Whatchoo Readin' For?

The last time I was too lazy to post (most of 2007) I did manage a list of what I read that year. Well guess what…

“Econobabble” by Richard Denniss. Popular economics. Some good points and from an Australian perspective - which these things often aren’t.

“The Three-Body Problem” by Liu Cixin. China’s most popular sci-fi book. Won all sorts of awards. Mostly dreadful rubbish, although the bit set in the Cultural Revolution was interesting.

“The Long Utopia” by Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett. Fourth in a series set on a string of parallel Earths. Pretty enjoyable.

“Stoner” by John Williams. Easily the best thing I read this year. Seemingly simple story of a university professor’s life, but the writing is so accomplished it ends up building into a beautifully moving epic, yet built from nothing really.

“Under the Skin” by Jonathan Glazer. The film adaptation of this is one of my favourite movies. The book isn’t as good, but is still an unusual story of dog-like aliens harvesting hitch hikers in remote Scotland for consumption as a delicacy on their home-world.

“The Rachael Papers” by Martin Amis. First Martin Amis I’ve read. First one he wrote. A surprisingly amusing tale of a tortured teenager in early ‘70s England.

“The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson” by Jeffrey Toobin. This was the written accompaniment to the screen-binge I was on at the time here. Plenty o’ Juice. Crazy stuff. Good book.

“The First Forty-Nine Stories” by Ernest Hemingway. Great writer. Usual hijinks in bull rings and pursuing manly pursuits.

“Mother Tongue” by Bill Bryson. I re-read this one afternoon in Hong Kong while I was feeling a bit ill. A lot of obscure facts in Bill’s usual readable style, though I think I prefer “Shakespeare: The World as Stage” for its insights into the English language.

“Elric” by Michael Moorcock. One novel in a very famous fantasy series. I suppose a successor to Gormenghast, or even the original Conan novels, and a precursor to ‘The Black Company’ series by Glen Cook. “Eldritch fantasy in a dying land” perhaps? Anyway, a bit dire.

“Lincoln in the Bardo” by George Saunders. Popular and ‘experimental’ hit of 2017. The experimental side of things didn’t do anything worthwhile besides inflating this from a short story into a novel.

“Bright Air Black” by David Vann. A retelling of Medea. It opens with Medea in the stern of the Argo, standing in the decomposing body of the brother she has just murdered, throwing pieces into the sea to slow the pursuit of her father, who must fish each limb from the water. Amazing prose and an amazingly fierce protagonist, unbound by the rules of her society.

“Victory” by Joseph Conrad. Enjoyable psychological thriller set in Indonesia. The protagonist was a bit too icily tortured, but there were some excellent villains.

“The Promise of the Child” by Tom Toner. Elaborate space opera which didn’t really grab me.

“Forensics and Fiction” by D.P. Lyle. Reasonably interesting read where various aspiring crime writers ask the author technical questions around forensic devices in their plots, e.g. “if my hero found the butler’s body buried in the cellar two months after he was killed, what would the body look like?”

“House of Names” by Colm Tóibín. Another retelling of Greek mytrhology, this time the story of the House of Atreus: King Agamemnon and his wife Clytemnestra, their son Orestes and daughters Iphigenia and Electra. This is a very realistic take – no gods or magic – which made it harsh, but I think I preferred “Bright Air Black” for its touches of the divine, even if they were explicable.

“The Secret Agent” by Joseph Conrad. Lighter than “Victory” and not as good.

“New York 2140” by Kim Stanley Robinson. New novel from one of my favourite authors. Fascinating examination of what city life might be like after massive global sea level rises and what it means to inhabit an ‘intertidal’ space.

“I, Claudius” by Robert Graves. Got a fair way through this before I realised I’d read it before. Still, an excellent book and I love a bit of Roman intrigue.

“All the Pretty Horses” by Cormac McCarthy. The first in McCarthy’s ‘Border Trilogy’. A young Texan cowboy travels to Mexico and falls in love. Beautiful, spare prose. Lot of Spanish. Lot of horses.

“The Crossing” by Cormac McCarthy. Second in the ‘Border Trilogy’. A young boy traps a wolf that is killing livestock on his family’s farm, then tries to return it to Mexico. Things end badly.

“Cities of the Plain” by Cormac McCarthy. The last novel in the ‘Border Trilogy’. The protagonists from the first two novels, older now, meet while working on a ranch, and travel to Mexico when one falls in love with a prostitute. Things end badly.

“The Many-Coloured Land” by Christopher Koch. A writer travels around Ireland to explore his family history in company with a musician. Pretty engaging. Made me want to see the Burren in County Clare.

“American Pastoral” by Philip Roth. Once it gets past the framing narrative, this was a great examination of a man’s inability to understand the decline of his business and the motivations of his daughter in bombing the local post office. It also had lots of technical minutiae about how to make really good hand-made leather gloves, such that I now want a pair.

“The Natural Way of Things” by Charlotte Wood. Ultimately stupid story about a bunch of ‘overly sexual’ women being kidnapped and held on a remote property for an unspecified purpose. Then they leave.

“The Misenchanted Sword” by Lawrence Watt-Evans. Amazing fantasy book that I’ve read nearly every year since I was about 10 years old. No thought required but a good story nevertheless.

