TEdALOG Lite II

Fun For An Advanced One

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 23:25:10 PDT

And, a bit tongue in cheek, here's the definitive style guide for homo virtualis the next step in human evolution..

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First Bunnies Litter

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 09:00:53 PDT

The latest news from the cottage, more affectionately known as Possum Hollow - Peta Bunny and Eddie Rabbit have managed to produce what looks like around six very cute pink and wriggly little kittens.

I've resisted the urge to picke them up and check them out and count them, there's about six, and at least one will be black and white like Peta.

Interestingly enough, Peta picked the day after Bunday to deliver these little ones. Maybe our pets hate 'Caturday" and "Bunday..."

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Wild West Intarnets!

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 09:26:17 PDT

Around three decades ago, a new world opened up. It was the wild west, but no-one realised it. Starting with computers and on to computer based communications systems (CBCSs) like bulletin boards, a whole ecosystem was born, modified by the inhabitants, and still evolves to this day. Look, this gets all complicated and meta, so either bear with me or click another link for a few minutes, okay?

Nothing evolves by itself, it evolves with its environment. And the environment is affected and changed by the organism. Which causes further evolution of the organism. In the case of humans, it has been said that our information and communication forms part of our evolution. (Please note that there is also tacit acknowledgement of that organism/environment interaction evident, they even title it " . . . the planet has entered a new phase of evolution . . . ") I'll add "technology" to those evolution indicators.

Remember that all our technology is obtained from our environment. The ideas may have come from our brains, but the material to make those ideas concrete was obtained from the environment. So far, this follows pretty closely to my scenario - we evolve, get ideas, turn parts of our environment into the manifestation of our ideas, and those manifestations (and the lacunae created in the "natural" environment) become part of our new environment. We evolve to be more fit to survive in the new environment.

So, the CBCSs and now the Internet have become a new part of our environment. And we've already evolved tools to deal with this new environment, made changes to it, and to ourselves. We've also brought with us a large dollop of the opportunism which got us to this point in the first place, the people who swindle and con and cheat and steal are now firmly ensconced in cyberspace and making their livings as they have always done, by taking it from the rest of us.

Now we come to the really tricky bit. (And you thought we'd gotten past that hey?)

Let's say I work at writing for a living, articles and copy and so forth. What I'm doing is not rocket science, and I sometimes feel like I'm taking money under false pretenses for something I enjoy doing and can't imagine being difficult for anyone. So am I a con-artist or working for an honest wage? It's a job in the online ecosystem, after all.

Now let's ratchet that up a notch. Suppose I write a really lousy piece, but convince my patron to pay me an ultra-premium rate for it. Now am I a thief, or just a person who writes really well and gets along well in the ecosystem? What about if the person I sell my article to for a pittance, on-sells that article to a large organisation for millions of dollars? Are they a con, exploiting me, exploiting the large organisation, or just good businessmen? And suppose someone helps themselves to the text, sitting there on my hard drive, and then on-sells it to that large organisation? What are they? Suppose they get their million dollars for my article, and anonymously pay me twenty dollars, which is twice what the agent might have paid me?

See? the only difference between a thief and a businessman is the office. Only now, online, there's even less of a difference between the thief and the businessman. It kind of begs a question or two about this new online environment, doesn't it?

Well, firstly, crime as a business has pretty much evolved at the same rate as business has, no matter if that was robber barons vis a vis dukes, pirates as contrasted to merchant shipping, terrorists vs military, Mafia vs business, bikies and police. Being surprised that online criminals have business training and do risk analyses is a bit of a comic relief, really. I'd venture to say that at the head of any cyber crime outfit you care to trace, there will be a business-suited person at the head somewhere.

We're stuck, because actually, either side is a valid means of surviving, either side of the equation equals staying alive. One way is a bit less sociopathic, it's true, but survival is a tricky thing, do you consider yourself successful if you perish but your two offspring survive, or is success measured by personally staying alive to generate lot of offspring, but maybe conning some of them out of their living?

