October 2017

Russell and Dave About air con and efficiency, which we didn’t get time to finish. The units themselves aren’t breaking any rules of thermodynamics by outputting far more energy than what they consume, because they don’t actually produce any heat or cold. They just shift existing heat around (they extract it from the surrounding air, and pump it, thus they’re heat pumps). Heating efficiency in an air con unit is measured as the COP (Coefficient of Performance), ratio of heat output to electrical power input. Cooling efficiency is measured as EER (Energy Efficiency Ratio), the ratio of cooling output by the device to the electrical power used by the device. For modern air con units both EER and COS are at least 5, you get 5kw of heat or cooling for every 1kw of power input to the device. So that’s a minimum 500% efficiency. The magic comes because that 1kw of electric input is used just to shift 5Kw of existing heat around between the inside and outside air of the house - the unit doesn’t have to generate the heat or cold.

One of the easiest reflexes of our time is to have a problem with ‘materialism’. But the love of comfort and well-being and new relationships is the healthiest instinct we have. We really don’t understand our own world. Those who re-built the world after the last world war knew this, and were often mocked by those who came after them, with their more ‘spiritual’ and idealistic bent. “Today I can measure the folly and malice of those who affect to despise money, that divine institution. Money spiritualizes all that it touches by endowing it with a quality that is both rational (measurable) and universal, since property reckoned in terms of money is accessible to all men. Venality is one of the cardinal virtues. The venal man suppresses his murderous and anti-social instincts - honor, self-pride, patriotism, political ambition, religious fanaticism, racialism - in favor of his need of his need to co-operate with others, his love of fruitful exchanges, his sense of human solidarity. The term, the Golden Age, should be taken literally, and I see now that mankind would swiftly achieve it were its affairs wholly in the hands of venal men. Alas, it is nearly always high-minded men who make history, and so the flames destroy everything and blood flows in torrents. The plump merchants of Venice afford us an example of the luxurious happiness possible in a state governed solely by the law of lucre, whereas the evacuated wolves of the Spanish Inquisition show us the infamy of which men are capable when they have lost the love of material well-being. The Huns would soon have checked their advance if they had known how to profit by the riches they acquired. Encumbered with their gains, they would have stayed to enjoy them, and life would have resumed its course. But they were disinterested savages. They despised gold. They rushed onward, burning as they went.” Michel Tournier. Friday, or the Other Island.

Happy birthday!!! And a holiday to boot.

Maybe time to put negative ion generators in classrooms, buses, trains, hospitals and other public spaces. Cheap, effective.

This is how the financial services industry does its work. Firstly the obvious advice to people who might run out of money at that age is to stop bloody spending it on overseas holidays and new cars. Secondly the industry uses the myth that we’re ‘all living longer now’ to create the sense of crisis, so that more money needs to go to it. https://www.domain.com.au/news/most-australian-retirees-will-run-out-of-money-before-dying-20171003-gypxcw/

Las Vegas. There'll be the usual call for gun control, and yes, why civilians need automatic weapons is a complete mystery to just about everybody. But I doubt the US will stop mass shootings until it understands: 1) why it's so violent, as a country, and 2) the psychology of the lone gunman, who wants to kill as many as possible and then top themselves.

Yep, this is the real issue. And why is the US so much more violent? My favourite theory: because it hates regulation. Because it has no real tradition of collective focus, so that each person then becomes their own island, with their own guns, to look out for themselves. I think it relates back to the Puritan ethos that founded the US, which was a group of people who were more or less kicked out of Europe for their strong beliefs, and who were determined in their new land to never let 'government' have too much power over them again.

Did you know the collective noun for a group of ladybirds? Made me smile (thanks Kell). A loveliness of ladybirds.

The Simpsons understood American violence as well as anybody. Itchy and Scratchy are all about the insatiable appetite for violence as entertainment, and the normalisation of violence in culture more generally. Bought an electronic game recently? Noticed how difficult it is to find any that don’t involve graphic violence? And not to put the cart before the horse, this isn’t saying violent games and films and tv produce violence, it says a violent society will have violent entertainment. Why that society is violent is different, I still think that’s because from day one every American was born a cowboy, it’s a founding myth. Down with the establishment, every man for himself.

