This does not give me confidence

For a few weeks now, my drinking water has tasted earthy/metallic. This is nothing new - the water coming out of our taps is so crap that I got a filter jug, something I would normally scorn as being an affectation, and have to regularly clean the faint red deposit off the sides of the unfiltered water part of it (hundred+ year old clay pipes). There are even times when water first thing in the morning is orange to the naked, bleary and sleepy eye.

But this was particularly bad and, in a beautiful moment of the sort of coincidence that sees people not shutting up about their children "developing" autism the day after getting vaccinations (which just goes to show how unobservant they were about their own child's developmental neurological disability), this came about just as fluoride was being added to the drinking water supply and making its way to homes.

Now, I come from Tasmania, which has had fluoridated water since before I was born, and Tasmanian drinking water was, when I left, better-tasting than any tap water I've discovered in Queensland so far. Plus, I also know all about fluoride being a naturally occurring chemical in water supplies, and that fluoridated water is not so much adding as regulating the fluoride content.

So I was skeptical of this being the cause of the taste, but hey, human error and too much added is always a possibility.

Well, now we have the solution and, frankly, it's more worrying than the thought that we might all have been dosed up with too much fluoride and can expect brown teeth or something.

It's water contamination that our treatment plant isn't equipped to handle (ABC News Online). I'll repeat that. Contamination that our water treatment plant isn't equipped to handle.

Apparently, runoff from recent rains - which has made the river brown from a month before Christmas until now, with no signs of this reducing - resulted in geosmin, a microbe-produced organic compound, being added in large amounts to dams with small amounts of water in them. And the treatment plant wasn't able to get rid of it.

I don't care if this wasn't actually a health problem and that the only consequence is an earthy smell and taste that the human body happens to be particularly sensitive to (why?), it's not a good sign for public health initiatives in general, is it?

If you are worried about this in water: The compounds break down in acidic conditions, so as soon as it hits your stomach you'll be fine. Unless, of course, the components are poisonous.

Link to the beautifully no-I'm-not-panic-mongering-at-ALL-titled ABC News Online article "SEQ's foul water flushed out"

Random beauty

I have just noticed something quite bizarre and incredible, while reading a blog entry with a compressed Archives list down one side. The entry itself is this one about anti-vaccination idiocy, on Respectful Insolence.

To simplify matters, I will attempt to recreate what I noticed here. It's simply the names of the months (with years, but they don't matter so I'll leave them out):

• January
• February
• March
• April
• May
• June
• July
• August
• September
• October
• November
• December
• January
• February
• March
• April
• May
• June
• July
• August
• September
• October
• November
• December
• January
  
• February
• March
• April
• May
• June
• July
• August
• September
• October
• November
• December
• January
• February
• March
• April
• May
• June
• July
• August
• September
• October
• November
• December

It's a wave!

Quite, I'll assume, by accident, the names of the months, in order and with one or two exceptions, vary in length by a small but steady pattern from month to month. The effect will undoubtedly be different with a fixed-width font where each letter occupies the same screen/paper real-estate, but the numbers are, starting with January:

• 7
• 8
• 5
• 5
• 4
• 4
• 6
• 9
• 7
• 8
• 8

It would be better if October was a longer name, and January longer (or February shorter), but with a bit of pattern-seeking human visual perception, we have a nice little wave pattern.

How about that?

Blinkers, blinders and bloody-mindedness: road safety

Few things are more indicative of how we, as a species, just aren't built to inhabit complex, multi-cultural and diverse societies than the opinion poll.

The latest example, dealing with matters particularly close to my heart, is this piece of actually fairly good journalism from the Courier Mail: Car drivers cut motorbike riders little slack - research.

To summarise the background: Bikers are dying in greater numbers.

To summarise the poll findings: Car drivers think that bikers have it coming, because they "often witness them breaking the law or taking unnecessary risks".

The bikers' response: "Four out of five motorcyclists (78 per cent) think that car drivers believe they have more right to the roads than riders do ... and 90 per cent say drivers don't look out for them," said AAMI Corporate Affairs manager Mike Sopinski.

