Failing To See You're Freezing To Death

“Are you drunk?”

“No.”

“You swore to me there was no more booze down there!”

“I’m not fucking drunk!” shouted Gerry miserably. “I had grease on my glasses and I started running them under hot water and one of the lenses cracked because it’s minus fucking thirty. I can’t see shit.”

“Oh. Sorry.” The Berg glinted in the sunshine. “I thought you ate all the grease. And hot water?”

“Not edible grease. Grease grease. For the engine.”

“Hmmm.” The Berg drifted away from the boat a little as if to get a better look at Gerry; wavelets sploshed energetically against the hull. “Your head doesn’t look oversized.”

“My head’s not oversized! What’s that got to do with it? You’re really being very irritating today.”

“Sorry. Something’s too big though, more likely your eye than your actual head. That’s why you can’t see. Your eye focuses light on a point in front of your retina. If your eye was smaller you wouldn’t have a problem.”

Gerry kicked a bulkhead. “Well I do have a problem! I’m starving to death and freezing to death. I spend my days talking to a fucking iceberg. And now I can’t see!”

The Berg trickled sulkily. “Well, if that’s the way you feel… we don’t have to talk. I suppose it means nothing that I could help you get a new prescription.”

“A new prescription?”

“That’s the spirit!” said the Berg, butting against the boat and sending a clatter of shards on to the deck. “Have you got a ruler?”

“Uhh… I’ll see if I can find one.”

Gerry returned twenty minutes later to find the sun had gone in and the Berg floating in a stew of sea ice that had seemingly appeared from nowhere. The temperature had dropped alarmingly.

“Got it? Great. Now measure the distance between your eyeball and the lens you have left in your glasses. Actually don’t! It’s pretty nippy out here. Don’t want the ruler stuck to your eyeball. It’s probably a centimetre. We’ll say a centimetre.”

“OK. Where did you learn all this anyway?”

“I’m made out of ice. I’m reflecting, refracting, all that stuff. Optometry’s easy. Now. Which lens is broken? Left? So hold the ruler up to your cheek and close your right eye. Look along the ruler and move your finger towards you till you can focus on it. How far away’s that?”

“About ten inches.”

“Metric, man! We’re not barbarians.”

“Sorry. Maybe 25cm.”

“Wow, you are blind. OK. 25cm is your farpoint. That’s the point your left eye focusses at when it’s resting. If you weren’t myopic that’d be infinity.”

“Infinity?”

“Technically, yes. The moon, the stars, they’d be in focus.”

“Oh.”

“OK. So you need a diverging lens, one that’s concave on both sides. That’s more bad news actually.”

“More?”

“If you ever need to start a fire in the wilderness you have the wrong type of lens. It won’t focus the sun’s rays to a point.”

“That’s OK. When I get too weak to move I’ve still got a few matches and a cup of diesel put aside. I’m going to set the boat on fire and be warm again before I die.”

The Berg groaned and cracked. A tern that had been perched out of sight on its far side flew off across the water with a mournful cry.

“That’s the spirit! Getting your sense of humour back – that’s good, just let me know before you torch the thing so I can drift off a bit.”

Gerry smiled. He didn’t want to admit it but the Berg’s high spirits were making him forget the sense of hopelessness that had descended on him ever since the lens had cracked in his numb fingers.

“So your diverging lens will make things appear to be at your farpoint. It’ll move things all the way from infinity to 25cm from your face. Neat, hey?  We just need to figure out the focal length for your lenses. That’s just your farpoint in metres, so 0.25, minus the distance of your lens from your eye, call it one, so let’s say 0.24. You bang a negative in front of that and there’s your focal length! Negative 0.24.”

“I thought prescriptions were in whatsits… dioptres.”

“No problem at all. Dioptres are just a bullshit measurement that optometrists like to use. They’re just one divided by the focal length. So… one divided by -0.24 equals... -4.16.”

“Nice mental arithmetic.”

“Thank you. Now optometrists like the steps to be in 0.25 increments, so your prescription, Gerry, for your broken lens, is… -4.25!”

“Wait I thought you were getting me new glasses?”

“Pay attention. I said prescription. Where am I going to get new glasses? I’m an iceberg. The North Pole is just there over the horizon.”

In the Night Garden

Simon watched Mum drive away. She reached the gate and disappeared left. Behind him Dad and the man, David, the man’s name was David, shouted in unison with the crowd on TV.

He was stuck in this room. For the moment he was hidden by the couch and erased by the football. To get to his bedroom he would have to pass in front of the TV, possibly blocking the game at a crucial moment, which meant getting in trouble. If he waited till quarter time his Dad and the man David would be bored. He would have to talk to them or get them a beer or sit with them or do something else he didn’t want to do.

Poking his head around the end of the couch, Simon watched the football. Often, when a player caught the ball, no, marked the ball, near the posts they would take a long time to psych themselves up before they tried to kick a goal. He waited quietly, a secret third spectator, while Dad and the man David shouted things like ‘ball’ and ‘kick it.’ When a player finally marked the ball near the goal, Simon waited - sometimes they marked too close to the goal and just kicked it straight away. The player bent to pull his socks up and Simon ran from the room. Halfway up the hall he heard shouting behind him. “Goal!”

He played in his room; then outside with the dog until it began to rain. Dinner was crumbed fish fillets and oven fries.

“What did you do today, Simon?” asked David.

“Nothing.”

Simon could see David watch him as they ate. He was bigger than Dad, nearly fat, but he had big shoulders too so he didn’t look fat. He had grey hair in a crew cut and a t-shirt with an ugly collar. Simon noticed he put tomato sauce on his fish, which was yucky.

“Hey Simon, guess what? David’s a policeman,” said Dad. Simon looked up in alarm.

“Don’t worry mate,” said David, laughing, “I’m not going to arrest you.”

Little bits of chewed up fish and chips sprayed out of David’s mouth when he laughed. Simon knew about policemen. Last month he and Gavin were playing in the hedge when Gavin spotted a For Sale sign on Mrs Fisher’s fence. The sign was tied on with black baling twine. They had found some sharp rocks and tried and cut through the twine. Simon realised he’d have more success if he separated the thin strings that made up the twine and attacked them one by one. Gavin was still sawing energetically when Simon made it all the way through his.

Suddenly there was a step behind them on the gravel and a hand on both their shoulders. The policeman, Bob Wilson, had snuck up and caught them. Simon was terrified but Bob Wilson had only delivered a very solemn speech about why cutting down the For Sale sign on Mrs Fisher’s fence was wrong – this seemed mainly to be because she was very old. Being caught by the policeman had been scary, but not for long. Two weeks later they found the roller door on the canteen at the oval had been left unlocked, so they snuck in and took as many cans of Fanta as they could carry.

After dinner Simon was allowed to watch TV for an hour; then it was time to go to bed.

“Goodnight mate,” said David. Simon worried he would have to give David a hug but it seemed it was ok not to.

He wasn’t tired and he wanted to find out what happened in the book he was reading, so once Dad kissed him goodnight he got out of bed and crouched in the slice of light that fell in through the open door. He was too big to have a night-light, but his parents left the light on in the hallway until they went to bed. It was cold and uncomfortable on the floor in his pyjamas. Even worse, across the width of the hall was the spare room. Once, reading like this, the door swung back to reveal a dead blackness and the smell of mothballs. He had run to his bed and hid under the covers with his feet pulled to his chest, convinced something living in that black space would devour him at any moment. Tonight though, after a few checks to see the door had not moved, he soon became involved in the story. Besides, the man David was staying in the spare room tonight. Whatever lived in there would not come out.

