probably not a good idea. I mean, the guy is pretty fit and so tough he doesn't even flinch when he has injections. In fact, he even seems to enjoy them. He boasts about having them in his book. Worse than that, he could probably kill someone with the right power chord from his synthesizer. The sonic blast could turn your bones to jelly. Which could have its advantages, if you didn't have to pull on your own nipples all the time to stop your lungs collapsing, which is kind of hard to do when you no longer have bones in your arms.

Anyway, the point is that I am extremely brave because I am now going to pick on Ray Kurzweil's ideas on the internet where he could theoretically find out about it. This is very fool hardy of me. After all, who knows what horrors he might inflict upon me after the singularity? Maybe swap my virtual reality Angelina Jolie image file with Margaret Thatcher's right in the middle of a hot and heavy philosophical discussion session.

Anyway, in his book, The Singularity is Near, Ray Kurzweil says he thinks humans are the only intelligence in the galaxy or perhaps universe. He thinks we’re the only ones around because he says it’s natural for intelligence to spread through the universe and spread, well, intelligence. Since there is no sign that anyone has done that yet he concludes we’re the only intelligence around.

To me, this isn’t a good argument. It could be that the reason we haven’t detected signs of technology in space such as Dyson spheres is because aliens think that idea of spreading intelligence through the universe is so late 20th century and have much better things to do with their time. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that there were people who thought that destroying all wilderness until the entire earth was paved over was a good idea. Nowadays when we read about how our grandparents looked forward to the day when all those nasty lions, dingos, Tasmanian Tigers, indigenous inhabitants and so on would finally be extinct; many people are disgusted. I think it is possible that in the future intellects might feel the same way about spreading intelligence through the universe willy-nilly.

Kurzweil says that intelligence should spread through the universe rapidly. Well maybe an intelligence did spread through the universe rapidly and it’s an intelligence that likes the universe the way it currently is. And it uses the massive advantage of being the first intergalactic species to squash or co-opt any new species that might pop up and want to do things differently. And the reason we haven’t seen any sign of this uber intelligence is because it doesn’t give a damn about contacting us. I mean when was the last time you tried to communicate with an ant? Sure you might watch ‘em in an ant farm, but you don’t have high hopes of engaging in interesting conversation with them.

Well, I'd better finish up by saying something nice about the book so Ray Kurzweil won't come and rip my bloody arms and legs off like an intellectual Aunty Jack. One thing I appreciated was that he didn't say anything too silly about deflation in the book. Deflation is a problem when the general price level decreases. It's not a problem if the prices of certain goods such as computers decreas. And if we do end up with Kurzweilian deflation it's easily fixed. Governments can simply stop collecting taxes and start introducing negative poll taxes and just give everyone money to prevent problems caused by currency gaining in value.

Book Review: A Teaspoon and an Open Mind - The Science of Doctor Who

What the heck? I'm up to page 26 and I am astounded by the scientific inaccuracies. And I'm not talking about the science in Doctor Who, I'm talking about the real life science this guy is writing about. I go to the front of the book and I see the author,Michael White, has written a lot of books before involving science so it's not as if we have an over ernest fan here who doesn't know what he is talking about. I'm hoping that there was some enormous slip up in the editing process, but it seems more likely that this book is crap.

UPDATE: I read a few more pages. It's crap.

Velocoraptors Smarter than Humans - Conclusive Fictional Proof

It's very interesting to note that if you take a normal door and move the handle from the usual place and instead put it in one of the corners, most humans on earth will either be unable to open the door or spend an inordinate amount of time working it out. Yet the velociraptors in Jurassic Park, who presumably had never operated doors before, seemed to have no real problem at all. This makes me think that the chiczulub crater wasn't the result of an asteroid impacting the earth and killing off the dinosaurs. It was the result of a velociraptor being smart.

Run for your lives! The Singularity is coming!

I’ve been reading a book by Ray Kurzweil called, The Singularity is Near. And no, the singularity does not consist entirely of Ray Kurzweil giving you a single finger. The singularity is supposed to be when the accelerating advance of human knowledge and technology reaches such a fevered pace that it skyrockets and our lives are completely transformed from what they were before. Kurzweil says this will happen around 2045. Only 38 more years. Sounds like we’d better enjoy our ignorance and technical incompetence while we can.

Now these ideas aren’t exactly new. They’ve been causing trouble for thousands of years. There have always been people who have said that if you follow their teachings (carefully prolong your life until immortality is invented) you will get to heaven (immersive virtual reality where you can do it with Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt or a combination of the two, Brad Jolie.) However, this particular nutty prophet is actually right about a few things, which puts him a little ahead of Jesus or Muhammad or Jeshammad.

Ray Kurzweil is typically portrayed as being insanely optimistic, but I actually agree with a lot of what he says. Human knowledge and technological progress is advancing at an accelerating rate. But I’m not too impressed by his prediction that we’ll all become immortal in the future. I mean look at the people around you and the ones you encounter online. Do you really want to be stuck with these people forever? You might say that it doesn’t matter, that you’ll spend all your time in virtual reality doing it with Brad Jolie, but there are people out there who aren’t going to be satisfied until you’re doing it with Jeshammad.

I don’t know if advances will come to pass as early as he says they will, but on one point at least he is much more pessimistic than I am. He says a machine won’t be able to accurately mimic human intelligence and pass a Turing test until about 2029. I think the date is much more likely to be next week sometime. Trust me on this, it only takes a minimal amount of computing power to mimic my cousin Andy:

TEST GIVER: What are you thinking about right now?
ANDY SIMULATION: Beer.
TEST GIVER: Anything else.
ANDY SIMULATION: Nah. Just beer.
TEST GIVER: Not sex?
ANDY SIMULATION: Are you a chick?
TEST GIVER: I’m a woman.
ANDY SIMULATION: Will you get all shitty if I tell the truth?
TEST GIVER: No, I won’t get all shitty if you tell the truth.
ANDY SIMULATION: Mostly beer, sometimes sex.
TEST GIVER: What would you say if I said that life was a constant conflict between what we aspire to be and our recognition of what we really are?
ANDY SIMULATION: Show us your tits.
TEST GIVER: All right then, we’ll try a different tack. You are walking in the desert. The sun is beating down on you. You come across a tortoise lying on it’s back in the sun. The tortoise can’t move. Its little legs are helplessly waving in the air. You could help this tortoise, but…
ANDY SIMULATION: Is it male or female?
TEST GIVER: It doesn’t really matter.
ANDY SIMULATION: Is it the male of its species, or the female?
TEST GIVER: It’s… it’s male.
ANDY SIMULATION: Fuck it then. I kick it.

As you can see, not a lot of computer power required there. In fact, I myself have written a computer program that is as intelligent as Einstein and I’m willing to put it through the Turing test right now. I’ll ask questions to two subjects. One of the subjects will be my computer program and the other will be the real Einstein. It’s your challenge to tell them apart.

ME: Thank you both for participating in this test. First I’d like to ask you both how you feel today?
SUBJECT 1: (Silence)
SUBJECT 2: (Silence)
ME: In your opinion, what would you say are the characteristics that truly define humanity?
SUBJECT 1: (Silence)
SUBJECT 2: (Silence) (Rotting smell.)
ME: Do you believe in Cartesian duality? That there is something about being human that cannot be captured and replicated by a machine no matter how well it is able to simulate the functioning of the human brain?
SUBJECT 1: (Silence)
SUBJECT 2: (Silence) (Fly lands on skull, crawls into eye socket.)
ME: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
SUBJECT 1: (Silence)
SUBJECT 2: (Silence) (Worm emerges from rotting suit, falls on carpet.)
ME: Thank you for your time, gentlemen.

So, could you tell them apart? I bet it wasn’t as easy to as you thought it would be.

I couldn’t be bothered to write about my lack of enthusiasm…

I haven’t done any work at all today. Not unless you get really imaginative with the definition of the word work. Even my dreams weren’t particularly productive this morning. They were just about how the dingier restaurants in Japan are better value for money, me discovering a good luck cat charm and a collection of novelty decoratred eggs in the gutter and my obtaining my own flat while still a high school student and deciding that I could learn more by staying at home and reading rather than attending school.

It’s funny that although I have travelled the world, battled blood sucking diseased monsters, been savagely hurled through the air and cruelly injured by mechanical monstrosities, and have sat through the entirety of Highlander 2, but my worst nightmares still involve high school. But then too this day I have still not faced anything as horrific as high school. I’m not saying that it was as bad as gutting fish for 12 hours a day, but it would have been nice to have had that option.

Not that I had any nightmares last night, but there was nothing that was obviously money making. No award winning songs, no great inventions, no locations to secret buried treasures. (Not that people ever let me dig deep enough into their living room floors before they call the police.) So basically there is no way I can claim to have done work.

It seems that for some strange reason I’m just generally reluctant to do work.

So from now on I’ve decided to only take on projects that engage my enthusiasm. If I feel like working on projects involving space travelling bonobos or nanobot chimpanzees, then gosh darn it, I’ll work on those projects! Instead of working on things I want to work on, I’ve been getting myself all twisted out of shape worring about things like artistic merit, taste, coherence, legality and making any kind of sense what so ever. Well all that’s going out the window and I pity those poor fools who get hit by the pointy triangles of coherence! The world is going to see a new me, and I’m not talking about a clone I grew in a vat! A new productive me that will cast off the shackles of convention! A me that won’t be held back or hampered by self imposed…

Is that the time? I’d better be getting to bed. I’ll finish this later. Well I would, except having to finish it later makes it seem a bit like work, and as I may have mentioned, I’m not too motivated about doing work…

The Brothel of my Dreams

I actually had a decent night’s sleep last night. It’s been a long time since that’s happened. I dreamed I went to a brothel. I was in a large waiting room with quite a few other people when a woman walked in and it was announced that my lady of the night was ready for me, even though it was the daytime. My prostitute was very sweet and I thought I was very lucky to be selected for her.

We went for a walk to the park together and sat under a tree so we could get to know each other better. I’m not sure if they do this at real brothels, but I suppose they must otherwise how would the prostitutes know if they wanted to sleep with their client or not? Well, we got on just fine, so we headed back to the brothel for sex. My prostitute got into bed and I was about to get into the bed also when everything faded out on account of how this was a PG rated dream. When I woke up in the morning I was sleeping in another room of the Brothel and I wondered if I had to pay extra for staying the night. I had been woken up by the noise, as apparently prostitutes are quite loud in the morning.

I put on my clothes but I couldn’t find my wallet or keys. I figured I must have left them somewhere in the brothel. I didn’t think they had been stolen because if you can’t trust prostitutes who can you trust?

I walked around the brothel looking for them, nodding hello to the prostitutes I passed, when I entered a small room and a prostitute entered after me and said she would have sex with me for $70. I explained that I had lost my wallet and she said that $50 was okay. Apparently this prostitute accepted I.O.U.s. Her wanting to have sex with me made me think two things. One, I must be a handsome, sexy guy if so many prostitutes want to have sex with me. And two, it economically normal behaviour for people to attempt to avoid extraction of rents by people such as the brothel owners.

Then everything faded out again. I was actually confused about whether or not we’d had sex similar to how it can be hard to tell if people have had sex in some older movies.

Well, I couldn’t find my wallet or keys, so I had to spend another night at the brothel on account of how I couldn’t drive home. The next day I gave up and started to walk home and on the way I met my parents in a swamp I was passing through. They were both quite pleased to hear that I was on my way home from a brothel.


Actually I left out the part of my dream where I was looking for my wallet and I walked into a room with a large indoor swimming pool. There was a group of athletic men wearing swimming costumes at one end and they asked me if I would pay $200 for sex. I thought about what a lovely person my prostitute had been and said that $200 for sex was definitely worth it. Then they all started chasing after me and I had to run for my life. I didn’t mention this in case people took it the wrong way and thought I was some sort of swimmerphobe or something.

Waiting for the comments to come flooding in.

I promised that today in an attempt to boost my popularity I would give the answer the following question:

WHY DID PRINCE CHARLES CUT OFF HIS WILLY?

Well, when Prince William was younger he was enjoying himself much more than Charles did at that age and Charles decided he wasn’t going to stand for it and cut off his allowance. Well, some of it anyway, for a period of time. It wasn’t as if he was going to make his own son live like a normal person or anything.

Boring Dailly Trivia of my Life

8:52am

Woke up,
Got out of bed,
Didn’t drag a comb across my head...

I’ve decided that what my blog needs to increase its readership above one (hi mum!) is more boring day to day trivia. That’s what a lot of other blogs have. Really boring, mindless crap. So rather than my usual insightful, intellectual pronouncements I will tell you the details of my fascinating life.

So far this morning I have woken up, turned on the computer, urinated and thrown my underpants in the wash. Yes, that’s right. Soon I’ll be able to have all the accidents I want.

So, what to do now? Can’t seem to really focus at the moment. I shouldn’t be tired, I only just got up… Ah! I’ve got it! I must be hungry! I’ll have breakfast! Time to go see what’s in the fridge.

Well, that was pleasant. I had a small amount of maize, a brussel sprout, navy beans, army beans, a green bean and a vegetable that I have decided to call styrofoam. Although putatively healthy, it didn’t really hit the spot, which is surprising because I have an excessively large spot. Must remember to go food shopping today.

So, what to do today, what to do? Well, I could clean up the place a bit. Broadening my definition of both rubbish bin and filing cabinet to include the concept of floor does seem to have resulted in a small amount of disorganisation. But is it really fair on the rest of the world for me to waste my huge intellect performing such a menial task? I don’t really think so. And besides, think of all the carbon I’m sequestering by not taking out the rubbish.

Let’s see, I have some DVDs I can watch and some books I can read. I could actually like, you know, leave the house and do something. Spend some of the huge quantity of money I have on doing something fun. Hmmm… Pity I can’t think of anything. I mean, why bother? Basically, when people say they are having fun they are just going places and seeing things and doing things. Well I can go places in my own house and see and do things here as well. What’s the point in leaving? I mean, it’s not as if I’m going to meet anyone who is more interesting to talk to than myself, right?

Well, if I’m not going to clean up the place and I’m not going to read or watch DVDs I guess I’d better do some work. Yes work. No, it’s okay, don’t be alarmed, I’ve actually worked before. It’s a strange compulsion I have. I actually believe that my life will be better if I actually do something with it. It’s all rather odd I know, but there you have it. Well, let's get to work.

No, wait a minute! There could be monkey jokes on the internet!

No monkey jokes. Well that was a waste of 23 minutes. But I did meet a guy who denies that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. I suggested he write a paper on it and get a noble prize for revolutionising physics, but he said it wasn’t worth the effort because it would just be suppressed by evil scientists who are using the lie that carbon dioxide absorbs infrared radiation in the 2.7, 4.3 and 15 micron bands to conquer the world. I asked him where the monkey jokes were, but he didn’t know. Well, I guess I better get to work then. Unless of course the monkey jokes are hiding among the gorilla jokes!

No, no they weren’t. Two more minutes wasted. Okay, to work now. Um, let’s see open file. Look at file. Oooh, symbols! It’s almost as if it’s some kind of language. Yes, yes… I know what this is. It’s English. Or rather, monkey English! Or it will be once I’m done improving it! No! No! Must resist temptation. These people want American English, not monkey English. Must resist temptation to OOOK EEEK! Must gain payment and professional recognition… So hard to resist the siren lure of monkey English…

Okay, I’m better now. What am I working on again? Oh yeah, medical stuff. What to do if your head comes off etc. Well I’ll get stuck into it.

Inflatable Domestic Abuse

Well, the next door neighbour is shouting at his wife again. You know, it’s just not fair. If I had a wife I wouldn’t shout at her like that, so why does he have a wife and I don’t? Maybe I'm just too humble when it comes to informing potential mates of how wonderful I am. But actually, now that I think of it, I’ve never actually seen his wife. He might not have one for all I know. He could well be shouting at an inflatable doll. Yeah, he’s probably even sadder than I am. Imagine, shouting at an inflatable doll. What a tosser.

You know, if I had an inflatable doll, I wouldn’t shout at it like that.

Slight Exaggeration?

Am I the only one who thinks the current U.S. government exaggerates the internal threat from terrorists just a teensy weensy bit? I mean they go totally berserk when they think they have discovered a single Al Qaeda cell. Imagine what would happen if they actually found an Al Qaeda organ, or heaven forbid, an entire Al Qaeda body. But no, just a cell is enough to freak them out. I guess they must be worried about that terrorist DNA, although I tend to think that more attention should be payed to the environmental factors that cause it to be expressed.

Self mutilation is what makes this blog popular.

Judging from the number of comments I've received, the most popular post I've ever written was two sentences on why Van Gough cut off his left ear. I will try to replicate the success of that post tomorrow when I will answer the question:

WHY DID PRINCE CHARLES CUT OFF HIS WILLY?

Sugar and Spice and Puppy Dog Tails and Apes.

In the book, Our Inner Ape, Frans de Waal discusses some interesting social differences between the sexes in apes. When human ape children were observed in the playground, boys were recorded as getting into twice as many fights as girls. However, when the children where asked at the end of the day how many fights they had been in, both the boys and the girls reported about the same number on average. It appears that disputes between girls can be far more subtle and less obvious than between boys.

I certainly noticed this when my friend gave me a book to read about the adventures of a girl in a boarding school. I found reading the thing very hard going. I was there going, “Well if being snubbed by this other girl hurts you so much, why don’t you just slay her? Or failing that, defeat her in physical combat and drive her before you while listening to the lamentations of her social cliche? Or you could just poison her. You’ve already mentioned how you were getting top marks in chemistry.”

Fortunately for the homicide rate, girls don't opt for violent solutions as often as boys. A wise man once said that violence never solves anything, but he quit saying it after the other guys punched his face in a few times.

Boys also appear to be much quicker to forgive each other after a dispute than girls. Admittedly this is often just so they can join forces and beat up some other boys, but it is a real difference. Girls seem to work much harder at avoiding disputes, but are worse at ending them once they start.

So, does this mean that as women gain more position of political power the world will be more likely to avoid most conflict but when conflict does occur it will be more intractable?

No. Countries that have women gaining positions of political power are generally sensible ones where one person’s grudge isn’t allowed to get people killed. I can’t think of a single developed country where a political leader’s personal vendetta would be allowed to substantially alter policy.

Okay, okay, I can’t think of two developed countries where a political leader’s personal vendetta would be allowed to substantially alter policy.

Nicotine - very, very bad!

Here's something I didn't know. It's possible for a young child to die from nicotine poisoning after eating a single cigarette butt. That's pretty toxic. In fact, a lethal dose of nicotine is 20 times smaller than a lethal dose of cocaine. This suggests that people should be more careful with cigarettes around children, but strangely enough it appears that seeing Janet Jackson’s nipple is more dangerous for children than seeing people smoke. Strange that. You'd think young children wouldn’t mind nipples at all.

Anyway, nicotine is supposed to be toxic. When insects eat tobacco plants they die from the nicotine. It's a form of chemical warfare. It's just chance that it also happens to be an addictive stimulant for mammals. Back in my grandfather's day you could buy nicotine in a tin to use as an insecticide. But they ended up banning it on account of how people had a tendency to use it to gain inheritances, get rid of annoying family members and so on. How typical of interfering bureaucrats to get in the way of innovation in family management! Gardeners also had a tendency to wake up anxious and irritable with an almost uncontrollable urge to go and kill aphids.

Oh, and apparently the majority of people with schizophrenia smoke. Not sure what's going on there. It may be an attempt to self medicate in much the same way as most people who suffer from work drink coffee.

I am not a racist.

It appears that I have managed to upset some people with my previous post. I have even been accused by some imaginary people of being a racist. It appears these pretend people were not impressed with the example I gave of a Dutchman attempting to communicate in English in my previous post. I have been told that I have made an ethnic slur against Dutch people everywhere, that I should be ashamed of myself for blackening the name of such a tolerant and kind people and that no one in the Netherlands ever speaks like that, except for filthy Brabanders.

I would like to apologize for any offence I may have inadvertently caused (without actually apologizing for the act itself). In the spirit of reconciliation I would like to quote the great actor Michael Caine, who said, "There are only two things I can't stand in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures and the Dutch."

Hmm. Maybe quoting Michael Caine wasn't the brightest idea I've ever had. Oh well.

Book Review: Our Inner Ape by Frans de Waal

This book didn’t start well for me. Near the beginning Frans disses The Selfish Gene, a book by the man of my dreams, Richard Dawkins. (In my dream Dawkins had me hide a dead lobster in my mouth so we could photocopy it as evidence of cruelty to invertebrates.) It seemed as though Frans de Waal hadn’t understood what Dwarkins was saying at all. But I’ll be charitable and put it down to misunderstanding. Frans is from the Netherlands and there is a lot of misunderstanding between the Dutch and English because the languages are so similar. Indeed, the two languages are exactly the same except for where they are different. It creates the illusion that Dutch and English speakers actually understand each other when frequently nothing could be further from the truth. I’ll give an example from my own experience of a Dutchman attempting to communicate with me:

“Yesterday I got up in the middle of the night. I made some sausage rolls. I made one, two, tree, four, five, sex. They were all the same length except some were longer than others. What? Why are laughing at me? You think I’m a stupid Dutchman, don’t you? You think I know fucking nothing. Well let me tell you, I know fuck all!”

I was very interested to read about the politics of apes, I wasn’t so interested in occasional asides into the politics of studying apes. After reading about how obsessed chimps are with status it’s almost impossible to not reflect on Frans’s apparent concern with it himself.