“Goodbye to Berlin” by Christopher Isherwood. Some novellas concerning Berlin in the ‘30s collected into one volume. Bit of old time scandal – abortions, women smoking – made more topical by passing references to Nazis. Some good prose too. Oh, and one of the stories was the basis for ‘Cabaret’.

“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” by John Le Carré. The first of Le Carré’s novels I’ve read. Unexpectedly meaty with some good characters, all set in a vanished milieu.    

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:

Desiccation

The desert is in my thoughts.

Arid nature: the barchan dune; the thorny devil.

Desert culture: the West, the Outback, Islam.

That house where Levon Helm lives in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.

The tombs of Ereth-Akbe.

Walt, burying his money.

Ballard.

I still haven’t seen Lawrence of Arabia.

The desert in Bolivia is vastly sublime. We crossed the border from Chile near San Pedro de Atacama, seven of us in a Landcruiser, strung into a dusty line with five or six other vehicles. It was like being on Mars. Huge plains and mountains, dry and red, baked under the blue sky, disintegrating under radiation. We were the only thing moving or living.

Then, around a foothill of Mount Juriques, we come to a salt lake, Laguna Verde: out into cold wind, thin air and harsh sunlight. Pale turquoise water laps powdery white sand underfoot. The sand coarsens; gains colour, ascending to umber mountains.

Later that day there are thin geysers, blown away in the wind, but which still leave the phantom stink of sulphur in your clothes. Cracks filled with boiling mud. Old volcanoes surround people and vehicle. Further on the mountains fall away into the distance. Plains of sand and gravel lead to the Siloli Desert where immense rocks have been scoured to sculpture by the wind. I climb their flanks, quickly breathless in the thin air.

That night I leave the others and walk alone up a small valley carved by a stream. It is freezing and the wind is everywhere. Eventually I find a draw and sit in silence. The little plants in the streambed huddle in silt. The upper slopes of the immense mountain that stands, thrumming, a short way across the plain are still lit by the setting sun. How can snow survive up there?

On the final day we reach the Salar de Uyuni. Prehistoric lakes have evaporated, leaving 50,000 cubic kilometres of salt behind. The spirit has flown but the body remains. It has rained two days before and huge, shallow puddles stretch to the horizon, bisected by the wake of our wheels, reflecting the world. Satellites calibrate themselves around us. Cold seeps through my shoes and salt crunches as I walk. Somewhere the Bolivians are extracting lithium for our mobile phones, but as we leave I see a man sleeping, propped against one of many small piles he has erected amidst the rain-summoned ghost of the dead lakes.

Most of me wants to swap my life for his; remain here and be eaten by the desert.

Solar Mathletics

A 1.5kW solar photovoltaic system in Melbourne is supposed to generate an average of 5.4kWh/day. Does it?

My 1.5kW solar PV system has, as of today, generated 4079kWh of electricity during the 9039 hours it’s been in operation. That’s 4MWh!

I’m a little stupid, so I used this table to figure out that the average day length in Melbourne is 12.10785 hours. Then I realised the average day length anywhere on the planet will be the same over a whole year – that is, 12 hours. That either means the table, Melbourne, or celestial mechanics are wrong. Possibly all three.

So, the 9039 hours my PV system has been operating is equivalent to 753.25 days.

If an average 1.5kW PV system is supposed to generate 5.4kWh/day then mine should have generated 4067.55kWh.

Only 11.45kWh off. That’s probably due to the strange error in the solar system, and/or Melbourne’s place in it, identified earlier.

How Long Till I Get Some Fucking Marmite?

Just in case you’ve been living under a rock I’ll summarise the situation:

February 22, 2011: the Christchurch Earthquake kills 185 people and destroys large areas of the city – the damage compounded by aftershocks in the coming months.

November 2011: Sanitarium shuts down production of Marmite at its Christchurch factory… the only source of Marmite in the entire world.

March 16, 2012: I buy one of the last remaining jars of Marmite from New Zealand eBay before Marmageddon.

February 18, 2013: I run out of Marmite

March 20, 2013 – Marmite production starts up again

Today, 3 and a half months later, there’s still no Marmite on supermarket shelves. Sanitarium have indicated they wish to stock the product in New Zealand before beginning export. Horrifyingly, I watched this video where, behind the cheesy comedy, you can see the new plant in action. It seems to produce a 250g jar of Marmite every 2 seconds, or 30 per hour. From this we can start to see the true scale of the problem:

Population of New Zealand: 4,468,200

Weeks that plant has been in operation: call it 16

Worst case scenario - plant operates an hour a day on weekdays: 1 jar of Marmite for every 31 New Zealanders.

Best case scenario – plant operates 24 hours a day, 7 days week: at least 1 jar for every New Zealander

Probable scenario – plant operates for 8 hours per day on weekdays: another 46 weeks until every New Zealander has a jar and they can start exporting some to Australia.

Forty-six weeks! And this assumes that the filthy Kiwis are spreading the stuff abstemiously! What if they’re eating it by the spoonful? Slathering it all over their obnoxious, sweaty selves and then licking it off one another with craven delight? If this is the case there might never be enough to satiate their greed.