Online, is it reasonable to expect "someone" to pursue and prosecute "criminals" much as has been happening in the real world? And how much good has that prosecution done in the real world? Are police effective? Or is it true, as some wit once said something like "a police force is an army that you turn on your own population?" (And no, I don't remember the precise quote or whose it is.)

My point is that we've already evolved to adapt to the new environment; we have people to whom the question "what's on the TV?" will trigger reaching for their 3G cellphone rather than look for a paper or TV guide. When someone asks me what he weather will be, I go to www.wunderground.com and open my favourites. If someone asks me a question, my first thought isn't "library!" - it's "google it!"

Invite people over for an impromptu dinner and movie? SMS them, or post on their wall. These are the evolved. How are they affecting this online environment? Well, they create new killer sites, introduce other people to those sites, and then move on when the environment is full of newbies and oldies...

The equation is - 200-300 years ago, a family would move into an environment, and alter a chunk of it to provide them with sustenance. Built that log cabin from the trees in the environment, levelled some of the land and grew crops and ran livestock. In time, the environment changed to include people who'd adapted to the next stage of this evolution, large farms with controlled environments, to provide for the towns and cities.

Now we've created computers from natural resources, then connected those together using energy from natural resources, then created internets and LANs from that. At each stage, we're using one form of resources and converting them to another form.

Even on today's quite stringently managed farms, the original occupiers of that environment keep popping up, from bacteria and fungi to large animals. What worries me and will keep me looking over my virtual shoulder for a long time yet, is the native wildlife online - who knows what business-suited native critters will appear on the Internet when it evolves a bit more?

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Hi Honey, I'm...

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:38:31 PDT

. . . not home apparently. I love my GPS and I'm pretty sure that between it and my road maps I can confidently find 90% of the places I need to, weird unmapped cul-de-sacs and odd split one-way streets excepted. But would I send in a wrecking crew to just GPS co-ordinates without giving them a sanity check, at the very least? Wonder how they'll solve this...

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Sunny Bunday

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 08:40:32 PDT

Today wasn't a midwinter day. It can't have been. And yep, it's almost two weeks after midwinter, but that's no excuse for a lovely day that today was. T. was down for the weekend and we let the rabbits have an extended run (first one for ages due to the rain and bad weather) on the front garden. And sat in the sun ourselves, soaking up the sunshine and blue skies. Apparently Perth averages (!!) eight hours of sunlight a day, putting it firmly in the upper range of sunshine cities. Today was such a day, just beautiful.

Next door has two shi'itzu cross looking dogs, and today they were out at the same time as the rabbits. Eddie is generally the most timid little guy but today he figured out what fences are for. To let him sneak up and sniff noses with a barking little dog that looks like it has a healthy splash of Ewok in its ancestry... We watched him, getting a little closer each time, realising that he was still safe, and then finally just flaunting it to those noisy yappy neighbours.

Pity that the smaller Ewok has figured out how to squeeze under their gate and wander into our yard. Mind you, the rabbits' piece of the front yard is fenced all around but Eddie still got a shock and hightailed for the pile of branches that are stacked up waiting to be thrown out in the next garden refuse pickup. His second scare for the day, the first having been when the neighbour across the road blipped the accelerator of his big bore V8 restored Falcon just as Eddie was throwing a nice high binkie jump. I'd never actually seen a rabbit get traction on thin air before that...

Better news: We drove through the new Bunbury highway works later in the day and the lines are all painted, traffic lights are all installed but not switched on, and all that's missing from the look of it is to remove the traffic barriers and throw the switch. This means Bunbury is now just a straight freeway ride away from Perth, because basically the freeway becomes the new highway from what I can see. Also means that I can get on the highway and be about an hour in either direction from either city. Also means that if I decide to move southwards I have a nice straight run for Duckzilla, too.

