Hi ho

There are some days when the world has a definite "Oh, FFS!" air about it. Thoughts don't gel, arrangements are difficult, research leads to too many dead ends. Today is one such day, hence the old Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band number. You have to cheer yourself up somehow.

For weekends, everywhere

One from the very, very, early days of a mis-spent youth. Full volume. From one of the classic albums of all time.

Good Friday?

- Or as one man said as they were nailing him to a tree...

"I don't see what's so bloody good about this."


A rather simple shop assistant made the cardinal error of wishing me 'Happy Earth day'. My response was, "Am I supposed to find the nearest piece of dirt and wish it happy birthday?" Sorry, but it's Easter. I don't do fatuous crap for the gullible like 'Earth day'.

I really shouldn't take the piss out of the credulous idiots who think 'green is good'*, but dear god almighty they do sit up and beg for it so.

*Although if you can explain to me what is 'good' about regressing our technological base to pre industrial levels and the deaths of several billion people I'll be amazed. After I've called you a 'genocidal knobhead' to your face of course.

Playing

Tell you the truth, of late I've gotten bored with the idiocy of the current UK administration. What a bunch of losers!. Instead of fixing the economy they're whining apologies to all and sundry about what our ancestors did or didn't do. Just as bad as the last lot.

Then there's all the scare stories about things which might give you cancer if you have a specific genetic weakness and if you ingest 100 times the usual daily input in a very short time frame. Shock! Horror! Probe! Yawn.

As kind of an antidote to the above misery I've been spending cooking time playing with food. Mrs S came out of hospital with a liking for Jello (Jelly). So I have been obliging this revived taste. Being the inventive type, I've been trying things out (See picture) just because I can. Layering Jello is remarkably easy, and as you can see I've been embedding fruit in the dishes. Although I'm told Pineapple is a big no-no. Does something to the setting properties of the stuff we use over here I'm told. Have already tried chocolate (Dark chocolate doesn't work so well - too bitter). Strawberries are exactly right, and turning out a jelly mould without having the moulded jelly disintegrate or delayer is just a matter of the judicious application of hot water to the outside of the jelly mould. Dead easy, and the end result gets demolished with gusto.

Far too much fun for kids.

E Books

Over the past few days I've been looking at various means of expanding my library without choking up the house with bookshelves. Enamoured as I am with the sheer pleasure of handling words on good old low tech paper, I've got to thinking that my addiction for the printed word might need some modification. Whilst a good book is like a solid single malt, a good meal or a fine wine, there is something to be said for more workaday reading (Classed in my eyes like a reasonable plonk, a solid bacon butty, or a Jamesons) reduced in its physical bookshelf size.

My reading rate has been clocked around the 1200 Words per minute rate on average, although my typing remains at a lowly 15 words per minute max, despite all efforts to teach myself touch typing. This means I read. A lot. Always have done, from pulp Sci-Fi to Camus, Kafka and Voltaire and all stations in between. Including technical manuals. My parents were always critical of this need to read, but the more I got scolded, the more I wanted to curl up with whatever I happen to be reading in a cosy little corner. As a child I used to read underneath the blankets with a torch, hiding in the back seat of the car in the garage, while walking the dog, in bed, wherever. To me, part of heaven is an entire library all to myself with no chucking out time.

Ergo, one of the things I've been considering is a E-reader like a Kindle or similar for general leisure time reading. There's something called a Kobo which I found interesting, and a whole bunch of other E-readers from the petite and basic to Netbook size, many of them with their own web browsers built in. The only real issue is catalogue and flexibility. The last thing I want is a 'content incompatible' type warning when loading a pdf or similar from outside the e-readers host catalogue. If Barnes and Noble have what I want, but Amazon don't, I want to be able to read content from multiple suppliers. As an aside, I find all these 'locked down' formats a big turn off, I mean what's the point of buying something you can't port across to another media for your own private use? Whoever comes up with the closest thing to a multi-format reader may find a ready market in me. Expandable content is also a must, so I can dump stuff I'm really not interested in onto an SD card or via a Mini USB link to make room for others.

Thinking aloud, the text to speech thing I'm not interested in. I can read, so why the hell do I want anyone else to do it for me? Audio books are only for in the car on long road trips, which I'm not doing at the moment. Don't listen to Radio in the car, and have my own music (Mainly prog rock to classical) on a 4Gb data key. This is probably why the latest pop thing (Whatever recycled pap that currently is) kind of passes me by.