The solution? I propose we send the Australian Navy to annex Christchurch and divert all the Marmite that is being produced to Australia. Plausibly we could also send raiding parties into the surrounding countryside to secure even more of the delicious spread. If nothing else, now that Afghanistan is a peaceful democracy, it will give our armed forces something to do (other than demeaning homosexuals in between bouts of sodomy/hazing-the-new-guy).

I believe we have no other option.

Sodom and Gomorrah

On Thursday afternoon, by an incredible coincidence, I finished two very long books that I have been reading for a very long time. They are Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (or ‘In Search of Lost Time’) and Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time. Proust’s is considered one of the greatest works of modern literature; Jordan’s a great work of fantasy. In nearly every respect they are the total opposite of one another. In one respect though, they are the same – length.

Oh, and they both have the word ‘time’ in their titles.

I started reading The Wheel of Time (or WoT as its hoards of devotees call it) when it came out in 1990, twenty-three fucking years ago. Robert Jordan actually died in 2007 and they had to get another guy to finish it, which he did in January this year. It ran to 14 volumes and a touch over 4 million words. In contrast, In Search of Lost Time clocks up only 1.2 million (War and Peace, for comparison, totals 587,000) across a mere seven volumes. Strangely, I read the first volume, Swann’s Way at university, counted myself lucky that was all I had to persevere through, had it itch at me for a while, then started the whole thing again in around 2008.

So, were they any good? They were, but they’re so different I can make no real comparison between them. ‘Exile on Main Street’ compared with Beethoven’s Ninth? ‘Terminator’ compared to Kieslowski’s ‘Blue?’ Jordan himself was an Episcopalian nuclear engineer who served two tours of Vietnam as a helicopter gunner (aside: Michael Herr to a door gunner in Dispatches: “How do you kill women and children?” Answer: “Just don’t lead ‘em so much”). Proust was an asthmatic social climber who spent the last three years of his life confined to his cork-lined bedroom.

The Wheel of Time was epic fantasy of a sort I don’t really read any more – I barely read fantasy at all these days. It was done very well with a big cast of nicely drawn characters, an interesting world, neat descriptions of sword fighting, a novel conception of magic and a satisfying resolution. There was a certain amount of disconnect as the years between each book meant that I started each one with the plot for the previous volume as a dim memory. I do remember that some of the latter ones penned by Jordan, say volumes 8-10, were pretty dull, and having a new author brought in after Jordan died (possibly from RSI after all that typing?) was a definite breath of fresh air to get the whole thing moving and finished.

In Search of Lost Time was vast and infrequently rewarding. It forced me to read slowly and carefully due to its dense, multiply compounded sentences, sometimes running to more than a page. It drew me in with accessible portraits of, and ruminations on, obsessive love, then pushed me away with the tedious minutiae at play between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie at the world’s longest and most boring dinner party. It left me with an impression of Proust as an expert on memory (and what a fantastic thing on which to be an expert), modestly possessing a huge vocabulary, preoccupied with class and with homosexuality (or ‘inversion’ as he calls it), a pettily jealous mummy’s boy, a tender child filled with love for his grandmother, and someone deeply affected by flowers, particularly hawthorn blossom.

So, let me cheerfully roll out the usual clichés regarding high and low culture. The Wheel of Time was a plot-driven, fun read populated by shallow characters and showing a shallow conception of the world. In Search of Lost Time was disdainful of plot; a difficult book populated by multifaceted characters and displaying an almost painful engagement with existence. I mentioned before that besides being long they also have the word ‘time’ in their titles. A good summation then is the thesis put forward by each about the nature of time:

The Wheel of Time: ages come and pass, history occurs in cycles.

In Search of Lost Time: people change so radically from day to day and throughout their lives that there is no consistent ‘person’ left by the passage of time and the process of forgetting. This is only counteracted occasionally when some chance moment throws us back to the memory of an earlier time in our lives – this gives birth to a new being who briefly exists outside time who can look at the past and the present simultaneously from an atemporal perspective.  

Guess Who?

Answers...















Bit further...

Visual Puns and Recycling

My new job has left me with little time to post, but in the spirit of keeping my hand in here's a little pun I came up with yesterday:

I prefer one of these myself:

Though it's a surprisingly mediocre drink for such a classic.

In other ramblings today is Melbourne Cup Day. As you can see from this earlier post, the winner today should complete the race in some time less than a minute, while possibly being outrun by Hicham El Guerrouj who, according to Ten News, is already trackside and becoming belligerent.

Lastly, a hearty congratulations to Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries & Forestry, Senator Joe Ludwig, who managed to dodge Kerry O'Brien's questions about the latest live export fuck-up like a fly dodging a rolled up newspaper. Reading between the lines, I think Senator Ludwig's point was essentially, "we put regulations in place so we can control the slaughter of animals exported overseas. If that sometimes falls in a heap and a bunch of state-sanctioned, drunken butchers happens to be let loose on the odd mob of sheep then so fucking what? We put regulations in place dickhead." No doubt Senator Ludwig's position will shift over the coming days in the face of the inevitable shit-storm.
Typically, I've already covered things in an earlier post.

Miroslav in America

I’ve previously posted about my desire to witness or experience something paranormal; about the loneliness of being Scully in a world of Mulders.