But it is good to read about Chimpanzee and Bonobo interaction. That is, interaction between chimps and other chimps and bonobos and other bonobos. I’m not sure exactly what happens when chimps and bonobos are put in the same enclosure and allowed to interact. Indeed I’m sure we could get a sitcom premise out of it with a talking chimp and a talking bonobo being forced to share an apartment and the hilarious hijinks that occur when their families come to visit. Not quite sure how American viewers will react to a typical bonobo orgy, but as long as we don’t show a nipple belonging to a member of the Jackson family I’m sure everything will be fine.

Interesting points in the book:

Bonobo sex acts last for about 14 seconds.
South American Capuchins have brain to body ratios equal to that of chimps and may be the most intelligent of monkeys.
Monkeys don’t comfort other monkeys, but apes comfort other apes.
If a bonobo kisses you, be prepared for tongue.

So in conclusion, a good read, but you might have to cut Frans de Waal some slack when he starts to get over concerned with status and starts acting like some sort of human.

Filthy Clicking Things

Hey,I'm allowed back onto my blog!

But I'm not proud of what I had to do to get here.

I had to click on things. Which is just disgusting. My cursor is soaking in bleach right now. I was wearing a read/write protect tab at the time, but still, clicking on things on the internet is a disgusting thing to do. Who knows where those buttons have been or whose been clicking on them and what they were doing with their cursor before they clicked them? I feel so cheap and tawdry. I should be feeling expensive and tawdry. Anyway, I just wanted you to know what I'm willing to go through for my reader out there. Hi, mum.

Perhaps

One day nations will fear looking stupid as much as they currently fear looking weak.

George Bush Explained!

If you have been following the United States foreign policy over the past six years, you have my sympathy. And no doubt the actions of their president have made you think, "What the hell is he doing?" (If you haven't thought this I suggest you go and read a book on cost/benefit analysis, or history, or indeed just a book.) But after reading a Ray Bradbury story I believe I now understand what's happened. Obviously someone has travelled back in time to the Cretaceous and stepped on a butterfly. As a result we are now in one of those weird timelines where history is all screwed up for no adequately explained reason. Now all we need is an etomologist, a microsurgeon and a time machine to make things right.

Why don't children do end runs around their parent's wills?

Today I heard another story about a elderly man who kept changing his will whenever one of his children upset him. Now he's dead he's left behind half-a-dozen wills and the children are all fighting over his estate. What I wonder is why don't the children of rich but crotchety parents visit a solicitor and sign a contract where they agree to pool and equally divide whatever they receive from their parent's estate? They can also agree on a division of family heirlooms in advance. I have never heard of this being done despite the amount of misery it would save many families. Instead of competing with their siblings in being nice to their parents they would only have to be nice enough to make sure their parents don't give away their assets to friends, more distant relatives and charity. That alone would be worth a lot and dramatically cut down on the amount of hipocracy in the world.

Australian Government sees light on Iraq

Today a member of our glorious Australian government announced that Australian troops would remain in Iraq and continue to train Iraqi troops. The minister said that first Iraqi troops would be taught to crawl, then they'd be taught to walk and then they'd be taught to run. I'm glad to see that the government has finally realized that running is the most important survival skill for Iraqis these days.

Since the people responsible for the invasion are not going to pay for the tens to hundreds of thousands of Arabic speaking troops and police required to stabilize the situation, running (phased withdrawal as non English speakers say) might be a least worst solution for coalition* troops.


*The U.S. army has the nonsensical slogan "Army of One." This appears to be preperation for the equally nonsensical "Coalition of One."

Not a post on wind power storage

Have you ever had a great idea for some piece of engineering and been so excited you posted an outline of your idea on your blog and then later realized your mental calculations were off by an order of magnitude or two? I certainly haven't. Move along, there is no post on windpower energy storage and never has been. Or if there was, only in the sense that Trotsky used to be in photos with Lenin.

BEST AL GORE QUOTE EVER!

From a speech on how the United States needs to cut greenhouse gas emissions and reduce oil use:

"It is, in other words, time for a national oil change. That is apparent to anyone who has looked at our national dipstick."

I'm right with you Al baby. Having to look at America's national dipstick is bad enough, but having to listen to him as well is torture. No wait, actually it's just merely annoying. Torture is what the White House does to spread freedom and democracy.

Traveling in the USA! - Tips from the Brakster

As I am widely travelled and have visited America and several other imaginary countries, I have decided to offer the following advice to anyone who wishes to follow in my footsteps and travel to the United States:

1. Do not start conversations with Americans by offering to guess their weight.
If you must guess their weight, do not overestimate so as to make them feel well fed and prosperous.

2. Do not discuss religion with Americans. If you must discuss religion with them, do not inform them that their god is a weak god, no matter how much evidence you have to support your contention. Do not point out that Quezocoutal the winged serpent would never allow himself to get nailed to anything.

3. Do not mention that your uncle used to work for Saddam Hussien. Pointing out that this was back when he was the United State's ally will not make it okay.

4. It is never fun to stay at the YMCA.

Ask Pope Ratzinger!

Benedict -- on the second day of a visit to his native Bavaria-- said that spreading the word of Jesus Christ was more important than all the emergency and development aid that rich churches like those in Germany gave to poor countries.


Dear Pope Ratzinger,

Yesterday I saw some starving people in Africa on TV. I want to help these poor people and I was wondering what would do the most good:

1. Pay for solar cookers so contaminated water can be boiled to prevent disease and to save women and children spending hours collecting firewood.

2. Pay for a well to be dug to provide access to safe water.

3. Contribute to a micro-loan fund that makes small loans to women so they can start businesses and boost the economic development of their communities.

4. Pay for medicine to save the lives of children.

5. Pay for a crate full of bibles and religious instruction materials.

Yours faithfully,

Confused


Dear Confused,

Of course your fifth option, sending a crate load of bibles and religious instructional material is the best way to help these people. For how does it benefit a woman to not have her children waste away from hunger and disease in her arms if she loses her soul?

If the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ saw poor people starving he would take pity upon them and show them mercy by telling them about the glory of God and the eternal reward that awaits them in heaven. But he wouldn’t actually do anything to help them.



Dear Pope Ratzinger,

I believe that as Christians we have an obligation to end poverty, especially the hunger and sickness that exists in the developing world. I believe that if the Catholic church and other denominations worked together we could eliminate poverty from the world. What do you think of my idea?

Yours truly,

Hopeful


Dear Hopeful,

The good Lord Jesus said that the poor will always be with us. By ending poverty you would be making Jesus into a liar, you sinful little man. Go to confession at once and we’ll have no more of this ending poverty talk. Do you know how hard it is to get people to believe religious dogma when they’re well fed and educated? Improving people’s lives just makes it more likely they will be eternally barred from paradise. What’s a little hunger and disease compared to eternal salvation?


Dear Pope Ratzinger,

Is it true that condoms contain microscopic holes that allow the HIV virus to pass straight through them and thus they provide no protection against AIDS?

Yours sincerely,

Sister Orgasma,



Dear Sister Orgasma,

Yes it is true that the HIV virus is smaller than tiny holes in condoms and so can pass straight through. You can prove this by attempting to fill a condom with water. It’s impossible as the tiny water molecules which are even smaller than HIV viruses instantly pour straight through the latex without stopping. Now some people claim to have actually tried this and state that water does not instantly pass through a condom. But I warn you, do not be led astray by science and reason. Blind faith is the key to heaven. Trust me on this.

Doctor Who, Hear Thyself!

I watched Doctor Who on the ABC last night. It's my favourite TV show. In fact it's the only TV show I watch, as I generally regard regarding TV as the past time of the vegatoid masses who are wasting their lives away. It sickens me how people can waste their lives like that instead of say spending 60+ hours trying to get through Halo on Legendary level.

Anyway, I enjoy Doctor Who and I heartily recommend you go out and buy the DVDs. Or better yet, give the money to me. Well, I suppose you could use the money to prevent children dying of preventable disease in developing countries, but don't blame me if you can't get to sleep at night from your guilty conscience if it turns out I don't have enough money to buy Halo III and a small châteaux to play it in.

But I'm afraid last night's episode wasn't quite up to it's usual standard. Just why they didn't send the script to me for final approval I'll never know. Sometimes even the Prime Minister acts without seeking my approval first, the impetuous fool. Anyhow, it was a classic Doctor Who moment. The Doctor and his companion, all be it a temporary one, were making their way down a tunnel lined with dormant Cybermen, emotionless cyborg killers and the Doctor's implacable foes. The Doctor's not so young companion says, "Doctor, that Cyberman just moved!" And the good Doctor replies, "Nah, it's just the torchlight."

Now that bit of dialogue made me think, "Doctor, have you been paying any attention at all for like the last nine hundred years? If someone says the Cybermen are moving, then the Cybermen are freaking moving!" I find it amazing that for hundreds of years the Doctor has been travelling to planets and telling people who never once believe him that they are in great danger and then when someone tells the Doctor that he is in danger he doesn't believe them. How very... human of him.

Suffice to say I found this much more frustrating than the fact that a few minutes later Cybermen, who happen to have metal legs, metal bodies, wear metal boots and sound like a locomotive when they go for a stroll, managed to sneak up on them.

And in these liberated times should they really be called the Cybermen? Shouldn't they be called the Cyberpeople? Then you could have a law enforcement Cyberperson, a construction Cyberperson, a biker Cyberperson, a cowperson Cyberperson and an Indigenous American Cyberperson and they could sing:

Hu-man, there's no need to feel pain,
I said, Hu-man, we can scoop out your brain,
I said, Hu-man, we can all be the same,
There’s no need to be deleted.

Hu-man, you can join the great,
I said, hu-man, rejects we’ll incinerate,
You can become, an emotionless droid,
And survive when humanity’s destroyed.

It’s fun to become a Cy-ber-person,
It’s fun to become a Cy-ber-person,

You’ll lose everything, including hate, rage and joy,
Except for an urge to destroy,

It’s fun to become a Cy-ber-person,
It’s fun to become a Cy-ber-person,

You get an emotion blocker in your body of steel,
So you can never feel…

Hu-man, are you listening to me.
I said, hu-man, what do you want to be?
I said, hu-man, we can end your nightmares,
And unlike Daleks we can handle stairs.

No one upgrades by himself,
We have the right parts on the shelf,
And just go there to the factory,
I’m sure they can process you today.

It’s fun to become a Cy-ber-person,
It’s fun to become a Cy-ber-person,

Snakes on a Plane!

BIOLOGIST: Captain, the plane is full of snakes!

CAPTIAN: Okay, we'll arm ourselves with makeshift weapons and form squads and hunt them down one by one and beat them to death.

BIOLOGIST: Well actually all we have to do is turn of the plane's heating and since they're cold blooded they'll fall unconscious.

CAPTAIN: Don't give me that science crap! Next you'll be telling me you believe in global warming!

BIOLOGIST: But it's the truth! If we turn down the heat the snakes won’t try to bite us.

CAPTAIN: Yeah, well even if it's true, can you guarantee that no one will be bitten before the snakes fall unconscious? Can you be absolutely certain?

BIOLOGIST: Well I can't be 100% sure...

CAPTAIN: Then we have no choice! As long as their is even a one percent chance of an American airline passenger being bitten, we have to hunt the snakes down and beat them to death with carry on luggage bags, no matter how many passengers die in the process! Turn down the heat you say? I say let’s turn up the heat on these bastards! I say bring it on reptiles!

BIOLOGIST: But turning down the heat is a simple, effective solution! The snakes thrive on the heat we provide!

CAPTAIN: I’ll not ask a single one of my passengers to do without the heat they've become accustomed to. To do so would be to admit the snakes have already won.

BIOLOGIST: You're crazy!

CAPTAIN: Yeah? Well I say you're objectively pro-snake!

BIOLOGIST: But I told you how to defeat them!

CAPTAIN: A victory by your means would be worse than defeat! We must fight them in a way that sends a message to all snakes!

BIOLOGIST: That's insane! Snakes can't communicate! They respond to individual threats! If we turn the heat down they'll become much less aggressive and then we can land and get some professional reptile handlers to capture them.

CAPTAIN: The reason why we've never been able to defeat the snake menace is because of people like you! You want to turn down the heat! You want trained snake handlers to capture them! Well I tell you, the only thing snakes understand is force! The only way we can be safe is to exterminate them! After all, they hate us for our homeothermism! In fact, you’re looking a lot like a snake to me!

(The Captain beats the Biologist to death with piece of carry on luggage. A snake falls out of the luggage and bites the pilot on the arm. The pilot ignores the snake as it escapes and then he sits in his chair.)

CAPTAIN: I can pilot this plane better than anyone. Only I can see where we should be going, the proper course to take. And the snake venom in my veins just makes me more qualified, not foaming at the mouth crazy. Hey, what are those skiers doing up here in this cloudbank?

Guilt free petrol only 5 or so cents away!

Currently the human race is doing a very good job of screwing up the environment by dumping heaps of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The one with the largest effect being carbon dioxide, which has increased in concentration by 32% since the start of the industrial revolution. So it might be a good idea to do something to get some of this stuff out of the atmosphere. Carbon sinks are a way to do this.

Basically a carbon sink is anything that removes carbon from the air and locks it up. This can be as simple as growing trees or as complex as blowing mountains apart with hydrogen bombs to make carbon absorbing gravel. Other possibilities less drastic than nuking mountains include seeding the southern ocean with iron to increase plankton growth and changing farming practices.

Creating carbon sinks costs money. At first the cost may be low as less expensive options are used, such as growing forests on marginal grazing land, but to do it on a large scale might result in a cost of around $65 dollars per ton of carbon absorbed, according to some estimates. Assuming this figure is correct, then removing the carbon dioxide produced by a coal power plant would cost enough to increase the price of that electricity for consumers by over a third. This would make coal power more expensive than wind or nuclear.

However, coal is very cheap compared to oil. The costs of trapping carbon released by burning oil are much cheaper in comparison to the total price. Currently oil costs about $740 per ton. Since it is about 85% carbon, then the cost of absorbing the carbon dioxide produced by burning a litre of petrol in your car would only be about 5 cents. In other words, a 3.5% increase in the current retail price. If we tacked this price onto each litre of petrol sold it should be enough to pay for the removal of the carbon dioxide it creates. Now I suppose a lot of people don't want to pay an extra 3.5% for petrol, but I have also noticed that a lot of Australians were willing to pay a lot of money to help Asian people who were hit by a tsunami, so I think Australians are quite interested in saving people from being inundated by sea water. And just think, for only an extra 5 cents a litre you could fill up your tank and drive entirely guilt free.

Unfortunately, these days a lot of energy is spent wringing oil out of deposits and the oil we get tends to be getting ickier and ickier and more costly to refine. It's not like the good old days when you could poke the earth with a giant needle and the black blood would come bubbling up by itself. Nowadays we oil junkies have jabbed the earth so much we can almost never find a good vien and when we do we often have to force the blood out. The additional cost of capturing carbon released in this process might increase the cost to 7.5 cents per litre.

Ask Doctor Libertarian!

Dear Doctor Libertarian,

While I agree that governments should not regulate shop opening and closing hours, I only feel mildly rueful about this and have no desire to buy guns and shoot federal police in the face. Is there something wrong with me?

Confused

Dear Confused,

Yes, there is something wrong with you. You are obviously a commie.




Dear Doctor Libertarian,

My friend and I are both libertarians, but sometimes when I am at his house and he gets annoyed with me he bans me from breathing his air. Can he do this? And if so is it all right for me to bring a bag of air over from my house to breath in these instances?

Breathless


Dear Breathless,

Of course he has the right to ban you from breathing his own air! How dare you question his supreme right within his property! How dare you even call yourself a libertarian at all, you filthy pinko, hippy, commie scum! Not only does he own the right to all the atmosphere in and above his property, he also owns a wedge of the earth’s substance going all the way to the core! Even better than this, he owns a slice of the universe above his property containing countless galaxies and untold billions of alien slave races! See how much better everything is under libertarianism? Wouldn’t you like untold billions of alien slave races? Of course, since the earth rotates and wobbles there may be some dispute over who owns exactly which segment of infinity, but that’s okay. You can just sue people whose claims disagree with yours. Endless legal bickering is the most efficient way to run society.

As for your second question, yes you can bring a bag of air from your own property to breath, provided your friend doesn’t prohibit you from bringing it onto his property, but you will have to ensure that none of your neighbour’s air enters the bag via osmosis because that’s stealing. And in the same way that your friend has the right to prohibit you from breathing his air, he has the right to prohibit you from moving your bag of air to your face through his air.




Dear Doctor Libertarian,

If I put a sign up on my property says, “DO NOT INTERFERE WITH THE MOVEMENT OF PHOTONS,” and people on my property fail to turn invisible and continue to absorb and reflect light, can I sue them for the loss of photons, which are very valuable to me?

Suememasen


Dear Suememasen,

Of course you can sue them with interfering with your photons! What a stupid question! You had a sign right there saying don’t interfere with them, and your word on your property is law! You have the right to do whatever you want! And if pinko, liberal commies don’t like it they can go to hell! It’s their own fault anyway for insisting that God wasn’t created in our image, so we’ve had to compensate by becoming godlike ourselves in our own house, on our own land or in our own parent’s basement! Sue them! Yes, sue the apostate! Only by ignoring regulation and mediation and engaging in endless civil suits can we create libertarian heaven on earth.




Dear Libertarian Doctor,

My girlfriend says she is leaving me because I read her diary and urinated on her Barbie doll collection. But she agreed to be my girlfriend without negotiating a commitment from me to not read her diary or to not urinate on her Barbie doll collection. Does she have any right to leave me?

Lonely and asparagus smelling


Dear Lonely and asparagus smelling,

If she agreed to “never leave you,” or “to always be your girlfriend,” she has no right to leave you. However, if she merely agreed to, “always love you,” then this is open to dispute, as technically it may be possible for her to leave you but still love you. But still, you could always attempt to sue her for breach of contract on the grounds that leaving you is incompatible with always loving you and see how far you get.

If she didn’t make any commitments to you other than to be your girlfriend without any time period stipulated, then as an individual she has every right to leave you if she wishes and there is nothing you can do about it.

In that case you could always dig a big pit in your living room and cover it over so that when she comes to collect her CDs she will fall in it and you can contract with her to help her out of the hole in return for staying with you forever. After all, it’s your right to build booby traps on your own property and your right to negotiate contracts regulating the behaviour of the contracted parties. And the government’s only function is to enforce these contracts, no matter what they are.

I am a Petty Petty Creature

Aus Vac didn't have the vacuum cleaner I wanted in stock, so in a petty act of revenge I'm going to tell all the people in internetland that everything in their store sucks.

The Anarchist’s Cookbook

First, peel one anarchist...

Climate Change Deniers Say The Stupidest Things

I made the mistake of going to the internet the other day. I shouldn’t have done that. It is a dirty, dirty place. I discovered that it is inhabited by a great number of a very strange form of creature indeed. One name that I suppose could be applied to this odious form of electronic life is climate change denier. However, I think the term idiot is also quite apt.

Not all climate change deniers are idiots, indeed there are probably as many as three or four of them who are honestly confused about the issues and wish to learn more about the facts. People who are also in the not necessarily an idiot category are those who debate just what the exact effects of climate change will be or what the appropriate course of action to take should be.

However there are a great many idiots. And it is interesting to consider just what it is the climate change deniers are denying. Rather than deny that climate change takes place, what most of them tend to do is insist that climate change is natural and to deny that humans are affecting the climate and insist that nothing need be done.

Now this line of reasoning doesn’t seem entirely logical to me for even if one thought that climate change was an entirely natural process, it does not mean that one should do nothing about it. Being stung by a male platypus and then losing your mind and cutting off your own hand with an axe to try to stop the pain is perfectly natural, but still it's something that you might want to avoid.

To believe that human beings are having no effect on the climate, you would have to believe either one or both of the following:

1. Carbon dioxide does not contribute to global warming.

2. Humans are not increasing the levels of carbon dioxide in the air.

Statement one doesn’t make sense and cannot really be backed up. Carbon dioxide, or CO2 for short, is a greenhouse gas. Put simply, a greenhouse gas traps heat. It absorbs some of the heat that the earth would have radiated into space. The more greenhouse gas there is, the warmer the earth will be. There is no real way to get around this. You can debate what the exact effect of increased greenhouse gases will be, but you can’t say that they will have no effect, unless of course, you are an idiot.

The second statement doesn’t make any sense either. It’s not really possible to deny that humans are increasing the levels of carbon dioxide in the air. I have in my possession photographs of people burning fossil fuels. In Japan kerosene is sold from the back of a truck in broad daylight. We have hard evidence that people use oil products to power cars and as shocking as it sounds, people have even gone so far as to generate electricity from burning coal.

Humanity currently adds about 7 billion tons of carbon to the atmosphere every year by burning fossil fuels. The carbon combines with oxygen to create about 26 billion tons of CO2. This is 4-5 times as much carbon dioxide as is released by volcanic activity. Carbon dioxide levels have increased by about 31% since the start of the industrial revolution. About two thirds of this increase has been in the last fifty years and has closely matched humanity’s consumption of fossil fuels.

But don’t take my word for it. Take a few seconds to do the calculations yourself. It’s very easy to work out how much carbon using oil alone adds to the air. World consumption of oil is about 80 million barrels per day, the density of oil is about 0.9 that of water so there are about 7 barrels to the ton and oil is about 85% carbon. As you can no doubt see just by glancing at these figures, humans add about 9.7 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere each day, or about 3.5 billion tons per year. Do similar calculations for coal and gas and you come to roughly 7 billion tons total.