By the way I'm looking for a piece of land that I can lease for cheap, something that would let me drop garden and crop areas among some otherwise unused bushland and maybe run a few livestock, preferably southwards of Bunbury a bit and inland, if any of you know of anything like that please put me in touch. There's a nice cheese or a few links of farm style sausages in it for the spotter... %)

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Heartfelt Plea From A Special Needs Mom

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:32:33 PDT

A heartfelt plea from a special needs mom:

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Something Said In Haste: Utegate

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 03:45:34 PDT

The biggest thing Malcolm Turnbull has done wrong here is to break the cardinal rule:

If you want something done, do it yourself.

He took what I can only assume was a piece of bait handed to him in order to damage his credibility, and ran with it. Without checking it all out himself first...

I think someone will end up charged with a crime here, so Opposition claims that Mr Rudd is using the government machine to intimidate are not really well founded. One of the prime reasons for the government and the criminal investigative and prosecution systems is to investigate, identify, intimidate, and prosecute people who have committed a crime. An email is a document, and forging a document, and uttering a forged document, are all crimes.

The unfortunate thing for Mr Turnbull is that he's now come off as being a premature utterer. Would I vote for the Opposition knowing he'll be leading the country if I do? Most emphatically not! Imagine this scenario:

Kevin Rudd: (on the phone speaking Arabic he's just learned at TAFE and disguising his voice with an Osama burr) Meester Turmbool? I just want you to know that I have slept with your wife, meester Turnbool. And also, my cadre of 72 virgin suicide bombers, they also have slept with your wife and your mamma! To show them how pointless life is, meester Turnbool!"

Malcolm Turnbull: Hello? Defence Department? I want us to declare war on Iran, Iraq, the Emirates, and any other place where they believe in 72 virgins and suicide bombing! That'll show them!"

I rest my case...

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Not Green, Child...

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 02:26:39 PDT

This should be in the Zencookbook Blog but it's also funny, so it's here. Spotted among emails I get from one of those recycle/don't waste style email lists is this message:

"Sharp Carousel Microwave 32l works ~ just upgraded to silver one to match new kitchen location: xxxxxxx"

Someone using a green recycle email list to feel better about buying a microwave just to match the kitchen decor is quite funny. After all, the whole ethos is to save resources and save wastage.

Even funnier? Their email address: "earthgreenchild@xxxxxxx.xxx" ....

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Some Kind Of Veges, At Any Rate.

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 01:23:11 PDT

Spotted scrolling by on the chat at Evony, server 6:

"Anyone want to join a allince? just let me know! we are the saveges"

Hehehe really?

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Super. stition.

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 09:10:28 PDT

I don't know where you stand on the touchy subject of religion. Some people regard it as an absolute truth, others as a superstition. I don't know where I stand on the topic of an unknown, unknowable, intrinsic force of nature that has to be taken on faith and apparently is how the Universe was made. Oh wait - that could be called God OR The Big Bang...

You see how deeply troubling this topic can become? If you allow yourself to believe in The Big Bang, then you have to accept that Schroedinger's Cat is both dead and alive and that you - yes you, you murdering scum! - cause it to either live or die by merely looking at it. And if you believe in a spirit named God, then you also have to admit that ghosts, evil spirits, and all the accoutrements of superstition are equally possible.

One thing you should not do, however, is change your language on account of it. That would be plain idiocy - oh wait - America. What was I thinking? Of course it's normal over there...

America - and, increasingly, Australia - is a place where they debate such deep and vexing questions such as "should nursing mothers be allowed to flop a boob out in public, maybe where other people are trying to have dinner?" and coming up with the answer "Yes! Yes! We must not impede population explosion!" yet if someone drops his wanger out in a park at 3AM on the walk home (to avoid having to drive home drunk because by then no effing buses are running) he can be arrested for "public indecency" even if there isn't any public around for miles. It all makes perfect sense doesn't it? And I mean, that is despite knowing that urine has better purposes than to provide a job for some sewage treatment worker...

As the good little prudes we are, we know that God created The Big Bang so that we would have clothes to wear and water to waste on flushing our piss. Because if that's not the Meaning Of Life, The Universe, And Everything, then we may as well throw caution to the wind and stop burning witches and black cats...

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Curds, Cows, And Whey Whey Away.