So surely, with the ubiquity of the internet and the bottomless well of belief that this taps into, I should have been presented with something odd by now. With all those UFOs in the night sky, coupled with the millions of people walking around with a camera built into their phone, surely a few shots should have gone viral by now? Experts should have been unable to debunk a particularly convincing image. I should’ve seen a clip of a ghostly apparition where I thought, actually… is that real?

Well – almost.

You might have seen this image at some point on your cyber wanderings:

Honestly, what is that? My rational side says it’s been Photoshopped, or it’s some weird animal caught at an odd angle. If neither of those are the explanation, then we have to go down to the basement and ask Mulder what he thinks. I did, and his best guess is a hobgoblin.

I plugged the image into Google’s new Image Search tool which tells me that it first appeared online on www.fiski.net on 12/4/2006, posted by Tom Hendrix: “Here is a strange creation, I filmed, photographed when the parents' home in Florida (translated from Russian).” The word ‘creation’ here seems odd, but maybe that’s an artefact of the translation engine.

The only other explanation I can think of is that it’s a photo of the guy on the far right in this picture:

This one first appeared online at www.kalerab.sk on 30/7/2007. Perhaps this young man, let’s call him Miroslav as this is a common Slovak name and the website is from Slovakia, fled the Nazis (or perhaps his uncouth brother, second from left) shortly after this photo was taken. Escaping to America he worked for many years on the General Motors production line, but was continually persecuted for his unusual appearance. Eventually Miroslav was retrenched from his job and forced to live on the streets. Years later, old and thin, he was snapped by Tom Hendrix running across his parent’s backyard.

Leap Day

Today is that most exciting of days – February 29. Leap Days occur to keep our calendar of 365 days in line with the reality that is the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, which takes 365.24219 days.

Julius Caesar made a good stab at solving this discrepancy with his Julian Calendar of 365.25 days. There is some debate about where and how he inserted his Leap Day, but most likely it was achieved by having February 23 twice. During the late Middle Ages this evolved into the custom of having a February 29 every 4 years.

But don’t we still have a Leap Day every four years? After all we’ve got the rhyme:

Thirty days hath September,

April, June, and November;

All the rest have thirty-one,

Save February, with twenty-eight days clear,

And twenty-nine each leap year.

Slippery, no? The rhyme doesn’t actually specify when the Leap Day occurs. If it did we’d have to tack something on the end along the lines of:

Which are those divisible by 4,

But not those by 100,

Excepting those divisible by 400.

Feel free to fix up the rhyming and scansion there. Still, better than this 16^th Century version:

Thirtey days hath November,

Aprile, June, and September:

Of twyecescore-eightt is but eine,

And all the remnante be thrycescore-eine.

O´course Leap yare comes an´pynes,

Ev'rie foure yares, gote it ryghth.

An´twyecescore-eight is but twyecescore-nyne.

Anyway, the difference between the Julian Calendar and reality meant that each day was 11 minutes off. Pope Gregory instituted our current Gregorian Calendar in 1582, at which point the cumulative inaccuracies of the Julian Calendar were such that people went to bed on Thursday, October 4 and woke up on Friday, October 15 (spare a thought for the Greeks, by the time they adopted the Gregorian Calendar in 1923 they had to drop 13 days)

So, a happy birthday to all those born today, the Leaplings as you are called, with your furry tails and cute little snouts. Your peers include such luminaries as serial killer Richard Ramirez, motivational hack Tony Robbins and rapper/actor Ja Rule.

A special mention too, for James Milne Wilson, Manager of the Cascade Brewery, Mayor of Hobart and Premier of Tasmania. Admired by Anthony Trollope, he was not only born on February 29, but died on that day too, his “17^th” birthday.   

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.

Toiling in the Satanic Mills

The clever quote doing the rounds at present was posted on MetaFilter by blue_beetle on August 26, 2010:

“If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.”

What blue_beetle does so nicely with this elegantly worded statement is make you think about your place in the digital economy. I want to think about that, but specifically about myself as a cog in the two largest machines in town – Google and Facebook.

Examining Facebook in economic terms is difficult, as it’s still a private company and so therefore can keep its finances to itself. It does like to boast though, so we know in 2010 it had advertising revenues of $1.86 billion, and about 500 million active users. Divide one by the other and you can see that a single one of the products made by Facebook (e.g. me) provide them with an annual revenue of $3.72 – maybe time for Zuckerberg to crack the fucking whip?

Google’s a bit easier in some respects because as a public company it has to produce an annual report for shareholders. From this we can see it had revenues in 2010 of $29.321 billion, but expenses incurred in obtaining that revenue of $18.94 billion, so a net revenue of $10.381 billion. Of course Google is a more diverse company than Facebook, so these revenues are from more than just advertising. Still, without products such as yours truly running Chrome as their browser and deriding Bing at any opportunity, Google wouldn’t exist at all. So let’s be generous and divide things up equally - 85% of the world’s 2 billion internet users use Google, so each is responsible for one one-hundred and seventy millionth of the revenue. This works out at $6.11 per person.

Looking at the quote again we can see we’re not really a product - that just sounds cool. Google couldn’t sell us, because who’d buy? As always, we’re human capital, toiling away not only for our own boss, but also for Zuckerberg and the worthy shareholders at Google. We make them money (nearly $10 a year) and in return we can look up stuff, have somewhere to put this blog; have somewhere to organise a party, then show pictures from it. I’m not a product, I’m a sharecropper.