And:

Adrian Toscano, from the Motorcycle Riders Association of Queensland, said there were certainly elements of contempt between drivers of two and four-wheel vehicles.

"Every day riders come across people cutting them off, failing to give way, driving while talking on mobiles and even doing thing like eating breakfast, all while travelling at 60km/h," Mr Toscano said.

Let's go back and deconstruct the phrase "often witness them breaking the law or taking unnecessary risks":

• Nobody, and I mean nobody, unless they are a trained observer who is paying attention and taking notes, and not even then, can accurately gauge "often". If you see twenty bikers and two of them are weaving through traffic at speed, the chances are you will say "often" about that 10%, becsause it sticks in your mind and the rest just vanish from memory. This is how stereotypes arise - the human mind likes to simplify life by picking up on nice solid warning signs like "4WD vehicle" instead of analysing all aspects of road behaviour in depth, and unfortunately this tendency gets carried over into all other aspects of life.
  
• "Breaking the law" is a phrase that gets sadly overused by people who see something they don't agree with. I give this no credence without more details attached to it.
  
• "Taking unnecessary risks": Such as? Unless you are a rider, or at the very least an above-average driver, such as an advanced driving instructor, I give no credence to the idea that the motorists can actually judge what this is.
  

Put all that together, and you come up with the conclusion that the survey, as presented in this article, is absolutely useless and says more about perceptions and prejudices than about anything useful.

As a motorcyclist, I regularly see other riders behaving in a way that I think is stupid, but they're outnumbered by riders who aren't. My perceptions are also different - I don't think that riding between lines of stationary traffic or on the verge is dangerous unless you're going too fast. In fact, it's often safer. I'm pretty sure that most experienced riders who aren't actually policemen will agree.

And then this:

""The wake-up-to-yourself campaign implied to other road users that all riders have a death wish and, as a result, should be treated with contempt," Mr Toscano said."

Which is exactly what I was saying at the time. Queensland is just about the only place in the world which has managed to product statistics showing that riders are at fault in more than half of multi-vehicle accidents, and the entire advertising campaign addressed those at-fault riders, ignoring the shared responsibility of other road users completely.

What's even sadder is that people can watch ads like that, assume that the government know what they're talking about, and leap effortlessly to the conclusion that riders are their own worst enemy, staying serenely confident of that while they forget to check their blind spot and merge sideways, forcing a bike to brake hard, swerve and get clipped by the car in the other lane.

I don't hate car drivers as a group: I just don't trust them as a group, and I recommend that everyone else has the same attitude. If you trust nobody, you'll be ready when they do something stupid, whether or not they have two wheels, four, or eighteen.

Link to Courier Mail article "Car drivers cut motorbike riders little slack - research

You don't have to be an expert - that'll just annoy you even more.

There are a few things that really shit me about most science fiction, and that includes the new series of Doctor Who. I'm not talking about the big things, like having force fields or faster than light travel. I mean the easy bits of physics (and other sciences), the little bits of detail that just plain aren't necessary to break:

• "200%": the point to 100%, you see, is that it's ALL. As in, EVERYTHING. If it's possible to ever "Go to 200%!" or record a reading on anything over 100%, then you haven't built your equipment properly.
• "An unknown element!": No, actually, we know all of them. All the stable ones, anyway (we can create elements that have a half life shorter than the human mind is any good at comprehending). Unless they get suddenly stable at really BIG atomic numbers (which I believe has been suggested), you're not going to be meeting any new ones. Previously unknown compounds, well, that's easy.
• Sound effects in space. I mean, come ON! Sound requires a medium through which to travel. Space has, roughly, an atom per cubic metre. So, no sound.
• Explosions in space. There is a reason why you don't get fires in zero gravity, I believe - something to do with needing a gravity gradient. However: you don't get a fire if the reactants aren't mixed and in close proximity, either. How long is that going to last, in a vacuum?
• Spaceships sharing a common 'down' and having the same orientation as each other when they meet. Hello? Zero gravity? What's your reference point?
• Making up strange radiation or "particles". Isn't there enough weird physics in the world already? And how do you even get new types of radiation? Apart from changing the frequency?
• Casually passing off psychic powers while everything else has an explanation. No, sorry, you can't slip that past while nobody's looking. Try again.
  