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 09:32:12 PDT

I guess if you check TEdAMENU from time to time you'd have noticed that I've begun making soft style cheeses. These are curdled using citric acid, lemon juice, or vinegar, each of which give their own flavour to the cheese, and which you'd know from the taste of soft cheeses like cottage cheese.

It makes for pretty small curds too, which leads to a crumblier and drier cheese. So I'd love to source the enzyme rennet from some local stores. What rennet does is to curdle the milk more slowly, leading to the whole milk setting into one large curd and a lot of liquid whey. Then you can cut the curds into any size you want, controlling the smoothness and hardness of the finished cheese.

Wanting to be able to say I've sourced the rennet and the information locally, I went to Borello Cheese in Oakford and asked there if they obtained their rennet locally and if so, if their source sold hobbyist quantities. The most unhelpful and frankly hostile shop assistant I've ever had to deal with, any thought I'd had of actually buying any of their product went out the window as she basically told me to rack off and she wouldn't pass my question on to anyone else who might be able to tell me, either.

I tried to phone the next day hoping to catch someone with slightly more manners and a damn sight more interpersonal skills and got the same cow again, so I've had zero luck so far. I don't know what her problem is, but I tell you what, the company could do worse than sacking her with prejudice. Did she think I'm going to start a rival creamery in a one bedroom cottage with an electric hotplate to cook on? Pu-lleese!

This week I'll be asking a few of the friendlier local creameries, and Borello can basically go suck the whey off my curd knife.

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Scrappy V Leaves The Fold

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Sat, 30 May 2009 10:58:22 PDT

Saturday, after a bit of inner struggle and some thinking, I finally sold Scrappy V, my little Vmoto scooter. Well, the inner struggles happened a few weeks ago, with Saturday being the culmination.

Scrappy's gone to a nice owner, lovely person and I'm sure it will get a good life being someone else's shopping and get about town machine. I know I had Scrappy for almost three years, and it served me well during that time, being my work transport, shopping transport, and getaway machine when I needed to get - well, away...

But since moving to "South Beyonderup" six months ago, I also know that I haven't been able to justify keeping that scooter. I was riding it only to keep the cobwebs off, and since I really am looking for other places in the country to live and maybe even permaculture farm, a little scooter with tiny wheels will maybe not be the best choice of transport.

Ciao to one of the most fun machines I've had the opportunity to own in a long time!

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These Are NOT The Best...

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Tue, 26 May 2009 20:39:07 PDT

Have you checked out Second Life? By now, you either have, or perhaps aren't at all interested. Whatever. I had a few months of enjoying SL, then operated a sim for another few months, but finally, Linden Labs' creeping greed and unwillingness to fix useability issues in favour of adding ever more and more buggy features led me to give it up as a bad joke.

And not just me - many long term sim owners are just abandoning their holdings and walking away. So it's surprising to hear LL talking about the "stable economy" in SL. Because, of course, the place is driven by a constant flow of Real Life money, going from residents to sim owners to LL. And we all know about the famous "cratering" RL economy don't we? Many sim owners abandoned SL because of this reason. Many more will do so before this year is over, I'll bet. So the talk of a stable economy in SL is bullshit, sorry.

I also have some news for Linden Labs - if they halved their prices it would still not be worth it in the foreseeable future. With lovely clustering and multiprocessing systems such as Hadoop running on Ubuntu linux it surely can't be long before someone realises that a "sim" is a useful unit of virtual real estate but the limitations on it are purely artificial, and by running several server clouds each performing some specific part of the VR process they could have a faster and more reliable system than LL does, for 1/10th the price.

Such virtual sites will become more common, and will outpace Linden Labs' efforts, inevitably. They will become as common as websites were ten years ago, and many enterprises (as mentioned in some other articles of mine recently) will be run using such sites as their core. As is already proven in SL, many will actually perform services in that virtual environment, some will sell RL items and services using the virtual environment much as we use a website today to sell everything from books to handcrafts, coffee cups to cars.