How I Met Your Mother

Looking at the ‘Stats’ section of this blog I can see that by far the most viewed post is ‘How Loud is the Sun?’ Amazingly, any overly curious individual who types this into Google (or even Bing – God, do I even want that audience?) gets my blog as the first hit.

Being momentarily bereft of ideas for a new post I thought I’d bow to the collective will of humanity as expressed through Google (a sentence that may hopefully be used to describe some sort of internet-based fascist regime that could emerge in the near future). Typing ‘How’ into Google and letting it (via ‘Google Instant’) finish the thought for you gives, alarmingly, a suggestion of ‘How I Met Your Mother.’ Thankfully I’ve managed to insulate myself from the dregs of popular culture to the extent that, although I know this is a comedy TV show, that’s all I know. Never watched an episode. Don’t know who’s in it. No idea what the premise is.

I’d planned to move on to some of the other popular suggestions that Google offers when presented with the beginning of a question, such as “Do… Not Call Register,” “Can… You Run It,” “How… To Make Pancakes,” “How… Do You Print Screen?” etc. but as you can see they’re all quite fantastically boring. Worse still, those examples are the more interesting ones. Letting Google finish your thoughts for you reveals an obsession with crap TV, song lyrics, computers, basic science and elementary Christianity. This may mean one of three things: 1) humanity is obsessed with this sort of tedious rubbish; 2) the subsection of humanity Googling things often enough to effect Google Instant is obsessed with this sort of tedious rubbish; or 3) Google is showing the beginnings of sentience, but rather than an artificial intelligence such as Terminator’s Skynet, intent on wiping out humanity, it is an idiot intent on buying the 8^th season (Eight?) of ‘Two and a Half Men’ and finding the lyrics to ‘Do It Like A Dude.’

The only interesting thing revealed by all this is Google’s continuing fascination with the Sun – perhaps it is evil, and questions like “How Big Is The Sun?” and “How Hot Is The Sun?” are preludes to “How To Extinguish The Sun” or “How To Plunge The Earth Into The Sun.” With luck, my blog will help it formulate its evil plans, and I will be rewarded in some sort of virtual paradise.

Mewling in the Face of My Own Oblivion

I have never experienced any paranormal activity. No strange presences in an empty room, bumps in the night, lights in the sky. Sadly, until I do, I must conclude that such things are the purest hokum.

Don’t mistake me. Nothing would thrill me more than to watch a glass of water move mysteriously across a table, or see an inexplicable object streak across the night sky. I have a deep chagrin that nothing like this has ever manifested itself to me. Even if I were to be attacked by some malevolent spirit, or abducted by beings from Alpha Centauri, such a terrifying experience would still be tempered by the knowledge that I was witness to something, anything, para (“outside”) normal.

I know many people who have experienced such things, from pictures of their dead mothers inexplicably falling off mantels and bodies refusing to rot, to lights chasing each other in the sky. Some of these people’s word I take with a grain of salt, others’ I have no reason to disbelieve. They are intelligent, trustworthy people I have known for many years who have sworn that what they have seen is absolutely true. But, nevertheless, until I have seen or experienced such a thing for myself, and seen that there can be no rational explanation for it, I cannot believe.

I suppose such things can be broadly categorised as “psychic abilities” (something I am highly sceptical about – perhaps, perhaps, perhaps under extreme duress and in the most exceptional of circumstances a person might effect the physical world with nothing but their thoughts, but otherwise, no), “contact with the dead” (I suspect we do nothing more than rot in the ground once we are dead, and that any ideas to the contrary are just people mewling in the face of oblivion, but I do not know), and “UFOs” (this to me seems the most probable. Certainly it is a mathematical certainty that technologically advanced life lives elsewhere in the universe. Whether they’re visiting Earth, and whether it’s possible to travel faster than light in some fashion, is another matter entirely). Of these, “contact with the dead” and “UFOs” are by far the most exciting to me. Really though, these are simply contact with the ‘other,’ and my wishing for this is nothing more than my own mewling in the face of my own insignificance and mortality.

Skepticism and rationality is presented as enough. Why look to a life beyond this one, when life itself, here and now, both existentially and biologically, is so stupendously amazing? This is true, but life shorn of the palimpsest of imagination that we have been laying down for thousands of years is certainly arid sometimes.

Happy Solstice

Today is the Winter Solstice in the Southern Hemisphere. It is a
dislocated solstice. My ancestors, for hundreds of thousands of years,
huddled in the darkness of Winter and hoped that once again the Sun
would begin to travel higher in the sky, the days would get longer and
warmer, and humanity would avoid freezing to death on an icy plain in
the eternal blackness of some apocalyptical night. It was the time when
Sun gods and goddesses turned their chariots, the time for purification
and for sacrifice.
But that all happened in December - the 21st or 22nd to be exact. When
my (somewhat less distant) ancestors moved to Australia the time of cold
and darkness was suddenly inverted. Long days and sunshine baked the
midwinter festival of Christmas, and the already ailing midsummer
festivals sickened and died here in the antipodes. Modernity and
capitalism ground away these ancient festivals and rites. Where is my
anxiety over the return of the Sun today? Why aren't I rubbing butter on
my front fence and slaughtering a white animal in the backyard tonight?
Even Hallmark has failed me.
I hope the sun sets tonight and never comes up again. Science is left
witless. Civilisation collapses. Prophets and mad men will gather huge
crowds. We will burn everything in huge bonfires; throw virgins and
babies to the flames. And when everything and everyone is burnt and
frozen and dead we will not know why.