Simon woke up because he was cold and he needed to go to the toilet. He was sprawled on the carpet, his book an uncomfortable pillow. The door to the spare room was ajar, but that’s how it had been before. He got up and glided quickly down the hall to the toilet. The blue TV-light still flickered in the living room. He stopped when he reached the toilet door because the light was on inside. Was there someone in there? Did David know that when you finished you turned the light off? He reached uncertainly for the knob just as the door opened and David stepped out. Simon jumped and David brushed past him.

“All yours, mate.”

Simon stepped quickly inside, turned and locked the door. The knob moved as David tried it from the outside. The room was bright and smelled bad. David had not flushed and his pee was a dark yellow puddle in the bowl. Simon stood on the cold linoleum and held his breath. The doorknob turned back and forth once more and then David moved off down the hall. Simon flushed and stood for a long time before he could pee. Eventually he finished, unlocked the door and scurried back to his room, not flushing and not stopping to wash his hands.

When Simon woke up again everything was black and there was a horrible noise outside his window. The noise mewled and screeched and hissed, cycling up and down. His tongue felt like a dry stone in his mouth. He could not move. What could it be? His only guess was a demon that must surely be about to burst through the window and kill him. The noise went on and on. Surely Dad would come. If only he could cry out, but no part of his body would obey him.

After what seemed like hours the noise was still there, caterwauling up and down in the darkness. Simon decided whatever was making it did not know he was there and so would not kill and eat him straight away. He also knew there were no stories where the little boy stayed in bed and the noise went away. If he was to be part of a story he must get up and look. With more courage than he had ever summoned before he closed his half open mouth and forced himself to breath through his nose. Breathing right gave him the courage to get out of bed and, as quietly as he could, he crept across the room to the window. Awake, and staring into the darkness for so long, he could see enough to know when he reached the curtains. All the time the noise was still there, spitting and moaning like nothing he had ever heard before.

With infinite caution he parted the curtains and looked out into the garden. The moon was full and in the dead white light he could see two creatures crouched before the rose bushes. The one on the left, which he could see better, looked like someone had scribbled with a thick black pen until they had a scribble that was a little like a person and a little like a dog, cut it out and dressed it in a small set of clothes. The colours were hard to make out in the moonlight, but it looked like it wore a green pair of pants and a red jacket, a battered leather hat and carried a stick. The other creature was harder to see because it had its back to him, but it looked as if it were made from a lot of dead animals all joined together. Simon could see a raggy bit of mouse and what looked like a swatch of magpie forming its back. It had no clothes but was holding a long bone, nearly as tall as itself, by one end. Both creatures were no more than a foot tall and seemed to be having an argument – this was the sound that had woken him.

Simon watched the creatures for as long as he dared. The scribbly one was making the moaning and mewling noises, while the one patched together from dead things was making the hissing and screeching sounds. Although it all sounded terribly violent neither creature moved very much. They reminded Simon of two old men, querulously arguing with one another over a fence, one sometimes banging his stick on the ground, the other shaking its bone for emphasis.

It was cold next to the window in his pyjamas and when he could stand it no longer Simon wriggled a little to keep his feet warm. It made the smallest of noises but suddenly both creatures were silent and looking straight at him. The scribbly one vanished immediately, but the one patched from dead things turned and moved towards him. Simon tried to run back to bed but he couldn’t move at all. The creature came quickly to the window, dragging the long bone behind it. It moved strangely, as if it were an animation drawn in the corner of a book, slow then fast, jerking. When it was close Simon saw that its eyes were just holes with tiny teeth somehow suspended in them like blind pupils. It reached out with an arm that he saw was really the grubby leg of a dead lamb and tapped on the window. It had no mouth at all but it asked him a question in a voice that was wretched and dank.

“Who?”

The next morning Simon woke up feeling good. Then he remembered the creatures in the night and began to feel uneasy. The light under his curtains meant it was sunny outside, and there was a lot of birdsong. This didn’t fit with the strange creatures and the horrible question the patchwork one had asked him. Had that been a dream? The memory felt cold and hard, not like a dream at all, but it was so removed from the sun under the curtains and the birds outside that it didn’t feel like a normal memory either.

No one else was up so he watched cartoons until Dad came in.

“How did you sleep, chief?”

“OK.”

“Did you hear those cats? Bloody things.”

“I thought it was a monster.”

“Argh, I’m sorry Simon, I should have got up and checked you were ok. Did they scare you?”

“It wasn’t too bad.”

“Good boy.”

Dad let him have cornflakes with lots of cream and sugar as a treat. As he was rinsing his bowl gravel crunched in the driveway and Mum’s car pulled up outside the kitchen window. She waved to him and Simon waved back.

“Good morning boys,” she said, coming into the kitchen.

Simon ran and hugged her while Dad asked her about her night. Auntie Jo had been having something called a ‘hen’s night.’

“Were there lots of hens, Mummy?”

She laughed. “Yes darling, it was a veritable chicken farm.”

Simon didn’t know why this was funny or what ‘veritable’ meant, but Mum and Dad were happy and laughing, so he laughed too.

Dad told Mum about the cats. “Did you hear them, Simon?” she asked.

“I thought it was a monster.”

“Uh-oh,” she said playfully. “Alright now though? You know it was just naughty cats?”

He nodded and went to the fridge for some juice. Maybe it had been cats.

“David still in bed?” she asked Dad.

“Yeah, lazy city-slicker.”

But an hour later David was still in bed, even though Mum had started banging around in the bedroom looking for some shoes.

“Go and see if he wants any breakfast.”

A few minutes later he heard quick footsteps in the house and his parents whispering urgently to each other. He got up and went to the kitchen to see what was happening.

“We should still call the ambulance,” said Dad in a voice that Simon hadn’t heard him use before.

“Just call emergency,” said Mum. She was crying and when she saw him standing in the kitchen door she ran over and hugged him. He was scared.

“Oh darling,” she said. “It looks like Uncle David went to sleep last night and he’s not going to wake up.”

Simon wanted to ask if that was because David was very tired, but he knew the truth. “He’s dead.”

“Yes, honey.” Mum started crying again. “We think he had a heart attack during the night.” 

How to write a campfire scene | how not to write a campfire scene.

Sugar Rush

I eat a lot of sugar and it’s been figuring as a dietary demon in various things I’ve been watching and reading for a few years now. I’ve had a sweet tooth since I was a little kid, fuelled by the always reliable treat in the top drawer of a dresser in my grandma’s kitchen; crystallised in one of my few memories of early childhood when I made Russian caramels with her. Unlike many of my friends whose passion for alcohol has dulled their sweet tooth, mine remains keen.

What is sugar? Sugar is a very simple carbohydrate. Indeed, in biochemistry sugar and carbohydrate are synonyms. A carbohydrate is a large organic molecule composed of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. Depending on how complex these carbohydrates are, they are referred to a monosaccharides (the simplest), disaccharides, oligosaccharides and polysaccharides (the most complex).

