Christians: A Spotter's Guide

Christians can be divided into 5 families: the Church of the East, Oriental Orthodoxy, Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. 

Although the first two are theologically distinct, they have less than 100 million members between them, so nobody really cares. 

The Eastern Orthodox Church has 300 million members, but isn’t that interesting from a spotter’s perspective as its various species usually have boring, self-explanatory names such as the Russian Orthodox Church or the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. Be aware though, if you are keeping individuals from the Eastern Orthodox Church in a caged habitat they are prone to fight when placed in close proximity. 

While Catholicism is massive, with 1.2 billion followers, species are generally small and mostly concerned with variations on the liturgies used in different countries, usually based on slightly different scriptures or using a local language to the standard ‘Catholic’ rituals. 

For the dedicated spotter, Protestantism is the equivalent of the Brazilian rainforest. Why not try your luck against the following list of the most common, easiest to spot species:

Lutherans: the whole reason there are Protestants. Martin Luther launched the Protestant Reformation in 1517 with his whacked out ideas – basically that scripture, and not the Catholic Church, is the final authority on matters of faith.

Calvinists: Split from the Lutherans because they don’t believe that Jesus Christ is actually in the bread and wine of the Eucharist.

Presbyterians: Calvinists from Scotland.

Baptists: don’t baptise babies because babies don’t know what’s going on. If you want to get baptised you have to ask.

Anabaptists: same as the Baptists but they came up with the idea separately.

Anglicans: basically the broader name for the Church of England. It started when Henry VIII renounced papal authority so he could divorce Catherine of Aragon in 1533. It incorporated elements of both Catholicism and the Protestant Reformation via acts of parliament in 1558 and 1559. 

Methodists: split from the Anglicans because they don’t believe that all events have been willed by God.

Pentecostals: emerged from Methodism. They believe that the Bible is literally true and in such things as divine healing and speaking in tongues.

Quakers: Split from the Anglicans. They believe that you can access God directly. No priests are required as intermediaries.

Seventh Day Adventists: grew out of the Millerites (who grew out of the Baptists). Jesus is coming back in the very near future and Saturday, not Sunday, is the proper holy day.

Mormons: believe God revealed himself to Joseph Smith. Smith published the Book of Mormon in 1830 as a complement to the Bible.

Jehovah’s Witnesses: look back to the early church. Believe Armageddon is just around the corner.

Unitarians: believe there’s just one God, not a trinity.

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.”

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

Miru Miru Mega Yokunaru Magic Eye

Remember Magic Eye ™? Does it even need a ™? It certainly makes the question mark look awkward. Anyway, back when grunge and Hypercolor™ were cutting edge Magic Eye books spent a total of more than a year and a half on the New York Times Bestseller List. It was a simpler time, where staring at a nonsensical pattern for minutes at a time in order to perceive a poor quality 3D image was seen as a bit of a laugh. Now that we have computers you can build them yourself (or at least get a website to build one for you), so I thought I’d update them for the Age of Terror:

The Noise of Slaughter

Another shooting in the US got me thinking…

A little perspective.
I think I was 11 or 12 when I first became aware of the phenomenon of mass shootings. I was reading a Stephen King short story called 'Cain Rose Up' in which a student shoots people from his dorm window. The story stuck with me because it contained no monsters or supernatural elements. It was based on Charles Whitman’s 1966 shooting spree at the University of Texas at Austin in which the former marine killed 16 and wounded 32. Whitman’s rampage is interesting in that it embodies many of the elements that have since coalesced into an archetypal model for this kind of incident. He was a young man of above average intelligence with a strong sense of order and personal hygiene. He had an abusive family life. He planned his shooting meticulously. He shot indiscriminately from the elevated position of a clock-tower. An autopsy revealed an aggressive brain tumour. He was a white, male American.

Mass shootings seem an almost purely American beast in the popular imagination, with just a few examples, Martin Bryant, Anders Breivik, Dunblane, bred from a different stock, but this is only partially true.

• Of the 550 ‘rampage killings’ listed on Wikipedia (excluding school and workplace shootings), a greater percentage occurred in Oceania and Asia than the Americas.
• Looking only at the 61 school shootings listed, China leads the pack with 19 incidents to the US’s 16 (Germany punches above its weight with a respectable 8). 
• When the number of deaths is factored in, Chinese students, although good at math, are shown to be inaccurate marksmen. School shootings in the US claim an average of nearly 10 victims per incident, while the Chinese only average 3. 
• Unfortunately the US seems a stressful place to work. Of the 40 workplace shootings listed nearly half occurred in the US (only 2 involved postal workers).