Replaceable batteries are also a plus, as the last thing I want is my workaday reading list rendered inaccessible because the e-reader battery has gone down quicker than a cheap hooker on payday, forcing repurchase of a whole new e reader (and catalogue of text). Electronics fail for various reasons, and catch you out even with the best possible backup and restore policies. Something which runs off a replaceable cell phone battery might be a good idea. A capacity of 1100mA sounds more than sufficient. If one can adequately power an ageing Nokia 6310i cell phone after nine years, then maybe I should be looking for one with that kind of option.

Despite my initial resistance to the idea, a quick arithmetical exercise quickly persuades me that an e-reader may be an economical proposition. Book shelves cost to build and fill, never mind the actual cost of the book itself. Say if I want to buy three months reading, say around twenty or so volumes, I need a new half bookcase a year. That's not including all the technical magazines and periodicals I like to browse for various snippets. Cost can ramp up into well over two hundred bucks a quarter just to feed my general reading addiction. That's even with bi-weekly visits to the library for one off reads. A couple of hundred for an e-reader followed by 3-5 bucks per download soon drops the average price of my word fix.

Although there's still a good deal of information sifting to be done based on portability, durability and sheer basic functionality, I found this list a good basic guide.

Pass it on

As an antidote to all those hair short wearing alarmist guilt mongers. Celebrate the human ingenuity that keeps most in the Western world warm and cosy by not turning out the light of the world. Human achievement hour.

Feel free to copy and pass on (Didn't put pictures of the Internet and computing stuff because I couldn't find any images I thought were suitably sexy).

Yeah...... tools

To help ameliorate that yawning feeling of despair many in the UK may be feeling after finding out that the latest budget was more of the same pain repackaged, here is a great song and an amusing video. Oh, and great tools, yeah?

Even if it does get cut a bit short at the end. Now I need a lie down in a darkened room.

Fear and loathing

Now I've been drinking, so the following post may be even less lucid than my usual febrile ravings. However, I think I'm at that nexus that falls under the category of 'in vino veritas'

One of the problems I currently see with humanity in general is that we live in a near perpetual state of fear. We're trouser fillingly terrified about everything. There are some folk so scared that they can't set foot outside their own front door. We're scared of what the neighbours think of us, what our parents or family think. We're petrified for future generations or shitting ourselves about the state of the planet, which incidentally can do quite well without us.

Well the Bill Sticker take on it is; "Auchtahellweit!" Mind you, that's easy for me to say. I've faced my fear and stepped on its twinkling little toes. Not that I'd readily do it often - jeez louise - I'm not bloody stupid. Had I been an old scaredy puss, me and Mrs S would never have even considered emigration.

The problem is that we let irrational fears rule our lives. Fear of strangers; most surprisingly nice - providing you aren't going to try and be all huggy with the weapon toting basket case from the bad neighbourhood. Fear of the future? Well, you know; the future is the end result of good or bad decisions. Good or bad can come from both - depending upon how you as a person are willing to look at the outcomes. As far as irrational fears go, my two biggies are spiders bigger than my fist, and sheer drops over two hundred metres straight down. Also not terribly chuffed about people sticking guns or knives in my face with menaces. Not scared about media driven scare stories like Bird / Swine / Whatever Influenza, Cancer (Been there, done that), Pain (Likewise) and big earthquakes. I've trained myself to be competent in various survival techniques if everything goes pear shaped, and if pressured into a real scrap I'm no pushover.

This is not to say I wouldn't be scared, this isn't about the fear, it's about how you react to any given problem. You 'pull your big girl panties on and deal with it'. So instructs one of those amusing motivational sayings my Sister in law has posted on the wall at her place up in town. Anything new can be scary, but if you're going to do the old Rabbit staring at headlights trick, then unfortunately (For you) you might be bucking for a Darwin Award. From whatever standpoint.

Fear makes you vulnerable. Mostly to the next Snake Oil Salesman who says his / her product is the answer to all your ills, real or imagined. Understanding your fear makes you capable of kicking said Snake Oil Salesman in the metaphorical crotch and walking away whistling a happy tune.

As I said, I've been drinking.

Time for bed.

Syzygy

Recently heard the word Syzygy referred to in the context of the close approach of Earth's moon, or 'Perigee Syzygy'. The only other time I'd come across this word (No, I don't follow the X-Files) was in Joe Haldeman's 'All my sins remembered', so I did a little digging.