What we think of as sugars are actually the mono- and disaccharides. The more complex saccharides include things like starch or cellulose (which we think of as carbohydrates) and are both part of what we eat and what we are made of at a cellular level. This isn’t to say though, that simple sugars don’t also form a part of us. The D in DNA stands for deoxyribonucleic – in which the deoxyribose is a monosaccharide.

That’s a lot of syllables. Suffice to say sugars and carbohydrates are the same thing, and they aren’t just what you put in your coffee, they’re basic organic molecules that are absolutely everywhere.

But back to sugar:

Monosaccharides:

- Glucose. You can buy it as a syrup from the supermarket. Plants make it via photosynthesis. It’s one of the three sugars that are absorbed directly into your blood stream during digestion. I like to add it to home-made icecream to make it smoother.

- Fructose. Known as fruit sugar, it is found in fruit, root vegetables, honey and maple syrup.

Disaccharides:

- Sucrose. Table sugar. It is a disaccharide formed when glucose and fructose link together. Also known as ‘white poison’ in more hysterical circles.

- Lactose. Formed from glucose and another monosaccharide known as galactose. It is the sugar in milk.

- Maltose. Formed by joining two glucose molecules. It is present in germinating seeds and 1950s milk-shakes.

Pseudosaccharides:

- Smackose. The sugar you can’t stop thinking about. You try to ignore it with will power and clean living, then there’s a 2-for-1 special at the supermarket and you’ve suddenly downed a family block.

- Wankose. Seen increasingly at trendy cafes that don’t appreciate that if the coffee’s good you’ll have it black and unsweetened, but sometimes a latte with 2 sugars is nice… however not so much if their ‘raw organic Haitian cane sugar’ that looks more like dirty sand changes the flavour entirely.

- Chokose. Dusted over Greek pastries this can be easily inhaled by the novice, leading to rapid asphyxiation. Over 3,500 tourists die in Greece every year from inhaling chokose.  

- Artificial Sweeteners: you're eating them because you're fat, worried about the health effects of sugar, or both. Unfortunately sprinkling this shit on your cornflakes still leaves you a cancer-riddled pig at the end of the day.   

Bonus Level: My grandma Barbara Stebbings’s recipe for Russian Caramels:

Apicide

The bees are dying. They’ve died off before, but not in my lifetime. As far as we know, their deaths aren’t related to climate change, but it feels like that. It feels like an intimation of the sadness I felt when I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and realised all the animals had died.

The name for the bees dying is ‘Colony Collapse Disorder.’ In the past it has had better names. ‘Disappearing disease’ and ‘Spring dwindle’ are two of the neater ones. The current dying began in 2006 and we have yet to ascertain the cause. Probable contenders in descending order of likelihood are:

Neonicotinoids – these are a class of insecticide derived from, or chemically similar to, nicotine. They are useful in that they affect insects more than mammals, and because they can be applied to seeds and from there, provide protection to the whole plant, especially from sap-sucking insects. They are relatively new and their rise in agriculture coincides with the death of the bees, so they are a prime suspect. George Monbiot, an environmentalist whom I greatly admire, points the bone squarely in their direction. A more thoughtful view is taken by the American apiarist and biologist Randy Oliver, who keeps abreast of the scientific literature covering neonicotinoids and their effect on bees. He points out that there seems to be little correlation between the use of these chemicals and Colony Collapse Disorder, although more study needs to be undertaken on how long they linger in the soil, their effects when mixed with other chemicals, particularly fungicides, and their real-world application (when used correctly they seem to have a negligible effect on bees, when used heavily in home and municipal contexts they can cause harm, especially to waterways).

Pathogens – a high percentage of beehives can become infested with the Varroa destructor mite, which weakens bees by sucking their equivalent of blood. The mite can also carry viruses such as ‘deformed wing virus’ and ‘Israeli acute paralysis virus.’ The fungus Nosema is also thought to be a likely culprit in many hives collapsing.

High-Fructose Corn Syrup – is there anything it can’t do? Bees are often fed this syrup in winter when there are few natural sources of nectar. Such a bland diet may weaken their immune system. This may be exacerbated by bees feeding on a monoculture crop during Spring and Summer.

Apiculture – transporting a hive from one area to another can make it difficult for bees to find their way home; it can also spread the pathogens mentioned above. Other apicultural practices being touted as possible factors leading to CCD include the artificial control of queen bees, including selecting bees for breeding based on docility (and the concurrent lack of genetic diversity this has brought to bee populations); the use of antibiotics; the selection of which larva is to be fed royal jelly; introducing a new queen every two years (without interference a queen would normally reign for five or six); excluding the queen from some areas of the hive and clipping the queen’s wings. Lastly, the provision of such infrastructure as combs, wax sheets and ventilation, all of which can be taken care of by the hive itself.

Most likely Colony Collapse Disorder arises from a combination of all of the factors listed above, probably interacting in complex feedback loops. Although pointing at a single cause, for example neonicotinoids, is both emotionally satisfying and automatically provides a simple solution, it does belittle the effort being put in on an international level to pin down the causes of CCD and combat them. Bees are vital to our food supply. They don’t just provide honey for your toast, they provide free pollination to a vast array of crops. So, although “ban neonicotinoids” is a catchy slogan you may encounter over the coming years, and may prove to actually be the solution, bear in mind too that these chemicals have been banned already in France with no discernible effect. As yet there has been no reporting of CCD in Australia despite our use of neonicotinoids.

A summation? There appears to be no simple cause or solution for CCD. A combination of better beekeeping practices and more responsible use of pesticides would seem to be a good start. Until the crisis is resolved take a moment, next time you pass a plant covered in flowers, to appreciate the bees fuzzing its margins, their attention to each bloom, their tiny perfection. 

Freezing to Death in a Gamma Garden

Gerry leaned against the binnacle and bit into the nectarine. Juice dribbled down his chin and he sucked frantically at the flesh of the fruit to avoid losing any more.

“Where on Earth did you find that?” asked the Berg.

“Below decks,” said Gerry, slurping greedily. “There’s a whole box of them.”

“But you’ve been eating nothing but pemmican for nearly two months now.”

“I must have missed them. Nooks and crannies down there. Yesterday I found a book of crosswords.”

The Berg cracked alarmingly. It was a sunny day and light blared back from its surface and hurt Gerry’s eyes.

“Nevertheless.”

Gerry shrugged and continued savouring the nectarine.

“They’re radioactive you know.”

Gerry spat the stone noisily overboard. “Bullshit.”

“Well, not strictly radioactive, but bred with the aid of radiation.”

Gerry, who had been about to go down to get another one, turned back. “Really?”

“Really. After World War Two everyone was trying to find peaceful uses for atomic energy. Just using it to vaporise Japanese people was giving it a bad name. They made atomic gardens to try and harness its mutagenic properties.”

“Wasn’t this a Simpsons episode?”

The Berg trickled furiously. The sunshine had made its whole surface run with meltwater.

“Don’t be facetious. It’s entirely true. They set up circular fields with a radioactive slug, cobalt-60 or something equally nasty, tied to a pole in the middle. The idea was you planted a wedge of a particular crop and let the radiation work its mutation magic. Close to the centre everything just died. Further back though you’d get weird effects like giant fruit or strangely coloured leaves and flowers.”

“Cool.”

“Actually, I’m finding it distinctly warm,” said the Berg.

“You’re very grumpy today. So what happened with the mutant plants? And how did they harvest this stuff?”