Technical aspects.
Unsurprisingly some military training is an advantage, though not necessary. Access to high powered automatic weaponry is also an advantage (although Africa’s William Unek incredibly killed 57 people in 2 separate rampages, mostly with an axe and a pistol), as is access to explosives. Posing as an authority figure also seems to work quite well. Asia’s worst spree was conducted by Woo Bum-kon who travelled from one village to another killing people while dressed in his police uniform. A secluded spot and some sort of structure to corral people into would also seem to be advantageous. Anders Breivik combined many of these strategies (substituting simulated combat for real by playing video games), and achieved a very high death count. James Eagan Holmes’s recent shooting spree was less successful for omitting some of these strategies. Although having access to explosives, which he used to booby-trap his apartment, he did not incorporate these into his rampage. Additionally he did not block the cinema’s exits and, in choosing a cinema, he selected a location with multiple points of cover and further hampered his visibility by letting off smoke canisters.

Shooting sprees in the future.
As evidenced by the accompanying graph, shooting sprees are becoming more common.

With the wealth of information now on offer in the media we can expect future killers to plan and conduct more lethally effective rampages. In most instances easy access to weaponry is a requirement. Without some change to make obtaining such weaponry more difficult, mass killings in the US will continue. Sadly, with 12,632 gun related homicides in 2007, any single shooting spree, while horrifying, will effectively always be nothing but background noise to the larger slaughter.

Top 5 Songs to Listen to While on a Killing Rampage
1) “We Know Speak Americano” - Yolanda Be Cool and DCUP
2) “Popcorn” - Hot Butter
3) “Zorba’s Dance”  (from the movie Zorba the Greek)
4) “Yakety Sax” (theme tune to the Benny Hill Show)
5) “Theme from New York, New York” - Frank Sinatra

 

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.

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.”

Complete Idiot’s Guide to Fare Evasion Part II – ‘The Evadening’

My earlier guide to fare evading involved fare evasion on trams. Since moving house though, I've been catching the bus to and from work, and this has forced me to update my modus operandi.  

At first the bus seemed far more expensive than the tram. I had to validate every time and could only save money by buying a weekly concession ticket, secure in the knowledge that the drivers would never check my concession card – or lack thereof.

Luckily the Victorian Government is the fare evader’s friend. At vast expense they have installed the Myki touch-card system. This new technology means fare evasion is, once more, a gentlemen’s sport.

Bus-based Myki fare evasion can be played at one of three levels. You may incorporate the skills you have developed in the lower levels when playing at the higher.

Level 1 (the ‘Double-Blind’): Simply have on your person a Myki card and a Metcard. Both systems are notoriously unreliable and at least twice a week you will be able to walk straight on with an apologetic smile and rueful wave of the offending card, as you are unable to validate it at the red-lit machine.

Level 2 (the ‘Swagger’): Brazenly step on the bus and wave your Myki in an ineffective manner across the scanner. Swiping quickly, or closer to the display, rather than the actual sensor area, means that most often you won’t be charged. By placing your body between the reader and driver, thereby obstructing the driver’s view, you can usually walk straight on and take your seat. Occasionally the driver may be roused from their torpidity and you will have to swipe properly or, if the scanner is facing towards the back of the bus, endure the beady eyes of fellow passengers.

Level 3 (the ‘le Carre’): For over twelve months the ‘Swagger’ was all I needed. It wasn’t great, but it allowed me to dodge 60-70% of the fares I would otherwise have paid. Then Myki upped the ante and I was forced to a new level of deviousness, a level where I now manage to avoid paying anything at all for public transport.

One morning I noticed that the ‘beep’ sound that occurred when a Myki was correctly swiped was suddenly much louder. The ‘Swagger’ was still good, but it was increasingly obvious that I wasn’t paying. Luckily there are a number of videos on YouTube where people have recorded themselves using a Myki card. By downloading one of these, then editing it into an mp3 file I was able to put the sound of a ‘successful touch-on’ on my phone. Now, when I get on the bus I simply hold my phone and Myki together, wave the card near the reader and play the sound file. Perfection.    

Catching the bus

It's French for 'Under Vacuum'

Last night I entered the world of sous-vide.

Heston Blumenthal was guarding the door. I had to lick his bald head at each point of the compass and, with a saucy wink, he let me in.

Outside, in the wilderness, I’d been cooking chicken breasts on a pan, aiming to get the centre of the meat to the perfect level of ‘doneness’ - 60°C – the temperature at which the proteins in the meat set. In the howling wind, I’d crouch over a piece of car bonnet positioned over whatever rudimentary heat source I’d managed to scrounge, usually a dead dog soaked in petrol, and plonk the chicken down on the metal surface smoking away at around 200°C, wait, turn, wait. If I was lucky, I might get it off the heat when the centre was at 60°C, but the surrounding flesh certainly wasn’t.