Since the earth’s atmosphere weighs approximately 5,100,000,000,000,000 tons and each ton of carbon burnt combines with oxygen to form 3.67 tons of carbon dioxide, is easy to see that humans are increasing CO2 concentrations by about 5.1 parts per million per year. Since CO2 in the atmosphere is currently about 381 parts per million, if none of it was removed we would be increasing it’s concentration by about 1.34% per year.

Now some of this excess carbon dioxide released by humans should be absorbed by plants and rocks and itty bitty sea creatures, but the amount the natural environment can absorb is obviously limited, otherwise CO2 levels wouldn’t have increased to their current high levels. If we continue to add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere at the current rate and most of it stays there, then the current concentration will have doubled in about 75 years. These levels of carbon dioxide may actually contribute to some weak people dieing, as CO2 interferes with the ability of blood to transport oxygen. The effect won't be large but it will probably be enough to cause death in some special cases. I intend to have retired to a hermetically sealed bubble by this point, but still, watching poor people die on TV will be most upsetting.

Now some people might point out that it seems unlikely that can continue to burn 7 billion tons of fossil fuels a year for 75 years, on account of how we may run out before then, but perhaps if we tried hard enough we could. For example, I’m sure we’ll be able to find plenty of coal and oil in Antarctica once all that nasty ice melts off it.

The climate change deniers are so good at what they do because they are unencumbered by the truth. They have no trouble with inconvenient facts that they don’t happen to like. Scientists don’t have this freedom. While scientists can definitely state that humans are affecting the climate and causing the earth to be warmer than it would be otherwise, if someone asks a climatologist a direct question such as, “Can you state that the earth’s average temperature will definitely rise over the next 30 years?” the scientist will be forced to answer, “No.” At this point the climate change deniers start hooting wildly and claiming that this scientifically “proves” there is no global warming, but unless you are an idiot the statement does no such thing. The climatologist has to answer no because we don’t understand enough about the earth’s climate. Historical records and scientific research show that the earth’s climate isn’t stable and constantly varies for reasons that are not currently well understood. For example there was a medieval warm period that ended about nine hundred years ago, and a few hundred years later there was a period of cold temperatures often referred to as “the little ice age” that ended only 200 years ago. Scientists don’t know for sure if the earth would be getting naturally cooler or warmer without human interference. However, they do know that increased levels of greenhouse gases will make the climate warmer than it would be otherwise. For example, if the earth is now entering a natural cold period of cold like the little ice age, then perhaps we have won! The natural decrease in temperature may be enough to counteract the human made increase in temperature. However, if the natural trend is for temperatures to remain constant or to go higher, then we are in trouble. If we are actually coming out of a little ice age right now and haven’t realised it because of increased greenhouse gases, then we are really in trouble.

Even if the earth is entering a period of naturally lower temperature, current elevated greenhouse gases are probably enough to counteract it entirely. Unfortunately it is much more likely that the earth will experience elevated temperatures instead, which are likely to result in significant problems. It is also possible that we will have a dramatic increase in temperature with severe detrimental effects such as dangerously rapid increases in sea levels. So it would seem that the logical course of action would be to err on the side of caution with regards to climate change.

Another fairly idiotic tack of climate change deniers is to say that the earth will be better off with a warmer climate. If I happened to be a dinosaur I’m sure I would agree. While it is certainly likely that some places will be more pleasant with warmer temperatures, most human beings are extremely likely to suffer from worse conditions. Most humans live in or near the tropics and it is quite hot enough there already, thank you very much. Farms and flood controls currently only exist where they are suitable or necessary. It is not very easy to move them in response to climate change. Also, the vast bulk of humanity live only a few meters above sea level. If sea levels rise by several meters, most coastal cities would be swamped. The costs of relocation and flood control would be enormous. At the moment sea levels are estimated to be increasing by about 3mm per year. This may not sound like much, but even small increases raise the risk of storm flooding in coastal areas. The rate of sea level increase has the potential to greatly accelerate in the future.

Many of the creatures on the internet insist that slowing or preventing climate change will be massively expensive, but they are wrong. Over a period of decades, fifty dollars a year per person in the developed world should be enough to cut CO2 emissions by half or more. Compared to the possible costs of climate change this is likely to be a very good investment. However, I can discuss the details in another essay. Currently I feel I’ve written enough about idiots and how wrong they can be.

The Real Reason why the Government is Talking About Nuclear Power

Oh, by the way, I suppose I should mention that the only reason the government is talking about nuclear power at all is to draw attention away from industrial relations problems and so forth, but I thought that went without saying.

Australian Nuclear Power and Corruption and Incompetence

My good friend* Francis Spufford says that the Concorde supersonic airliner project cost the British government 900 million pounds and in return for that investment they received 7.2 million pounds in profits from ticket sales and 9.3 million pounds when they sold Concorde, for a total of 16.5 million pounds. That is, Concorde lost the British government 883.5 million pounds. And this was a project that was supposed to help the economy.

This is one reason why I am cautious about a nuclear power plant in Australia. Big projects can have big cost overruns. They also tempt companies to push costs onto taxpayers and I'm not entirely sure that our politicians will be able to resist pleas for free or discounted water use, waste disposal, security, legal costs, decommissioning and insurance. Also, many Australian politicians in power now seem so far up George Bush's colon that they are in good position to remove pretzels from his windpipe when he chokes on them, so it is just possible that contracts will go to American companies even if they are not the most cost effective. So it is not enough for nuclear power to be cheaper than other low emission alternatives, it has to be cheap enough to compensate Australians for the almost inevitable incompetence and corruption that attaches itself to these sorts of projects.

While problems can certainly exist for smaller scale energy sources, competition and previous experience help to cut down on corruption and incompetence. There are thousands of people in Australia who could prepare foundations and pylons for wind generators, but not many who can put together a nuclear reactor. I mean, could you do it? Do you know anyone who can? And Nuclear Irvine doesn't count as he is an atomic vampire who can only be killed by shoving a graphite rod through his heart.

So while nuclear plants could become an important low emission source of base load power in the future, any plans to build them should carefully take into consideration the possibility of extra costs due to corruption and incompetence.


*As we are both members of the Silly Name Club we are automatically good friends.

Mr Downer's Magically Cheap Nuclear Power Plant

A couple of days ago, Australia’s foreign Minister, Mr Downer said, "…it may be possible to build a nuclear power plant in SA supplying 1000 megawatts an hour of electricity and 75 gigalitres of water at a cost in the order of $2.5 to $3 billion,"

It looks like the magical pixie dust that the federal government sprinkles on ethanol production to make it seem economical and not the massive waste of tax payer’s money that it appears to be, also works on nuclear power.

Now if Mister Downer had named a single country that has so far managed to build a 1,000 megawatt reactor of modern safety standards for less than 3 billion Australian dollars he might not have sounded like such an idiot. Since a 1,000 megawatt coal plant costs well over a billion dollars these days it’s hard to see how a nuclear power plant plus desalinisation capacity would cost less than 3 billion dollars. And while some people insist that nuclear power plants can be built for less than 50% more than an equivalent coal powered plant, as far as I’m aware, none ever has. Thus Mr Downer’s statement is the metaphorical equivalent of the end product of a male cow’s digestive process.

Now personally I’m all for anything sensible that reduces the rate of climate change in the world today, including nuclear power, but either lying about the true costs or just being plain incompetent is not helping matters. Mr Downer’s comments make the government appear too silly to be trusted with something as inherently tricky as nuclear power.

Since most of the cost of producing desalinated water is for energy and not capital costs, and since wind power is cheaper than nuclear power, it may be more economical to expand South Australia’s wind generating capacity and build desalination plants that operate during times of surplus electrical generation. Also, expanding the amount of reclaimed sewage water used is an additional option.

But the most sensible thing to do first of all is to have a logical system of chargeing for water use for both rural and urban areas across Australia. For example there are still many people in Adelaide who do not pay for the water they use. (Or at least I've never paid. If I end up in jail after I post this I take back the last sentence.) And yes, this would have to involve compensation for some current water users.

X-Men 3 - The Development Meeting

STUDIO EXECUTIVE 1: Okay, now the first two movies did alright, but it's up to us to make sure X-Men 3 is going to be the money making blockbuster of 2006. We have the preliminary script here and this time round we have a director who knows how to take direction, if you know what I mean; so how can we make sure this baby brings home the bacon? Just what is it that kids like these days? And when I say kids I mean fat thirty year old nerds who are our main source of revenue.

EXEC 2: They like mutants, that's what they like.

EXEC 1: Way ahead of you number 2. I've already instructed the writers to rework the script so it includes every single mutant in the marvel universe, no matter how obscure or lame. That way the fans of every single marvel comic mutant will go and see the movie because it will have their favourite character in it. For about 30 seconds.

EXEC 2: Kids don't like boring movies with lots of talk.

EXEC 1: Okay, we'll cross out all this dialogue in the script and replace it with explosions.

EXEC 2: And don't forget T&A and muscle. Everyone has to wear skin tight outfits. And if the actresses don't have silicon implants, make sure their costumes do.

EXEC 1: Have we forgotten anything?

EXEC 3: What about the X-Men acting as a metaphor for what it is like to be a minority in the United States, with Dr. X and Magneto standing in for Martin Luther King and Malcom X respectively?

EXEC 1: Don't sweat it. I've already crossed that part out.

The Godbox - Holiest of Gaming Systems

Dear Ronald,

As a God-fearing young woman who constantly brings up her relationship with Jesus in conversations with men in a way that seems to completely sexually neuter them no matter how perky my breasts are, I am interested in buying a Godbox game system to while away my long lonely nights in between bouts of ministering to the fold with my vibrating plastic Jesus alarm clock. So I was wondering what Godbox games do you recommend?

Yours truly,

Fatima Nofatinme



Dear Fats,

Well if you like driving games, “Grand Theft Auto: Sodom and Gomorrah” is okay, but I think you might actually prefer to play “What Would Jesus Drive?” But in that game I always play Muhammad and crush Jesus’s hybrid with my monster truck.

But what ever you do in that game, don't select God as your co-driver. If you do that a message flashes up on the screen saying, "If God is your co-pilot, swaps seats!" And then you're stuck there doing nothing while God racks up a perfect score. And the funny thing is that you lose points for running over innocent people, but it seems that God can get away with killing as many as he likes.

If you’re interested in Role Playing Games there’s not much selection. The Godbox does have one Dungeons and Dragons game, but it's not much fun because as soon as you start to play you go straight to hell and stay there until you turn the console off. Then when you turn the console back on you're still there burning in hell. It's not a lot of fun. I keep trying to restart and play it, but nothing ever works as it insists that damnation is eternal. When I played it the entire game went pretty much like this:

GODBOX: You are in the town of Bethlehem. Demons have been preying on local people. What do you do?

ME: I buy a potion from the Wizard Gandalf.

GODBOX: For the sin of consorting with a warlock your soul is damned. Go straight to hell, do not pass purgatory, do not collect eternal salvation.

Mind Control

I received an e-mail yesterday telling me to write something on my blog, so I shall. I lack the willpower to resist. This makes me think that the CIA might be better off if they just stopped trying to develop mind control technology and just sent people e-mails instead.

Does Artificial Intelligence Exist?

Some people deny that artificial intelligence exists. They say that any apparent examples of machines acting intelligently are just illusions. This makes me wonder if we replace a human with a machine, does that mean that the human we replaced wasn't doing anything intelligent? I don't see how we can avoid that conclusion.

As machines perform more and more tasks formally done by humans, does this mean that less and less human activity will have turned out to require intelligence? At the rate we're going I think we'll soon discover that humans were never intelligent in the first place.

Mea Culpa

I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to everyone for my use of the phrase ARSE BANDIT on this blog. The politically correct term I should have used is ARSE FREEDOM FIGHTER. However, I understand that George Bush prefers the term ARSE INSURGENT.

Kitchen Utensils of the Gods

Like, has anyone here bought some crazy nanotech device without realiseing it? I bought a two dollar can opener from Cheap as Chips last week and the damn thing is frightening. It doesn't open cans, it shears through them. I swear man, you could make someone do a Darth Maul impersonation with this baby. And what's more they smell like the Soviet Union. What I have in my kitchen is obviously the can opener Ronny Reagan used to slice open the iron curtain. The mythical 22 billion dollar can opener of freedom. (I mean you honestly didn't think all the money going into the star wars stategic defense system was being spent on missile interceptors, did you?) And look what happened to them. George Bush sinks America in debt and they end up being sold in a discount shop in Great Southern City One for two dollars. Just typical of the financial irresponsibility I've come to expect from him.

Anyone got like a Dalek they want me to open up?

The Israelites didn't believe in God, so why should I?

Well, pastor maker has left a comment on my blog, which means that someone besides my mother is reading this, which means that I guess I should post some more.

Sorry I haven't written for a while. It's just that my mother got mad at me for using the phrase "bum bandit" on this blog and I got a little depressed. (I know it was you leaving that anti-bum bandit comment Mum, don't try and deny it.)

So what have I been doing since I stopped blogging? Not much. I've spent a lot of time playing video games, or at least trying to. I haven't had much luck. My gaming system isn't very good. You see, instead of buying a Playstation or an X-box I made a bit of a mistake and went and bought a God-box. It was an honest mistake. At the time I knew the most popular computer game in the world was called Halo, so I just assumed you needed a God-box to run it.

It's a very frustrating gaming system. It keeps giving me messages such as, "Your game has been saved, but you have not." And I'm not very impressed with the games available for it. Now you'd think that a first person shooter with a really cool title such as Exodus would be pretty good, wouldn't you? But I have to say that I've played a lot of computer games and I've killed zombies, aliens, dinosaurs, Nazis, terrorists and mutants, using everything from laser guns to swords, but in Exodus where you run around killing first born Egyptian children with the finger of God strikes me as being just a little creepy. And the plot is really stupid too. I mean it has God sending all these miracles to free theses slaves, including turning the Nile red, sending down flaming hail and plagues of frogs. He even sends down a flaming pillar and parts the Red Sea and drowns the Pharoh's army. But, next thing you know, they've forgotten all about God and start worshipping a gold cow. How unrealistic! Who would believe people could be so stupid? Sheesh, and people get up me for lacking faith. The Israelites got a bumper crop of miracles and they still didn't believe in God. Personally I don't see how anyone can fault me for having the same level of skeptcism about God as his own chosen people did.

V is for Vendetta which is good enough for me

I went to the movies and saw V for Vendetta last night. I enjoyed it very much. However, some people out in internetland have become a little confused, so once again I offer free of charge the following infomation to help clear things up:

1. Trying to Blow up Parliment House in real life = bad.

2. Making or watching a movie in which someone tries to blow up Parliment House = not bad.

I hope this helps clear things up. And in further good news, both Natalie Portman and Kermit the Frog have signed on for the sequel C is for Cookie.

American Health Care!

Some Americans are concerned that rich and elderly people often receive expensive health care that does little or to improve or extend their lives while many children and poor people miss out on much cheaper treatments that could dramatically improve their lives. Of course there are some Americans don't see this as a problem. They merely regard it as nature's way and point out that in the wild lion cubs rarely receive adequate medical treatment while rich and elderly lions are always hogging the MRI machines.

Now some people might think that the U.S. would obviously benefit from some sort of national health system, but I'm afraid the U.S. can't afford this on account of how taxes had to be cut in order to improve the sale of treasury bills. However there is one fairly simple thing that could be done to help even out access to medical care that would be revenue neutral to the government. Put a tax on medical treatment and then redistribute income from it to every American in the form of a "Health Savings Account" that can only be spent on medical treatment.

This would give every American some money for medical treatment which hopefully would improve the lives of the poorer half of the U.S. and result in more healthy years of life gained than are lost due to rich people having to pay more for very expensive treatments.

Of course there are details to be worked out. How high should the tax be? Should newborn babies get a lump sum? How will guardians be allowed to use their own health accounts for their children's benefit? And so on. Also, to prevent too much money being blown on old people who are going to die soon anyway, old people could give what's left in their health accounts when they cark it to other people. For example they could give it to family members or donate it to charity.

If the Bush administration implemented this policy, I am extremely confident that they would mess it up beyond belief and make the vast majority of Americans worse off except for a few corrupt cronies who would be rake in cash hand over fist, or possibly just with big rakes.

Chris McNicol of Concerned Families and Friends uses Unpatriotic Foreign Statistics!

I got another interesting little pamphlet in my letter box today. It is from Chris McNicol of Concerned Families and Friends and says that removal of discrimination against homosexual couples caused a 47% increase in family breakdown in Norway over an 11 year period. Now this might be an appropriate use statistics if Norway happened to be the name of an alternate universe Australia that was identical in everyway to the Australia in our universe except for the legal status of homosexuals and also assuming that it was a 47% increase over the rate of family breakdown in our own Australia. But that's not the case.

Fortunately I am much more patriotic than Chris McNicol and have no need to resort to using filthy Norwegien statistics. No, I will use fair dinkum, honest, Australian statisics and none of those filthy, shifty-eyed foreign statistics McNicol hangs out with.

Using Australian statistics I find that in an 11 year period from 1967 to 1978, a time when Australian society was much more anti-homosexual than it is now, divorce went from less than 10,000 cases a year to over 60,000 cases a year. A more than 600% increase in family breakdown! After 1978, in a period in which homosexuality become more tolerated, divorce rates declined from their peak. The only logical, scientific conclusion to reach from this infomation is that bum banditry is vital to save Australian marriages. So I'd like to say to all the poofters out there, roll one on and get stuck into it for marriage! Our hetrosexual relationships depend on it!

I would also like to take this opportunity to make an offer of free marriage counselling to Chris McNicol. I really think he needs it. I mean if he believes that he will actually love his wife less and be more likely to divorce her because some fags have the legal advantages of marriage, then I feel sorry for him. If his marriage is that shaky then it's the least I can do.

Help Family First jail your family in 2006!

Well it's almost election time here in South Australia and those wonderful people from the Family First Party have gone and put some lovely propaganda in my letter box. How kind of them! However, I am a little confused. You see, they call themselves Familly First, but one of the main planks in their platform appears to be the criminalization of cannabis use. They seem to have overlooked the fact that almost every single cannabis user in Australia is a member of a family. And while I agree that locking up a quater or more of the workforce would do wonders for the economy and create many new employment opportunities in prision construction and correctional services, I can't really see how it would actually help familes. Perhaps it would be a little more honest of them if they changed their name from the Family First Party to the Lock up Dopeheads First and Screw Families Party.

John Howard is a Cheeky Chappy!

On Wednesday the Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, said in an interview:

"We have a declining population. We are all getting older and the nation is ageing, and we have to handle these issues."

I dunno, but I think that it's a bit late to be worrying about this now. I mean it's a bit rich to struggle for years and years to keep filthy refugees out of the country and then whinge about the declining population. You know, I think I can see a way here we could have killed two birds with one sinking refugee packed boat.

And it's also a bit much to complain about a declining population after going on and on for years about traditional family values. You see most Australian women grew up in traditional families and as a result they know that traditional family values suck. My own mother would have a cup of coffee and read the newspaper everyday. If she wasn't doing that and was conscious, then she was doing some sort of work. Non stop. It doesn't take young women a lot of brains to realize that isn't an especially attractive deal. I've known several women who want to have children but probably won't because they think they have to be married first. It's the 21st century, for Buddha’s sake, isn't it about time we had a Prime Minister who was against traditional family values?

I want you to return that fish by next Friday.

I went to the supermarket today and saw little signs at the dead animal counter saying, “Fish for Lent.” Now call me crazy, but why would anybody want to borrow a fish from the supermarket? Now generally when people take a fish away from a supermarket it’s for the purpose of eating. You really don’t want people returning fish after it’s been digested. That would be quite unpleasant. And even it is some sort of returnable fish that isn’t for eating, do we really want to be encouraging bad grammar such as, “Here’s the fish you Lent me last week.”

So I googled “Fish for Lent” on the internet to see if I could learn just what was going on here, and I discovered that Lent actually refers to a bizarre Middle-Eastern/European religious practice of not eating much for a month. It seems the practice originated in the good old days when everything was better than it is now, except for the hunger, disease, war, poverty, wife beating and beating in general. It seems that there wasn’t much to eat at the end of winter so to take the edge off their hunger people decided that semi-starvation brought you closer to god. Well, I guess starving to death would definitely bring you closer to the afterlife.

There is another Middle-Eastern custom called Sawm that resembles Lent and is usually known among English speakers as Ramadan after the month it occurs in. Although it happens at a different time, it seems to be much the same sort of thing as Lent. However, one common theme running through Lent and Ramadan seems to be giving stuff up, so I think it would be more appropriate for supermarkets to have an empty shelf with a sign saying, “For Lent,” or “For Ramadan,” rather than trying to use an imported custom that many Australians don’t even understand to sell fish.

The Severed Head to Completed school ratio: Metrics of Success in Iraq

via Brad Delong

I found an interesting article today. Apparently this chap called Victor Davis Hanson believes that:

“…the terrorists have an invaluable ally in the global media, whose “if it bleeds, it leads” brand of journalism always favors the severed head in the street over the completion of yet another Iraqi school.”

So he believes that the media doing what the media has always done counts as being allied to terrorists? I think this sort of statement just goes to prove my theory that key members of the U.S. ruling class are being affected by Soviet mind control. Already they are convincing America that the free press is the enemy of freedom while destroying the economy of the world's greatest capitalist nation by forcing the government to cut taxes and run massive deficits. Getting America to bog itself down in the Iraqi equivalent of Afganistan was a stroke of genius. And I don't even have to mention their sucess in getting the American President to drink vodka in private.