Having positioned themselves, LL will end up like AOL, large, top-heavy, and a dinosaur in under five years, extinct in, what was it, eight? They should have taken a leaf from Obama and Rudd, and put incentives in place, both fiscal and technical. Then a few more people might believe that SL is at least as good as Australia and China at insulating the effects of the financial crisis...

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We Are The Best!

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Tue, 26 May 2009 09:58:08 PDT

Before you all shrug off Rudd as a dudd, please take a moment to let this sink in. Of all the countries in the world, Australia is the one least affected by the Recession. ANY amount of future debt is fine, provided it cushions the here and now. There's not much point having money in the piggy bank for a ravaged country, better to do as we have done and go for it, and let tomorrow take care of itself. For all we know, tomorrow there may be a whole different economic system in play, anyway...

Yes the recession has hit hard here, with mining jobs falling to the economic scythe, tourism dollars drying up, and the real estate and rental market in a mess. But we're still managing to keep more going around and around than many - no, most - other countries of the world. And that's not some lucky fluke, it's because we've been steered largely in the right direction.

I was on the point of giving up on our PM, I really was. but maybe we need to give him a shot, and maybe ask the contrary few like Mr Turnbull to put it back in their pants and let K-Rudd do his job. Who knows, we may be pleasantly surprised...

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Spaghetti Cabling

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Tue, 26 May 2009 09:58:53 PDT

Compare and contrast. Discuss it if you like. is there a reason FSM and IT seem to go hand in noodle?

I've worked on contract in one of these sort of server rooms. The only reason I'm not scarred for life is that I was able to tell myself that I only had to work there six weeks...

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Shot At A Knife Fight...

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Sun, 24 May 2009 18:13:34 PDT

Austrian police (?) say an Indian Guru has died following gunshot wounds. During a knife fight. WTF?

Well, that was the JJJ report, anyway. Turns out they were not reporting the whole truth. Reading a report by an ironically more correct source than JJJ indicates that there was apparently also at least one gun involved.

The way this radio station reported it, you'd have had to assume that there was just a knife fight and therefore the fatal gunshot would have had to come from Austrian Polizei, which would (when you think about it) provoke an international religious incident.

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Some Bank Is Concerned For The Security Of My Banking Details

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Sun, 24 May 2009 09:51:54 PDT

And of course, I'm touched by their concern and immediately compliant to their authority.

Dear Bank - I am in receipt of your email dated this instant, requesting me to "update and verify" my information, no doubt including my PIN and account numbers I suppose, but since it's you that's asking I guess that's all right:

Dear xxxxxxxxx Bank member,

For your protection, we have limited access to your account until additional security measures can be completed. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Please update and verify your information by checking the link below: http://headcasehats.com/users/sandra/.limited/account/index.html
*** if you can't open this secure link copy to your internet browser

We thank you for your prompt attention to this matter. Please understand that this is a security measure intended to help protect you and your account. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Sincerely,
xxxxxxxxx Bank Account Review Department
------------------------------------
Copyright © xxxxxxxxx Bank of Australia 2009 ABN 48 123 123 124

Oh okay. I understand that this is just a security measure intended to stop anyone stealing my information by sending me to some website with some un-bank-related name, like, oh, say, headcasehats.com and of course I'll do whatever you say because after all, I don't even bank with you. So I promise to supply you with the details of all my other bank accounts so that you can check them with the other banks...

Honestly - is there some unwritten rule out there that says every phishing email has to be written by phucking phuckwits who think everyone else is an idiot too? Is there some law of nature that requires idiots to give clear and unambiguous warning that they are idiots who think you're an even bigger idiot? Come on phishers - at least look like you're making an effort...

I can just imagine this particular silver tongued devil sitting back waiting to the billions to start pouring in from all those banking details. "I don't get it, Clem. I wrote it all purty with real lawyerese stuff in it, but it's almost like they're all sitting back laughin' at me!" and with that sits back with head in hands, shattered and disillusioned.

Psst! Boy! I got a link here for you! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect guaranteed to point out what your problem is!

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Having Just Seen Angels And Demons,

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Sat, 23 May 2009 19:49:54 PDT

... the one thing that struck me was how many religious statues are holding sharp swords and spears...