Do we really understand smartphone ‘addiction’? A common criticism is that smartphones are making people anti-social, because they’re constantly glued to them everywhere they go. I think that’s backwards. Smartphones allow people to be HYPER-social, because they allow them to be constantly connected to their friends and societies. It does mean that they’re often not as present to their immediate surroundings as they could be, although I’d wager before smartphones people would often daydream and otherwise zone-out in everyday life anyway. Our usual response to new technologies is knee-jerk moralism, based on what is more comfortable to us (usually from the past). When you see a teenager for example staring at their phone, from the outside it looks like they’re in a world of their own, but they’re usually not, they’re plugged into the much wider world. Sure sometimes people get the balance wrong, but as above, I think they always have, and think about it - for years people have pleaded with people to ‘act locally, think globally’. With a smartphone that’s *exactly* what people are often doing. They’re connecting their local lives to global activity, in real-time.

Today’s collective noun. For Zebras. A dazzle of zebras. (No joke.)

I know people love my Daylight Saving rants. Here's another angle. The only argument anybody ever gives in favour of Daylight Saving is "I love it". Is an argument for beating your wife, that you love hitting women? Or is it an argument for not having vaccinations (steady Kato) that you hate needles? Or would it be an argument to ignore all speed limits because you love driving fast? This is what irks me most about Daylight Saving. It's a fundamental screwing around with peoples' circadian rhythms, for the selfish reason that many people 'love' having an extra hour of daylight in the evening. A superficial, personal preference that is used to justify changing our entire time systems twice a year, and which has powerful and negative impacts on our biology too. And it's also so selfish in that it completely ignores the fact that many in the population are morning people, and the "I love it" crowd are stealing that extra hour from the morning people - no daylight is 'saved', it's stolen from one end of the day and tacked on the other.

Shame on The Project last night, reporting on research apparently showing that people who skip breakfast are at higher risk of heart disease. It took 30 seconds to check that research and find that the researchers clearly concluded that heart disease risk had nothing to do with skipping breakfast at all, but with the lifestyles of people who tend to skip breakfast. Google knows, use it.

Lots of comments along the lines of ‘they worked hard for that money’. Maybe only about half as hard as their parents who went through WW2, who retired with nearly nothing, but hey, boomers invented hard work *and* sex too. Just ask them.

Beat this.

Today’s collective noun. For hippopotamuses. There are actually a few. The best: - a bloat of hippopotamuses - a crash of hippopotamuses - a thunder of hippopotamuses. Hippos are considered the most dangerous of all vertebrates. They don’t like humans much.

Burial or cremation? And why?

Politics! But hopefully not what you're thinking... There are 2 games in town I think, and mixing them up is what's destroying our societies. There are traditional political parties, like Labor and the LNP here in Oz. And then there are the 'culture warriors'. These are zealots who think there's a wider war in society, a fight for ideas and minds. They use terms like 'the Left' and 'the Right' a lot, those are its goodies and baddies. Andrew Breitbart is a leading US culture warrior, in Australia we have people like Andrew Bolt, Ray Hadley, Alan Jones to some extent, the Institute of Public Affairs, most of Sky News, and some others. Sometimes the two worlds intersect, when the culture warriors try to have impact on politics. Nearly always they favour conservative political parties, like the Republicans in the US or the LNP here. But they destroy those parties as much as they destroy any other party - they're actually not all that interested in politics, their war is 'cultural'. Ask the Republicans in the US, a party in ruins because their culture warriors were successful. I get frustrated when people associate these idiot zealots with traditional politics. The likes of Bolt, Hadley, the IPA and even Abbott only pretend to be interested in politics here, in truth they want to smash the joint. They're not Right or Left, they're not Liberal or Labor - they're extremists. They're destroying the whole show. Look at what Abbott did to the NBN, which is now an international laughing stock, or his opposition to rescue action during the GFC. Pure acts of vandalism, even to this day he wants to keep destroying energy policy not because he cares, but because he wants to attack 'the Left'.