But anyway, back to the article that Hanson wrote. That’s an interesting metric he’s got going there. He apparently he believes that the utility of one completed Iraqi school is equal to or greater than the disutility of one severed head. Gee, and who says the Americans have no way of telling if they are winning or losing in Iraq?

AMERICAN OFFICER: How many severed heads* did we find in the street this month corporal?

CORPORAL: Three sir!

OFFICER: And how many schools did we complete?

CORPORAL: Four sir!

OFFICER: Excellent! We’re winning!

*That is heads severed with sharp pieces of metal, not blown off by explosions or sliced off by flying shards of glass, with no pieces of torso attached and with the head still at least 90% intact.

I find it hard to believe any Iraqi kid could have a normal school life in a place where they find even single severed heads lying in the street. Over here parents pull kids out of school simply on account of poisonous snakes being found on the oval. I think even a single severed head would result in more kids being pulled out of school than a whole mess of limbless reptiles. Unless Victor Davis Hanson thinks the following type of conversation is common in Iraqi:

MOTHER: How many severed heads can you see on the street today, Achmed?

SON: Just one, Mama.

MOTHER: Okay, you can go to school today, but if you see more than one extra severed head on the way, you come straight back home, you hear? Three severed heads is just too many.

Land seized to build Bush Presidential Library

via Marginal Revolution

The Southern Methodist University of Dallas has used eminent domain to seize land to build the Bush Presidential library. Local residents are outraged. "They took over a square yard out of my vegetable patch!" says local retiree Eleanor Digby. "What do they need so much land for?" The University's director of land seizing stated at a press conference today that, "We needed such a large amount of land to ensure that the disabled could access the Bush Presidential Library. We feel it is very important that all Americans will have the opportunity to browse through a Michael Crichton novel, My Pet Goat and The Hungry Caterpillar."

Fun in Nigeria

Let's see, in 2004 oil companies paid 27 billion U.S. dollars to Nigeria and Nigeria has about 130 million people. That's a lot of people, you know. It's Africa's most populous country. Anyway, 27 billion dollars divided by 130 million is about $208 U.S. dollars a year for every person in Nigeria. That might not sound like much to us rich bastards in the first world, but since the average Nigerian lives off just a few dollars a day at best, it's quite a lot of dough. Or at least it would be if the average Nigerian actually got it. But for some strange reason a lot of the money seems to be spent on luxury cars, military equipment and deposited in overseas bank accounts, none of which really helps the average Nigerian. Funny that. It's almost as if the people who make up the Nigerian government aren't entirely trustworthy. But I'm sure there must be a good reason why not much oil money seems to be getting to the people. Maybe the government entered the wrong pin number three times and the national ATM ate their cash card? Anyway, to avoid such problems in the future, wouldn't it be good if the oil companies (and by oil companies, I mean Shell) did something like give the money directly to all Nigerians instead of giving it to the government? They could give each and every Nigerian $100 a year and put the rest into indexed personal investment funds which will pay dividends but the capital can't be touched because they'll need that when they run out of oil. But what about the poor government, you cry? How will they get money? Well they can do what most countries do, which is tax people. In fact, if they had to get their money from taxing people then they might actually do things that encourage people to make more money instead of just whacking them around the head with a truncheon.

Conflict of interest? I see no conflict of interest here!

HEALTH MINISTER SNUBS VOODOO - SUFFERS SHARP STABBING PAINS

Australian Health Minister Tony Abbott is confident that church-affiliated groups will deliver professional abortion guidence to women facing unwanted pregnancies.

He further went on to say that he believed that temple-affiliated groups would deliver good advice to women about what sort of pork to eat and that mosque-affiliated groups would give professional advice on just what style of bikini to wear to the beach. Several Voodoo-affiliated groups have said that they were insulted that they hadn't been approached by the Minister and asked to offer professional advice to women on how to deal with relationship break-ups.

Whittington apologizes for being shot

Today Harry Whittington apologized for being shot by Dick Cheney. In further news Pearl Harbor has apologized for placing itself beneath falling Japanese bombs and Poland has admitted that when it saw those Nazi tanks coming it should have just jumped out of the way.

It's not a plot by the CIA!

Cheney's hunting accident was a terrible tragedy, mostly for the person who got shot. But one good thing about it is that it might demonstrate to certain conspiracy minded people that the U.S. government finds it very hard to cover up a severe wounding, let alone mass murders or other bizarre inccidents. If they can’t cover up Cheney’s accident how likely is it that the U.S. government is capable of pulling off all the X-Files stuff they are often accused of, running from covering up alien landings, faking manned moon missions and keeping a division of Soviet troops inside a disused salt mine in Utah? I’m much more worried about U.S. government anti-conspiracies where they tell everyone in the world what they are going to do, such as invade another country without a proper rational, deny that global warming exists, insist that deficits don’t matter and so on.

Skeptics' Circle

The Skeptics' Circle is back and I'm in it! Pretty cool, huh? Well, when I say "I'm in it," I mean a blog post of mine is in it. I don't mean I have performed a Kurzweil like uploading of my personality and now exist as a web based sentient lifeform. That's what I'm doing next week when I sell my xbox.

The Adventures of Dead-Eye Dick

I’ve been thinking about designing a computer game. I mean, just look how much money they made with Halo where you get to shoot aliens. Just think how popular a Dick Cheney computer game where you get to shoot lawyers would be. And just like an action hero he already has his witty trademark phrase, "Go f&*# yourself."

The first level can have him shuffling through the White House shooting away patches of Clinton's semen which he can detect with his cyborg spermovision. Then he can go on to shoot hippy protesters, his own credibility, Hans Blix, the budget, people who mention his five Vietnam deferments, the reality based community, poor people and so on. But some people will no doubt be disapointed by the fact that he doesn't shoot gay people.

Although Dick moves slowly, his special ability which prevents anyone from knowing he has shot someone for 24 hours will give him the edge over his enemies.

As Dick progresses through the computer game he can collect various power ups: a pacemaker, leg vein surgery, thicker glasses, a sock puppet with unlimited presidential power, the fat of an unbaptised baby and so on.

I plan to call it, “Dick Cheney: Undisclosed Location – But Probably the Neck.” What do you think?

The Ballad of Deadeye Dick

This is the story of a man named Cheney,
An American VP who wasn’t very brainy,
Seems one day after shooting at some food,
He shot in the neck a 78 year-old dude.

Nearly killed him that is, bird shot, hurt a lot.

Well the next thing you know the guy is in intensive care,
But nobody knows just why he is there,
He’ll survive thanks to his recuperative powers,
But they didn’t tell the press for 24 hours.

Kept it mum that is, they didn’t tell, kind of smells.

Now some blame Dick but that isn’t really right,
Even though the guy he shot was in plain sight,
Blaming the victim is one defence,
But Dick blames it all on bad intelligence.

Like Iraq that is, WMD, nothing to see.

RU486? No I'm much younger.

I see the senate thinks Australian women should be allowed access to the abortion drug RU486 and doesn't think the Health Minister should be allowed to keep it for himself as his special plaything. Now I think the senate has been a little hard on the Health Minister for wanting to keep it all to himself. They just don't seem to understand his situation. You see he's Catholic so he's not allowed to use a condom when he gets it on with chicks. It would make baby Jesus cry. (Although why God lets baby Jesus watch the Health Minister get it on is beyond me.) But, if he just happens to have all this RU486 laying around in his pad and the honeys just happen to take some, well then it's their sin and not his. This way the big guy will still be able to get to heaven.

Anyway, the Health Minister had to take this particular drug out of the hands of the usual bunch of doctors and health care experts, you know, those losers who normally decide which drugs are safe for Australains and keep it under his own personal control in the interests of women's health. He said so himself. So I'm wondering why he didn't care about women's health for all those other drugs that he left in the control of the usual bunch of wankers? Why didn't he protect Australian women from those drugs that treat breast cancer? And why didn't he protect them from the ones that lower cholesterol? Why did he follow the dangerous course of leaving them in the hands of a bunch of qualified experts? Was he just too lazy to protect women from all these drugs? And why does he only seem intersted in protecting women from medical treatment? Why isn't he protecting men from medical treatment too? I demand the Health Minister protect my health too by making drugs for men his own personal fiefdom! I demand the Health Minister protect me from testicular cancer drugs the same way he protects women from RU486! My balls are on the line here and if that's something he can't handle he should step down in favour of someone who's willing to take things in hand.

ETHANOL – But more politely this time.

Australia’s first petrol sniffing treatment centre will be opened in South Australia this year. Now do you see why I’m concerned about the government subsidising ethanol production? And you think petrol sniffing is bad now!

But is burning ethanol for fuel in cars really a bad idea? Not as such, no. But I do think that the government subsidizing ethanol production is a bad idea. This is basically giving a little bit of money from all Australians and giving it to just a few companies and a tiny amount will be temporarily given to farmers all over the world as demand for what ever crops will be used increases. For example if the demand for sugar goes up because the government subsidizes ethanol, then Australia will export less sugar, which will push up the price of Cuban sugar and European sugar beat. I wouldn’t mind if the government funded some ethanol research as the results of scientific research can increase the sum total of wealth of all humanity but subsidies for one sector of the economy tend to just move wealth around and often isn’t very efficient at it.

But isn’t ethanol greener than petrol? Shouldn’t the government give it a tax break because of that? Um, yeah… sorta. This is actually a difficult topic. Motorists in Australia pay a petrol tax when they fill up, which acts as a defacto carbon tax and encourages fuel conservation and the purchasing of fuel-efficient cars. But farmers don’t have to pay most of this tax, so a lot of the fossil fuel that gets used to create ethanol isn’t taxed at a high rate. If we had across the board carbon taxes then the cost of the carbon released would be built into the price of the ethanol. But until we get a consistent, logical carbon tax I guess the government will have to look at how much CO2 is released producing ethanol and give it a tax break based upon how green it is and lower that tax if ethanol producers lower the amount of CO2 they produce. Of course this means the government should put a lower tax on imported Brazilian ethanol as it will probably be greener than Australian ethanol. I wonder how that would fly politically?

Okay, so if the government doesn’t subsidize the building of ethanol plants, should private companies invest in ethanol plants in Australia anyway? That’s a tough one. Would I be willing to invest my own money in an ethanol plant? Hmmm… Well recently Brazilian ethanol has been selling for about the same price as oil. Now that’s pretty impressive, because you can use ethanol directly, you don’t have to refine it. On the down side ethanol contains less energy than oil. One litre only has 68% the energy of a litre of petrol. The actual product cost of one litre of petrol in Australia, before any taxes or distribution costs, is roughly 60 cents. One litre of Brazilian ethanol costs roughly 50 cents, but has less energy. The ethanol energy equivalent of one litre of petrol costs about 72 cents. And although ethanol will be more expensive to transport and distribute because of its bulk, when you consider the environmental benefits of ethanol that’s a pretty good deal. It’s obvious that the price of oil doesn’t have to increase by much to make Brazilian ethanol a good deal even if environmental effects are ignored. (However, as the price of oil increases, the price of ethanol will tend to increase as well as they substitute for each other.)

But can Australia produce ethanol as cheaply as Brazil? I see no real reason why not, with regards to using sugar cane, as sugar cane is the easiest crop to convert. (Of course we should consider if it would just be cheaper and easier to import ethanol from Brazil than to make it ourselves.) However, there are apparently plans to use sorghum to make ethanol and sorghum only produces as much ethanol as maize and maize has always been very expensive to convert into ethanol in the United States and has never really been able to compete with Brazilian sugar cane. In the U.S. they keep out Brazilian sugar cane ethanol with a tariff. (Whereas environmentally unfriendly oil has no tariff, pretty stupid, huh?)

So if the price of oil is only going to go up then it may not be a bad idea to invest in a sugar cane ethanol plant in Australia. But I would be very wary of plans to turn sorghum into ethanol. I don’t see how that could compete with sugar cane ethanol. For one thing sorghum is grown inland whereas sugar cane is grown near the coast, closer to population centres and ports. My guess is that oil prices will have to be very high before sorghum becomes an economical source of ethanol.

I think that even if current oil prices don’t go much higher we could see people slowly shifting away from oil use over the next decade. For example I wouldn’t be surprised if “plug-in” hybrid cars that get part of their energy from the electrical grid are soon produced in Japan. Electric cars may even start to become popular before too long. It is possible that government money spent on ethanol production may just delay the introduction of these technologies.

So basically to sum up, I think tax breaks for any environmentally friendly sources of energy are a good idea, and taxes on sources of energy that release CO2 are a good idea. But I don’t think the government should try and pick one form of technology, such as ethanol, and give it special support.

The Great Asteroid Mining Con

There are some people who think that mining asteroids is a good idea. And not just for building things to use in space, but to ship metals to earth to sell. They say things like, “The metals in the near-earth iron asteroid Amun are worth 20 trillion dollars.”

But is the current market value of metals the proper way to value an asteroid? Wouldn’t it make just as much sense to say that since I can buy meteorites for 25 cents a gram on e-bay, the market value of the asteroid is 25 cents per gram? And since it weighs 30 billion tons, therefore the asteroid is actually worth 7,500 trillion dollars? I mean that’s using the market price, isn’t it? And while these asteroid mining enthusiasts like to tell you how much money Amun is supposed to be worth, they never tell you how much a similar amount of earth dirt is worth. Well according to my calculations 30 billion tons of earth dirt is worth over $1,700,000,000,000,000. Which makes a ton of dirt worth about $57,000. Not bad, hey? Might be a good idea to run outside with a shovel.

But wait a minute, you say! How can plain earth dirt be worth that much? Well it’s quite simple. You see 99.9999% pure silicon sells for about $200 per kilogram and the earth’s crust is 27.7% silicon. Of course it’s only worth that much after you have removed and purified the silicon. Before that the dirt is only worth as much as dirt. But counting an asteroid as being worth what it would be if all it’s substances were refined, purified and sold at today’s prices is pretty much just as stupid.

To really test how much the asteroid is worth, let’s assume that there is a hole in the space-time continuum in your bedroom cupboard that not only allows instantaneous transportation of material from this asteroid, but it delivers it in conveniently sized chunks. Ignoring its novelty value, how much could you sell this asteroid material for on earth? Well the answer to that is simple. You could sell it for about $300 U.S. per ton because that’s what scrap metal sells for these days and an iron asteroid is basically a big chunk of stainless steel. The good news is there are plenty of scrap metal dealers around so you won’t have to lug it too far to trade it for cash. This means that even with zero transportation costs and assuming that thirty billion tons will in no way push down today's current high prices, then at best the asteroid Amun is worth about nine trillion dollars, not 20 trillion.

But wait a minute! Some people say asteroids are supposed to be chock full of valuable metals such as platinum which currently sells for about $33 a gram! Couldn’t we just extract the platinum and forget about the steel? Well there are some problems with this. You see on earth there’s all sorts of geological activity, mostly involving water, that can concentrate ores and metals. But iron asteroids don’t have this activity. They’re just chunks of a busted planetoid’s core. As a result, precious metals aren’t going to be concentrated but are going to be evenly spread throughout the damn thing.

But some iron asteroids, perhaps one in fifty, contain 30 grams of platinum per ton or more! On earth 30 grams of platinum per ton would be equal to moderate to high grade platinum ore, so if your chunks of asteroid had this much in them, surely you could sell them to someone who owns a platinum refinery for a good price? Well, probably not, because I don’t think they’d be very impressed by the fact that the platinum is inside a block of nickel alloy stainless steel. That could increase the cost of extracting the platinum considerably. Most things become harder to extract once they’ve been placed inside a solid hunk of steel. A platinum refinery wouldn't pay as much for it as a scrap metal dealer.

Some people say that weightlessness in space will make refining stuff like platinum easier. Well I challenge everyone in the whole wide world to name one thing that is easier in weightlessness, and you’re not allowed to say, “Floating in the air.” I can’t think of anything at all that becomes easier in zero gee. There is a reason why the space shuttle toilet cost twenty-three million dollars, you know. But what if I’m wrong? What if it is easier to refine metals in weightlessness? If only there were some way to mimic weightlessness on earth. If only there were some sort of substance in which things could float. Just for the sake of the argument, I would call this imaginary substance a liquid. If only we could convert say platinum ore into some sort of magical liquid solution when we refine it. Wait a minute! That’s what they actually do in platinum refineries! Several times in fact! Freaky, hey? But even so, extracting platinum from ore is a very expensive and difficult business, despite the weightlessness offered by this incredible stuff called liquid.

Then there’s the argument that we have to go into space and mine asteroids now because the earth is running out of metals. Well this just isn’t true. A couple of hours drive from my house there is enough copper in the ground to supply the earth for maybe a couple of hundred years. But nobody is extracting it because the ore is so low grade it would take a hellacious amount of energy and effort to refine it. The more energy it costs to extract, the more the copper is going to cost. The earth might be running out of cheap and convenient high quality deposits of some metals, but it’s certainly not running out of metal. In the future we may have to pay extra for the energy to extract metals from low grade deposits, but it’s still going to be easier to extract copper from ore that only has a few kilos of copper per ton than it’s going to be to extract copper from asteroids that have only grams of copper per ton.

Now some people say that the costs of mining asteroids don’t matter because once we start it will all pay for itself. All we need to do is send a few robots to an asteroid and they will then build more robots and solar energy collectors and mining equipment and rocket ships and so on. Well, tell you what, you give me access to the same technology, you send your robots to an asteroid and I’ll send mine to say the middle of Western Australia. Then we’ll see who makes the most profit. Now you might say that my robots will have a disadvantage because it’s harder to use solar energy on earth than in space on account of things like clouds and night and bird poop, but my robots will have the advantage of being able to use wind power, or burn coal, or use geothermal energy, or dial up the local power company and get connected to the grid. All of these options are a bit tricky in the depths of space. I’ll also have the advantage of being able to drive out there with my spanner set and fix ‘em if something goes wrong. Also, you would have to waste a lot of time building and powering your rocket ships while I could spend my time building things people actually need, like robo prostitutes. Then there’s the fact that I can respond to changes in demand as they happen where as your stuff might spend years just being transported to earth.

Anyway, in conclusion I would like to say that asteroid mining is a pretty sucky idea. Now it’s probably just dandy for getting resources for use in space itself, but there just doesn’t seem to be any point in lugging stuff all the way from asteroids to earth.

Astronaut killed in effigy - NASA scientists take hint

An empty space suit with a radio transmitter was released from the International Space Station today. The suit is programmed to transmit greetings in six languages, send tempreture and battery power readings, and to scream in pain when the suit starts to burn up in the atmosphere

The White House apointed director of public relations for NASA said today that, "This suit might be empty, but NASA scientists better realize that the next one we send to sleep with the fishes might not be unless they stop coming up with lies about the existance of global warming." Under futher questioning the White House apointee denied that he was making threats and said that NASA employees were perfectly safe provided that they, "Make sure they keep their filthy spaceship away from God and use the word theory when referring to the earth being round."

Boys only classes - Wot a good idea.

The Liberal party in South Australia plans to introduce Boys only classes if they win the state election. (Note to Americans: Here Liberal means conservative.) This is supposed to help the boys. Well I think this is a great idea because it will prepare them for the many male only workplaces that exist in Australia today.

Now I'm not sure if they realize this, but introducing boys only classes also means they will be introducing girls only classes. Now this is intolerable. Without the deadweight of these stupid boys who need special boys only classes the girls are going to way outperform the boys. So I suggest that while the boys are in their boys only maths classes the girls can go learn how to bake cakes, just like back in the good old days. That will create equality. In the good old days we had plenty of boys only classes and life was perfect then. Unless of course you were a woman. Or drafted. Or black. Or sick. Or foreign. Or an abused child. Or poor. Or... but the point is that despite all the poverty, disease and discrimination, things were better back then because they just were.

The Liberals also plan to introduce more sports to help boys. That's a good idea. I mean just think of all those kids who were good at football at high school and went on to high paying infomation technology jobs while those computer nerds they used to beat up at school went on to become stuck in low paying semi-skilled manual labour.

The Liberals say that women are no longer disadvantaged and so they will take money from women's groups and give it to men's groups. This is a great idea. I mean our tax money is not to be used where it will do the most good, it's to be used as a political football. Instead of making a case that more Australians would be better off if the money were distributed differently we'll just pull an opinion out of our arse and decide which Australians to help based on that. What a great idea. I mean every year women bilk money out of the medical system that men never see. It is blatant sexism that men don't recieve government support for things such as pre-natal care, childbirth, or ovarian cancer. And just because I'd rather die a painful death than examine my own scrotum for cancer doesn't mean I don't deserve equal treatment. Women have been hiding behind their wombs for far too long.

I completely agree with the Liberals when they say that women are no longer disadvantaged. Just look at the way women dominate parliment and I think Australia has had far too many female Prime Ministers and just look at how many high paid CEOs are women. It's time to redress the imbalance and the Liberals are on the right track to do that. I for one know that when I was in school we had to study far too many of Shakespere's plays that were written by women.

Why Brazil is energy self-sufficent

A lot of Americans are currently amazed at the fact that Brazil is apparently energy self-sufficent. I'm not quite so amazed for the following three reasons:

1. Brazillians don't use as much energy as people in the first world.

2. Compared to first world countries Brazil is poor. It's harder for them to import large amounts of energy.

3. It rains a lot in Brazil. Unless there is a drought they get about 88% of their electricity from hydroelectric power.

Of course, Brazil actually imports about 2% of its electrical power from neighboring countries, but that's pretty close to being self sufficent.