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Job Ads No-one Checked

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Wed, 20 May 2009 22:39:51 PDT

When you're looking for a job, which ad would attract you more?

#1
Job 1: Senior System Administrator, great renumeration, centrally located.
#2
Job 1: Senior System Administrator, great remuneration, centrally located.

I know I'd rather have great income than a bunch of great numbers...

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Talking 'bout Every Other Generation

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Wed, 20 May 2009 19:24:39 PDT

It's another article by the young technopuppies , you know the ones, they aren't out there creating anything new to do with the Internet or anything, they're just using it and complaining like the little bitches they are... I'd love to ask if Gen Y'ners maybe don't fancy themselves a little bit too much, you poor precious li'l things...

See, you're the ones putting all your lives online there because as you say it's your Internet - and then putting the words into Aunty Jemima's (or whoever's) mouths that the oldies are concerned for your privacy. While at the same time yourself whining like a bitch that *anyone* can just read your stuff online, like, y'know, Aunty Jemima and mum and even dad - bless his inappropriate li'l heart.

You're such a liberated li'l generation though, putting your lives and thoughts and pictures and memoirs and brainfarts and stuff there. I like that, I have my stuff out there too, despite being a Boomer. I get what it's about, I like that I don't have to repeat my story about The Big One That Got Away, and The Time That Dog Nearly Ate My Balls. I love that I can send people to my bio pages or photobucket or the relevant blog article and they can find out as much about me as they want, without me having to laboriously repeat it all for them.

But you liberated li'l generation then get all effing precious precisely because everyone can read that online? (Everyone, in this case, meaning, like, your parents and relatives God bless their inappropriate li'l hearts?) Come on get a grip will yaz - and in the words of Ronnie Johns, how about a li'l bit of hardening the fuck up eh?

If we're to believe you and your mastery of high tech, you should have your parents on the ropes in this new medium. If that's true, then how come you have to drag your asses to complainfests like that article and all sit there in a kumbaya circle telling yourselves how "OMG my parents have doomed my Facebook / Twitter / MySpace / etc OMG epic fail"? Sounds to me like your parents have got you down for the count instead hey?

As the article also so kindly points out, the Boomers are a "demographic." That means they are a section of the population who together possess particular traits skills habits needs and desires. (Okay so they have a skill for interfering in your Facebook, a trait of being inappropriate, a habit misusing technology, a need for a shopping buggy, and a desire for that titanium Zimmer frame down at the local mobility aid store.)

That makes them, whether or not you personally approve, a section of the population. A section of the population that will get online, and who will log into FacebookSpace and all the rest.

And I agree - I watch many of them struggling with what to use that "silly Twitter thing" for and how to get a video from their childrens' childhood on Facebook -apparently just so they can "embarass" you, - and them not thinking for one moment that once it's uploaded, it's online somewhere forever. I watch them and want to beat them around the ears with relevant Clues or a Giant Cluebat.

But be fair to them, when they grew up there weren't even computers and gameboys, and many of them were brought up with the concept of "nerds" who developed complex pieces of flash high tech gear that needed a Doctorate Of Black Magic And Strange Thought Processes to operate and are thus clueless about whether or not they really can fax a VHS video to their cellphone so that their brother can burn it to DVD on his PC.

By the same token I've also seen a lot of Gen X and Gen Y bobbleheads who believe that the Secrets To The Intartubez are the magic incantations "LOLOLOL" and "OMGOMGOMG." Brainless airheaded packets of 404 drifting from one social networking site to another wanting to hang with cool people.

To all those groups I say FOAD - but instead of worrying that they might read my profile or post a NSFW video on my wall, I'll deal with them as individual cases and not label them with tags until they earn them.

One old tag from BBS and newsgroup days seems appropriate for them though, being "LAMER..."

And for all the whiny kids who think that snivelling is all it takes to make lamers go away and give them back their Internet, maybe the old tag "echo cop" is kind of peripherally relevant...