Letter the second

Apple

PO Box A2629

Sydney South NSW 1235

Wednesday, July 1 2009

To Whom It May Concern:

I am writing to express my dissatisfaction with Apple’s decision to charge $10.95 for the new iPod Touch 3.0 Software Update. The charge is unnecessary and sets a disturbing trend – would Microsoft get away with charging for a Windows Service Pack? I do not think so.

I believe Apple may have also charged for the 2.0 update – I do not know as I purchased a 2nd generation iPod Touch which had up-to-date software included on it. Too bad for those customers who now have to pay $419 for a 16GB iPod Touch, then take it out of the box and pay another $10.95 to have it work properly.

Luckily those customers with an iPhone receive the update for free. Why is Apple suddenly creating differentiated pricing policies for its customers?

Finally, I would like to inform you I am speaking to Consumer Affairs Victoria regarding this matter as I believe the above is in breach of the Trade Practices Act. The Act states that ‘goods must be fit for the purpose for which they are sold.’ As the Software Update is essentially a security fix it should be provided free of charge in order to render the goods fit for their purpose. If Apple wants to charge $10.95 for the bells and whistles included in the update, it should also provide the necessary, bug-free software, as a free package – as every other IT-based manufacturer does for firmware or software upgrades that fix errors in the original programming.

Looking forward to your speedy response,

Sincerely,

Scott Howard.

PS - I am not the trite and pedantic person this letter would, on first glance, indicate me to be. At least not most of the time. XX

What I've Been Reading...

Seeing as I’ve posted nothing since August it’s perhaps time to explain myself. As usual I’ve been reading instead of writing because I’m bad bad bad. But, while reading I’ve actually managed to do something I’ve been attempting since 1996 – keep a record of every book that I’ve read in the year. Here then is my list of “What I Read in 2007” and, just so I can’t be accused of simply filling out a list, I have included a short review for most titles (where my memory is up to the admittedly small, but daunting, task).

“The Left Hand of Darkness” by Ursula LeGuin – Classic and rather icy sci-fi. Explores slightly interesting gender issues in a mostly dull manner.

“One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” by Alexandr Solzenytsin – Another chilly one. Extremely detailed account of the minutiae of life in a gulag that I enjoyed a lot. Better than Levi’s ‘If This is a Man” and way more readable than the only other Solzenytsin I’ve read – The Gulag Archipelago.

“Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said” by Philip K. Dick – Nicely paranoid, if dated.

“Solar Lottery” by Philip K. Dick – Not his best.

“Martian Time-Slip” by Philip K. Dick – This one was pretty good, I liked the native Martians.

“The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid” by Bill Bryson – a nice little lament for ‘50s America. I also liked learning about Bryson’s dad, who was apparently a very good sports writer.

“The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time” by Mark Haddon – Cool window into life with Asperger’s.

“The First Man in Rome” by Colleen McCullough – a wholely unexpected introduction to a continuing love affair with all things Roman. This series is jaw-dropping.

“The Nasty Bits” by Anthony Bourdain – gritty chef voyeurism. Whenever I read his stuff I wish I could go back and tell myself in grade 10 “Become a chef!” – even though I’d probably hate the demands of the job and give it up after a few months. Still…

“Why Don’t Penguins’ Feet Freeze?” – a collection of the Q&A section from the back of New Scientist magazine. Unfortunately I can’t remember why penguins’ feet don’t freeze and can’t find the book either – so a wasted exercise. Something to do with reduced blood flow I suppose.

“Exultant” by Stephen Baxter – dire space opera. Can’t believe I finished it.

“Revelation Space” by Alastair Reynolds – lovely space opera. Reminded me of Stephen Donaldson’s ‘Gap’ series.

“The Children of Hurin” by JRR Tolkien – much better than I expected. A coherent tale, instead of the usual cobbled together dross Christopher Tolkien usually turns out under daddy’s name. Beautifully tragic.

“Collapse” by Jared Diamond – Not as good as “Guns, Germs and Steel” but interesting nevertheless. He certainly can belabour the point sometimes though.

“The Shadow of the Wind” by Carlos Ruiz Zafon – nice romantic literary travel-guide. I wish I’d read it later in the year when I was actually in Barcelona.

“The Collapse of Globalism” by John Ralston Saul – the opposite of Jared Diamond. You’re constantly going ‘What? Tell me more…’ but Mr. Saul does not oblige. I liked “Voltaire’s Bastards” when I read it a few years ago but the scope here was a bit reduced. Still, a very very smart guy.

“The Sword of Shannara” by Terry Brooks – a fantasy classic I’d never read. The precursor to 90% of what’s on the fantasy shelves – to make a million you basically want to write something halfway between this and “Lord of the Rings.” Sadly, it’s a piece of shit.