Unfortunately some Americans think that it might be a good idea to copy some of Brazil's ideas, no matter how difficult they may actually be to apply. Producing ethanol to burn in cars is one of these. I wouldn't be surprised if producing ethanol has cost Brazil more money than just buying oil would have. Only now that oil prices are so high does it have a chance to be profitable. But Brazil has advantages in producing ethanol that most other countries don't have and one of these advantages is huge amounts of land where magnesium ions dominate calcium ions in the soil. About the only crop that can grow in this type of soil is sugar cane which means that a lot of farmers are stuck producing sugar cane, and sugar cane is the easiest crop to turn into ethanol. America thinks it can turn corn husks into ethanol. Good luck America. While this is certainly possible, I don't think it would be as cheap and as environmentally friendly as actually say increasing the fuel efficency of American cars.

P.S. In Australia you can often spot magnesium rich soils by the presence of wattle trees. Or, possibly in Queensland, sugar cane.

I assume you are reading this because you have infinite time

My friend gave me another book to read. You know, the friend who lent me Francis Fukuyama's Our Posthuman Future. Well I think I'm starting to notice a pattern here. This friend is only giving me books to read that require me to assume 20 different things before breakfast before their arguements make sense. In much the same way I hate being in a room with more than three people I can't stand arguements that require more than three assumptions. Actually make that two assumptions and they have to be clearly aknowleged as assumptions for the purpose of speculation. My friend is doing this to try to get me to assume things! Well I don't assume, thank you very much! Wait a minute! Now I'm assuming that my friend is trying to get me to assume things! My head hurts.

Anyway, I get to the top of page two in this new book and it says that death gives time meaning. That, "Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it." Gee, what an assumption. Did he even think of asking some immortals if time meant anything to them? What? There are no convenient immortals around to ask? So this author is making an assumption that can in no way be checked? What cheek! Well I guess we'll just have to do a thought experiment then. If you found out today that you were immortal and someone tried to shoot you through the head a few times to prove it, would your time suddenly become meaningless? Or would you enter party mode, secure in the knowledge that no matter what risks you took you'd never screw up enough to die? It must be nice to know that whatever your mistakes you have forever to make them up.

Indeed, many humans seem incapable of realizing the fact that they are likely to live for eighty or more years, let alone eternity. Just think of how many teenagers have lost perfectly good teeth showing off or in a stupid fight or both? Even if we all became immortal tomorrow I doubt many people would appreciate it on more than an intellectual level, even if they managed to get hit by a bus every second week. Humans just aren't made to lose appreciation of time, even if they did get an infinite amount of it dumped in their laps. I even have trouble convincing myself that too much caffeine today will make it hard for me to sleep tonight.

And what is the name of the book? I'm not telling you that! What if the author gets mad at me for mocking his assumptions? He might come around and knock my teeth out with a baseball bat and I'm planning on using these pearly whites until I'm at least eighty.

Me no benefit from me be dumb

Francis Fukuyama (yes, him again) says that if everybody increases in intelligence nobody benefits. I don't know about that. If I became smart enough to come in from the rain I think I would benefit, even if everybody else became smart enough to invent their own personal weather control devices.

There is no such thing as global warming and who needs glaciers anyway?

Those stupid bloody hippies are at it again. They are whining about global warming simply because Great Southern City One has had its worst heatwave in sixty years. This goes to show how brainless these hippies are. If it's the worst heatwave in sixty years, then obviously it must have been hotter sixty years ago than it is now, proving there is no such thing as global warming! Stupid hippies! I hate you!

And what's more, this melting icecaps thing is a complete scam. I went to the beach the other day and in the couple of hours I was there the sea level actually got noticably lower. When I pointed this out to a stupid hippy he started going on about the tides and the moon's gravitational pull. What a load of nonsense! I couldn't even see the moon! Stupid hippy.

Hints for buying a car

There is a chance that the car you test drive will have underinflated tyres. Although this is bad for safety and fuel efficency, it will give you a smoother ride and that can be helpful when making a sale.

Although you could bring along a tyre pressure gague in your pocket, it can be easier just to look at the tyres and if they appear at all underinflated you can ask them to put some more air in them. Unless your salesperson is Mister Grumpypants they will probably bend over backwards to please you. Then, while they're contorting their spines by bending over backwards, grab their air pump and top up the tyre pressure.

That's a lot of Soft Drink

Hey everybody! Look at this paragraph I found in an article on MSN. The article is called, "The Fat Tax: A Controversial Tool in War Against Obesity." It's by Alan Mozes, Health day reporter. The paragraph reads:

Brownell emphasized that, if properly implemented, fat taxes could yield major benefits. For example, slapping a single penny tax onto the cost of soft drinks across the country would generate almost $1.5 billion annually -- a figure that far exceeds the budgets of current government-sponsored nutrition programs, he said.

This is incredible. That means Americans are consuming 150 billion soft drinks a year. That's an average of nearly two soft drinks a day for every American. If we assume that half of Americans rarely or never drink soft drink that means half of the U.S. is scarfing almost four softdrinks a day. And soft drinks servings aren't small in America. If that's four American sized 600ml bottles of coke then that's about 4,250 kilojoules of soft drink everyday, or about a third of an American's caloric intake. That's a lot of softdrink. Even if half of it consists of diet drinks it's still enough kilojoules to prevent undernutrition in perhaps 200 million of the world's poorest people, although it wouldn't do much for their teeth or their vitamin intake.

Or is it possible that the article is just throwing numbers around without even bothering to check if they are realistic? I really, really hope that these numbers aren't realistic.

Francis Fukuyama and Responsibility

My friend who lent me the Francis Fukuyama book has told me that I have to write more about what I thought of it. Gee, it’s bad enough that I had to read something, now I have to write about it as well. Anyway, I’ll pick on some things Fukuyama says and this means I might end up sounding a bit hard on old Francis, so I’ll begin by pointing out that it is very easy to nit pick a book, it’s much harder to go and actually write one.

Francis Fukuyama seems very concerned that as our knowledge improves about our bodies, people may have a tendency to blame their biology for their actions rather than take responsibility themselves. But this makes me wonder, when have people ever taken responsibility for their actions? Or at least when have they ever taken responsibility for the bad results of their actions? Throughout history people have taken responsibility for good things that happen and denied responsibility for the bad things. It sounds like increasing knowledge of our biology will result in a SNARB. Situation Normal, All Responsibility Denied.

Now I’m aware that taking responsibility is viewed as a good thing by many people but this doesn’t change the fact that it doesn’t often happen. I’m not quite sure why taking responsibility is viewed as being good. I think a person’s actual actions are more important than whether or not they take responsibility for them. In fact when people do take responsibility for their actions it can be quite disturbing. I’d rather be locked in a room with someone who says, “I didn’t mean to kill him, it was the drugs. I never meant to kill anyone,” than be locked in a room with someone who says, “Yep, I killed him. I made a decision to kill him, and I followed through on it. Teach him to make fun of my hairstyle.”

But don’t people who take responsibility for their actions lead much better lives? I’m not sure about that. Perhaps people with better lives have less problems to not take responsibility for. For example if I had a great career, a great marriage and wonderful kids I’d gladly take responsibility for all those things. But if I didn’t get on with my grandfather I’d probably blame the old coot. A person with a lousy life does exactly the same thing, they just have more lousy stuff to blame on outside forces and less good things to take credit for.

Now I can see how taking responsibility can result in people changing their behaviour for the better so that they will end up leading better lives. For example if a person says, “I continuously told my last three boyfriends that they were stupid and all three left me. That was my fault. In the future I won’t call my boyfriends stupid and hopefully they won’t leave me,” then that person might wind up with a boyfriend who will stay. But a person who says, “I continuously called my last three boyfriends stupid and all three left me. I did that because I had an abusive childhood. In the future I won’t call my boyfriends stupid and hopefully they won’t leave me,” could achieve exactly the same result as the first person despite not taking responsibility for her actions and blaming her actions on her past.

I think people who are rationally able to think about how their behaviours affect their lives and then change them are more likely to be able to avoid problems and enjoy life than people who have difficulty doing this, regardless of whether or not they take responsibility. Although I must admit I think it is better when people do accept responsibility, mainly because it then means that it’s not my fault.

The Gay Pill

I'm reading a book. You know, one of those papery things that isn't an x-box? It's by Francis Fukuyama. That's Francis "The End of History" Fukuyama. Anyway, in his book, "Our Posthuman Future," he suggests that it is possible that a pill that eliminates the chance of your child being homosexual could be developed and he speculates that discrimination against gays could increase if this results in their becomeing a much smaller minority.

This got me to thinking about what if a pill was developed that could temporarily make hetrosexuals gay? This could be a great boon to human happiness. Time and time again groups of young men go out drinking and trying to find women to have sex with and fail miserably at the second part. If these young men had a gay pill then they could take it and enjoy having sex with each other instead of going home alone. I think this development would go down very well with a large section of society and is not too different from what some of them do already.

But I imagine some people might be very resistant to taking a gay pill, even when it would logically make them happier, for reasons of self image. I can sort of understand this. I for one would be very resistant to taking a pill that would make me enjoy cricket. But as more and more people enjoy switching between sexualities when it's convenient, it's possible that this exclusively hetrosexual group may end up becoming a discriminated against minority.

The Futility of Violence

When I was in school there was a big kid who thought it was fun to shake hands with other kids and then painfully crush the smaller kid's hand in his meaty grip. He tried this trick on me one day, so I merely smiled as he started to apply pressure then flipped his hand up putting him in a painful wrist lock and pushed him back. He sure learned a lesson that day. He never tried to crush another kid's hand while shaking hands after that. Instead he'd flip the other kid's hand up into a painful wrist lock. He found that much more satisfying.

Land of the Sleepless

I have a bit of a problem with insomnia. For the past week I've had trouble getting any sleep at all at night and then yesterday I spent 16 hours in bed and slept for much of that, a new record for me. I've always had trouble sleeping even since I was a little kid. The sleeping tablets my parents made me take when I was young may have made it worse. They made me sleepy all the time so I had to become good at automatically fighting sleepiness. I've even considered that my problem is that I might actually need less sleep than I think I do and so might find life easier if I don't have so much of it.

I know there are several things I can do to help prevent insomnia: Avoid stimulants. Have a regular set time to go to sleep and to wake up and stick to it. Learn to relax more. Make sure that I eat food that will slowly digest at night so I won't end up feeling hungry in bed. Possibly expose myself to sunlight when I wake up to try to set my biological clock.

I know these things but so far I have had a bad habit of not doing them. So I'll have to change my bad habits. To do this I'll just need to have a little talk to myself. Everyday. For example, often I'll buy a caffinated drink without thinking about the conseqences it might have on my sleep that night, but if I spend five minutes of everyday forcefully reminding myself of those conseqences then I'm going to think twice when I reach for that Pepsi Max. I won't be able to get away with buying it as an automatic process anymore. I'll bust up that bad habit of mine.

I'll let you know how my struggle to stop struggling when it comes to getting to sleep goes in the hope that it might help other insomniacs out there. Wish me luck.

Corrupted again!

Q. How many mice does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A. Only two, but the hard part is getting them inside the lightbulb.

Hint for when buying a TV

When you go into a store and you see that the cheapest TV has the worst picture quality, the moderate priced TVs have better picture quality and the most expensive TVs have the best picture quality, before you make your decision about which to buy, first fiddle with the brightness, sharpness and contrast controls until each picture is as good as you can make it and you will probably find that you won't be able to see any difference between the quality of the pictues.

Two factors explain this:

1. The owner of the store and salespeople on comission want you to buy the most expensive TVs and they tune the TVs to make sure the most expensive have the best picture quality.

2. It is very difficult to make a bad picture tube.

Very rarely will a picture tube manufacturer set out with the goal of making a low quality image picture tube. If they did they would probably go out of business. They would probably also have trouble with worker motivation.

BOSS: I don't pay you much, but that's because I expect you to do a crap job! Now I want you to go out there and produce a mediocre to poor product, because we're number one hundred and twenty-eight! What are we?

LISTLESS WORKERS: (Mumbling) We're number one hundred and twenty-eight...

It's a lot easier to make a decent picture tube and charge less for putting it in a cheap plastic case with an el cheapo remote control which refuses to change channels after a couple of years and to charge more for the same picture tube that comes in a stylish looking case with an ergonomic and reliable remote control.

Oh, and nowadays there are TVs that don't have picture tubes, but the basic principle is probably the same.

BUY AUSTRALIAN! Because... umm... well... there are no reasons.

When I was in Melbourne last week and riding in one of those electric conveyances they call a train, I saw a sign painted on the side of a factory building that said, “Buy your kids a job: Buy Australian.”

I wonder how this would work? If everybody in Australia only bought Australian products then everyone who produces exports would be out of a job. This is because you can’t export without importing and if everyone only buys Australian no one will buy imported goods. Unless of course the people who want us to buy Australian expect the export industries to just give away their production to other countries for free? My, if that’s the case, how generous they are with other people’s money. But it might be a bit hard to convince those workers it’s a good idea. “I’m sorry, but as Australia no longer imports anything and this mine only produces coal for export it’s not possible to actually receive payment for it anymore, so the wages of all you miners will have to be reduced to zero. In addition, since there is no income to purchase fuel we will soon be reduced to digging coal by hand. On the bright side, the Japanese will be very grateful. Now stop standing around and get to work!” No wonder so many people support weaker unions.

If buying overseas products is so bad it’s a wonder we didn’t ban it ages ago. In fact Australia made strong moves in that direction during the great depression. This was so successful that Australia soon became an economic powerhouse and entered the period known as the roaring thirties. Any stories you’ve heard about hardship at this time, or indeed swagmen, are lies spread by the black armband type of historian.

I have heard people say, “It’s better for the money to stay in Australia!” But I wonder why that is? Does the money get scared when it leaves its home country? If it were better for the money to stay in Australia, wouldn’t it be even better if the money stayed in its own state? Or perhaps even its own town? Wouldn’t it be best of all if the money never left the pocket of the person who owned it? Just think how rich we’d all be if no one ever bought anything!

But Australian money always comes back to Australia. It has to. It’s like magic. Let’s say some filthy foreigners, in an attempt to hurt Australia’s economy, take a heap of Australian notes and burn them while dancing and gloating around the rather stinky bonfire. Well, all that money value would return to Australia, as the treasury would print up a new batch of notes as soon as it noticed there weren’t enough in circulation, magically creating money out of nothing!

Okay, you say, so filthy foreigners burning or eating Australian notes won’t result in money not coming back to Australia, but surely buying filthy foreign products made by filthy foreigners, or even clean ones, must be bad?

No. Not at all. To explain, let’s say you want to buy a toilet brush. To keep things simple will assume that all transactions are in cash and that there are no banks or other institutions that exchange money.

Let’s say that down at the shop you have a choice between two toilet brushes of equal quality. An expensive one made in Australia and a cheap one made in China. Now you might think that if you bought the more expensive Australian one, you’d be helping an Australian company. Well you’d be right, but you’d also be hurting an Australian, yourself. It costs you money to buy the more expensive product. If that’s what you want to do, fine, go for it. But it might be more efficient to buy cheaper foreign goods and then just give the money you save to Australian companies as a gift.

But what happens if you buy the cheaper Chinese toilet brush? Won’t the money go out of the country? Well, yeah, it’ll go to China. But it won’t stay there. Somewhere in China there will be some toilet brush factory owner with a stack of Australian money. What’s he going to do with it? Australian dollars aren’t much use to him. He can’t go down to the corner store and buy a bowl of noodles with them. He needs Chinese currency for that. All his employees expect to be paid in Chinese money too and so do the suppliers he buys plastic stock and bristles from. Unless he wants to go on vacation in Australia and spend it himself he’ll have to swap it for Chinese money.

But who in China would want Australian money? What good is it in China? Well it is useful for buying things from Australia. For example, the local meat distributor might be interested in buying some Australian beef. The power company might want some Australian coal. The noodle factory might want Australian wheat. All our toilet brush businessman has to do is call up these companies and find out which one will give him the best deal on Chinese currency in return for his Australian dollars and then the Australian dollars will return to their home country as they are used to pay for Australian products. Hey presto, no money leaves the country for long.

Using checks or electronic money transfers don’t change this situation at all. Nor do the existence of banks that act as middlemen for exchanging money. So buying goods from overseas isn’t somehow bad for the economy.

But wait a minute! What about Australian companies that are going to the wall because of overseas competition? If the Australian toilet brush company goes out of business won’t Australian workers lose their jobs? Shouldn’t we help the owners of these companies? Well no, we shouldn’t. We should help the workers, not the owners. If the owners want they can receive the same training/relocation/government work program that their former employees get. You see, business owners have a very important job and that is to make good business decisions. If we protect them from the results of bad business decisions, such as producing toilet brushes in Australia, then they haven’t got such a strong incentive to do their job well.

Are you a machine intelligence thinking of enslaving humanity? Well have we got the place for you!

I went to Melbourne last week and had a variety of exciting adventures. But going there caused me some problems. You see, I've already renamed the city I'm currently in as Great Southern City One. So I was somewhat miffed when I realized that Melbourne is even more southerly then Great Southern City One and is much larger, although perhaps not greater. I had no wish to chuck an Asimov and name it Great Southern City Zero, so I decided instead to call it Bioslave Mine One. I think it has a pleasent ring to it. And for those pendants out there who wish to point out there are currently no Bioslave Mines in Melbourne, I say patience! North Korea wasn't built in a day!

If You're a Pilot, Don't Swap Seats with an Imaginary Person

While driving past a Christian religious building I saw a sign that said, "If God is your co-pilot, change seats!" I found this very interesting for it suggests that this particular religious group believes that not only should you have a supernatural being second guessing what you do in your life, but you should surrender all decisions to this supernatural being and put it in complete charge.

In practice this would actually mean putting people from your religious group in charge of your life as no one knows any practical method of communicating with supernatural beings for which no evidence of their existence exists. But none the less there are many people who are very sure they know what God wants despite being unable to coherently explain how they found this information out.

Some people recommend the holy book method for finding out what deities want, but this runs into the same problem as asking religious people. If they can't offer any reasonable explanation of how they know what God wants, how do we know that the people who wrote the holy books knew what God wants?

But let’s give the holy books the benefit of the doubt for now and turn to them as we consider a personal problem. Let's say I'm pregnant and I'm not sure whether to give birth or have an abortion. Turning to the Christian holy Bible, or one version of it anyway, I use the Biblegateway.com searchable Bible and look for the term "abortion" and find - absolutely nothing.

This is surprising. The way some Christians go on about abortion you would think that the Bible would be chock full of references to it. You'd think the Bible would be abortion this and abortion that.

As there is no reference to abortion in the Bible if we want help from this holy book I guess we’ll have to resort to working out what God wants by interpreting it. There is no reference to the word abortion but if I type in the word "kill" I get 420 references. It seems that the Bible goes on for quite a bit about killing people and in many instances seems to recommend killing people rather going in for forgiveness and peace. For example, just how many Phillistines do you run into these days? Indeed, if you ever meet a male Shechemite it seems that lopping off part of his penis and then killing him is okay by God. But I don't see how I can arrive at any conclusions about abortion from this mess. And if I can't work out what God wants from the Bible, why should I trust what anybody else interprets from it? Especially when most people who say they can tell what God wants from the Bible seem to lack even an elementary understanding of Middle-Eastern cultures at the time the Bible was written. For example they genuinely seem to think that a carpenter whose family owns land in a variety of locations would qualify as being poor by the standards of the time rather than being in the wealthiest ten percent of the population. The only method I can see for divining God’s will from this book is via imagination and imagination appears to be the entire substance of God.

Conversation with someone trying to make a commission

SALESPERSON: I recommend this TV.

ME: But that only has a one year warranty. This one has a three year warranty and is cheaper.

SALESPERSON: Yes, but if you buy that TV you can only expect it to last three years. If you buy this TV you can expect it to last 10 years.

ME: Why would I want to buy a TV from a company stupid enough to make a TV that lasts ten years and then only puts a one year warranty on it? They're not very good at this business stuff, are they?

Imaginary conversations with people who are only doing what their boss told them to

SALESPERSON: This TV is covered by a 12 month warranty, but for only $30 more you can buy an extended two year warranty and return it to any of our stores in the country if you have any problems.

ME: Do you think that's a good deal? I mean the TV only cost $168 so the extended warranty would only be worth it if there was a greater than 15% chance of the TV breaking down somewhere between 12 and 24 months from now. In fact, when you consider that in one to two years new TVs are likely to have dropped in price and improved in quality and the original TV will have depreciated in value it would only be worth it if the chance of breakdown was greater than 15%. Is your store in the habit of selling such shoddy goods?

SALESPERSON: Of course not sir. We try to sell only the best quality products. But the extended warranty does offer peace of mind.

ME: I'm trying to pick a nerdy fight based on the mathematics of probability with a complete stranger in the middle of a crowded department store, so I'm kind of wondering why on earth you think I care about peace of mind.

Incredible Stories of Psychic Powers

Ronald Brak: Tell me about your son’s psychic abilities, Madame.

Stupid Bint: Well, my son had a dream that we went to the zoo and I wouldn’t let him out of the car. Then, when we did go to the zoo, that’s exactly what happened.

Ronald Brak: That’s incredible.

Stupid Bint: And what’s more, my husband had a dream that he jumped in the chimpanzee enclosure and was made king of the apes.

Ronald Brak: And is that what happened?

