Some suggestions for bio-fuels

The world has gone biofuel crazy. Ethanol and biodiesel are apparently going to save the planet and our effluent ways of life.

The problem beings first, that ethanol is really nasty to engines that aren't engineered to cope, and secondly that we have to produce tonnes upon tonnes of biomass to convert into biofuels, and it's a loss-making sum at the moment.

We need oily plants for biodiesel, high-starch plants for ethanol, or some really clever genetic engineering or hunting of yeasts or bacteria to convert inappropriate substances to appropriate substances.

All of which has, of course, been happening.

I, however, would like to make a couple of suggestions for plants which should be investigated as source stocks, other than labour-intensive food crops like corn or rapeseed/canola:

• Bamboo. Grows amazingly fast in the right conditions. Would need a bit of processing, I think.
• Kudzu vine. Grows so fast that it frightens people into introducing biological controls. This strikes me as an opportunity, rather than a problem.
  
• Aloe vera. Grows bloody everywhere, where it's not wanted, and fairly quickly. It's got to be useful for something apart from hippies rubbing it on their skin. I've got several patches if any processing plant wants to buy it off me.
  
• Hemp. I mean, come on: People have been arguing this since before it was first outlawed - grows insanely quickly, in all sorts of conditions. And we're already really good at growing it hydroponically, so we save on farmland!
• Grass. If we collect an entire suburb's weekly production of grass clippings, couldn't we fuel at least one Landcruiser?
  

Drivers die in hot cars

Road safety just never goes away as a news item. People continue to die in ludicrous numbers, the police continue to labour under the delusion that hiding speed cameras is an effective deterrent, and the media continue to not point out the obvious questions.

Take the article on the front cover of last Friday's Courier Mail: "Highway hoons on M1 race at triple the speed limit."

Now, obviously, nobody should be surprised if a small group of people decide that a wide, straight, well-maintained section of highway will make for a good bit of late-night fun. What's really interesting, however, is that these "hoons" claim to be "middle-aged professionals and businessmen with the money to afford expensive modifications to their cars."

Question: If you can afford expensive modifications, can't you afford the entry fee for a track-day? Or, say, a dedicated race car and a competition licence?

Are you not, in actual fact, just embarrassed to admit that you can't go around corners very well?

And now we have this one: "Drivers dying in lone crashes, survey reveals."

Apparently, the police have investigated their crash data and noticed that just about half of all fatal accidents have been single-vehicle.

So?

Superintendent Col Campbell's comment, that this "may come as a surprise to those motorists who believed other drivers posed the only danger on the roads" is particularly fatuous.

Yes, most drivers certainly are labouring under the misapprehension that they're fine, it's everyone else who is the problem. But nobody is going to be surprised - if you're convinced that everyone else is an idiot, you won't be surprised that they keep crashing by themselves, will you?

Nobody is going to take these results as a warning to themselves, if they don't already think that they have a problem.

The really stupid part is this:

"We've looked at the causes of single-vehicle fatalities and they are the same causes as multi-vehicle crashes - alcohol, speed, fatigue, not wearing seatbelts, and you can throw inattention in there as well," Supt Campbell said.

I'm sorry, not wearing a seat belt is a cause of a crash, not a cause of getting hurt in the event of a crash?

Language such as this does not promote confidence in the authorities, it really doesn't.

Here's yet another opportunity for Twitter.

I have been working for a few months now as an after-hours Emergency On-Call Officer. Which means that whenever there is a risk to any of the clients my employer has around South Brisbane, and it happens after hours, I get rung.

Problems include clients getting sick, clients having a crisis when they don't have a rostered worker on, workers getting sick so they can't go to clients, and workers getting drunk and pretending that they didn't realise that they had a shift.

And, unfortunately, many of these calls come down to the unfortunate fact that our rostering system doesn't really work.

It doesn't work because it's too easy to miss that a shift hasn't been filled. It doesn't work because the people who also need to know, the On-Call Officers, aren't always informed when there's a change.

The first problem, of course, is that the entire system is run by people. But, of course, there are ways around that using automated technology.

The first problem is therefore that the entire system is run using Excel and Word.

Without naming names, I work for a pretty large and, indeed, statewide organisation. And one of their fairly large services still organises rosters using spreadsheets and word processors.

Which means that when the contact details for a worker are updated, they have to be updated in a minimum of three different places, which means that the third one tends to get ignored and is horribly unreliable.

Which means that there is no, that's no system in place within the software to remind people that something hasn't quite worked.

Which means that it's possible to book a worker for conflicting shifts, if the worker had a brain-fade moment and forgot about the first one while being asked for the second one.