Ushered inside the world of sous-vide by Heston Blumenthal himself, things were very different. Flaming dogs in windswept ruins were a thing of the past. Now I had gas, stainless steel, and some sort of Louis XIV-meets-Tron décor that made my eyes water.    

Under Ferran Adriá’s gentle direction I placed the chicken breasts in separate snap-lock sandwich bags with a little salt and pepper, filled a pot with hot water, turned on my Zyliss badly-designed-cooking-timer-that-I-bought-because-it-happens-to-have-a-temperature-probe-on-a-cord and waited for the water to get to 60°C. Once there I carefully submerged the bags and let the water pressure push the air out. I then snapped the seals shut, put the lid on and spent the next hour keeping the flame underneath the pot as low as possible, holding the water temperature between 59°C and 62°C, while Ferran read me Spanish poetry and Heston came in from minding the door and gave me a foot massage.

The result? No more hunks of blandness tasting mostly of burnt dog and petrol! Instead, the most moist and flavoursome chicken breast I’ve ever eaten. I’m a convert. Maybe even an acolyte.

Caveats:

-         You can use sous-vide on most foods, but it’s particularly good for cooking eggs, fish and steak.

-         You can’t ‘overcook’ but you do have to be mindful of good hygiene. A long (8 hours and above) cook in a vacuum can lead to the growth of anaerobic bacteria, particularly botulinum, which will kill you stone dead.

-         Hippies, you can do vegetables, but you have to use higher temperatures to break down the stronger cell walls. The plastic bags won’t fill your tofu up with chemicals because they’re food grade anyway.

-         If you’re doing a steak or similar you can give it a quick sear before it hits the table to caramelize the outside.

-         I was originally alerted to doing this at home by this article which uses an esky. I would not recommend this method. You can watch the temperature drop before your eyes.

-          No, I don’t watch ‘Masterchef’ or ‘My Kitchen Rules.’ I was hooked on cooking shows back when Floyd was still tooling, shickered, around Italy, thank you very much.

Postscript 25/5/11: tried my first sous-vide steak tonight. 45 minutes held between 55 and 57°C then a quick sear on the grill for some colour. I could cut it with the edge of my fork.

Postscript 19/6/11: Lamb at 58°C for 30 minutes was good, but not great. Bloodier than I expected. This beast requires further experimentation.

Postscript 29/6/11: Salmon at 50°C for 20 minutes required a little preparation. When cooking with sous-vide salmon will leak albumen, a milky fluid. I submerged the cuts for half an hour in a 20% saline solution to try and prevent this before cooking, but there was still some liquid in the bag after cooking. I found the finished product delicious - very flavoursome and with a texture closer to sashimi than cooked salmon. Carryl wished the meat was hotter, and found it a 'bit fishy.' I will try some flavourings next time to try and please her. 

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:    

Complete Idiot's Guide to Fare Evasion

1) Fare evasion is best run as a numbers game. I tram to and from work everyday. With a yearly ticket this would cost me $1094, 12 monthly tickets would cost me $1228.80, or 52 weekly tickets would equate to a princely $1435.20.
In reality though I pay between $400 and $500 dollars. I achieve this by purchasing weekly tickets and only validating when absolutely necessary.

2) Fare evasion is a balance between the savings generated by buying fewer tickets and the increased expenditure due to fines levied against you for fare evading. The level of risk you wish to run in this balancing act will determine your success. Because fines are around $250, just 2 per year will eat up any profit you are making by fare evading. I personally try to make a 10-trip ticket last a month, and avoid fines altogether.

3) I limit my risk of being fined for fare evading by the following methods:
a- Where possible I sit at the back of the tram on the left-hand side, this way I can look out for inspectors and be close to a ticket machine if I do need to validate. Other good spots are at the very front of the tram (though inspectors can get on behind you) or next to the ticket machine (but limited visibility).
b- I always have my ticket close to hand.
c- I never read or allow myself to be similarly distracted.

4) Plain-clothes inspectors are a big risk. They often:
a- Stand together or sit together.
b- dress warmly, especially preferring beanies.
c- Do not carry bags.
d- Are larger guys.
e- Work in groups of 3 or 4 men and 2 women.
* Plain-clothes inspectors will always check to see if the ticket machine is working when they get on board.

5) If you are caught try and argue yourself out of a ticket on the spot. Do not be fooled by inspectors assuring you that they will ‘just write out an infringement for their records – head office won’t fine you.’
Sort out some plausible excuses beforehand. Preferably ones that can be enlarged upon later should you decide to contest the fine.

6) My expertise is confined to trams. On a train I always buy a ticket.

7) Now and again it’s nice to doze off or read your paper. Validate. After long periods of paranoia and laserlike attention such periods are quite relaxing - almost festive. Besides, it’s only $2.70.