Stupid Bint: Yes it is! They’ve been able to reattach one of his generative organs and he’ll be released from the hospital on Tuesday.

Ronald Brak: Astounding!

Stupid Bint: And that’s not all. I myself have psychic powers. Often I will be thinking of one of my friends and my friend will ring me.

Ronald Brak: That’s incredible. How often does this happen?

Stupid Bint: Everyday! I spend most of my time thinking about my friends and calling them.

Ronald Brak: And how many friends do you have?

Stupid Bint: Oh lots! Dozens! Three. Except I’m only talking to one of them right now.

Ronald Brak: One last question, Ms Bint. When the phone rings are you even consciously aware of the fact that you’re answering it?

Stupid Bint: I try to spend as little time conscious as possible.

Ronald Brak: Thank you for your time Ms Bint, as I have now sucked it out of you using temporal vampirism.

Why Insects have Camouflage

When I walked outside this morning a pee-wee flew over the fence straight towards me. (For those of you who don't know what a pee-wee is it's the Queensland term for a magpie lark.) ((For those of you who don't know what a magpie lark is it's a lark that looks like a magpie, or possibly vice versa.)) As it sliced through the air towards me it looked to its right and swooped to a halt a couple of feet from me on another fence, this one made of bundles of grey twigs, scooped up a brown moth and flew off. I was surprised. I would never have seen that moth if the pee-wee hadn't drawn my attention to it. I felt like I had let my primate ancestors down. My monkey relatives would probably appreciate a nice juicy moth and if they had seen what happened they would probably screech with laughter at me for being shown up by a bird with a brain the size of half a peanut. And they would probably keep laughing right up to the point where I used them for medical experiments. (Who's laughing now, monkey boy? How about I inject you with some more of this bird flu, He Who Laughs at Homo Sapiens?)

But what I can't figure out is why a brown moth was sitting on a gray fence. Surely they don't do this sort of thing just so we can have textbook examples of evolution in action? I have arrived at two possible conclusions:

1. Moths are colour blind.

2. Moths are stupid.

After giving it some thought I considered a third possibility:

3. Gray moths turn brown when they see a pee-wee coming in an attempt to scare them off.

I am aware that if my third point proves true it also provides support for point 2.

How to make the Virgin Mary cry in five easy steps

1. Take one glazed porcelain statue of the Virgin Mary.

2. Chip the glaze around the eyes.

3. Stand it in liquid.

4. Wait for the statue to absorb the liquid and start to leak it from the eyes.

5. Commence bilking the credulous out of their money or just enjoy the attention. Your choice.

Note, when people start claiming miracles associated with your crying statue it is vitally important that you don’t believe in them. Otherwise you’ll end up as one of those sad people who fake a miracle for either attention or money and wind up justifying your fakery to yourself as the will of God.

The Joy of Consumerism

I went out and bought a Lovegirl today. You know, I used to pride myself on being the sort of person who would never buy that sort of thing, but the truth is I really wanted one and it was just intellectual snobbery that held me back. I bought her in Big W and the nice young man there popped her into a trolley and I wheelled her out through the shopping centre. When I got to the parking lot I had a bit of a problem. You see, my car is very small and I wasn't able to get my Lovegirl's box into either the boot or the back seat. I was reduced to taking her out of the box in the car park and sitting her in the back seat. It was extremely embarrassing, as I had to park in a handicapped space to do it.

My Lovegirl's main measurement is 51cm, which probably wouldn't be considered much by American standards, but I'm quite happy with it. I think that more than an eyefull is a waste.

I suppose most people wouldn't realise that the electronics brand Aiko literally translates into Lovegirl, but I think it's a lovely name for a television set.

I spent quite an amount of time considering the quality of the image. At first I wasn't terribly impressed. When I looked closely the picture on the screen it seemed to be make up of tiny little squares, unlike objects that weren't on TV such as the salesperson, unless of course her pixels were so small they were beyound the resolution of my eyes. I also stood in front of the display TV and closed my eyes to test if it had any backup systems for transmitting visual images directly into my cortex in case my eyeballs happened to fall out, but it apparently lacked even rudimentary telepathic ability. I finally decided that its image quality would do when I compared it to vastly more expensive TVs and could see no discernable difference.

I paid $168 dollars for her, which seemed reasonable. There was also another 51cm TV for $138 but there was a waiting list for that one so I didn't get it. It is interesting to consider that the median Australian worker earns over $30,000 per year and so could buy a TV for for less than one day's pay. This is quite a change from say thirty years ago when I guess that a similar sized TV with less features might have cost a month's pay.

Headscarves and Reality

It seems that there are a few people out there who are still a little bit confused over the issue of headscarves. In order to help these people I will provide the following infomation free of charge:

Blowing people up - Hurts other people.

Wearing headscarves - Does not hurt other people.

I hope this helps anyone is still thinking that wearing headscarves in school should be banned, or indeed those who think blowing people up should be legal.

Licking salt off the national flag

Today I ate some microwave popcorn. The packet was blue and had stars on it. It was like eating out of an Australian flag. Mmmm... nationalicious!

Sensible Questions

How much does an average African elephant weigh? If I tell you it weighs eight tons, you might not know if I'm correct, but you would probably think that my answer sounds reasonable in the way that the answer lemon chicken does not.

If I ask you a harder question, what kind of government or governments will the Iraq region have in ten years time? Then you will still be able to distinguish a possibly correct answer, such as Stalinist Monarchy, from an answer that could not possibly be correct, such as erotic aardvark.

However there are some questions for which all answers could be said to be equally valid. For example if I asked, "What is the meaning of life?" the answers lemon chicken or erotic aardvark seem to make as much sense as any others that have been advanced. Similar questions for which there are no classes of answers that we could could define as reasonable or unreasonable would be, "What is my purpose?" or, "Who am I?" Apart from reasons of convenience, Ronald Brak doesn’t seem to be a better answer to the question, "Who am I?" than erotic aardvark.

So what do I recommend when faced with a question for which no type of answer could be said to be correct or incorrect? My advice is to forget about it. Of course if you enjoy pondering it, then go ahead. But as people have been arguing over these sorts of things for thousands of years, be aware that you are extremely unlikely to come up with anything better than lemon chicken.

I'm Back!

Well I'm back in South Australia and I haven't seen a single giant insect since I arrived. How depressing! And time is out of joint again. It doesn’t get completely dark until after nine o’clock here. And every time I come here the moon moves lower in the sky.

Now some people may say that it's not the moon that has gotten lower in the sky but rather it's me who as moved further along the curvature of the earth. These people might also go on to say that everything that happens is not to do with me and that I am not the centre of the universe. Well if I'm not the centre of the universe, then how come everything happens from my point of view? Answer that one, Mister Smartypants! (Wow, I think I have now reached a level of self-centeredness that allows me to become a right wing blogger!)

Bloggered

Q. Why did the nuclear physicist go to the gay bar?

A. He wanted to find top and bottom quarks.

Ethanol - The Stench of Corruption!

The government wants to make petrol that is 10% ethanol available for all Australians to use in their cars. Oh good. I’m sure this idea will work very well. You see Australian ethanol producers have a magic pixie dust they can spread on sugar cane and sorghum to make economical what has been a giant money loser in Brazil and the United States. The pixie dust is a special blend consisting of 60% winning votes in marginal seats, 40% corruption and 17% mathematical incompetence.

You see ethanol is good because it’s environmentally friendly. Sort of. Well, it uses solar energy stored by plants and there is nothing more environmentally friendly than solar energy, right? Of course, agricultural machinery used to grow and harvest the plants does use fossil fuels, as do chemical fertilizers. Transportation of crops to ethanol plants requires fossil fuels and the energy used at ethanol plants to create the ethanol also requires fossil fuels. Of course, all this fossil fuel use is only temporary. In the future we will be able to make the entire process powered by ethanol itself. Of course this would require approximately all the ethanol the process produces, so there wouldn't be any left over to actually add to fuel, but just think of all the jobs that will be created. Of course it wouldn't be fair to actually pay anyone in the ethanol business any money as they're not actually producing anything, but at least they would be kept busy. Besides, sniffing ethanol fumes before they're denatured is its own reward.

One columnist says that government subsidies to ethanol production are about $118,000,000 a year. I have no idea if that figure is correct, but it is obviously much better to spend taxpayer’s money on something that is economically inefficient rather than doing something like reducing the tax on fuel-efficent cars. Spending the money on subsidies for hybrids and other fuel efficient cars instead would drastically reduce the amount of oil consumed by Australians over the course of the decade and have a major impact on the amount of carbon dioxide released. But spending the money on ethanol is a much better idea. I mean, have you ever tried getting high by sniffing the exhaust of an electric car? It's damned near impossible. But ethanol exhaust is easy on the lungs and hard on the brain.

Then there is the fact that ethanol only has 68% of the power of petrol per litre which means that 10% ethanol fuel would have 3.2% less power than normal petrol and only an idiot would buy it unless it was at least 3.2% cheaper than ordinary petrol. But this isn't a problem. It can be easily fixed with more subsidies!

Now some people say that if ethanol is a practical energy source then it only needs a tax break equal to it's environmental benefit and then this thing called the free market will take over and provide ethanol. But I went to the Sunday market, which wasn't free but was pretty cheap and there was no ethanol there. So I think the free market is for losers and poor people.

Soon I shall open a plant that will render lepricorns into biodisel fuel. It shall be going into operation as soon as the government drops off my wheelbarrow full of subsidies.

The Even Darker Side of the Force!

I was talking to my brother yesterday. Well, not actually talking as such, we were more verbalizing our internal thought processes while in the same room, when my brother pointed out something interesting about Star Wars. In the Star Wars movies there is supposed to be a light side of the Force and a dark side of the Force. The dark side of the Force is described as giving in to anger or fear or desire for revenge when fighting. So does this mean that if you can cut people up with a light sabre while maintaining a pleasant state of mind you are using the good side of the Force? Surely wouldn't someone who cuts another person in half without experiencing anger or fear would be a psycho nutcase rather than a person who could be described as being on the good side of anything? Instead of the light side of the Force, surely the sociopathic side of the Force would be a better description?

If the ground writhes, I'm happy.

Well I'm back in Queensland now, as opposed to South Australia and it's quite pleasent to be back in the sub-tropics. I was getting tired of living in an area where I could walk outside and not see some form of bizarre organism crawling around. Now that I'm back I've already seen lizards, frogs, a hand spider (generic name for any spider the size of your hand), ants that build nests in trees, etc. I also like the approach to pest control in this house. Last night a cockroach flew inside and a geko ran out from behind a painting and ate it. Back in South Australia the ecosystem seems to be dominated by feral apes and ducks. The ducks are nice enough, but the apes don't seem as cheerful or as relaxed as the ones around here. Possibly this is due to the large number of churches in South Australia, which I've found generally have a bad effect upon apes, or maybe it's just something to do with the rate at which cannibis grows here.

Cool!

Today I have realized two amazing things.

1. The universe is infomation. The fact that the universe is the form it is means that all the possible forms that the universe could be are implicit in it's current state. There are a finite, yet immense number of alternate universes seperated from us not by other dimensions but by flips of a coin. As our ability to control outcomes over a greater and greater area of space increases, so our abilities become more and more godlike as we chart our course across the vast sea of the possible.

2. If you drink a lot of yellow softdrink and then brush your teeth with blue toothpaste, green foam comes out of your mouth.

I and the Bird - And Poison!

I should have mentioned this earlier but there is a new edition of I and the Bird at Girl Scientist. It has one of my posts, which if I dare say so myself, exceeds or perhaps even meets my own standards for quality.
I'm a little slow informing you because yesterday my friend and I were both laid out with terrible food poisoning, and the only thing we had to eat in common was the product of a big international food company. I have since called this company and as a result of my savvy negotiating skills they have agreed to confiscate the remaining evidence and pay me three dollars. I considered asking for the thirteen dollars I spent on sports drinks to rehydrate myself, but the three dollars up front was just too tempting. I suppose I have grounds for a civil suit, but I think I'm perhaps just a bit too honest to go to court:

DEFENSE LAWYER: Do you seriously expect the jury to believe that you deserve fifty thousand dollars for a single bout of food poisoning?

ME: No, but I was hoping you wouldn't ask that question.

DEFENSE LAWYER: You have stated that you lost four kilos of bodily fluids over a 24-hour period. In your opinion would you say that's a lot?

ME: Um, yeah.

DEFENSE LAWYER: So you admit that you lost a lot of weight over a very short period of time? From your appearance I can see that you are coated with a somewhat excessive layer of blubber. Don't you think you should be grateful that my client helped you lose weight by accidentally including a miracle, bacteria based, weight loss formula in your food, you walking tub of lard?

ME: Well, the whole experience was quite painful.

DEFENSE LAWYER: Painful? Ha! Your honour, I'd like to call a leper to the witness stand.

LEPER: Due to a degenerative nerve disease I am unable to feel pain. I would give anything to feel pain again and quite frankly I am disgusted that anyone would talk about feeling pain as a bad thing. And by the way, we prefer to be called Hanson disease sufferers nowadays, not lepers.

DEFENSE LAWYER: Yeah, whatever. Your honour, I rest my case.

ME: Is it too late to take the three dollars?

Attention all decks!

Attention all crew! As you are all fully aware, this is your Captain, Jean-Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise. By forces unknown we have been propelled beyond space and time into a region where our very thoughts can become reality. For this reason it is vitally important that none of you think about the Enterprise being destroyed. Got that? Nobody think about the Enterprise being destroyed, all right? And whatever you do, don’t think about writhing in pain as your eyeballs are sucked out by a giant tentacled monstrosity from your foulest nightmare. That is all. Carry on.

Is there life on Venus?

Venus is not a very hospitable place by our standards. The atmospheric pressure is ninety times that on earth, the surface temerature is hot enough to melt lead, there is no pizza delivery, etc. However, it has been suggested that there could be bacterial life floating in the atmosphere about 50 kilometres off the ground where the pressure is roughly equal to sea level on earth, the temperature is about 50 degrees Celsius and there are tiny drops of floating water. Hydrogen sulphide and sulphur dioxide have also been found which are unlikely to result from natural processes that we are aware of and so could be the by products of bacterial metabolism.

In addition, patches in the atmosphere of Venus have been detected that absorb ultraviolet light. It is possible this is caused by bacteria using it to photosynthesise. Although there is no life we know of on earth that uses ultraviolet light to photosynthesise, the fluorescent tube in my living room converts ultraviolet light into visible light everyday without difficulty. It may be possible for bacteria to do something similar.

So, how can we find out if there is life there? There are three ways. One is to send a probe that would skim through the atmosphere and capture a sample and return it to earth. Another way would be to send a floating laboratory that would suspend itself from a balloon and analyse the atmosphere in place. Or a probe could simply capture a sample of atmosphere at the appropriate height and analyse it after it had landed. However, it might have to analyse quickly as the temperature and pressure on the surface aren’t very good for the survival of probes or of any life it may have collected.

Actually, there are more than three ways to discover if there is life on Venus, but all the other ways I can think of are kind of silly.

How to Improve the U.S. Political System – Preference Voting

I feel sorry for people in the United States. They can’t vote for the Uber Fascist Party without throwing their votes away. The first-past-the-post voting system used in the U.S. means that minor parties have almost no chance of obtaining power and anyone who votes for them pretty much wastes their vote. If a hypothetical Uber Fascist Party voter didn’t want to waste his vote he’d probably have to support an even more extreme party and vote for the Republicans.

In Australia we don’t have this problem. We have preference voting where we rank our preferred candidates so I can vote for the Monster Raving Looney Party secure in the knowledge that if they fail to win a majority, I can still help my second choice, The Moderately Silly Party come to power.

As an example of how it would work in the U.S, if the 2000 Presidential elections had used preference voting then Al Gore would have won, thanks to support from Ralph Nader voters. As most Nader supporters would have put the Democrats before the Republicans on their list of preferences most of their votes would have gone to the Democrats instead of being blown on old Ralph.

Preference voting would not get rid of the two party domination of government and probably would not be a good thing if it did. But it would make it possible for minor parties and independents to exist, make their voices heard and have some effect upon government for good or for ill. It would certainly be an improvement upon the current two sizes fit all system.

Phosphorous and Carbon Sinks – And no, Carbon Sinks don’t make for dirty dishes

I’m planning to live for quite a bit longer, so one of the things I’m concerned about is global warming caused by increasing amounts of Carbon Dioxide in the air. I mean, it is going to be very difficult to enjoy my retirement inside a hermetically sealed bubble if the only thing they show on the news at night is pictures of people dying from environmental disasters in less fashionable nations. After seeing images of people dying of heatstroke in Amazon desert, the only thing that would probably make me feel better is to crank up my air conditioning and sip iced pina colada.

As a result, I’ve gotten to thinking about if it would be possible to increase the amount of carbon taken up from the atmosphere by scattering phosphorous rich gravel over certain parts of Australia to encourage plant growth. Since the vast majority of Australian soils are phosphorous poor, a lack of phosphorous is often a limiting factor in the growth of plants. Once the gravel had been scattered it would slowly weather away, gradually releasing phosphorous over many years. However, spreading this gravel could be quite expensive. To add an average of one gram of phosphorous rich rock per square meter to an area the size of Tasmania (that little island just below the right half of mainland Australia) would require about 70,000 tons of rock. That’s equal to a cubic chunk of rock about 12 stories high. Finding that much rock isn’t going to be a problem, but grinding it up and scattering it is. Normally adding phosphorous to land for agricultural purposes doesn’t involve flinging gravel. Perhaps some sort of catapult could be used?

Besides absorbing carbon and reducing the effect of global warming, there could be other benefits, including improved soil and water quality, and increased plant growth could help moderate the extremes of Australian climate.

If this idea is practical at all then it is only likely to work in areas with local sources of phosphorous and access to cheap catapults. However, if property owners could receive payments for increasing the amount of carbon their land holds, then they could try whatever method they think is best for their location.

Thank You, Science.

I went to Subway today, which is a chain of sandwich shops from America. The sandwiches don't taste bad but for the life of me I can't work out why they decided to name their shops after a long, dank, underground tube that smells of urine. For some reason, I'm not sure why, but I think it has something to do with their current administration's voodoo economics affecting all Americans, at the moment it is cheaper for me to buy a sandwich with a drink than it is to buy one without a drink. This is a minor problem, as I don't actually like any of the drinks they have. The ones with sugar in them have too much sugar in them for me and the one that doesn't have sugar has too much caffeine. I've tried drinking a whole enormous cup of one of their sugary soft drinks, but it made me feel as though I had taken a horse tranquilliser and I could feel my I.Q. dropping by about sixty points as I drifted off into a pre-diabetic coma.

However, as I stood in line, I did consider turning to the young lady behind me and asking politely in my best Australian accent, "Wood'ja like a drink?" It is my belief that Australians use their accents out of politeness. When everybody has to spend a few seconds working out what everyone else has just said, it makes conversation a lot more intellectual and less combative. But I suddenly realized that I couldn't ask the lady this. What if she misinterpreted me and thought I was asking her to partake of an alcoholic beverage down at the local watering hole? I couldn't bear the thought of bitterly disappointing her when she found out that I was just talking about a small tub of subway soft drink.

So I acquired my sandwich and walked out of the place with an enormous Subway soft drink container in my hand. It wasn't very difficult to carry despite its large size, thanks to the immense slabs of hard muscle my body possesses under a thin layer of blubber. I maintain the layer of blubber out of consideration for others. I don't want them to be hurt if they happen to run into me.

I thought about how unfortunate it is that you never seen to come across anyone who is on fire when you just happen to be walking through town carrying a large drink in your hand that you don't particularly want. I briefly speculated upon the possibility that if my drink was sweet enough and a burning person's flames intense enough, would pouring my soft drink on them cause them to explode into a fireball as the sugar ignited? I decided that it was unlikely.

Anyway, as I was walking home, I got hit by hamburger rain. We often have this in Australia. That is, large fat drops that look like hamburger buns as they flatten on the bottom while they fall through the air. Of course you can't actually see that they look like hamburger buns. You have to muck around with a camera that has a very short shutter speed indeed to see that. And if you have a camera that good you shouldn't take it out in the rain in the first place. But nonetheless I took it as read that the raindrops were hamburger shaped.

Then I heard the thunder and I remembered how a dog we used to have, a big German Shepard, was terrified of it. I thought how lucky I was that I knew what thunder was and that it couldn't harm me. (Although admittedly lightning could make a bit of a mess of things.) I tried to explain to our dog that he had nothing to be afraid of, but he just didn't understand. And I wondered how many of my ancestors would have been in a similar position, terrified of the thunder and unable to understand it? For how many generations did they carry their fear with them? So I'd just like to thank all the people, both alive and dead, who have contributed to our understanding of the world. I'd like to thank science for freeing me from superstition and for the fact that I don't cower under the table when I hear thunder.

Oh God, Now Even This Blog is Posting on Avian Flu!

A lot of people have been writing about the threat that the world faces from bird flu. Personally I’m not so worried. Currently I’m afraid to go outside due to the intense ultra violet radiation that is beating down. Also, I live next to a busy road, so I think that about half the air I breathe has been purified by being passed through an internal combustion engine. In addition I’m sure we will soon have many days where the temperature will be over 35 degrees Celsius. These are all conditions that make unlife hard for a virus. When you add in the fact that I prefer to bow than to shake hands and that many of my friends are imaginary, I consider myself pretty safe.