Important for you to remember is that another generation is coming along, who will be just as offended when you show up with a n00b avatar at their favourite Real Life server and drop inappropriate penis bombs. Learn to deal with your older generation, so that you can teach that skill to your kids...

Now get out there an' show me some Universal Peace And Love, man! %)

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Post Anno

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Tue, 12 May 2009 19:28:33 PDT

New post at TEdADYNE Systems. You all DO know that the rest of my blogs are to be found

<---- here in the sidebar (just scroll down a little bit)

don't you? And that you can also subscribe to the feeds, HERE via Feedblitz, or HERE to get the Tumblr version of them? Just sayin'...

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Volcans Get Social?

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Mon, 11 May 2009 02:56:12 PDT

The Social Ramifications of Volcanism? I thought they included cheating by developing unwinnable exam software, command of a starship for a few days, really bad planet bad hair day, really bad hair, and an attitude prob - . . .

Oh wait. That's Vulcanism . . . Sorry . . .

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Love On The (Lunar) Rocks

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Wed, 06 May 2009 22:18:14 PDT

Bonking. Among. Moon rocks...

I lead such a boring life in comparison. Also, of course, I am not in jail, and could still get a job anywhere that trust is required...

Things which annoy me about the story, in no particular order:

They stole something that had cost literally billions of dollars and considerable risk to people.
NASA hadn't done anything more with the rocks, they were sitting there being dead weight.
The rocks they stole, they contaminated and rendered useless, so now these are the world's most expensive useless rocks.
Collectors might still end up getting those rocks, sealing them into another dead space where they will once again achieve absolutely nothing. Because they forced NASA's hand really - the rocks can now sit and waste resources, or they can generate an income for NASA. Either way they will now be as useless to science as they were before the robbery.

That's the real crime here - all that material sitting in a sterile vault, doing precisely nothing for our knowledge. The interns are guilty of a crime too, but NASA in its buck-passing bureaucratic way has just made a shrine out of those rocks, no-one wants to use them for research because of the cost, but it's costing millions to keep them just doing nothing too.

A decision needs to be made that weighs the cost of maintaining that vault against the cost of using the rocks up to further scientific knowledge and progress. To me it's pretty obvious - those samples were brought home to study. Study them. If we want more samples, let's go get them. That way, we keep the space program alive and tuned-up, we have activity and things happening. What we have now is stasis.

On the idea of stasis. Just a thought, but suppose those rocks had had a trace of a virus or bacterium on them, then the interns would have had the first Space Flu... And on that idea, we know that a few decades ago our sterilisation procedures can't have been as good as they are today, and we know that bacteria and viruses have been shown to be capable of surviving in space. So if we went back for more moon rocks now, would they perhaps have a mutated strain of some organism on them that we put there decades ago?

When they put a moon base down and these organisms find some warmth and moisture (which they will, given that no airlock or decontamination procedure is repeatably perfect) then will we experience Lunar Flu when these future astronauts come back to Earth after a shift? Also keep in mind that if interns could steal and smuggle rocks out of that facility, how easily some staffer on the moon could sneak one down to Earth...

Basically - the story has shown that no matter what it is, no matter how good/bad/disastrous a result something may occasion, someone, somewhere, will do it, for some reason that seems valid for them. The human race is, indeed, screwed...

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Corns Anyone?

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Tue, 05 May 2009 22:45:57 PDT

I was idly looking at silly photoshopped gross foods produced by sick kids with poor senses of humour and social skills to match, (as one does,) and the thought suddenly came to me - whatever happened to the prevalence of corns? When I was a kid, there was a turf war on between manufacturers competing for the mighty dollars of people suffering this apparently crippling affliction. Everyone's auntie and uncle and the family dog seemed to have "damn corns" back then.

Nowadays - nothing. Dr Scholls is not flogging odd shaped plasters with ominous looking holes in them, there aren't any weirdly shaped plastic pegs and bits in the front of sock drawers, and no-one hobbles any more...