I never get sick of this photo. That’s where we live, in that thin blue line. We don’t live ‘on Earth’, we live in that tiny thin layer of life which churns the surface of the planet. At school we were often taught that our oxygen comes from trees. In fact it mostly came from blue-green algae, that toxic muck that stops people swimming in dams in summer. Microbes are the source of all life, and still are today. You, as a person, are really just a machine that microbes built, and there are trillions of them all over you and inside you right now. They’re immortal too, they don’t age or die, provided they have food. There are lots of discussions about whether we have an immortal ‘soul’, that is separate to and survives our bodies when they’re gone. We do have an immortal soul, it’s your microbes, a big part of you is already immortal.

Happy birthday Den. Rock on.

Professor Talisse is a clever man. If you want to have fun, don’t try to have fun, if you want friendship, don’t try to make friends. If you want democracy, don’t try to have democracy. Democracy comes when people have other things in common. The reason our democracies are struggling is because our societies are being broken up into sub-groups with little in common and with little interaction. I think Facebook is an important push in the other direction.

Daylight Saving is only one part of our general war against the dark. Also, it’s a genuine tragedy if you can’t see the night sky. “As we discussed a litany of light-related problems, I asked Stevens: ‘Is it a legitimate question to ask if light is the major factor in depression, obesity, and cancer? Is there potential for light to be the reason behind all of those things?’ ‘Yes,’ he said flatly. ‘No doubt about it.’‘’

Still love this.

Some of my medical friends will probably chip in with an opinion on this one. Have you ever wondered what’s the best way to treat the ordinary cuts and scrapes we get? It’s something we’ve all been given a range of advice on over the years. I’ve been looking at the research on wound care, and there seems to be a consensus that the best approach is: 1) wash the wound, just with water (jury is out on whether soap is necessary, some say it gets in the way) 2) put a good amount of Vaseline over the wound, and then cover the wound with a good occlusive (keeps out air and water) dressing. A band aid is fine, and they come in a range of sizes. 3) change the dressing and give the wound another quick clean, with more added Vaseline, daily. 4) antibiotic and/or antiseptic creams aren’t really necessary, although if the wound is tough to clean for example a dab or two of iodine before adding the Vaseline can’t hurt. The research seems to agree that keeping a wound ‘wet’ and then dressed in this way (to keep the wound wet and keep air and germs off it - the Vaseline helps with both of those things) is far and away the best way to heal it. Dry wounds open to the air tend to kill the cells that are trying to fix the wound. Scabs are also an initial protection, but after that slow wound healing and also increase the chance of scarring, so if they get knocked off it’s actually not a bad thing, just clean, add the Vaseline and dress. Tried this on a cut on the top of my foot which was taking a long time to get better. Spectacular results in only a couple of days. If your wound isn’t getting better or is sore and red after a few days, best to see a doctor for the infection.

Insight is doing a discussion on ‘wine oclock’ tonight. “I feel mandated to be part of the message of hope that recovery and freedom can happen, and to help people see the truth of what alcoholism can look like – that it begins, for many of us, with a very unhealthy relationship with "wine o'clock". Many a work-day ended for me with a wine or two. Over time, for me, that "one harmless glass" of wine insidiously became one bottle, and then two.‘

Love this town. Was chatting to John Doyle tonight about life in Lithgow, not much has changed since his day, it’s a beautiful place and community and most people who live outside it don’t understand the first thing about it.

You can look up the way technologies like CDs, film, digital encoding, magnetic tape etc. ‘work’. But there’s a mystery, even a miracle, that won’t be explained. How is it that images and sound are able to be captured by plastic and metal and digital bits? What is it about the world itself that means images and sounds are able to be transformed into completely separate materials?