“The pole with the radiation source could be retracted into the ground, then workers would come in to examine what had happened to the plants.”

“Voila, radioactive nectarines.”

“Actually, peach trees mutated by radiation whose progeny are what, today, we know as the nectarine.”

“I’ll be damned. Any other successes?”

“Mint oil.”

“Mint oil?”

“Mint is particularly susceptible to a particular fungal wilt. The Americans irradiated hundreds of thousands of shoots and then planted them in wilt-infested fields. The resulting wilt-resistant cultivar, Todd’s Mitcham as I believe it’s called, is now the standard crop used in the world’s mint oil industry. You brushed your teeth with some this morning.”

“I ate the last of the toothpaste six weeks ago.”

“You’re going to wish you hadn’t when it comes time to get all those bits of nectarine out of your teeth.”

“Very funny. So, nectarines, mint oil… they give it up after that?”

“Oh, it’s still happening. Not as popular as back in the ‘60s and ‘70s but they still use it to try and breed new plant varieties today. The last success we know of was the ‘Rio Star’ – a particularly red variety of grapefruit.”

“That we know of?”

“It’s all very hush hush. Genetic engineering. Radioactive mutants. You know – things you don’t want associated with your product.”

“So how do you know about it?” asked Gerry, turning to head below deck again. The sun had moved and he was in the Berg’s shadow. When he tried to lick some of the nectarine juice from his beard it was already starting to freeze.

“A hippy who was down here in 1976 told me. They parked their boat alongside me for a few days. He used to like to come and and talk to me.”

“Talk to you? You’re an iceberg.”

“He was taking a lot of acid.”

  

Remember When the Whole Street Got Together and Killed the People in Number 37?

The Holocaust holds a fascination for many people. I am one of them. Up until recently this has manifested as an interest in the technical aspects, and in the grisly details, of killing somewhere between 11 and 17 million people; also in the details of life in a concentration camp. These interests are satisfied most fully by Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man and The Truce, and in the testimonials of the members of the Sonderkommando or ‘Special Unit’ – the Jews who were forced to run the gas chambers and crematoria.

In the last week I’ve been reading Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark and this has drawn my attention to an aspect of the Holocaust I’d previously been only peripherally aware of. Previously I had thought of the attempted genocide as something secret, as something a minority of people were aware was occurring, but this is not the case. As early as 1941 the Allies were aware of mass killings of European Jewry. In 1943 there was a meeting between the UK and US to discuss what to do about the extermination camps which aerial photography had revealed. The lack of action from this meeting led Szmul Zygielbojm, leader of the Polish government in exile, to commit suicide in protest.

For the German people though, the holocaust must been an open secret. Estimates put the number of Germans directly involved in the Holocaust at 300,000. The SS had around 900,000 members, all of whom would have been aware of what was happening. Add to this the 1.2 million people working on the railways who would have seen the cattle-cars filled with prisoners rolling past, the thousands of civil servants who would have gained an idea through their day to day work of what was occurring, and finally the average citizen who would have seen Jews rounded up, beaten, often shot as they were deported to ‘the East.’

Add to this the level of knowledge and collaboration in neighbouring states: the Balkans, Romania, Poland, Hungary etc. We are left with a picture of a large percentage of Western Europe rife with anti-Semitism, that watched on, or helped, as the Nazis carried off and killed millions of their neighbours and fellow citizens.

What must this have been like for that generation? The men and women now in their 80s and 90s who have been walking around with this secret for 50 years? The fellow with the beard who you see every week at the bus stop, what did he do? How much did he know? The woman at the pharmacy? The man selling you your car? The others in your retirement home? When you see news of a mass grave discovered in a Polish forest what secret communication passes between you and the other old men at your club? Didn’t Thomas say his regiment was stationed in that area? Did he kill as many as you did?

An insanity of shared experience.

Veni, vidi, vici

Great news. As of December 15, Operation Iraqi Freedom, otherwise known as the Iraq War, is officially over (we won). Australia, as part of the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ can give itself a big pat on the back here. We, and the forces of Western Democracy, have done bloody well.

In summary we were in a bad situation back in 2003 when the whole thing kicked off. Osama bin Laden and his Terrorist Army were pretty much in charge of everything in North Africa and the Middle East. Even worse, some guy on a desk in the CIA had reliably informed us that our former best friend Saddam Hussein appeared to be making Weapons of Mass Destruction - and not that nerve gas we said it was OK for him to use on the Kurds, really bad nerve gas this time. Maybe even nukes.

The situation was simply unacceptable. If anyone’s going to be killing innocent civilians it’ll be the goddamn Western Democratic Powers thank you very much. To that end we bombed the bejezus out of Baghdad and anywhere else that looked promising. Even let our boys play with a bit of white phosphorous in Faluja. Geneva Convention? What are you? A pussy?

May 1^st 2003 – all done. The Iraqi population pretty much gave us a tickertape parade. Now it was time to clean up. Things were in a pretty bad state due to the bombing in the Gulf War and the years of economic sanctions before the bombing in the Iraq War. Luckily Iraq had a newly democratised society finally out from under the yoke of Saddam Hussein; they were raring to go. Even better, Iraq probably the largest oil reserves in the Middle East* – all that money would allow Iraqi society to flourish in no time. They just needed a little help from their Liberators – us!

First things first, everyone in any position of power was a member of Saddam’s evil Ba’ath Party. This wasn’t because Saddam was a crazy dictator and being in the Ba’ath Party might make it slightly easier for you to get a job or avoid getting executed for coughing at an inopportune moment; it was because you were an evil supporter of an evil dictator. Getting rid of anyone who was a member of the Ba’ath Party gave the new Iraq a minty fresh taste – the fact that these were the very people who knew how to run the country was immaterial. We could always get new guys in to replace all that experience we were flushing down the toilet. Oh yeah, we’d also let looters burn and destroy nearly every public record in Baghdad (apart from those in the Oil Ministry*) so that should make it even easier.

Second things second, Iraqi Society was a little too homogenous. Most Iraqis thought of themselves as Iraqis first, then Muslims. We knew better though, there were Dangerous Sectarian Undercurrents that could erupt into violence at any moment. To that end we based all subsequent decisions on the idea that the country was divided amongst Shi’a Muslims, Sunni Muslims and Kurds. That guy on the desk in the CIA found out that the Sunnis had been pretty much the big boys under Saddam so they had to be put in their place. A few years later things were ticking along nicely, political representation was based along ethno-sectarian lines, ethno-sectarian based violence was up to nearly 100 incidents per day and Iraq had a brand new constitution that the Iraqi People had been completely excluded from having a say in.

Next up it was time for the money to start rolling in. The Iraqi oil industry had some of the best engineers in the business. They’d managed to keep the show on the road despite bits of infrastructure being blown up every other day and the sanctions meaning they had to fix things with string and paperclips. Unfortunately lots of them were Ba’athists so they had to go. The rest started joining the revived trade unions that had been illegal under Saddam. That was no good either, as they were all in favour of keeping the oil under the aegis of the Iraqi State, buying in technology with the profits from existing wells in order to develop more production capacity, and training a new generation of Iraqis to manage and exploit their country’s single most important resource. That all sounded dangerously like communism so we put a bunch of guys in charge based purely on how hard they could suck up to the occupying forces, left Saddam’s laws on the books that made trade unions illegal, and moved trade unionists from one facility to another to make sure they couldn’t stir up trouble.