Here are the main definitions;

1. (astronomy) A kind of unity, namely an alignment of three celestial bodies (for example, the Sun, Earth, and Moon) such that one body is directly between the other two, such as occurs at an eclipse
2. (psychology) An archetypal pairing of contrasexual opposites, symbolizing the communication of the conscious and unconscious minds
3. (mathematics) A relation between generators of a module
4. (medicine) The fusion of some or all of the organs
5. (zoology) The association of two protozoa end-to-end or laterally for the purpose of asexual exchange of genetic material
6. (zoology) The pairing of chromosomes in meiosis
7. (Literature) In ancient prosody, a group or combination of two feet. Ancient metricians varied in their use of this term. Some use it regularly for a dipody or (dipodic) measure. Others call a tautopody, or double foot, a dipody, but a combination of two different feet a syzygy. Some, accordingly, giving the name syzygy to tetrasyllabic feet (regarded by them as composed of two dissyllabic feet), speak of an iambic or a trochaic line as measured by dipodies, but an Ionic line as measured by syzygies—that is, by single Ionics considered as combinations of trochees and pyrrhics. A peculiar use is the restriction of the term syzygy to compound feet of five or six syllables.

Yes, it's a good ten dollar word, but not one I'd care to use.

Boris gets it

There is no rhyme or reason to an earthquake, and we should for once abandon our infantile delusion that we are the cause and maker of everything.

Doesn't happen often, but when a politician gets it (almost) right, they should have it pointed out and applauded.

Likewise:

We now know that the work done at Climatic Research Unit barely qualified as science; they kept it secret to stop other scientists checking it; thus breaching one of the foundations of the scientific method.

Graham Stringer, MP for Bolton & Blackley.

H/T Bishop Hill for the Manchester Confidential piece.

Money for nothing

By their own admission, the Ministers and high up panjandrums in charge of taxing future generations into slavery mitigating 'Climate Change' really haven't a fucking clue are unsure of the effect, spending $280 billion of taxpayer dollar on policies that don't and can't work decisions to prevent a highly disputed predicted global temperature rise based on fucking useless climate models.

Now we hear that one such in England is having a steel wire fence put around his property to prevent angry members of the public and disaffected party members storming his house and doing him harm. Personally I am in great favour of this high level protection; it is my deeply held conviction that all UK politicians and personnel in charge of climate mitigation measures (Of whatever stripe, let's not be partisan about this) should have this level of protection. They should have the 'right' to be free from violence.

Now I'm not for a moment suggesting that perhaps if some clever dicky were to say, wire the new security fence to the mains and drop an extra secure extra padlock with a crop resistant shackle on the gate (or even weld the gate shut), the politician in question would have to stay in the warmth and comfort of their own delightful home, safe within the bosom of their nearest and dearest. Safe from the angry majority of the population, and not being able to make any half assed decisions that further messed up said populations lives. A small jammer would might stop his cellphone and Internet access and stop the bleeder person in question doing any more economic damage. However, this is just my idle speculation, and in no way an incitement for anyone to actually do this. Although I'd be laughing like a drain if they did.

To quote the wise words of the fictional General Tacticus (From Terry Pratchett's Jingo); "If your enemy retreats into an impregnable fortress - see that he stays there."

Then, with the benefit of some inadvertent but perhaps welcome purgatory 'quality' time spent with their demanding children and impatient spouses lovely families perhaps they might think twice about spending money the taxpayer doesn't have.

Correction: It's not a home it's a whole party conference. Still, the same principles apply. 'Rings of steel' work both ways.

Christchurch NZ since 22nd February 2011

Just ran the sequence of quakes since 22nd February and watched the following pattern emerging. Whilst the number of quakes has tailed off, aftershocks are still coming in at 3-4 magnitude, many at between the 5 and 8km depth level. At this point I'm wondering whether the current tremors indicate the formation of a new extension to the Greendale fault.

Webcams are still down in the centre of Christchurch, although most of the local traffic cams seem to be operative.

I'm still waiting for some moron highly qualified non-scientist / government adviser to blame the Christchurch quakes on 'Man made global warming'. Just so I can play 'spot the looney', and I'm not talking about the Canadian one Dollar coin.

Ah....

You know, last night I felt so down that I called the Samaritans for counselling. Must have misdialled because I got though to this Pakistani call centre.

I told the guy on the other end of the line I was desperate, suicidal even. Then he got all excited and asked me if I could drive a truck.

No idea why..........