This is the first ever recording of a human voice, on April 9, 1860. The voice is Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, who also invented the device which recorded it, which he called a phonautograph. The device took sound waves and let them move a stylus/pen over soot-covered paper. It was never designed to play back sound, only to study properties of sound waves, but modern scientists realised they could take these basic scribbles and turn them back into the original sounds. Quality is not great (he’s singing a French tune, Au Clair de Lune), but it’s the otherworldly quality of these earliest recordings which highlights the miracle of how what we take to be separate things - sounds and scribbles they cause on a piece of paper - are not at all. It’s easy enough to build these machines, but the traditional science won’t explain *why* they work.

Well people, what's that large building under construction in this picture of Bathurst from 1873?

Super is a time bomb. Shifting retirement funding to the finance industry will likely have the same outcome as financialising anything else - a complete disaster. As a society, we would have been much better off keeping the old pension system, and if you wanted a 'lifestyle' retirement, you funded it yourself, not at the expense of taxpayers. As always, the only people who will do really well out of super will be - you guessed it - the boomers. And the finance industry. The mess will be left to the rest of us to clean up, as we work into our 70s and get a pittance.

Bit surprised at the number of people who say they absolutely would refuse to turn their air conditioner up a few degrees in summer, in times of high demand, even if they were paid to do it. It really enrages some people. Demand management is one of the smartest things we currently don’t do in managing energy. The savings to the whole country can be huge.

I read a lot as a younger person. But I’m a bit off books now, except for some that are important to me. Text and books are very restrictive and narrow things, and we’ve turned books into a fetish. But hypertext is much closer to thought itself, proliferating in every direction at once. Kids get it, many adults still cling to books, like they cling to the music of their youth. “...books squeeze ideas into long, narrow paths that head the reader forward...Long-form writers are out to move readers from A to the Z that is the author’s destination. What is not needed to get readers to that conclusion is left aside...Worthy ideas that diverge from the narrative’s narrow path appear as distractions. Books often just aren’t long enough to enable long-form ideas to uncurl until their natural shape. Further, we’ve elevated private thought because of the limitations of writing.” Too Big to Know, David Weinberger

Seneca said this 2000 years ago. He would have gone pale living now, when there are several *million* new books each year. Here are some intriguing other facts about books. Intriguing because while we publish more than ever, people buying and reading books is heading in exactly the opposite direction. - the sale of books is either stagnant or shrinking - average sales for most books are tiny - any book has less than a 1% chance of actually being stocked in a book store - most books sell only to the communities known by the author and publisher.

‘Base load’ is a term people often use in energy debates. They think it means a basic minimum amount of electricity the community needs, night and day. It doesn’t mean that at all. Like most of the energy debate, it’s a lot of hot air, usually emanating from the direction of Tony Abbott’s arse.

Stevie Riks is some sort of genius. Makes hundreds of hilarious videos at home, an amazing mimic but also great comic. https://youtu.be/iqCgruHOjnU

And one more, from James, who rejected any idea that habit was either positive or negative - it just is, we are really just a collection of habits. “... we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and as carefully guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous. The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work are subjects of express volitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding or regretting of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all...”

Easily the best way to teach kids about intertia is to put them on a bus with a bad driver.

I wish everybody happiness in the sorting out of their own lives. This one just seems like a cliche in plain view though. What could go wrong?

Thanks to Ian Verrender for this.

“The same is true of love as of death, when we imagine we will still be alive enough to see the faces of those who have lost us. In the same way we imagine that we will still be enough in love to enjoy the regrets of the person we have stopped loving. It is quite true that we repeat our past loves, but it is also true that our present love...”repeats” the moment of the dissolution or anticipates its own end. Such is the meaning of what we call a scene of jealousy.” Gilles Deleuze

Happy Birthday! Will see you in the last quarter later, (at which point you'll be about 15 goals behind ;) )

Hmm, what was the last time we had a public policy that was "technology-agnostic", as a quick political fix? NBN? What could go wrong?

Hands up anybody who will avoid the restaurant mentioned, where the chef doesn’t wear undies 3 times a week?

Brought to you by the same team who promised getting rid of the carbon tax would slash your power bills. They’ve doubled. It’s amazing how these idiots can take any issue and turn it into a political whipping boy. Broadband, now energy. Worst broadband in the developed world, now on track to be the worst energy system as well.