“The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion – a writer with lovely prose who I liked immensely when I read her at Uni. This is a very sad book about the death of her husband and the illness of her daughter.

“Redemption Ark” by Alastair Reynolds – sequel to the one above. Nice meaty sci-fi.

“The Grass Crown” by Colleen McCullough – the second of her Rome series. Again, superb.

“The Italian Secretary” by Caleb Carr – a Sherlock Holmes novel that is stylishly very similar to Conan Doyle’s, but lacking in any actual mystery. At all.

“Absolution Gap” by Alastair Reynolds – a good conclusion to the trilogy, but I think I’ll give him a break for a while.

“Interventions” by Noam Chomsky – a quick summary on who America’s killing and fucking over at present.

“The Road” by Cormac McCarthy – Stephen King’s “The Stand” with 99% of the plot removed. Lurvely prose though, you slow down and savour it.

“The Sea, The Sea” by Iris Murdoch – I’d been wanting to read one of the Dame’s since I saw that movie about her (that made me cry, they were so old and loving). The book was odd. The protagonist was quite unsympathetic, which kept me at a distance.

“Elementary Particles” by Michel Houellebecq. Smart, funny and sexy stuff. Those French…

“Coming Up for Air” by George Orwell – one of the few books he wrote that I hadn’t read. It left me vaguely obsessed with fishing.

“We Need to Talk About Kevin” by Lionel Shriver – pretty readable book that in the end seemed quite conservative and copped out completely at the end.

“How We Are Hungry” by Dave Eggers – a man made much more readable by confinement to the short story. Very enjoyable. Cool cover too.

“The Undercover Economist” by Tim Harford – a very interesting book explaining why organic stuff shouldn’t cost so much, amongst other things. Something I need to read again as I can’t recall things from it when I need to.

“Fortune’s Favourites” by Colleen McCullough – the general politics here were less interesting but Caesar is coming to the fore, and is amazing. If he was anything like his depiction here I would have been glad to submit to his dictatorship. Fuck freedom, let’s Romanise everything.

“Fatal Revenant” by Stephen Donaldson – looking at the inside cover I found I’ve read every novel this guy’s written. In hindsight I wouldn’t recommend such a course of action to anyone, though his ‘Gap’ series was good.

“Interview With the Vampire” by Anne Rice – like “The Da Vinci Code” really… inexplicably popular.

“Heaven’s Net is Wide” by Lian Hearn – a prequel to the other four books in the Otori series. I like em all sir.

“The Essential Dave Allen” – essentially a collection of transcribed stand-up. Funny stuff.

“The Man Who Loved Children” by Christina Stead – this is what I’m reading right now, as 2007 draws to a scorching close. An Australian classic sadly out of print that I borrowed from the library. It’ll want to get a lot better quite soon or it’ll be sent back to the library. Plus it’s set in America! Christ.

A Rather Free-Ranging Ramble

I thought I should try and post something before the end of July since it’s been many months now since I tacked anything up here. My last missive was rather political/environmental – attacking my own upbringing as a son of the land! Not long after I wrote that I did some more research about some of the statements that I’d repeated. I found a very credible sounding article repudiating a lot of Jared Diamond’s facts and conclusions, something I was willing to go along with because one of the chief faults in Diamond’s Collapse is its lack of sources and figures.

But. This interesting article was from the journal Energy and Environment, which has a distinct lack of credibility due to its lack of peer review and industry sponsorship.

I hate conundrums such as this. Short of going out and learning climatology, soil science, agro-botany and a host of other disciplines then making one’s own measurements there are always competing points of view on controversial issues such as ‘should Australia largely abandon agriculture?’ That’s why we have peer-reviewed scientific papers. Diamond’s book maybe a long way short of rigorous science, but why couldn’t the article I read that contradicted his findings have been published in something a little more prestigious if the science it was espousing was so sound?

I suppose all of that is why I find the whole climate change ‘debate’ such a non-event. If 99% of the experts think we’re heading for a long hot future then I’m happy to agree.

Speaking of climate change, I saw in the news last night 3 consecutive stories that 15 years ago would have had no metanarrative, but today seem rather ominous: 1) the biggest floods in 60 years in Britain, 2) a massive heatwave in Greece, and 3) a very rare tornado in Poland.

I find myself very jealous of children being born now. Things have been chugging along very nicely for a few hundred years now, with essentially just more stuff and more convenience as the years roll on. By the end of my lifetime though there will be serious changes, but I’ll be dead by the time the world starts to take on its new shape. With no oil, massive population, and climate change all mixed together there will have to be some radical shifts to prevent us all lurching back to something approximating 1200AD.

I think our climate will end up at the hottest end of all the models – I couldn’t be more positive that we’ll burn every drop of oil we can possibly extract. So, very hot, no oil, and China and India wanting to live a Western middle class life. We could possibly try and use the 1000 to 1600 billion barrels of oil left to set up some sort of future society, but all good pessimists know we’ll just use it to kill people in the middle east and tool around town. Once it’s all gone our grandkiddies will have to get their shit done with something else – in a nice future that’ll be hydrogen or solar sourced electricity; in a bad future it’ll be horses or good old fashioned elbow grease. Maybe black people.

How Loud is the Sun?