Things looked bad for a minute when the neutered remnants of the government couldn’t even pass an oil law so we at least had some sort of legal recourse if the country ever got uppity about their economy getting raped. Eventually though everyone settled down and had a good old fashioned auction. There was plenty of collusion between bidders and plenty of oil up for grabs so there wasn’t too much competition to put people off. Lots of companies got the rights to extract lots of oil for the next 20 years*. The new Iraqi government were really obliging by not insisting on any legal oversight, not mandating any jobs for Iraqis, and even chucking in some compensation for all the security the companies would have to hire. Everyone was happy. Especially the West, as a bunch of private companies ramping up production on pretty much every oil field in Iraq would certainly be a kick in the nuts for any production limits OPEC tried to set in the future*.

So, three cheers for us. Another job well done, and it only cost us 5,123 lives... Oh yeah, there were a few dead Iraqis too – somewhere between 100,000 and 650,000. It can be hard to keep track when you’re killing so many people you don’t give a fuck about.

* NB: the war had nothing whatsoever to do with oil.

Humanity V. Horses

In other startling news surrounding the Melbourne Cup, it seems that the time for the horses to run the 3200m race is getting steadily less. By juxtaposing the unrelated, but similarly timed, Men's World 1500m record, we can see that:

a) by 2020 it will take less time for the World's fastest man to run 1500m than it will for a horse to win the Melbourne Cup

b) somewhere around the year 3000 we will all be able to run faster than a horse

c) in the distant future all races will be run instantaneously, bending both time and space into dangerous knots that may adversely effect race-goers.

Gestalt Pong

I watched something pretty amazing on TV last night – gestalt Pong. The footage was of a demonstration, or experiment, run by a computer graphics specialist, Loren Carpenter. Five thousand people file into a conference room; on each chair they find a little paddle, red on one side, green on the other. At the back of the room a camera linked to computers scans the crowd and monitors the position of each paddle, and whether the person holding it has it displaying its red or green face. At first this information is simply translated into a red or green pixel on a screen in front of the participants, by flipping one’s paddle back and forth each person can locate ‘their’ pixel on-screen. Then, with nothing more than a request for the number 5, everyone flips their paddle based on their position and, with a little experimentation, the number resolves itself. With a little practice the participants can bring up any shape or figure requested extremely quickly, all with no planning or organisation.

Things get freaky when a game of Pong is put on the screen. The crowd is dived into left and right; displaying the red side of your paddle ‘votes’ to move the Pong bat upwards, displaying green is a ‘vote’ to move the virtual bat down. But if all the participants on one side show red the bat moves up extremely quickly to the top of the screen - a mixture of green and red is required to move the bat with more finesse. None of this is explained. Loren has simply put up a game of Pong and said “folks on the left of the auditorium control the left bat; folks on the right control the right bat. Go!” Thirty seconds later the crowd is playing an increasingly quick and skillful game of Pong.

Flocking patterns can be simulated with simple rules, but what is the rule that governs the Pong players? A small percentage of the group unknowingly reversing the directions (believing that, by displaying the red side of their paddle they are moving the Pong bat down, when in fact they are voting to move it up) providing the balance to move the bat more fluidly? This seems less likely than the more unlikely explanation – that two ‘mob intelligences’ are somehow playing the game. Awesome.

Related (and unverified) folklore….

-         a swarm of bees is as intelligent as a dog

-         the part of the brain that causes you to yawn when you see someone else yawn is the same part that is involved in the flocking of birds

Enrich Your Own Uranium

There were breathless reports this week that Australian scientists (yes, we still fund a couple, and these are physicists, not those bloody climate change ones) are developing a new method of refining uranium. The method, if perfected, will make a difficult process much easier. The US and Australian governments have entered negotiations whereby the technology will be licensed to General Electric, which would then build a billion dollar enrichment plant in North Carolina to supply 60 of the US’s nuclear power plants.

Ignoring the fact that all this possibly puts us in breach of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (hey, we sleep soundly while supplying 15% of the world’s uranium already, why not enrich it too); ignoring the fact that the US has taken reckless actions (e.g. the invasion of Iraq, the STUXNET worm) to prevent countries whose governments it does not approve of from enriching uranium; what pissed me off was the hushed tones of secrecy surrounding the technology.

Western Democracy is obsessed with secrecy. The decisions and processes of government and business are hidden under a sheet of confidentiality. Citizens may, at times, lift a corner of this sheet through freedom of information requests, but in general one must know where and what to look for. This is not how our society should be run. The usual bleatings about security were shown to be nonsense when Wikileaks dumped about a billion diplomatic cables into the public domain. A few people had their noses put out of joint; a few people’s opinions about other people, or countries, were revealed. The world did not collapse. The terrorists did not win.

Yet, here was the media reporting on the new method of uranium enrichment with fawning obedience to the cult of secrecy. The method (and the company’s name) is SILEX, or Separation of Isotopes by Laser EXcitation. It is both classified and proprietary. End of story. No scientists were interviewed about the possible mechanism for such enrichment. There was no speculation. It was as if the merest description of the process would crack it wide open for any half-arsed scientist from Jakarta to Islamabad. Hell, you could probably do it yourself with shit you bought down at Bunnings.

So, in the interests of a full and frank discussion on the technology and the part we are playing in its development, this is how it probably works. Uranium ore is refined and gasified, becoming uranium hexafluoride. This is mixed with a carrier gas and exposed to pulsed laser radiation from a series of CO₂ lasers at the wavelength of 16µm. This laser energy selectively excites the uranium isotopes used in nuclear reactors – ²³⁵U – allowing the stream of gas containing them to be funneled off, condensed and processed back into reactor feedstock. Voila.

Let’s just check out the window…. No fireballs and/or mushroom clouds? No, the people, from whatever country, who are developing this technology know all of the above already. Failing to include such details in your reporting simply serves to keep the issue opaque, while playing to the tune of cold war Spy vs. Spy nonsense that surrounds the nuclear industry.  

Animal Holocaust

Human beings have killed off some pretty amazing things in our time, but we usually think of these as remote (prehistoric man hunting the last of the mammoths already pressured by the end of the last ice-age), or already vulnerable (the dodo). Americans were particularly good at it.

1870s entrepreneurs and their 'Bison Bone Ski Slope' 

Plains Bison were famously hunted to near extinction in the 1800s, but think about what this means. Native Americans had lived in balance with the bison for centuries and the number of animals was such that large populations of humans could prey on them with little change to the bison’s overall numbers. The best estimates of the pre-Columbian bison population are around 30 million animals. At this time they were the most numerous single species of large wild mammal on Earth.

With the introduction of guns, Native American hunting escalated to the extent that the Comanche tribe were killing over a quarter of a million animals every year by the 1830s. By the 1870s the industry was in full swing and it is estimated that between 2,000 and 100,000 animals were killed every day depending on the season. Hunters had to put the barrels of their guns in the snow to cool them down.

Plains bison were saved from extinction by a few enterprising ranchers who preserved small herds which were later released into National Parks. The Passenger Pigeon was not so lucky. These birds were present in such numbers (between 3 and 5 billion animals) that in 1866 a flock over 1.5 kilometers wide was reported as taking 14 hours to pass overhead. That is, you wake in the morning to find the largest flock of birds you have ever seen blotting out the sky, and as night falls that same flock is still flying overhead. Unfortunately Passenger Pigeons were a convenient and cheap source of food. In 1878 one hunt killed 50,000 birds per day for nearly 5 months. By 1896 the last big flock was killed and in 1914 the last living specimen died in Cincinnati Zoo.