One estimate says if the bird flu mutates into a highly contagious form then about 5% of the worlds population could become infected, with nearly half of them dying. Well, when I say “estimate,” I actually mean “rumour,” because no one really knows for sure what might happen. But lets assume there is a 5% chance of such an event coming to pass that will kill on average 150 million people. Let’s also assume that because I live in a first world country with a fairly effective health care systems we will we will suffer only 10% as many deaths per person as less developed countries. Let’s further assume that the fact I live in a geographically remote location in an environment that’s harsh on viruses reduces the chance of infection by a further 50%. Finally I’ll rate my introverted lifestyle as further reducing my chances of infection by another 50%. This gives me a grand total of a 0.000025 chance of dying from bird flu. I like those odds.

But what if I’m an extroverted Australian who lives in Sydney, you may ask? Well don’t worry. According to the figures I pulled out of my butt, you probably only have a 0.0001% chance of dying, or one chance in ten thousand, which is less than your chance of being murdered in your lifetime. (Unless of course you are a particularly annoying extrovert.)

Of course some people think that even a tiny chance of dying is too high. (How wimpy.) So what could the government do to reduce the risk of people dying from bird flu or other epidemics? Well it could increase the number of sick days available to people who work in positions where they are likely to spread diseases. This reduces the chance of someone coming to work with a sniffle that could turn out to be bird flu. However, to help prevent them being abused, we might have to call them Contagion Prevention days.

As for spending money on drugs that might protect against bird flu, it makes sense as long as the money wouldn’t save more lives on average if it were spent somewhere else. For example, many people die of run of the mill flu every year, so if more years of human life would be saved by spending the money on conventional flu vaccine then that would be the sensible course to take. Of course governments don’t get kicked out of office if the average number of people who die from ordinary flu each year die from ordinary flu in a year. They will get kicked out of office if a bird flu epidemic occurs and people don’t think the government was adequately prepared. This consideration may affect the cost benefit analysis somewhat.

What can you do personally to protect yourself and loved ones against avian flu? Well, buying a game consol and some addictive games might be best. That way if an epidemic hits you might be able to persuade your kids to stay indoors and away from friends who might infect them. Frequent hand washing is important and wearing a mask helps. A handyperson’s dust mask works well at stopping virus filled particles of phlegm people may have coughed out, but you may want to carry an electric drill or something around with you so you won’t feel self conscious about wearing one. Masks can always be improvised if you find yourself caught short. Warm water, soap, detergent and sunshine are all good for killing virus particles that may be on clothes or other surfaces. Ultraviolet lights are available if you’re really paranoid. One of the most important things to do is to eat healthily. Failing that, get into the habit of taking a multivitamin.

Intelligent Designers: “God not supernatural”

I’ve found a Chicago Tribune article that contains an earth shattering idea. The concept is a little hard to assimilate, but the ramifications are astounding:

HARRISBURG, Pa. - (KRT) - A Pennsylvania biochemist testified in federal court here Monday that intelligent design, a view critical of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, is a scientific theory that doesn't require involvement of a supernatural agent, although he said he believes the intelligent designer is God.

So he’s saying that God is not necessarily supernatural? That’s exactly the sort of intelligent idea I’ve come to expect from the Intelligent Design crowd. It’s an incredible concept and it explains so much. You see I’ve met this God. He was a crazy, smelly, old man I met under a bridge one night who revealed his divinity to me. The fact that he’s not supernatural would explain why he slept in a cardboard box. It would also explain why he alternated between talking to dirt and stomping on it. “What? No flagella?” he’d cry. “Why you worthless excuse for a procaryote! I’ll show you what I think of bacteria that can’t be bothered to develop intricate molecular machinery!”

He’s obviously been wandering the earth for billions of years and since he doesn’t have any supernatural abilities he’s must have been Intelligently Designing life with the only tool available to him, a club. It wouldn’t take much for a man with unlimited time, a sturdy length of wood and a mean streak a light year long to affect the evolutionary course of a great many species.

"We infer design when parts appear to be arranged for a purpose," Behe said, noting that the more parts involved, in a process such as blood clotting, for example, the more confidence there is in a design component.

Yep, with a knife made of a shard of stone, in a few million years a non-supernatural god could provide a fair amount of selection pressure for the development of efficient blood clotting just by slashing any animals that had the misfortune to get in his way. He could also foster the development of human intelligence by snapping the necks of ape-like creatures that weren’t smart enough to run like hell when they saw him.

You know, I like the intelligent designer’s idea of a non-supernatural god who is obviously completely insane and bloodthirsty. He’s not a distant God with incredible powers, but just a man who walks the earth like us. And kills those who don’t fit his design.


If God had a game what would it be?
And if he wasn’t supernatural
Would it be Intelligent Design with his bare hands
And would you fear those hands so steeped in blood

Yeah yeah God is cruel
Yeah yeah God wants blood
Yeah yeah yeah yeah

What if God was one of us,
With a rock chasing after us,
Throwing the poorly designed under a bus,
Trying to make us stronger bones

If God made a race
What would it look like?
And would you want to flee,
If fleeing meant you wouldn’t have to believe,
In nuts like Behe and Intelligent Design
And all that bullshit

Yeah yeah God is nuts
Yeah yeah God is psycho
Yeah yeah yeah yeah

What if God was one of us
And designing was his lust,
He would kill us without a fuss
Trying to create a blood cascade
Killing failures along the way
Not caring how many have to pay
Supernatural is not what he is
As just a man he must exist
And so he Intelligently Designs with a fist

The Great Space Con: Part I

So how can you convince your citizens that your ego-tripping space missions aren’t a waste of money when hundreds of millions of them live in rural poverty? Simple! You tell them that as a direct result of the space program they can grow giant space cucumbers! The following quote is from the China Daily article – Space-age technology seeps into everyday life:

Space breeding: Under the influence of space rays, the genes of crop seeds carried by spacecraft were changed. As a result, some new crops with high yields will be bred.
Incomplete statistics show that more than 800 kinds of seeds have undergone in-space breeding experiments by retrievable satellites since 1987 in China.
Experiments show that these crops have made remarkable progress in producing bigger fruit containing more nutrients and with a higher ability to resist pests.

Now this is just bizarre. They believe space rays have some sort of beneficial effect, on seeds as opposed to say, exposing them to radiation on earth? (Well it worked for the Fantastic Four, didn’t it?) This is comic book stuff. Not that there is anything wrong with comic books… No, wait; there are lots of things wrong with comic books. They treat the laws of physics as if they were a sort of bureaucratic red tape that can be safely ignored when convenient. Let me restate myself. There is nothing wrong with enjoying comic books as fantasy, but when you start thinking they are accurate reflections of real life, and start shooting seeds into space, then you are wasting your time and your countries money. There is no reason I’m aware of to think that exposing seeds to space rays will cause more beneficial mutations than exposing them to radiation on earth. Now I have to admit that I have no evidence that it won’t, but then I have no evidence that exposing my car to space rays won’t improve its fuel economy. Perhaps we should shoot it into space as well? Perhaps exposing lemon juice to space rays will convert it into a magic potion! Perhaps if I pat my head while rubbing my nose and spinning my chair counter clockwise my laptop will turn into an alligator? Hmmm… apparently not. Perhaps the Chinese space program and I would waste less time if we tried to do things that evidence suggests will work.

If I am wrong about this I will expect the Chinese space seed agricultural business to boom and make huge sums of money selling seeds all over the world and start putting Monsanto and others who don’t use space rays to develop crops out of business. Then I will stand corrected. Let me know when that happens.

In the same article we have a paragraph that says:

New materials: The special conditions of living in outer space, characterized by microgravity, a need for cleanliness and being in a vacuum, provide an ideal place for producing new materials.

Name one. Name one new material that has been developed in space. We have been shooting probes and people into space for nearly fifty years now. Earth is now onto its eighth space station. You would think that by now that someone would have come up with a new material made in space by now if it was easy, wouldn’t you? While large crystals have been gown in zero gee, large crystals aren’t exactly new or very helpful. My watch wouldn’t operate any better if its quartz crystal were larger.

Outlook Weekly quoted Professor Han Liyan of the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics as saying that every 10 yuan (US$1.23) invested in the aerospace industry has generated 80-140 yuan (US$9.87-17.30) worth of benefits.

Investing in scientific research can pay great dividends to all humanity. Even non-human life often benefits. But what I disagree with is the suggestion that spending money on sending humans into space will somehow magically have benefits that investing money in other areas of research won’t. If you want to develop cleaner energy, or a cure for malaria, then you’d probably be better off spending your money on research that specifically deals with those problems rather than hope that by some chance you’ll find a malaria cure as a by product of your crewed moon expedition program.

Now on one hand it may not seem fair to pick on Chinese space propaganda when American space propaganda has said much the same thing, but the average Chinese citizen is a lot poorer than the average American and so the waste is less excusable. I would also hate to think they can’t learn from other people’s mistakes. As the old saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice… We can’t get fooled again!”

"The Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."

I have recently been mulling over a number of incidents that have occured over the past five or so years and have come to a somewhat disturbing conclusion. I think that George Bush may not always be completely honest. Now I realize that my evidence is kind of flimsy. All I have to back it up are fictional weapons of mass destruction, fictional Iraq ties with criminal organizations and perhaps only three or four hundred more dishonesty related incidents. Now some people go as far as to say that George Bush is the greatest liar in American Presidential history, but I think that's just crazy talk. Remember Richard Nixon? And remember the old joke, "How do you tell if Nixon is lying? His lips are moving!" Well there is no way Bush could be a greater liar than Nixon, because when George Bush moves his lips what comes out of his mouth often can't be described as communication.

The Ronald Brak Astrology Institute

The Hubble telescope, the Chandra X-ray observatory, the Voyager space probes. These are all names that don’t mean a damn thing to astrologers. I’m here today at the Ronald Brak Astrology institute, interviewing myself about how the stars affect our day to day lives. So Mr Brak, can you tell me just what it is you do here?

Ronald Brak: Please, call me Ronald. I feel as though I’ve known you all my life.

Interviewer: Whatever.

Ronald Brak: Here at the Ronald Brak Astrology institute we have the latest scientific equipment that can be used to observe the heavens. And this equipment is put to good use. You’d be amazed at the number of crushed beer cans you can cram in an eight-inch reflector.

Interviewer: So astrologers use eight-inch reflectors? Do you often use your eight inch?

Ronald Brak: Of course, that’s what Astrology is all about. You grab however many inches you have and then you reflect upon the virtues of some beautiful heavenly bodies and then after making a series of fevered arcane movements with your hands you cast your horoscope all over a piece of paper and charge someone money for it.

Interviewer: And that’s all there is to it?

Ronald Brak: Well there are certain other factors you have to keep in mind, such as the position of Uranus. I happen to know that the position of Uranus has a major effect upon my happiness. If Uranus is in your house then that will have a profound disturbance upon the course of your life.

Interviewer: Well, if Uranus was in your house and you weren’t, that would be profoundly disturbing. But tell me, just how do the stars and planets affect our lives?

Ronald Brak: Well, it’s simple to see how gravity affects the tides.

Interviewer: Yes, but how does the gravity of a planet such as say mars affect us? Wouldn’t any effects be swamped by the vastly greater gravity of the earth? Don’t nearby objects such as cars and buildings have greater gravitational effects upon us than the incredibly distant planet mars? Wasn’t it Carl Sagan, or more likely someone who is going to be incredibly pissed off that I can’t remember his name, who said that the Doctor who delivered you is going to have more gravitational influence on you than the planet Jupiter?

Ronald Brak: Well there are other forces at work besides gravity.

Interviewer: Like what?

Ronald Brak: Well, there are electromagnetic effects and quantum fluctuations, but mostly we rely upon the power of imagination. The most powerful force there is. Basically we make crap up.

Interviewer: So it’s all a con then?

Ronald Brak: Bingo!

Interviewer: Aren’t you afraid that admitting this will ruin your little scam.

Ronald Brak: It’s not a little scam. We rake in millions. And no, I’m not afraid of losing money. I’ve told people right to their faces, like I’m doing now, that it’s all a con and on the way out they still shell out $45 in the gift shop for a printout of their own “personalized” horoscope. On the whole our customers are what we astrologers call, very, very stupid. For example I’ve had a brain surgeon pay me thousands of dollars for a horoscope that I pulled out of my butt. It takes a special kind of stupidity for someone so intelligent to be so dumb. And women are the best! They are our best customers! They might think they’re liberated, but we still have so many of them trapped in chains of superstition!

Interviewer: Well I’ve heard quite enough! I can find my own way out, thank you very much. And I assure you, I won’t be stopping to purchase any horoscopes in the gift shop as I leave.

Ronald Brak: Please, wait for just one minute! Since we both have the same birthday, I’d like to read you your horoscope that I prepared for you before you leave: You are very intelligent and reasonable but like everyone, capable of making mistakes. You are also kind and forgiving, although there are times when your patience is tested. You enjoy physical activities and also more relaxed pursuits. You enjoy being with people except when you prefer to be alone. You have a natural talent for leadership but are wise enough to let people make their own mistakes. You enjoy life for the moment but are always prepared to plan and make sacrifices for the future. You have a special insight into the world around you that other people lack.

Interviewer: Oh my god, that’s me exactly!

Ronald Brak: Ha! Sucker! I read you Hitler’s horoscope instead! Or perhaps it’s Ghandi’s. Who gives a crap? Besides Uranus, that is? Man, everybody falls for that one! Like who doesn’t that describe? I bet you read your horoscope in the newspaper everyday but act like you’re reading the comics. Man, you are too much of a tool to even be called a fool! And that’s $45. Fork it over.

Elephant time

Q. Why is a white elephant something that is considered useless?

A. Because they cost a fortune in sunscreen.

The state of American education

I sometimes wonder about the state of education in America. Just how good, or how bad, is it? On one hand I know that high school kids study some really advanced stuff in many classes. On the other hand, the worst textbook I’ve ever seen was American. A geography text that taught nothing about why the world was the way it was, but was merely lists of points to memorise arranged into chapters. Also, I’ve never understood this whole ligament is to string, as earwax is to shoe polish business. What is that all about? They spend hours on these bizarre comparisons. It’s as if they are preparing their children to major in gibberish.

But the most damning thing about the state of American education I’ve ever seen was in Disneyworld, Florida. In the room where you waited prior to going on a dinosaur ride, there were labelled pictures of a variety of animals. One of them was of a centipede. Dust had worked its way between the persplex and picture, indicating that it had been there for quite a while. The picture of the centipede was labelled, “Insect.” I can’t imagine that mistake of that magnitude lasting for any length of time in any of the countries I’ve live in. Some kid, or a schoolteacher, or my grandmother would point out that if it has more than six legs and it’s not a caterpillar, it’s not an insect. It seems so strange to me that hundreds of thousands of people must have walked past it and it never pointed it out to the management, or if they had, the management felt no need to worry about it.

I’m too nice to blog!

I’m having trouble blogging today. I’m starting to think that maybe I’m just too nice to blog. You see, I started off writing a post on Christmas and I ended up insulting finance companies, which wasn’t a very nice thing to do. I mean, just think about how many people finance companies save from having their thumbs broken by amateur loan sharks. So then I started writing a post about China’s space program and I ended up insulting both China and the United States. I chastised myself quite severely for that, because even though robotic exploration of space is much safer and cheaper, I’m sure that many Chinese and Americans think that putting astronauts lives at risk for no practical purpose is well worth the risk. Then I started writing about George Bush, while being determined not to insult anyone, but strangely enough I ended up insulting him anyway, even though all I had done was write a factual account of what he had done. Gee this blogging is tricky.

Come one! Come all! The Skeptic's Circle is in town!

The Skeptic's Circle is up and running at Time to Lean and I'm in it! Yah-hoo! Personally I think it's fascinating, but don't take my word for it, check it out for yourself. It's important to maintain a skeptical attitude, you know.

Crop Circles and Human Hoaxers

It has been brought to my attention that many sensible people believe that crop circles are created by much less sensible people using a length of rope, a wooden board and copious amounts of free time. While I explained below how shifting winds can produce crop circles and crop blobs, this can’t explain the many incidences of fields being flattened into much fancier designs. If we consider these cases carefully and apply Occam’s Razor, then the only logical conclusion we can reach is that most ordinary crop circles are created by shifting winds, but the more intricate designs that you can see displayed in many web sites dedicated to the paranormal are obviously created by UFOs piloted by Bigfoot, possibly as part of his continuing struggle against animated Japanese women in skin tight costumes.

I’ve been told that I have to write about politics if I want my blog to be popular.

I guess there may be some people who don’t think I’m entitled to write about U.S. politics as I am not an American myself, but I think that perhaps my position as an outsider may allow me to make some valuable observations that may not be readily apparent to American citizens.

For instance, to an outsider, it does appear that United States does have a bit of a problem with its deficit, which certain foreign investors think may result in a bit of a complete financial disaster. Also, we’re a little worried that the current heavy American presence in the Middle East may not be in the best long-term interests of all parties involved. And we’re a little concerned with the complete lack of leadership shown by the United States in many situations involving international cooperation. If at the end of the twentieth century the United States had wanted to lead the world, then all it had to do was lead. But now that opportunity appears to have been pissed away.

But I’m optimistic about the future. I look forward to the day when the United States can overcome the damage caused by shortsighted policies, live up to its ideals and once again become a guiding beacon to the people of the world.

Personally, I’ll just be glad when the expression, “I’m bushed,” goes back to meaning, “I’m really tired,” rather than, “I’m bleeding from my anus in a prison in Iraq.”

Jesus’ location found via logic.

I was sitting in my friend's car today when we passed a church. A church is a meeting place for members of the Christian religion, which originated in the Middle East. It first came to Australia about two hundred years ago, along with cricket, football and many other devotions. Despite differing in several respects from more traditional Australian beliefs, Christianity still remains fairly popular among those who are obsessed with the supernatural and almost all towns have at least one church.

In front of the church we passed was a sign that said, "TURN TO FACE THE SON AND THE SHADOWS WILL FALL BEHIND YOU.” Now this sentence becomes very interesting if you happen to know that the word "son" refers to Jesus, the son of God, who is a magician with many amazing powers. It is interesting because we can use this sentence to determine Jesus’ location. Now if everyone on earth who is currently in daylight turns so that the shadows fall behind them, there is only one place that Jesus can be, somewhere in space along a line drawn between the centre of the earth and the sun, extending from the equator to a maximum of about a sixth of a light year away.

Now some might say that Jesus could be located on the ground at the equator, but this is very unlikely as he would have to travel at approximately 1,670 kilometres per hour in order to keep pace with the noon sun. The shockwave caused by Jesus’ passage would destroy all structures in his path and cause the earth to become banded by a zone of destruction extending from the tropic of Capricorn to the Tropic of Cancer. Jesus is also unlikely to be found within the atmosphere, as he would be quite noticeable, careening through the air at supersonic speed. Nor is he likely to be near the earth as we haven’t been able to detect Jesus with telescopes. We know that Jesus must be within a sixth of a light year of our planet; otherwise in order to maintain his position he would have to travel faster than light and would therefore be a tachyon. It is also unlikely that Jesus is travelling at high relativistic speeds, as the radiation he would release when colliding with space dust would be detectable. Also, he would have to expend a phenomenal amount of reaction mass to maintain his position.

So logically, Jesus is most likely to be in the position that would require the least energy to maintain, but far enough from the earth so we wouldn’t have detected him yet. This would be in Earth’s orbit on the far side of the sun. This position could be easily maintained for over 2,000 years with no expenditure of energy whatsoever.

I propose the immediate start of a program to deploy space-based telescopes far enough away from the earth that they can detect Jesus in his orbit. Just how sensitive these telescopes would have to be in order to detect him is open to debate, as there is much disagreement over Jesus’ albedo, or how much light he reflects. Despite many representations of Jesus showing him to have a very high albedo indeed, historical data suggests his albedo is actually likely to be mid to low.

However, once Jesus is detected, it could be used as an argument against sending humans to mars. Putting people where shadows would not fall behind them if they faced Jesus could cause the son of God to pass through some sort of Roche limit of the faith and break into a circular cloud of debris. Personally however, I think he is much more likely to be forced to plunge into the sun and burn. Ouch! Poor Jesus!

Movies and Crop Circles (Warning! Contains spoilers for the well filmed but badly thought out movie, Signs.)

Since I wrote about how crop circles are formed, I've had some thoughts about a Mel Gibson movie I saw in which aliens used crop circles to help their invasion fleet navigate, on account of how latitude and longitude are so 17th century. At the end of this movie we discovered that the aliens' weakness was that water was a deadly acid to them. This is a very interesting weakness, because previously in the movie the aliens were running around in cornfields stark naked. I guess they were running so fast in an attempt to escape the dew point. I mean really, if you were going to visit a planet in which it rained acid, had oceans of acid, and you wanted to abduct life forms that sweat, spit and pee acid, would you do it naked? This would surely have to be one of the all time badly planned alien invasions in the history of the galaxy. "I'm sorry boys, but we forgot acid proof suits and the kill-o-zap ray guns, so you'll have no defence against humans peeing on you or cutting off your fingers with kitchen knives, but on the bright side, our pee is poison gas to them."

The movie ends with Mel Gibson's character having his belief in a kind and benevolent God restored. Which is a bit odd, because you'd think having seven foot tall, green, demonic creatures that emit poison gas attempt to abduct your family members would be more likely to reinforce your belief in Satan. Oh well. Perhaps in the sequel the aliens will have better luck when they return with advanced technology they stole off us, such as clothes.