Henri Bergson was a trippin’ dude, even though he looked like a minister at the local parish church. He won the Nobel Prize for literature, although was actually a philosopher (he wrote very well). His speaking tours were like Beatlemania, people queued to see him. One of the most amazing books ever written is his ‘Matter and Memory’. Bergson describes there how we really don’t understand some basic things - time, the brain, and memory. - Time doesn’t pass, it’s not like some river that flows. - The past is not something that happened before and is now gone, it’s always just here. - The brain doesn’t contain any images, nor is it where we ‘think’ or where ‘we’ are. - When you have a memory, you enter the past directly, it’s not a picture or image stored in your brain.

It's fun to watch the bovver boys over at Channel 9 go after the sheilas, as the knuckleheads over at 7 did a few weeks ago over the firing of one of their female staff. Apparently if they'd had to pay Lisa Wilkinson the same as they pay mid-life crisis Karl, they would have had to lay off 10 staff. Woe! Nobody mentions how many staff had to be laid off to pay Karl. These women are pesky creatures.

The fascinating thing about faces is that the muscles in your face are the only ones in your entire body whose function isn’t about movement or support, or keeping you functioning. They’re there to express emotion. And emotions are always about something - you are scared of something, or confused about something, or happy or sad about something etc. There’s no such thing as just happy, sad, angry, confused. I learned this reading about film directors, and why they use so many close-ups of faces. Hitchcock was brilliant at it, Janet Leigh’s face in that shower in Psycho doesn’t just tell you she’s scared, it captures all of the terror of that moment and compresses it into a facial expression. Seeing it you don’t just think ‘she’s scared’, you imagine and feel an entire context, of being naked in a shower and some lunatic coming at you with a knife. And if your wife or husband gives you ‘a look’, you know it means a *whole* lot of things.

Even the ABS is in on the silliness. That’s not how to use a life table, these are averages.

Shaw was a childhood hero of mine. He didn’t get everything right, but who does? He was witty, and one of the first to really understand what socialism is, and what it isn’t.

The gas 'crisis' is easily solved, and from that electricity prices should come down a lot too (gas is used heavily in electricity generation). Instead we have the idiots going into bat for the big gas companies, who would like to do more fracking. And blaming the States, and solar and wind power. IDIOTS. They won't do it because the simple solution is the one Labor also suggested, because it's the one all experts and people with brains suggest - have a reservation policy for domestic gas.

Blah blah, we shouldn’t have medically-assisted dying because people will feel ‘pressure’ to use it so as not to be a burden to others? Makes as much sense as saying we shouldn’t have contraception because it might encourage people to have sex. Recent times are showing us just how much our societies are driven by interfering old men with paternalistic plans for all of us, whether we want them or not. It’s for our own good, apparently.

Holden closes in Oz today. Toyota is already gone. Directly the result of Tony 'The Wrecker' Abbott, who refused to continue to support them in 2013. Every successful country in the world heavily subsidises its manufacturing and other industry. Except us, here we have idiots in charge.

Most people don't really give a toss about unis. Except when they need advanced medical treatment, or advice on just about any topic, or experts in any area, which is every day. The fact that the largest proposed cuts in the entire budget were to universities, at a time when tax-free super, capital gains tax concessions, negative gearing and the "Future Fund" all went completely untouched, and $65 billion is to be given to mostly foreign interests in tax cuts, was just disgusting. Australia used to call itself The Clever Country. Universities are in the top 5 export earners for Australia, generating over $20 billion per year. Those who say they just sit up in ivory towers and think useless thoughts can stick that in their pipes and smoke it.