More numerous even than the Plains Bison and the Passenger Pigeon was the Rocky Mountain Locust. These insects were so numerous that there were serious questions raised as to whether agriculture in North America would be viable, such were their depredations. The famous “Albert’s Swarm” of 1875 was calculated to cover an area greater than the size of California and contain perhaps 12.5 trillion insects. 30 years later they were gone, and no-one was really sure why. The best guess is that farmers dug up the areas they used as egg-laying beds.

In the words of Kurt Vonnegut,“so it goes.”

Hatred of Cattle

Bombing Melbourne

I’ve always had a dark turn of mind. This, coupled with a love of interesting technical facts, combines to form an abiding interest in nuclear bombs.

The whole “duck-and-cover” fear of nuclear annihilation was absent from my childhood. I was 13 when the USSR disintegrated in 1991, and the idea of imminent death had been on the wane since the Cuban Missile Crisis anyway. Growing up in Tasmania meant that I was far removed from the machinery and immediacy of nuclear Armageddon that must still have been present, like fog burning off in the sun, for my childhood contemporaries growing up near a missile silo in Kansas or in one of the USSR’s ‘secret cities.’

The literature was still there for me to discover though, and a lot of my favourite stories were set in a post-apocalyptic world. Louise Lawrence’s Children of the Dust, John Christopher’s ‘Tripods’ series, and Caroline MacDonald’s The Lake at the End of the World were all read repeatedly. Later, John Hersey’s Hiroshima gave me the horrific detail that the children’s books had only alluded to.

Anyway, the following map is a better effort at some figures I scribbled down some years ago. A good map can illuminate many things, and hopefully this one shows just how big the explosion of a big nuclear bomb is. A good shorthand for measuring the explosive power of large explosions such as a nuclear bomb is in tonnes of TNT. The ‘Little Boy’ bomb dropped on Hiroshima exploded with a force of 15 kilotonnes, or 15,000 tonnes of TNT. The largest ever nuclear bomb, the USSR’s 1961 effort ‘Tsar Bomba,’ was originally going to detonate with a force of 100 megatonnes, but was scaled back at the last moment to 50 megatonnes (50 million tonnes of TNT) – pussies.

A ‘big’ bomb nowadays is around 20 megatonnes. The US and the Russian Federation each still have around 2000 weapons of various sizes ready to go, and another 6000 (US) and 9000 (Russian Federation) in mothballs. Here’s what would happen if a 20Mt bomb was detonated 5.4km over the Melbourne CBD:    

8 Anecdotes about John von Neumann

The following problem can be solved the easy way or the hard way:
"Two trains 200 miles apart are moving toward each other; each one is going at a speed of 50 miles per hour. A fly starting on the front of one of the trains flies back and forth between them at a rate of 75 miles per hour. It does this until the trains collide and crush the fly to death. What is the total distance the fly has flown?"
In a strict mathematical sense the fly actually hits each train an infinite number of times before it gets crushed, and one could solve the problem the hard way with pencil and paper by summing an infinite series of distances. This is they way that most trained mathematicians will solve the problem. Conversely a mathematical novice will most likely solve the problem the easy way - since the trains are 200 miles apart
and each train is going 50 miles an hour, it takes 2 hours for the trains to collide, therefore the fly was flying for two hours, at a rate of 75 miles per hour, and so the fly must have flown 150 miles. Easy.
When this problem was posed to John von Neumann, he immediately replied, "150 miles."
"Ah, I see you've heard this one before, Professor von Neumann. Nearly everyone tries to sum the infinite series."
"What do you mean?" asked von Neumann. "That's how I did it!"

An MIT student cornered the famous professor in a hallway:
Student: "Er, excuse me, Professor von Neumann, could you please help me with a calculus problem?"
John von Neumann: "Okay, sonny, if it's real quick -- I'm a busy man."
S: "I'm having trouble with this integral."
JvN: "Let's have a look." (a brief pause) "Alright, sonny, the answer's two-pi over 5."
S: "I know that, sir, the answer's in the back - I'm having trouble deriving it, though."
JvN: "Okay, let me see it again." (another pause) "Yep, the answer's two-pi over 5."
S (frustrated): "Uh, sir, I know the answer, I just don't see how to derive it."
JvN: "Whaddya want, sonny, I worked it out in two different ways!"

"Johnny was the only student I was ever afraid of," the mathematician George Pólya once recalled. "If in the course of a lecture I stated an unsolved problem, the chances were he'd come to me as soon as the lecture was over, with the complete solution in a few scribbles on a slip of paper."

Von Neumann was the subject of many dotty professor stories. He supposedly had the habit of simply writing answers to homework assignments on the board (the method of solution being, of course, obvious). One time one of his students tried to get more helpful information by asking if there was another way to solve the problem. Von Neumann looked blank for a moment, thought, and then answered, "Yes".

In the 1950s, von Neumann was employed as a consultant to IBM to review proposed and ongoing dvanced technology projects. One day a week, von Neumann "held court" at 590 Madison Avenue, New York. On one of these occasions in 1954 he was confronted with the FORTRAN concept (the first 'high level' computer programming language); its developer, John Backus, remembered von Neumann being unimpressed and that he asked "why would you want more than machine language?"

"The spectacular thing about Johnny was not his power as a mathematician, which was great, or his insight and his clarity, but his rapidity; he was very, very fast. And like the modern computer, which no longer bothers to retrieve the logarithm of 11 from its memory (but, instead, computes the logarithm of 11 each time it is needed), Johnny didn't bother to remember things. He computed them. You asked him a question, and if he didn't know the answer, he thought for three seconds and would produce an answer." - Paul Halmos, Mathematician.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, John von Neumann was strictly logical in his thinking. One afternoon his assistant, Paul Halmos, dropped von Neumann off at home. "Since there was to be a party there later, and since I didn't trust myself to remember exactly how I got there," Halmos recalled, "I asked how I'd be able to know his house when I came again. 'That's easy,' he said. 'It's the one with that pigeon sitting by the curb.'"

Henry Ford had ordered a dynamo for one of his plants. The dynamo didn't work, and not even the manufacturers could figure out why. A Ford employee told his boss that von Neumann was "the smartest man in America," so Ford called von Neumann and asked him to come out and take a look at the dynamo.
Von Neumann came, looked at the schematics, walked around the dynamo, then took out a pencil. He marked a line on the outside casing and said, "If you'll go in and cut the coil here, the dynamo will work fine."
They cut the coil, and the dynamo did work fine. Ford then told von Neumann to send him a bill for the work. Von Neumann sent Ford a bill for $5,000. Ford was astounded - $5,000 was a lot in the 1950s - and
asked von Neumann for an itemised account. Here's what he submitted:
Drawing a line with the pencil: $ 1
Knowing where to draw the line with the pencil: $4,999
Ford paid the bill.

Saint Philby

Think famous spies and you think James Bond. Think harder and you hopefully think of Kim Philby He was an English spy who turned double-agent and spied for the Russians through the Cold War. He was a very naughty boy, but he's not half as interesting as his dad, Harry St. John Bridger Philby, usually known as 'Saint.'.