One for the Neo-Malthusians out there

You know, I was quite happy when the Jehovah's Witnesses gave up predicting the end of the world. Now I'd be just as content if another group would all give us a rest from their annoying doomsaying. If you think the world could do with fewer people, as always the message is; "After you."

Sometimes.....

A simple look can encapsulate everything you want to say. Although I'm still wondering what 'listenting' is.

Fruit Warning

Saw this article about radiation and food over at Wattsupwiththat and fell about laughing. The article points out that the levels of background radiation in naturally grown foodstuffs, like bananas, are higher than we think. For example;

Relative food radiation levels;
Beer= 390 pCi/liter
Tap Water= 20 pCi/liter
Milk= 1,400 pCi/liter
Salad Oil= 4,900 pCi/liter
Whiskey= 1,200 pCi/liter
Brazil Nuts= 14,000 pCi/kg
Bananas= 3000 pCi/kg
Flour= 140 pCi/kg
Peanuts 8,000 pCi/kg
Peanut Butter= 120 pCi/kg
Tea= 400 pCi/kg

In fact most foods contain some form of radioactivity. This is perfectly natural. The world is filled with various kinds of radioactivity. It occurs regardless of human activity.

One of the figures quoted is our total exposure to radiation in a year is in the region of 360 millirems a year. Before you go running off to berate others about atom bomb tests, remember that a single transatlantic flight can expose you to about 4 extra millirems a year, whereas dosage from atmospheric pre ban treaty nuclear tests has been calculated overall at 1 millirem a year. Moving to a location 1000 feet above sea level exposes you to an extra 5 millirems a year. That's not including radiation from the soil and rock underneath your feet. Like granite? High natural background radiation just from that fancy counter top in your kitchen.

Figures culled from here. Please go and read.

Next time some anxiety prone goes off at me about the wickedness of nuclear power stations, food residues and sterilising with Gamma radiation, I think I'll just ask them about how many bananas they eat.

Happy Valentines day

This is for Mrs S. She won't like the song, but she'll get the message. Happy Valentines day, love.

Correction; she likes the song, the message, and by proxy, me. I going off to blush now.

Just as a matter of interest

Looked at my 'Climate Widget' which integrates a number of sources of data to give a snapshot of what the Earth's climate is doing. From being 0.51 Degrees Celsius last year, the global temperature anomaly just went negative at minus 0.1. For the second month running the CO2 index is also down. Actual widget here;



Tsk. Just as a matter of interest, that means all the 'Warming' of the past 30 years just disappeared. Gone.

Baiting the 'righteous'

They don't like people who smoke, who drink a little more than a single glass of wine every other day, or who like the odd bit of red meat now and again. Light heartedness is an alien concept, as is imagination. They don't think you have the right (or ability) manage your own affairs or bring up your own children. They want to dictate what information others have available, how much exercise they take, and look upon themselves as the arbiter of all that is 'moral'. They have no 'live and let live' about them and judge others only by their own narrow standards. You must do as they do, believe as they do. All else is anathema. These are people who serve vegetarian cuisine at dinner parties and never provide for those who prefer a little meat or fish with their meals. Many believe in the evil of Eugenics and that 'Global Warming' is real. They exert a disproportionate influence upon our daily lives.

These are the new puritans. UK local and central government is plagued both by and with them.

I believe Longrider was first to dub them the 'Righteous'. I may be wrong, but his blog is where I first recall seeing the term. Although Longrider in the comments says it was Leg Iron of 'Underdogs bite upwards'. Thanks for the correction.

Synonyms and adjectives include bigot, chauvinist, diehard, doctrinaire, dogmatist, enthusiast, extremist, fanatic, fiend, maniac, Malvolio, monomaniac, nimby, puritan , racist, sectarian, segregationist, sexist, stickler, zealot. Other worthy descriptions are; grinch, misery, wet blanket, scourge, shrew, self righteous, misery guts.

My personal choice is the term used by the Aussies and Kiwis; 'Wowser'. Far more appropriate, and carries just the right balance of pejorative disdain without treading the unimaginative trail of Anglo-Saxon four letter invective. Even if that is where temptation leads.

You can even use the word in polite society without legitimate censure; as in.
"You're a bit of a Wowser aren't you?"
"He's a complete and utter Wowser."
"Wouldn't date her. She's a complete Wowser."
"Don't be such a Wowser." ....and so on.

Although our friends south of the 49th parallel apparently think 'wowser' is an adolescent term of approval.

I prefer the Anzac version.

Introducing

The inimitable, the amusing, Fenbeagle!