Lots of talk about the ‘sanctity’ of life at the moment, and not much about the sanctity of death. Life and death aren’t even opposites. Arguing when life begins and when it ends, for example in debates on abortion and euthanasia, misses the point that life is not just a circle, where life needs death and death needs life, but also that what is alive is already dead and what is dead is already alive. Your fingernails and hair are dead, but ‘you’ are alive, and you spend 6-10 hours a day unconscious already, as you sleep. If you ‘die’ bacteria and plants will happily feed off you, but they were already doing that while you were ‘alive’ anyway. It’s why I think these debates never go anywhere. You are already immortal in some ways, and already dead in others. If we try to protect and sustain life at all costs, we do great evil because we ignore the importance and sanctity of that part of life that gets called ‘death’. They’re one and the same thing.

Homer's car is today's world. Art is so important. Just gotta pay attention to it.

The secret to everything is bacteria. Learning about them changed my life; they are the most complex living things, don't believe a word of the biology you learned that says humans and other animals are the most complex creatures. It's part of a huge misunderstanding we have about big and small. We think big things are more complex than little things. That's backwards, little things are much more complex than big things, and it gets more complex the smaller you go. "One legitimate answer to the question "What is life?" is "bacteria". Any organism, of not itself a live bacterium, is then a descendant - one way or another - of a bacterium or, more likely, mergers of several kinds of bacteria. Bacteria initially populated the planet and have never relinquished their hold...Closer to life's original structures, bacteria do not live as we live, toward death. Banning an unfortunate accident, a mutation, or a gene-trading encounter with another bacterium, a single bacterial 'cell' can "survive" essentially forever in its original form..." Margulis and Sagan, "What is Life?"

About 20,000 people were killed by terrorism in 2016, worldwide. The world spent over $50 billion fighting terrorists in the same year. Over 9 million people died from air pollution in 2016. Very little was spent addressing it. The cost to the world from air pollution is projected to rise to $2.6 trillion per year in the next 40 years.

Which came first - city or country?

This is one of the main reasons I've never really liked open plan as a design, and hard floors. The acoustics. So many modern homes are echo chambers, it can become exhausting as well as loud. It can look good, but as the article says, that's the problem, it's based on visuals and not practicalities. I saw a woman interviewed on TV the other day who was begging to have a separate kitchen back, so there wasn't constant noise crossing between the kitchen and her living room. But each to their own, just my taste.

Hmm. Maybe one for the grammar Nazis, I was quite amused.

Happy Birthday Wayne! Have a ripper day.

It sounds political, but really - how is giving away $65 billion of our money to businesses, many of whom are owned by overseas interests, of any use to Australia? It's been proved all over the world and in Australia, multiple times, that these tax cuts won't create jobs or economic activity - it's just a myth that won't go away. It's an outrageous use of taxpayer money, at a time when so many important things are crying out for funds.

Imagine a TV show where people took old fridges, spent $50 fixing them, and then sold them on for $500 more. How long would it take Fair Trading to come a-knockin'? Just call it real estate and you have half the reality shows on TV.

I've substituted LNP for "Republican Party" in the quote, because they're reading from the same playbook. "What is the fundamental purpose of the LNP? To minimize the tax bill of the rich. For those in the highest tax bracket—the people whose interests are actually represented by elected officials—politics is an investment. It is no big deal to invest a million dollars in the presidential race if it ends up saving you ten million dollars on your tax bill. Issues that do not directly affect the net worth of the rich are sideshows, in the sense that they are not the core purpose of the party, but rather instrumental tools to be used to advance the core purpose. It is that simple. All of the issues that attract the majority of the LNP's voters—Gay marriage! Bible thumping! (Australian) exceptionalism! Tough on crime! Tough on terror! Abortion, babies, rah rah rah!—are not the issues that motivate the people who actually control the party. The rich, after all, are insulated by money from the potential negative impacts of these issues. They care about money, and how to keep as much of it out of the public till and in their own pockets as possible. The way to do that is to manipulate the tax code to their own advantage. In order to do that, they need elected officials working for their interests. In order to get elected officials, they need lots of votes. In order to get lots of votes, they need more than just the rich voting for them. In order to get lots of poor and middle class people voting for a party advocating policies in direct opposition to the economic interests of the vast majority of people, they wave around social issues like a matador waves a cape in front of a bull. The wealthy can watch the culture wars play out from on high, laughing to themselves all the while. All of the fine hardworking Christian culture warriors are the peasants fighting for their king, who urges them to battle for god while being primarily concerned with maintaining a healthy flow of capital." Hamilton Nolan

Quiz question. A government orders federal police to raid the offices of supporters of its opponents. Which country is this? A. Sierra Leone B. Russia C. Colombia D. Australia

There are thousands of old wax cylinders from the beginning of sound recording, in the 19th century. Very famous people were often recorded, which isn’t always well known. Here’s Florence Nightingale speaking in the 1890s. Somehow the scratchiness of it makes it even more powerful.