Saint was the your archetypal man of the British Empire. He was born in
1885 in Sri Lanka, he went to school at Westminster and then Cambridge,
where he was friends and classmates with Nehru - later prime minister of
India. He was a clever little bugger who got into the Indian Civil Service (no mean feat, a sample question on the entrance exam read: "State the arguments for and against Utility, considered as (1) the actual, and (2) the proper, basis of morals.") and learnt to speak 5 languages.

Anyway, during WWI he and some other gung-ho chaps went over to what is
now Saudi Arabia with the aim of a) helping the Arabs rebel against the  Ottoman Empire (which was allied with Germany with which Britain was
fighting), and b) protect the oil-fields at Basra in modern day Iraq so the Royal Navy could continue getting oil.

That was all well and good, but if you wanted an Arab revolt, you had to have a "King of the Arabs" - Britain wanted a guy called Sheriff Hussein, who was leader of the Hashemites, an Arab dynasty. Lawrence of
Arabia and an archaeologist and explorer, Gertrude Bell (who taught Saint the finer points of espionage), had been building up the Hashemites for years, primarily as a group who could rule Iraq - but Saint was friendly with Hussein's bitter rival, Ibn Saud, and thought he was the man for the job.

That all ended up going nowhere in the end, because at the end of WWI Britain reneged on her promise to hand the Middle East over to a King of the Arabs, and instead parcelled the remains of the Ottoman Empire up between herself and France, with nominal free governments, but really run as British and French colonies.

Saint did well out of this - being appointed Internal Security Minister of the newly formed Iraq (or British Mandate of Iraq - their new name for a colony). He whipped the Iraqis up a constitution and other  democratic accoutrements, but was pretty embarrassed that Britain had gone back on its word. He then moved over and ran the secret service for the British Mandate of Palestine, but he was still keen for a "King of the Arabs," and thought his mate Ibn Saud was still a contender. Eventually the British, who still supported the Hashemites, got sick of him and chucked him out of the Foreign Office, but old Saint still had lots of friends in high places, and so could advise Ibn on exactly how far he could go in conquering Hashemite territory before the British Empire would get pissed off enough to intervene. In this way Ibn created Saudi Arabia, and Saint handled the coronation.

Saint was sitting pretty now, he was best mates with the king of Saudi Arabia, the king's advisor on all matters British, and could spend time pootling about Saudi Arabia mapping things, exploring, and bird-watching (he liked to name the birds he discovered after women he admired). To get into the swing of things he converted to Islam in 1930.

Oil was growing in popularity, and in 1933 Saint helped negotiate an exclusive contract between Saudi Arabia and America's Standard Oil to drill for oil along the Persian Gulf. Britain won't listen to your opinions and continue backing those fucking Hashemites and bloody Lawrence of Arabia? Well, let's see how they like missing out on massive oil reserves in favour of their successors to the rule of the world, America. He continued in this vein for the next few years, undermining Britain's interests in Aden, and then facilitating a merger of Standard Oil, Texaco and the Saudi Government to form ARAMCO, today the world's largest oil company with revenues of more than US$200 billion/year.

This anti-British stuff all got a bit out of hand when before the start of WWII Saint had meetings with the Nazi Adolf Eichmann and put forward a plan for neutral Saudi Arabia to sell oil to pretending-to-be-neutral Spain who could then sell it to definitely-not-neutral Germany. While supporting the Nazis on one hand, he also came up with the "Philby Plan," which included unlimited Jewish migration into Palestine, as long as the Jews supported Ibn's son, Faisal, as the heir to the throne of Saudi Arabia. In return Saudi Arabia would also chip in to resettle the Palestinians.

Strangely, Saint then returned to Britain, which he must have found bloody freezing, and ran for election to the House of Commons on a peace platform. He lost that, went to India, and was arrested as a Nazi  Sympathiser. His mate (and most influential economist of the 20th century) John Maynard Keynes spoke up for him though, and he was released.

Back in Saudi Arabia things started to go downhill. When Ibn heard about the "Philby Plan" he was less than impressed, as Saint hadn't consulted him on all the details, and began to suspect Saint was perhaps more
interested in Britain's, or possibly the Jews' interests, rather than Saudi Arabia's. They started having massive arguments, largely provoked by Saint, who thought that all that oil money had turned his old mate Ibn into a wanker. To keep himself happy Saint went and got himself a second wife, a 16 year old slave he bought at a market near Mecca.

Ibn Saud died in 1953 and Saint's choice for successor, Faisal, was pipped by his brother, Saud, who Saint had openly criticised. Saint was exiled to Lebanon where he lived with his son Kim, whom he introduced to
many of his contacts in Arab politics. Eventually he was reconciled with the Saudi royal family, but in 1960, while he was back in Beirut visiting Kim, he died in bed, with Kim at his side. His last words were "God, I'm bored."

The L&N Don't Stop Here Anymore

Carryl and I are heading to Dunkeld for a quiet weekend away soon. Playing around on Google Earth I noticed there was a rail line passing nearby. I started investigating and soon found that Victoria formerly had an amazing amount of rail lines to all corners of the state. This is the network in 1947:

These lines were used less and less as Victorian agriculture became more centralised; freight was moved more by truck; and people tended to drive rather than catch public transport. With the downturn in profitability, and the rise of a more right wing take on political economics, corporatisation, and then privatisation, has led to this:

It's more profitable, and patronage has increased, but I can't catch a train to Dunkeld any more.

Demon Core

When the Americans were developing the atomic bomb in the '40s under the
auspices of the Manhattan Project they had to find out how fast
different masses of fissile material would go critical. They did this by
getting some plutonium and steadily surrounding it with a 'neutron reflector' - a substance that reflects the neutrons that the plutonium is pumping out back on itself, which makes the plutonium throw out more neutrons, on and on, till you get Hiroshima.
But because this was the '40s and they didn't have health and safety
they just put the block of plutonium on a stand and stacked up bricks of
tungsten carbide around it till their Geiger counters started going nuts. The
guy doing this, by hand, one day accidentally dropped a tungsten carbide brick
onto the block of plutonium, so the plutonium went 'prompt critical' and
threw out enough radiation to kill the dude.
Later, they'd refined their technique a bit and had the same lump of plutonioum
inside two hemispheres of beryllium which, amazingly, they had a guy
hold open with a screwdriver. Of course the screwdriver eventually
slipped and the 2 hemispheres closed to form a sphere, the plutonium went
prompt critical again, and the guy holding the screwdriver, Louis
Slotin, felt a burning pain in his hand, a sour taste in his mouth, a
wash of heat and saw the air glow blue around him. He managed to yank
the hemispheres apart again, luckily stopping everybody in the vicinity
from dying horribly, but he had received a dose of radiation equivalent
to standing about a kilometre and a half away from an exploding atomic
bomb, so he died a few days later.
The lump of plutonium, really the hero in the tale, became known as the
'demon core.' Luckily we showed it what for, blowing it up in the 'Able' nuclear test at Bikini Atoll in 1946 (although this and other tests have made Bikini Atoll uninhabitable).

Letter the first

Dear Senator Fielding,

I have just read your 3 questions regarding climate change and feel I can answer these for you:

QUESTION 1
Is it the case that CO2 increased by 5% since 1998 whilst global temperature cooled over the same period (see Fig. 1)? If so, why did the temperature not increase; and how can human emissions be to blame for dangerous levels of warming?