How Crop Circles Are Formed

One of the neat things about Japan is the insistence on avoiding a false dichotomy between city and country. Many towns, cities and suburbs are peppered with small rice fields. From a height it's like looking down at a sliding tile puzzle in which someone has mixed together all the country and city pieces. One advantage of this is that it's easy to look down at a rice paddy from a high-rise apartment building and watch crop circles forming.

Now I’m sorry to disappoint some people but no flying saucers were involved. Nor did Bigfoot make an appearance and dance in a circle. And I have to regretfully inform fans of anime that no giant robot mechs piloted by young women in skin tight costumes took part in their formation either.

All that was required was a constantly shifting wind. Normally rice plants will bend in the wind but not break, for not only are the stalks springy, but they are closely packed and give each other mutual support. However, once one stalk is damaged and loses its springiness, it can become the straw that breaks other straws backs. Rather than springing up and blowing in another direction when the wind changes it will push against the backs of other straws and the extra weight can cause their stalks to become damaged and lose their springiness. Once a small patch of damaged plants has formed, the changing wind will cause the destruction to spread in a circle as plants are damaged from other plants leaning on them and also from not having undamaged plants next to them to help give support.

Sometimes the shape that results is a crop blob rather than a crop circle, but other times it is a very neat circle with the damaged stalks spiralling out from the centre, all woven together by the shifting wind. When I first saw crop circles being formed I assumed that all sensible people realized that was how they were made, but a quick Google search on crop circles has since convinced me that there aren't many sensible people out there.

Internal organization of blog note.

I'm moving a couple of slightly older posts up closer to the top of the blog for egocentric purposes. If you've already read them, try singing them this time so they'll seem fresh and new. If you haven't read them, there is no need to concern yourselves with this. You can go about your business. This is not the blog post you are looking for.

So bad

Q. Why do elephants have big ears?

A. Because Noddy won't pay the ransom.

The Sinister Moon - Or Possibly The Dextrous Moon, I'm not sure.

Several months ago I met a South Australian and sat in his kitchen and discussed astronomy. It wasn’t a very deep discussion. He told me that his cousin, who had gone to England, said that the moon was the opposite of what it was in Australia. I asked him to describe what he meant but unfortunately he didn’t have a clear idea of what his cousin meant and his description made no sense to me. I asked him to draw a picture and his pictures made no sense to me. Now I have travelled a fair deal and never noticed any difference in the moon that depended upon which hemisphere my eyeballs happened to be in. I was certain that there was no difference, but even after drawing my own diagrams and giving a lecture on the phases of the moon and setting up a flashlight and using an orange impaled on a pen and tied to a string so it would orbit his head, I couldn’t convince him that his cousin must be mistaken. Eventually I gave up and regarded him, despite his many other fine qualities, as being astronomically stupid.

But today I was reading an astronomy book and I realized what he was talking about, and what’s more it was a difference that I personally am not capable of perceiving. You see, he was a South Australian rather than a tropical Australian and his cousin had gone to England, which is also quite far from the tropics. Because the earth is curved the moon will usually appear quite low in the sky to South Australians and the English. But if the left side of the moon appears illuminated to the English, then the right side of the moon will appear illuminated to the South Australians as they will be facing the other way. This is something I never realized in my travels, because of a certain lack I have. You see, I can’t tell left from right.

For someone in the tropics the moon can appear quite high in the sky. If you were to watch the moon all night there while it is waxing, that is when the illuminated part is getting larger, then the lit part of the moon will appear to be on your left until it passes over your head and then you’ll turn to face it and the lit part will appear to be on your right. And when the moon is waning, that is the illuminated part is getting smaller, it will be vice versa. Or possibly I have this mixed up and it’s the other way around? It’s very hard for me to tell. Could someone who knows left from right please leave me a comment and confirm this for me?

Stupid Meme!

Here is a stupid meme I contracted off P.Z Myers and which was apparently coughed onto him by someone else. It consists of typing your first name followed by the word needs into Google and then putting the whole lot in inverted commas and then hitting search to find out what you need. According to Google I need the following:

Ronald needs to market his new beverage product...Petro-Fuel - Well that's true. I can't imagine anyone drinking it unless there was some really severe marketing going on.

Ronald needs a home where he gets a lot of attention, not a family that will place him in day-care. - Hear that, Mum? And no locking Mister Fluffy in the cupboard with me and saying that counts as attention.

Ronald needs his gun back - Yes, I have to go shoot space elevator ribbon so I can estimate how many days it might take to be destroyed.

Ronald needs a Passport - I already have one. When I applied for it, for some reason the mayor of my town hand delivered it to me on the same day, wished me luck and said he hoped I would be leaving the country soon. Talk about service.

Ronald needs to figure out how to get children more gym time - Simple. Just replace video game controllers with gearboxes from excessively large cars from the 70's and they'll get a good workout.

Ronald needs to work harder - Ha!

Ronald needs corporeal agents as badly as any other Demon Prince - Yeah, like I need corporeal agents as badly as Beelzebub does. I mean the guy is totally made of compressed flies. He can't even get a thick shake without working through an agent.

Ronald needs a minimum of 9 x 9 ft. for these appearances. - I'm not that fat!

Ronald needs 'ome beautys 'n grog to get the party started - Not with my radiant charisma, I don't.

Ronald needs to earn his wings to get into heaven. - And here I was thinking that rewiring the house while standing in a bucket of water would do it.

Ronald needs someone to search for hotels and caterers - I have a healthy appetite, all right? But I'm not so greedy I need someone to supply me with a constant stream of caterers on tap.

Ronald needs a blog - What do you think this is? The UNICEF home page?

Ronald needs it so he won't have to wear Bozo hand-me-downs anymore - But how could I afford to look this flash otherwise? But then I might be able to make some friends who aren't colour blind.

Ronald needs some information from you - Just your bank account details so I can get my father's money out of Nigeria.

Ronald needs to start blogging - Hello? Open your eyes! I ain't training kittens to play ping-pong here.

Ronald needs to show off and do it all by himself. - That's why I knocked back Joss Wheldon when he said he wanted to help me with my blog.

Ronald needs to borrow 32000 - 3000 - 200 = $28800 - Yeah, right. Do think I would be wasting my time doing this if I needed money?

Ronald needs help with selling the patent to his invention, the Oops! Cloth - Maybe Ronald needs to rethink the potential market for a cloth, that when pressed in the hand, causes incontinence.

Ronald needs to be careful not to overlook the value of Nancy's heritage - I'm planning to sell her off to highest bidder at the soonest opportunity.

Ronald needs us to have faith - Oh definitely. Remember how good things were back in the middle ages when everyone had faith?

Ronald needs to give em the damn storyline - They can have my storyline when they pry it from my cold, stiff, cerebral cortex.

Ronald needs another hand - If I had one growing out of my lap there would be so many practical jokes I could play.

Ronald needs to sue Micky D's for making him obese - Yeah, but Micky D's family are suing me for cannibalism.

Ronald needs a pancho - Yes, that's right on my list, right after getting stung by a platypus while dirty dancing with a box jellyfish on top of a bull ants' nest.

Ronald needs prayer for protection - Not when evil things just bounce off my charisma, I don't.

Ronald needs to keep Sony out there for as long as possible. - Yeah, that'll make my Walkman feel sorry unravelling my tape, "1984: The Hot Ones."

Ronald needs no oath to bind it - A piece of string will do.

Ronald needs moderation here - Yeah, I'm a little too extreme. Like the time I demanded extreme moderation in government extremism.

Ronald Needs A Friend - No I don't. I have one in the cupboard.

Ronald needs a transplant - Is this about transplanting a hand to my lap?

Ronald needs you to get naked, and get in the trunk. - Why on earth would I need you to do that? Unless of course you are a very small veterinarian and I want you to treat a very large elephant's nasal polyps. In that case, some Vaseline may be in order.

Ronald needs to grow up before he can win Hermione over - Oh great! Now the whole internet knows about me and Hermione.

Ronald Needs Help To Battle For Britain - Bounce for Britain, yes. Battle for Britain, no thank you.

Ronald needs a new look. Greasy Burgers - You want me to look like greasy burgers?

Ronald needs to be the smartest bear so people can tell him apart from his gluttonous twin brother Oliver. - My brother isn't called Oliver. He's called Chinboy.

Ronald needs another attorney if there is any hope for him to survive - Is this about the friend I have in the cupboard?

Ronald needs my money - But there are children in the developing world who need it more.

All Ronald needs is a girl, who's a clown and likes to eat at McDonalds - My gods, you're right. This is what's been missing in my life! If I had my own personal clown, no one would ever laugh at me again! And I could pay her in burgers.

Ronald needs to be edited, I think - Anyone want to help edit me, now that I've alienated Joss Wheldon?

Ronald needs time - Hello, I'm on the internet! This isn't exactly the behaviour of someone who's pressed for time.

Ronald needs to address his addiction and PTSD and possibly anger management - Anger? I don't have any problems with anger and I'll topologically invert anyone who says I do! Now shut up and pass me the horse tranquillisers.

The surface area of a bird - A trick question.

If my uncle told you that when he had been out walking he had spotted a bird that had a surface area of over fifty meters, how much do you think that bird would weigh?

Now this is an interesting question, because if you had a box with a surface area of fifty meters then that box would be over four meters across, four meters deep and four meters high and would have a volume of over sixty-four square meters. Now birds aren’t very dense creatures, but if but if you stuffed that box full of small birds so there was no space left over and then sat on the lid, that box would weigh over forty tons, or about as much as six and a half African elephants. But I’m not suggesting that this is something you should ever try to do on account of how stuffing all those birds in a box would be cruel. (And just for the record I’d like to say that I don’t think you should cut elephants in half either.)

Now generally, birds aren’t boxed shaped, and if anyone out there has bred a box shaped bird I would say you have a sick, sick, mind. (But still, do drop me an e-mail sometime and we’ll discuss making a fortune breeding square pigs.) But even if we make generous allowances for the fact that a bird will have a different surface area from a cube on account of having wings and legs and so on, we are still stuck with my uncle apparently seeing a bird that must have weighed at least as much as a small elephant.

Now does this mean my uncle has been picking and eating the wrong sort of mushrooms while out walking? Quite possibly, but you don’t know how annoying my uncle can be. The bird that he saw with a surface area of over fifty square meters could have been about the size of a chicken or perhaps a goose. You see, he’s crazy enough to include the feathers in his calculation of surface area.

A typical bird will usually have thousands of feathers. A Canadian goose can apparently have 33,000 in winter, which seems rather excessive to me. A feather used for fight is a shaft with two rows opposite each other of what resemble stiff hairs growing off it, making up the blades or vanes of the feather. The stiff, hair-like structures are called barbs and each barb has two rows of tiny extensions that they use to hook onto each other like the teeth on a zipper and hold the feather in shape. In fluffy feathers, or down, the barbs aren’t as stiff and they don’t hook onto each other as they are for keeping the bird warm rather than for flying. Feathers, with all their barbs and tiny extensions, can give the average bird an enormous surface area, if like my uncle, you are annoying enough to include them in your calculations and want to ask a trick question.

Advice I received in high school

When I was in high school we had a subject called English that we all had to take. I'm not sure why, as everyone in the entire school was actually already capable of speaking English. When I pointed this out to the English teacher and asked why we were wasting our time with him, he said that we had to study English in order to be able to communicate. Personally, I thought that the conversation we were having was evidence enough that I already knew how to communicate and asked if I could go and finish my science homework instead of attending his class. He said that I had to stay and learn to communicate instead, because even if someone became the greatest scientist in the world, it wouldn't do him any good if he couldn't communicate his findings to other people.

I have spent a great deal of time pondering the words of my English teacher and have always wondered, how could anyone become the greatest scientist in the world if they couldn't communicate with other people? Did he think someone could turn up at a research laboratory and say, "Nerrrhhh! Urrrhhh! Murrhhhh! Dahhurrrhhhhhh!" And the laboratory technicians there would say, "Well I can't understand what he's saying, but he could be the greatest scientist in the world, so we'd better let him in to play with the expensive scientific equipment."

Intelligent Designers are losers, I mean losing!

One of the lovely people who left comments on this blog, Anonymous, has pointed out something very interesting. But before I tell you what it is, I’d just like to say what a beautiful name Anonymous is. It sounds like it should be the name of a Greek hero or something. Anyway, my hero, Anonymous, says that the term irreducibly complex means, “it won’t work without all its parts,” and that it is used more on proteins and enzymes than body parts.

I have noticed creationists, generally ones who call themselves Intelligent Design proponents, talking a lot about little itty bitty things like proteins and enzymes and bacteria flagella and the blood clotting cascade and so on lately. I think there is a good reason for this. I think it’s because the creationists are losing. They are losing big time. Nowadays people are getting pretty educated and even children can point out plenty of holes in the creationist’s arguments. And these days creationists aren’t allowed to slap a ten year old who points out that dinosaurs lived over 64 million years ago, not six thousand.

So creationists had to find something new with which to confuse and bamboozle people and they found it in the internal processes of cells. Plenty of people know that dinosaurs and people didn’t coexist, but how many people know how a bacterium’s flagellum could have evolved from a structure used to cut holes in cell membranes? Not many, so convincing the average Joe and the average Eileen that the structures must have been designed and couldn’t have evolved isn’t that hard. Of course biologists know there is no reason why cellular structures couldn’t have evolved and indeed you can go to P.Z. Myers site and enjoy him energetically debunk Intelligent Design until he’s frothing at the keyboard. Due to the efforts of people like P.Z. and ten year olds who aren’t afraid to ask questions, Intelligent Design creationism will eventually go the way of geocentrism. When you think about it, any god that feels the need to hide behind a bacterium’s flagellum isn’t a very impressive entity at all.

Acoelomorph Flatworms – The Cinematic Extravaganza

I’ve just finished reading Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale. It was a very interesting book, but it did take me a while to get to the end. As I worked my way through it, I experimented with several different ways of reading. First I tried sub-vocalisation, and heard the words in my imagination as though I was listening to a lecture in my head. But this was too slow. Although I could sub-vocalise faster than normal talking speed, I couldn’t go very much faster, probably because I was using parts of my brain that are involved with producing and understanding spoken words and they insisted that speech simply does not occur at very high rates, although imagining the lecture was given in a high pitched and squeaky voice helped somewhat.

Next I tried bypassing speech and letting the words tumble into my brain as concepts rather than sounds. This went a lot faster, although I had to be careful not to start daydreaming. Then I gave up on not day dreaming and concentrated on picking out ideas from the text and day dreaming about them. Then I developed the cinematic technique, which involves turning what I read into a blockbuster movie inside my brain, complete with computer generated special effects and talking bacteria. And so now, for your cinematic pleasure, I present to you:

Chapter 27: Acoelomorph Flatworms- the movie!

Tezza the Tapeworm, president of the Platyhelminthes Society, stared in horror with his nonexistent eyes at the acoelomorph flatworm before him. “What do you mean the Platyhelminthes aren’t a true group, let alone a phylum! You can’t break us up like this and put us in different groups! I need the acoelomorph flatworms! How am I supposed to defeat my nemesis, Phylum Porifera Man without them?
“Oh shut up, you gutless wonder who lives in a gut,” said the flatworm as it stormed out of the room very, very slowly. “We’re better off without you. And besides, Acolelomorh Flatworms is a much better name for a band than Tezza the Tapeworm and the Paltyhelminthes. Goddammit, Tapeworm! What happened to you? You used to be something! You used to have an anus! But you gave it all away to live inside other people’s anuses.”

Meanwhile, 630 million years ago, the world was turned upside down. Terra Australis was in the Northern Hemisphere and suffering an acute identity crisis on account of its name meaning, “Southern land.” Enormous ice sheets groaned and covered the sorts of things enormous ice sheets generaly do. In the warm tropical sea that covers most of Antarctica, a progressive flatworm is having a conversation with a conservative flatworm.

PROGRESSIVE: It’s six hundred and thirty million years in the past! It’s time for us to evolve into something interesting! First of all, I’d like to develop an anus, and after that, Freudian psychology.

CONSERVATIVE: We don’t have anuses? No wonder I’ve been feeling constipated. So what do we do when we need to excrete?

PROGRESSIVE: I don’t know about you, but I use my mouth.

CONSERVATIVE: Well no wonder you talk crap. Personally, I’m just going to laze around in the sea for few hundred million years, ride out the Permian extinction, and then basically give evolving a miss until the sun turns into a red giant and the oceans boil. Oh sure, I’ll change my body chemistry to deal with environmental changes, but I’m not planning any real deviation from my basic body plan.

PROGRESSIVE: Loser! I’m going to develop the ability to parasitise livers right now! (Sound of a flatworm mutating.) There! I did it! Talk about lucky!

CONSERVATIVE: Yeah, you are a bit of a fluke. Now all you have to do is wait around for someone to evolve a liver.

PROGRESSIVE: Bugger! I should have known macro mutation never works!

Koalas: Cute Scourge of Nippon!

My sea monkey friend, or rather, my friend who has sea monkeys, (as I have not yet befriended any of the brine shrimp that may be our future, aquatic, alien masters) has mentioned to me that she doesn’t think that koalas are a feral scourge upon the face of Japan as I alluded to in my previous post. She has even gone as far as to support this contention with, “facts,” and, “evidence.” Such as the, "fact," that, to a first approximation, there are no eucalypt trees in Japan that are necessary for the survival of the koala species. But this rather naïve viewpoint ignores the existence of Japan’s huge pharmaceutical manufacturing base that could easily be subverted to produce the aromatic chemicals required for their survival by an organized cable of koalas. But leaving such speculation aside, I prefer to believe the evidence of my own eyes.

At one point while in Japan I was standing before a set of elevator doors in a shopping centre, waiting for them to open so I could go upstairs to play the Village People’s Y.M.C.A on the electronic taiko drums, as was my habit. I was caught completely unawares when the elevator doors opened to reveal a young girl wearing a koala t-shirt and a koala backpack, with koala ribbons in her hair and carrying a koala purse in her suspiciously doubled thumbed hand. The waves of cuteness emanating from her body lifted me off the ground and hurled me twenty feet through the air until I smashed into a taco-yaki, or octopus ball, stand. So forgive me if I’m not as complacent as certain sea monkey owning people are about the koala threat Japan faces.

I also had to pay for the octopus balls that were damaged, but fortunately they weren’t too expensive when you consider the fact that at best each octopus only has two.

Worst ethnic joke ever.

Q. Why didn't the Japanese business man go bobbing for french fries?

A. He didn't want to lose face.

Prince Charles and the Gaia Hypothesis

Now some people are very much against the idea of royalty and disapprove of the fact that Prince Charles will some day be the soverign of a significant portion of the world's landmass. Some people think he's not fit to be king, but I think he is very well suited because we can show Prince Charles to school children and say, "This is why we vote," and the value of democracy will immediantly become clear. In the United States it's a little more difficult. There they show George Bush to the children and say, "This is why we vote," and the whole issue becomes extremely confusing.

One of things Prince Charles apparently likes to do is talk to trees, and this is all fine and well and a bit of a royal tradition. However, confusion can sometimes arise when he talks to people. I haven't paid a great deal of attention to his public announcments on account of how I'm easily bored, however I think that he, or perhaps just some of his friends, are supporters of the Gaia hypothesis.

The Gaia hypothesis is the idea that all the different forms of life in the world cooperate together to form communities and ecosystems, and each organism is actually just part of a greater whole. Now someone with a degree in zoology, or possibly a five year old, may point out that lions and antelope don't really cooperate, in fact the antelope tend to run like hell away from the lions, and sometimes put out a lion's eye with a hoof when they get caught. But a supporter of the Gaia hypothesis might say they are cooperating in a greater sense in that if the lions didn't hunt the antelopes, the antelope's population would explode and soon there would be no grass left and they would be worse off than they were with the lions, and so they are actually cooperating together in much the same way as different parts of my body cooperate together to create me. Personally I don't find this idea very convincing on account of how when my liver gets hungry for nutrients, it never leaps up through my neck and eats my brain.

Intelligent Design, Eyeballs and Mad Scientists with Scalpels!

A post I wrote on Intelligent Design is now in the Tangled Bank! How cool is that? I’ve really arrived as a blogger now. The total number of comments my blog has received has more than doubled today. In the comments the subject of eyeballs were brought up. Now personally I like eyeballs and happen to have two of them myself. I’m very attached to them. (Mainly via the optic nerve.) I happen to know a lot about their internal structure on account of a cheap pair of glasses I used to have that under the right conditions would reflect the inside of my eyeball for my visual delight. Often when I was riding my bike in the rain at night a ghostly image of my own retina would be laid on top of everything. It was like cycling through my own aqueous humour.

Intelligent Designers, or as I tend to think of them - creationists, are also fond of eyeballs. In discussion they love to pull out eyeballs (ouch!) and say that they are an example of irreducible complexity. I’m not sure just what irreducibly complex means, but from the way they use it I think its meaning is, “I’m right, you’re wrong, so there, nyah-nyah-nyah!” They then might go on to say that eyeballs are comprised of a multitude of specialized parts, each of which is dependant upon the others to function and so the eye could never have evolved by any step by step process, because half an eyeball is useless.

This idea is has been dismantled by plenty of clever people, including my nighttime companion, Richard Dawkins. However I’d like to add my own macabre take on this.

If I were to take a scalpel to your eyeball and cut the muscles that control the focusing of the lens, then you wouldn’t suddenly go blind as this system was removed. Instead, you’d just lose the ability to focus on close objects, which is something almost everyone experiences, as they grow older. Your vision wouldn’t be as good, but you’d still have vision. If I were then to use my scalpel to disable your iris, again you wouldn’t go blind, you’d just find it hard to adapt to different light lev