Not that I miss the departure of tylomas, not one bit. I was just wondering what has led to this mass change. Are our shoe fittings really so much better these days? The majority of people I know still buy their shoes at a shoe store, not get them custom made and/or fitted at a cobbler's. So in theory, there should still be thousands of pairs of ill-fitted shoes causing corns and calluses.

Have we perhaps developed materials that don't cause pressure sores? New cuts that somehow magically avoid pressing on sensitive toe joints? I know that I wear cushion socks a lot more these days, as they make shoes fit so much better - is it perhaps the prevalence of these? But a quick look in stores provides me with the best hypothesis:

Most shoes now are made with synthetics, cloth, soft plastics. The cut and shape of the shoes is far different from the clumsy efforts a cobbler or leatherworks shoe factory was able to form. Socks are available in a variety of materials, but I'm betting almost every material is less stiff and scratchy than the clumsier wollen and cotton socks of yesteryear. And pretty much no one darns socks any more, preferring to buy new ones more often.

And that last one is a deal clincher, when combined with the three others. Not only do shoes fit better and eliminate a lot of pressure spots, not only is the material much softer than dried animal skins, and not only are the socks softer and more durable and cushioning. But also, hole in socks developed in - pressure spots... Places where the leather pressed the sock tight between shoe and foot, and then of course we compounded that pressure by adding a course of thick darning thread at those spots...

Aside from the problems that synthetic shoe and sock materials cause in the way of tinea and foot odour, and the wasted resources of throwing out a "perfectly good pair of socks" (as my mother would have said) when they develop holes, slow gradual advances in technology and manufacturing have all but eliminated the humble corn.

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Old Fart's Recollection Of What Rain Was Like

noreply@blogger.com (teddlesruss dat who!) — Mon, 04 May 2009 17:39:59 PDT

Odderer and odderer. It's one way of describing our weather here in the antipodes. It's been brought into shapr focus with the Black Saturday bushfires which destroyed much forest, a lot of buildings, killed a terrifying number of people, and either killed or destroyed the habitats of uncountable and uncounted numbers of bush animals. Black Saturday has now been laid firmly at the feet of global warming, being due to drier seasons, hotter seasons, each year a little drier and hotter than the last.

But it's only the tip of an iceberg. (Which is probably rapidly melting...) Australia has been in a steadily worsening drought for decades. My family arrived in Australia in the mid 60's. We spent time in the south west wheat belt, and I was around 8 years old at the time. I remember (after coming from a place like Arabia it was especially noteworthy) that there was such a lot of rain, and so much that stayed green. Without irrigation... It was a miracle indeed, to me.

We then moved northwards, to the cyclone-prone regions, and I remember years where the differences in the two extremes surprised and awed me. SOOOOO much rain in the wet season, so dry and dusty in the dry!

Then I moved around a fair bit for a few years, certainly long enough to be able to see huge differences in weather patterns when I eventually moved back to those initial areas. Things were drier, warmer. In the wheatbelt, the zones of green had shrunk, perceptibly and inexorably. I learned then that Australia was in the grip of a drought. I saw it in the farmers who sold farms because yields couldn't be sustained, because their livelihoods were drying up.

In the late 80's I moved to the capital, a bit further south still. I was impressed with how a few degrees of latitude could make so much difference to the greenness of the vegetation, the lush growths seemed amazing to me. And gradually, over these next 20 years, I watched that verdant green also brown, the rainfalls become shorter and less in number. Now, the green lushness is hundreds of kilometers south of here.

In a way, I guess that if Australia's weather had been studied, global warming would have been detected and predicted decades earlier. If people had been able to foresee Black Saturday, perhaps some of the steps that are only just being belatedly taken now, would have been taken twenty years ago...

More importantly, if people would only look at the future now through the lens of knowledge we've built up, then it would already be a criminal offense to operate coal or other fossil-fuelled power stations or vehicles, there'd be severe punishments for polluting or wasting water, and the world economy would have been replaced entirely by some form of green points.

As it is, we are already too late with what we've so grandiosely planned, but are still not doing. No matter what we now do, our children look to be due for a period of blissful agrarian living, if indeed they survive. So long and thanks for all the fish, hey?

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