Happy Birthday Guy, hope it's awesome :)

Expensive suburbs are often described as 'leafy'. And with summers getting hotter also a fantastic way to keep places cooler. But so many of our towns and cities have very few trees. It changes the whole character of a place, having trees. There are some issues with storms and leaves, but nothing that isn't easily factored in. If you don't live in an expensive location, this is by far the cheapest way to improve the 'look' of your town or suburb. My dad (not in any way a 'greenie') used to say that Australians don't seem to like trees very much. Some Australians do, but he might have had a point, we certainly chop a lot of them down, both in urban and regional areas. And I've known many people who can't bear the thought of a tree in their garden. They also bring rain, if you have enough of them, improve stock health on farms and keep soil more stable and fertile, etc. The Africans are planting an enormous, continent-wide band of trees to try to hold back the Sahara, right now.

Works for life expectancy too. We’re kinda average at averages.

What’s the duty of care when a kid on the bus starts to cut a pimple off his forehead with a razor blade? I didn’t want to mention the ‘triangle of death’ to him.

Conversation a female member of my staff just had at the local child care, with an old man out for his daily walk. Old man: heading off to work? Staff member: yes, just on my way now, after I drop my son off Old man: ah, things were different in my day. Mums stayed home and minded the kids. Ah well, it's a greedy world, have a nice day. (My guess is this old turd went home to book his next OS trip using his boomer tax-free super, in an ungreedy way of course.)

Not to be mean-spirited, but I joked she'd pick the guy worth $500 million. I give it a year. The man obviously has issues.

Spotted on my way to work today. Must have been a good bar night.

Educating myself. Most people I meet are short(er). There’s a whole genre of this, apparently.

Love a marching band. Even when it isn’t marching.

Peasants in the Middle Ages had around 14 weeks holiday every year.

I really believe that you can understand more than 95% of all child and adolescent behaviour using one simple rule. They want to be ‘grown up’. Nearly everything comes back to that, and also every way to live peacefully with them needs that insight.

Ever noticed that the more we fiddle with 'clock-time', like Daylight Savings and ridiculously long working days, and only 2-4 weeks of holiday per year when our ancestors had 14-26, the busier we get? That's because the two problems are actually the same problem. We live by the clock, rather than by events.

By imaginary demand, a topless pic.

I’m sure we had clothes on sometimes. Think that’s Michael Drengenberg trying to read. Can’t remember if he ever managed it.

Mike’s horse always looked ready for the glue factory. I’d forgotten how superb his helmet was too.

What do you call a group of platypuses? A paddle of platypuses.

I reckon my superb fashion sense started with that red hat. Crocs weren’t invented yet.

The evil of busy, is that we’re too busy to understand it. And that’s how it does its evil work, because the next day you’re even more busy. Has anybody else stopped to think about why our lives and work have been hijacked by busyness?

Eleanor Rigby. Fantastic song, but is the ending rubbish? Sounds like they didn’t know where to go next, so they just stopped.

Would Kate Ceberano or any other female singer still get away with singing: “Young boys are my weakness I just love their sweetness”? The Commodores actually wrote this song, as “Young Girls are my Weakness”. And it didn’t seem to raise much concern. I do wonder if it would, today?

And yet, Kell Drengenberg...

Those were the days, back when books were popular, and video cameras could do your back in. You know, I don't remember if Michael Drengenberg, Tobias Drengenberg or Kirsten Drengenberg ever even used this camera? Man that wallpaper was a shocker.