ANSWER
You may have noticed that during the season of Spring that not every day is warmer than the previous day, nevertheless, by the time Summer arrives you can definitely say 'it is warmer now than 3 months ago.' This is called a trend.
Similarly, global warming is a trend. So, although we can happily ignore it for the rest of our lives, future generations will be able to say, 'it is warmer now than 100 years ago.'

QUESTION 2
Is it the case that the rate and magnitude of warming between 1979 and 1998 (the late 20th century phase of global warming) were not unusual as compared with warmings that have occurred earlier in the Earth’s history (Fig. 2a, 2b)? If the warming was not unusual, why is it perceived to have been caused by human CO2 emissions; and, in any event, why is warming a problem if the Earth has experienced similar warmings in the past?

ANSWER
Global warming is not a problem. If global temperatures increase, for example, to the degree experienced in the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (a period approximately 56 million years ago where average global temperatures increased by 6 degrees over a period of 20,000 years), then presumably we would experience similar effects in the present day (though the most dire global warming predictions do envisage a 6 degree increase happening in less than 1000 years). These could include such things as a wetter, more tropical climate; raised sea levels; and partial extinction of deep-water microscopic organisms. Interestingly, there was an increase in biodiversity during this period, although this did take some millions of years to fully evolve. Such temperature increases will of course cause huge changes to the way humanity lives and survives, but over the long-time scales we are talking about such changes will happen anyway.

QUESTION 3.
Is it the case that all GCM computer models projected a steady increase in temperature for the period 1990-2008, whereas in fact there were only 8 years of warming were followed by 10 years of stasis and cooling. (Fig. 3)? If so, why is it assumed that long-term climate projections by the same models are suitable as a basis for public policy making?

ANSWER
See Answer 1.

I hope this helps you understand more about global warming. I think a good thing to do in the modern world is to listen to the opinions of experts. For example, if you were diagnosed with a rare disease, with few initial symptoms, but with a bad prognosis (e.g. disfigurement and death) you would most likely go to a doctor who has spent many years studying this disease. If the doctor said something surprising such as, 'The disease you have can only be cured by chopping off your index fingers" you would of course ask for a second opinion, but if chopping off you index fingers was the consensus amongst all the doctors you saw, you would most likely conclude that this was what had to be done. The only other options you would have would be to become a doctor yourself and study the disease until you either reached the same conclusion, or found an alternative cure; or to wait and hope that the disease went away or was misdiagnosed.
Similarly with global warming, because the science involved is very complicated, it is a good idea to listen to experts. At present, the vast majority of these experts are saying that global warming is a real threat that we must act to avoid ("you must chop off your index fingers"). Taking action would obviously be distressing, and so, once again, there are really only 2 alternatives to contemplate. You could return to university and study Geography, Climate Science, Atmospheric Physics, Glaciology, Meteorology and all the other disciplines represented by the experts who are currently telling you that global warming is real, until you yourself were an expert. You could then make an informed decision as to whether global warming is a serious issue that must be addressed. Otherwise, your other option is to wait and see if global warming does not really exist (waiting for the disease to go away, or perhaps a misdiagnosis).
Waiting for something to go away, or to be proved untrue, is a bad stratagem when dealing with potentially terminal diseases. You might feel fine for a few years, but then take a turn for the worse, where you can see you are obviously sick, and the disease has not gone away or been misdiagnosed. But when you come back to the doctor he says he cannot help you because the window for successful treatment has passed, or that cutting off your index fingers is no longer enough, and he must now remove your arms.

Anyway, you can see where I'm going with all that, and being a Christian I'm sure you know about Pascal's Wager and have applied the form to the global warming question, et cetera, et cetera

Hope this helps.

Best regards, Scott Howard

P.S. Possibly the reason Al Gore declined to meet with you is that he thought you were a crackpot.

Cressy

This was originally called Euthanasia, but I'm feeling mellower right now, so it's just Cressy. Cressy is a very small town in Northern Tasmania where I grew up. It's the sort of place people think their kids should grow up in, and in fact it was lovely. Lots of BMXs, forts in hedges, that sort of shit. A town with a top shop, a middle shop and a bottom shop (though these days the top shop has closed).

What parents who imagine their children growing up in these places don't take into account though is what happens when forts in hedges start to lose their appeal. For my friends what happened was a shoot out with police for one guy (maybe just a bigger, better fort in a hedge), and Friday night fights with rolls of 20c pieces in his fists for another. Though don't misunderstand me, most of them have gone on to become perfectly average blokes.

Anyway. In Grade 6 I left Cressy District High School and started school in Launceston, a place with about 40,000 more people than Cressy, and so lost touch with a lot of my old friends.

So, the following is somewhere between reportage and caricature. Certainly it's a conversation I had to listen to ad infinitum as I was growing up, circling endlessly around the dinner table, or over tea and scones while I kicked at the table legs and twisted on my chair. Enjoy

Cressy

“What’s the name of that tea-room, Bev? That one your Sandra took us to?”
“Which one?”
“You know. The one just before you get to the Liffey turn-off.”
“Near the pine forest there?”
“The pine forest near the weigh-bridge? Or the one farther along, on the right?”
“The one old Royce Pritchard’s dad used to own. What was his name now? Used to know him like the back of me hand!”
“You don’t mean old Tom Pritchard?”
“No, no, no! That was his brother. He lived out the back of Breadalbane there.”
“I thought they logged that forest.”
“Him and me used to pick blackberries down by the Mill Dam.”
“I know the one you mean! The one that runs up the hill there – Squizzy Pritchard’s.”
“Squizzy Pritchard! That’s it! God, how could I forget Squizzy Pritchard? How long’s he been dead now?”
“Must be five or ten years now. Buried him up the ‘yard at Carrick.”
“Did they now? Did they now?”
“You remember that time at the Carrick Show, Bev? That time we tried to sneak in down by the river and you got your slip stuck in all that gorse and I said I’d have to leave you there, and you started hollering!”
“I remember! And you run and got Nora from the bakehouse, and the both of you got me out of there. Hardly a mark on me slip, neither!”
“Whatever happened to Nora? I ain’t seen her for a power o’years.”
“Didn’t she marry that bloke from up Bracknell way? The one who used to run that pub in Town?”
“O’Connor’s?”
“No, that was old Jim Smith’s.”
“You don’t mean the Federal?”
“No, not him either.”
“I don’t know then. Where was it exactly?”
“Just up behind the old hospital.”
“That was O’Connor’s.”
“O’Connor’s was up there by the park next to the Methodist church.”
“So it was. You’re not talking about the Centennial?”
“That’s the place. Trevor Richardson used to run it and he married Nora. She was Nora Musselwhite and then she was Nora Richardson. They had two daughters, Sarah and Katie, and Sarah’s a doctor in Sydney. I don’t know what Katie’s doing.”
“She had a son by that Brett Easthouse fella. Brian or Barry or someone.”
“Barry, it was Barry.”
“Barry, that’s him. Turned out alright. Him and his wife run that little place your Sandra took us to last Easter. Oh, what’s the name of that now?”
“The Easthouse Country Tea-Room!”
“That’s the one. We should go there again.”
“Lovely scones.”
“They were, weren’t they?”