Unsurprisingly, being a closet geek, I love browsing through New Scientist magazine. Months and months ago now I submitted a question to a regular feature they run on the back page called “The Last Word” where readers can ask odd questions and other readers (usually scientists who are experts in the particular field to which the question relates) can answer them.
My question was along the lines of: “If the space between the Earth and the Sun was filled with air – but a hypothetical air whose only physical property was to transmit sound – then could we hear the sound of the Sun, and how loud would this be?” I had a wonderful vision in mind of the Sun peeking over the horizon every morning with a sound like some giant, yet distant, bowl of Rice Bubbles.
Well, for some months there I wasn’t keeping abreast of the latest issue of New Scientist. Then, about two months ago, I was wallowing in the air-conditioning at the Richmond Public Library, flicking through some of the issues I’d missed, when I discovered they’d published my question! Not only that, the issue I had in my hand wasn’t the one with the question, it was the later one where people have written in with answers! I was one excited little motherfucker.
But my glee was short-lived! Reading further, I discovered that to save space the editors had cut my question a little, knocking out the caveats about the hypothetical sound-carrying substance having no other physical properties. As a result a tidal wave of outraged geeks had written in attacking my question on its supposed inaccuracy, whining on and on about how the Earth couldn’t orbit the Sun with the drag created by so much air, and how that much air would collapse the solar system, and blah b’blah blah blah. One cunt had the gall to send in something saying, “The question seems to imply some sort of odd, pre-Copernican view of the solar system…” Piss off mate, I know the Sun’s at the centre. Christ.
Fine, I thought, I’ll figure it out myself then. So that’s what I spent a good deal of the weekend doing.
I started off with the idea of finding out how loud a 1-megaton nuclear bomb is, then how many megatons the energy produced by the Sun is equivalent to, then multiplying one by the other to get a decibel level for the Sun. Annoyingly though, I discovered our system for measuring sound is a bit of a bastard. The decibel scale is a logarithmic scale, which makes it very nasty to graph, so scaling the dBs from a 1-megaton nuke up to the dBs produced by the 91,467,495,219 megatons the Sun is equal to was a bit much for the addled remnants of my high school Advanced Vegie maths.
Besides that, explosions are apparently notoriously difficult to determine dBs for. The sound peaks very quickly, then trails off, and at higher dBs the sound becomes a shockwave, which behaves differently altogether.
Luckily, I found that dBs can be converted to watts and vice versa. The sun produces about 3.8e+26 watts every second, or 383 yottawatts (whatta lotta yotawatts… sorry), which, as you would expect, is an absolute pants-load of energy. This translates into 290dB, which is very loud indeed.
But, the Earth is 149,600,000 km away from the Sun. Applying the inverse square law, that tells us how sound intensity decreases with distance, I found the Sun would actually deliver about 125 dB here on the surface of the Earth – hardly a distant bowl of Rice Bubbles. 100dB is a jackhammer at 2 metres, 120 is your ear about a metre away from a train horn, and 130 is physical pain.
And what sound would you constantly hear at this excruciating level? Something like this, but immeasurably deeper: http://soi.stanford.edu/results/thr_modes_1_0_1_2_30s.au

Late night maths

Here’s a sample of the rubbish that occupies my brain at 2:30am, unable to sleep. First some background, in March 2006 I was walking with two friends when a madman jumped out of his car and tried to stab us all. He got one friend in the kidney, the other in his huge, overflowing heart, killing him, and me in the arm, severing three nerves and an artery.
Some amazing surgery managed to reattach all that, but then the nerves have had to grow back, leaving my right arm at first without movement or feeling, and now, coming up to a year later, with pretty coarse movement and feeling (though a lot better than nothing), and a sensation of pins and needles with every touch on my hand. At night though my hand often aches, and that was why I was awake. Normally I take two Panamax before bed, but that night I had decided I didn’t need to, managed to get to sleep, and then woken up because my hand was aching.
“Shit,” I thought. “I’m going to have to take these for the rest of my life.”
Now, the Victorian Government had very kindly already paid me some compensation (a bit under ten grand since I know you’re curious), but I can reapply to have that compensation changed in future, should I say, need expensive treatment that wasn’t at first evident when I made my initial claim. Lying in bed I calculated the following:
-100 Panamax at $6.00
- 6 cents per tablet, 2 tablets per night, 12 cents per day.
- $43.83 per year.
- I live for 50 more years
- $2191.15 to keep me in Panamax from now till death.

But, inflation is 3.3%! So, when I die in 2057, not only will my box of 100 Panamax now be costing me $31, I will have spent a total of $5584.22. Shit.

But, the interest rate for investments is higher than the rate of inflation! So, by awarding me a modest sum now, by investing it at, say a cautious 5%, (all this assumes we’ll still be getting 5% on our investments and inflation is 3.3% in 2057 – highly unlikely if we’re out of oil and we’re still talking about ratifying Kyoto – if that’s the case I suppose I’ll be scrounging my Panamax in some sort of urban wasteland), my future Panamax needs can be catered for by a pretty small outlay.
Just how modest a sum? $487. Shit.

Then again, I would have to invest that and then never touch it for that to work. In reality I would be withdrawing the cost of the Panamax each year. That being the case an initial investment of $1486 would do it.

Pretty bored, or pretty anal? Or perhaps Scottish?