Which also means that last-minute changes aren't communicated to the people who get calls along the line of "Who's coming tonight?", find out that officially nobody is, and panic.

Oh, and there's another problem I forgot about: We used to have a laptop with a mobile Internet dongle which could be used to view current client rosters, to get the latest information ourselves. Except we can't now, because the IT policies changed and now they're not allowing confidential information to be accessed externally to an office.

So we're back to were we started.

The first possible solution that presented itself to me was a rostering system that stored all data in one place, could print out any different list as necessary from the same data that it only had to be updated once, could tell you who was banned from working with individual clients, who was available, who wasn't, and who had already worked their maximum allowable hours that fortnight.

Then, and this is the important part, whenever a shift for the current week is changed, it will send an SMS update to relevant mobiles, including the workers, the client and the On-Call Officers.

In the meantime, however, we need a stop-gap measure.

So here's a thought: Secure twitter.

Every time a senior worker puts the phone down and makes an update in the (Excel) client rosters, they can change into another window and type "Jane doing Fred this evening". Then, when the office closes and I start work at 4:30, I can log in (hell, even into the organisation's website) and see a run-down.

Slightly more permissible than accessing the entire rosters, surely?

Mind you, thinking about it...

How is this too different from a desktop application that sends multiple txts? And we have those, surely.

Of course, the ultimate problem will remain: Getting the senior/office staff to actually use the bloody thing.

Being reasonable as an offence against reason.

The ABC in Australia has started an interesting little panel question-and-answer program called, unsurprisingly enough, Q&A, in which highly experienced journalist Tony Jones moderates a panel of guests and fields questions from the website (in real-time, even) in text and video, and from the audience.

On it, this week, were Federal Minister for Telecommunications and Messing With it, Stephen Conroy, and also, among the others, way-far-right-wing newspaper columnist Andrew Bolt.

These two were key for two reasons: One, Conroy got sent more questions than Q&A had ever received on anything, ever, and never managed to give one straight answer in half an hour, and, two, Bolt is a warped travesty of a stereotype of a pundit.

The man managed to use most of the tools of illogic available to his kind: Misrepresenting his opponents and their arguments, warping the argument to suit himself, ignoring any counter-claim that he doesn't feel up to answering, cherry-picking facts, being annoyed when people throw him different cherries, and using the word "moral" as though it had an objective, concrete and unwavering meaning.

All of which would merely serve to provide one side of a debate, and prompt some good back-and-forth, were it not for the greatest sin of all:

Being reasonable.

You see, there is honour in honesty, and honesty in self-righteousness, and truth in bald statements. Yet being reasonable is to use the forked tongue of an insurance salesman to do the devil's work.

Beware, at all costs, these phrases:

• "I don't want to appear [racist][sexist][whatever] but..." - This means that they're about to, but want some sympathy for being honest or for raising a painful point which people may sympathise with, at least a little bit. Be honest. Or, if you realise that you have to skirt tricky shores, be carefully exact.
  
• "While I do concede that point..." - This is tricky, and can be used honestly, of course it can, but it often means "I don't agree with you, and I'm going to try and make you appear narrow-minded and stupid by being narrow-minded and stubborn."
• "Surely nobody would argue that..." or "Nobody is really arguing that..." - This is usually used to make their side of the argument look more moderate, but can also mean that they are trying to discredit your position before you have a chance to state it. They are almost always wrong, and are avoiding the issue, which is what they are arguing.
• "All I am saying is..." - There is no all you are saying. You are saying. This is often a weasle way out of listening to the details, coming up with a counter-argument, or indeed paying any attention at all. When you present the five reasons why science has settled on a position, and they say "All I am saying is...", they're not interested, so give them up as a lost cause. If you really believe that you have been misrepresented, say so. Acknowledge that they may have honestly misunderstood, and try and do something about it. If you want to scale back on your certainty, say something like "At present, I believe..."
• "I haven't heard anything to convince me otherwise..." - This usually means "And I won't, because I refuse to listen to it." This is tricky, in light of what I said in the point above, so pay careful attention. It may be useful to assay a couple of the most common arguments, and see if they recognise them or not.
• "Surely..." - Often expressed as "Surely you can see that..." or something similar, this is the most economical way of combining most of what is listed above, and is shorthand for "I'm a reasonable human being, I recognise my faults, and realise that I may be wrong. But I'm not, because I'm right, and you're wrong. Because I said so."

Here's a good, short tip: If they make your head hurt, appear to be saying only a third as much as they actually are, and you know they're wrong but can't quite work out why, then look for the above statements. They may well be using other tools of illogic, but if they appear to be baffling, then they're invariably piling on the bullshit.