• Nobody ever needs to go to the toilet onboard the TARDIS. Okay, that's just picky.
  

Any other ones you can think of?

This is why Clarkson patronises us.

Due to a massive corporate sponsorship deal, tax breaks for non-profit service organisations, and an 18,000km lifecycle, my new employer actually makes a profit on using XR6 Falcons as company cars.

Now, I'm pretty sure they'd make a profit on using base-model Falcons as company cars as well, but what fun would that be?

What this means, however, is that for one week out of every three, I have an XR6 ute in my driveway. Strictly, it need hardly be said, for business purposes only.

There's just one problem.

It may be ungrateful, rude and possibly even sacrilegious to say this, but:

I don't think it's a very good car.

There is no feel from the steering whatsoever. The styling makes it really difficult to work out where the corners are. Visibility from the cabin is horribly compromised, particularly over your right shoulder, and through the left A-pillar. The throttle pedal is soft and imprecise. The suspension is crude (I mean, it has the 1-tonne suspension, which means leaf-springs. Haven't they been phasing those out of bargain-basement trucks?). The gearbox is slow to react and slow to shift.

I actually prefer the way my partner's 1994 Commodore wagon drives, to the way this brand new sports-model Falcon ute drives.

Talk about a let-down.

Oh yes, and one more thing: It has the world's most stupid tray cover. It's rubberised fabric, and it's held down not by the good old-fashioned elastic rope around hooks, or even by clips. It's held on by what I can only describe as a giant zip-lock bag arrangement. There's a plastic lip around the edge of the cover which clips over a lip on the edge of the tray. It's very easy to not completely close it, and it's a fearful pain in the arse to get on. Who the hell thought that would be a good idea?

How to avoid work - legimitately.

There are a small collection of occupations where you are allowed to hope that you never have to actually do any work.

Firefighters. Emergency room staff. Homicide detectives. All people who, although they may become mind-bendingly bored and start to worry for their jobs, could be justified in feeling a warm glow of satisfaction if they finish a shift and have been twiddling their thumbs and re-reading the day's paper from start to finish.

I've just started another one.

I'm an "Emergency after-hours on-call officer", and that should tell you everything, really.

In essence, I am the post-office hours contact if anything goes wrong with one of 40-off clients being supported, in their homes, around south Brisbane. So if someone does need to ring me, I'm already annoyed with the world. If a worker rings me to find out what's going on because they haven't been told that the shift is off because the client's in hospital, I have extra reason to be annoyed, but that's another matter.

Obviously, the mere fact that such a service exists is proof positive that there is a need - Not For Profits will jump through hoops to avoid putting new people on when they could farm the work out among existing staff, instead.

I do, however, take solace from the fact that in the last week, my colleague fielded six calls. I, however, have fielded six in my first twenty-four hours in the job.

Hmm...

Let's think laterally about refugee policy

I have a suggestion. It's not created out of any very deep thought, or even halfway decent consideration. It's just an idea, considered briefly, and thrown into the world to see what happens to it.

These are fairly indisputed facts:

• There is a massive refugee problem worldwide, and particularly in Australia, which has become something of a destination of choice and has a large and ugly legacy of (concentration) camps scattered around Aus and the neighbouring region to highlight this.
• This population of the displaced contains both political asylum seekers fleeing death or torture, and the ambitious opportunistic, looking for a better life in a more affluent society with plumbing and clean water, and everyone in between.
• Australia spends quite a large amount of money each year, I believe over and above UN requests, in international aid programs.

Can you see where I'm going with this?

My suggestion for debate is this: whenever Australia accepts an asylum seeker, we take the cost of doing so out of our aid to that country. You chase your own people away, you can pay us to look after them.

Quite obviously, there are a huge number of arguments around carrot-versus-stick approaches to encouraging behaviour change, and I don't believe that punishment has any legitimacy as a useful tool. However, if we can link aid moneys to human rights performance indicators, can we get it past the moral philosophers, and should we?