Random headline wool-gathering and commentary - 2

First up this morning, we have this absolute gem:

"BMW driver follows satnav to edge of cliff" from The Register (tagline: "Biting the hand that feeds IT".

Why is it that I can only recall ever hearing these stories from the UK? What's wrong with them? Thankfully, he's on a careless driving charge.

Next up: "Trial aims to tame bad behaviour in classroom" from The Courier Mail. What's exceptional about this item is where it points out that not only are children being taught etiquette (ignore the one about milk after tea - it violates science and common sense), but that their parents are as well. I think I'll go with "By their fruits, shall we know them".

Next, "Former doctor accused of selling 'snake oil' cancer treatments", also from the Courier Mail. Now, (deep breath) there is no such thing as a "miracle cancer cure", okay? The closest we have is a completely successful surgical removal of a tumour that hasn't spread yet. If you go and buy a "miracle drug" that promises to cure cancer completely, without asking "So, why don't you have a Nobel Prize yet?" Then you may well deserve to find out that it's not detergent and toilet cleaner in it.

The ABC News Online gives us "China uses the pill to fight gerbil plague". I really don't think that this one needs any commentary from me. It stands by itself.

If you delight in freeze-frame photography, with pictures of bullets halfway through fruit, go to a gallery at the Daily Mail here. You used to need special equipment for this, now all you need is a digital SLR and a really good flash. My favourite would have to be the water-filled bauble.

The Australian allows a journalist to engage in heavy-handed righteous sarcasm in response to a comment made by a judge. Bad. Wrong. Just don't, okay? It makes you look petty, whiny and short-tempered. Basically, you have allowed yourself to sink far below your opponent's level. Please don't do it again.

Customer service - getting better

Having bitched and griped before the way that Nuance Communication delayed the commerical launchof T9Nav until a week after the beta period ended, I have to give credit where credit is due.

I bought T9Nav, one of my rare treats to myself, from Nokia's Appstore (sorry! Software Market!).

Today, I received an email directly from Nuance Communications, saying:

"Attached is the upgrade version of T9 Nav, version 2.0.1. We’ve fixed some issues with SMS indexing and recommend that you use this version instead of the original."

Okay, that's better. I was scratching my head and wondering what would happen if they ever did upgrade, and now I know.

Well done.

After the Internet, let's burn all the books. Nobody'll mind that, will they?

When I was in high school, and a keen but untutored debater, my team were affirmative in a debate on the topic "That censorship is an insult to the intelligent." At one point, one member of the opposing, negative, team pointed at various military hardware posters around the room and tried to use them as an example for a point he was making, but clearly didn't know what any of them were.

When I stood up, third speaker for my team (I always was), I went around and named each piece of hardware - helicopter or aircraft - to make the point that I was more intelligent than he was. I then used the story of how Tom Clancy had been threatened with a military court-martial as a spy because the details of anti-submarine warfare he had outlined in Hunt for Red October were so accurate. He had to take the military to his local library and show them how he had pieced together a plausable explanation from publicly available data. They let him off. Well, they had to (although today he might find himself in Guantanamo Bay before they had given him a chance to explain anything. That, however, is a different story).

Despite my inability at the time to remember the name "Tom Clancy", we won that debate and rightly so. Apart from being better debaters, we were right.

Censorship is an insult to the ingelligent, and it is an insult to voters in a democracy. Unfortunately, because so few of the people calling for it are actually intelligent themselves, it's got a good chance to get worse.

I am referring, of course, to the planned Great Firewall of Australia, the Berlin Wall dreamed up by Canberra, the national, mandated, non-opt-out, Internet filter.

I haven't said much in these pages, simply because I haven't much on anything over the past few months.

Every now and again, however, I get a head of steam up and feel that it is my duty to publicly insult the stupid.

I refer you to an article in the Australian entitled "Internet filter list of porn exposed".

Problem number one is that, as other commentators have already discovered and noted, it's not a list of porn at all. It's a lost of mostly porn, with the odd pet shop or dentist or poker or betting website thrown in for bad measure. So, shame on you The Australian.

This is the background:

The Australian Communications and Media Authority, the ACMA, maintains a list of sites which have been reported as offensive. This includes directly illegal content, specifically and most vocally child pornography, but also legal but reported-as-offensive-by-somebody content such as graphic anti-abortion websites, perfectly legal over-18 pornography, content which has been refused classification in Australian and is therefore not technically, actually, banned, and poker websites. That's the card game, not anything else you may think of from the pronounciation of the word "poker".

This list is used to create filter software so that, should families wish to download something from the government which restricts their internet viewing to only those sites not blacklisted by said government, which is a worrying sort of decision to make, they can do so.

The problem begins when the said government pledges to filter certain types of content for the entire country, whether or not you agree to this. They claim a mandate, of course, having won an election on the back of workplace and industrial relations laws and thereby clearly having been given carte blanche over telecommunications. If you can't see that perfectly obvious link then think of the children.

The list has, in a triumph of decency over paternalistic, fascist politics, been leaked to the website wikileaks which has, ironically, itself been put on the list for having leaked the lists used in other countries, and is available here, which is to say http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Australian_government_secret_ACMA_internet_censorship_blacklist%2C_6_Aug_2008 , and also, for good measure, at http://bit.ly/w3Gb.

Now: The ACMA says that the list is bogus. It may well be.

However, I don't wish to discuss the contents of that list, which are frequently hilarious, but the response to the list's release.

Let us dissect the Australian IT article itself.

Opening paragraph: "THE Rudd Government's plans for a nationwide internet filter are in jeopardy after its top-secret blacklist of banned web pages was leaked."

Excuse me? In jeopardy how? How on earth will people knowing what's on the list, affect the possibility of filtering the contents, apart from making somebody look like an idiot?

Moving on to paragraph two: "The list, published on the internet, reads like a White Pages of porn and its release has provided a handy guide for young people to access the very material the Government wishes to banish from their eyes."

I call time out for being an idiot. This isn't reporting, it's tabloid journalism. Here's another way to access a huge amount of the very material which the Government is trying to banish: www.google.com.

The White Pages at the very least tries to be comprehensive. This isn't even a decent yellow pages - the very idea that any list with less than about a million entries could possibly be any sort of comprehensive guide to anything on the internet is laughable.

Paragraph three: "The secret blacklist, which was leaked to the whistle-blower website Wikileaks, is purportedly the same list the Australian Communications and Media Authority distributes to vendors of approved internet filters to ban offensive material -- such as child pornography, bestiality and violence."

Violence is offensive? Since when now? Is www.wwe.com on the list? Or how about www.defence.gov.au?

"Senator Conroy has said he plans to use parts of the ACMA blacklist to block Australian internet users from accessing pornographic and violent material. Now the secret list has been made public, it is more likely it will be used by interested parties as a pornography database of unheralded proportions."

You have got to be kidding me. Who the hell wrote this tripe? Mitchell Bingemann, have you ever even been on the Internet?

"Child protection group Child Wise said whoever published the blacklist had opened up a pandora's box of porn."

No, sorry, the Internet did that.

""Every 15-year-old boy in thecountry is going to be after this porn list," said Child Wise chief executive Bernadette McMenamin."

I hate to break this to you Bernadette, but most 15 year olds masturbate, fart, tell each other filthy jokes and already know far more about their current tastes in porn than they could ever get from this list.

"Yesterday's disclosure of the blacklist could also jeopardise efforts to block access to offensive material as the perpetrators will now know they were tagged by the secret list."

Oh, who the fuck runs a child pornography website and doesn't already assume that they can be tagged?

I find the scariest part of this whole sordid mess of irresponsible journalism and rank head-in-the-sand squawking to be in the final paragraph (emphasis added by me):

"ACMA threatens fines of up to $11,000 a day for linking to sites on its secret censorship blacklist and said Australians caught distributing the list or accessing child pornography sites on the list could face criminal charges and up to 10 years in prison."

What the fuck? In other words, distributing a list of URLs is punishable in this country? How the hell did that happen?

In addition: How about everyone who's been fined puts their URL into a hat, and we can rebuild the list from first principles, hmm?

I'll leave the final word to Wikileaks themselves, as quoted in the article:

"While Wikileaks is used to exposing secret government censorship in developing countries, we now find Australia acting like a democratic backwater," the website notes.

"History shows that secret censorship systems, whatever their original intent, are invariably corrupted into anti-democratic behaviour."

And that, my friends, is why this must never be allowed to happen.

Further information:

• ACMA - www.acma.gov.au
• ACMA response to the release of the list, and legislative background (worth reading): http://www.acma.gov.au/WEB/STANDARD/pc=PC_311669
  
• Electronic Frontiers Australia - protecting and promoting online civil liberties - www.efa.org.au
• Somebody Think of The Children! - discussing censorship and moral panic in Australia - www.somebodythinkofthechildren.com.
• Page on wikileaks: http://bit.ly/w3Gb
• "Internet filter list of porn exposed" - Australian IT. - bit.ly/5ZJpq