There is no such thing as a "will of the people"

I have tried to avoid this. I really have.

Commenting on this farce of an election.

I was not an angry voter, but I was not an undecided voter either.

I was disappointed by Kevin Rudd's managerial style after being elected, but pleased by many of his policy initiatives. I was disappointed when he caved on emissions trading, but more by his failure to more vigorously pursue the carrot approach of incentives to manufacture clean power plants combined with a nicely predictable timeline to phase out the manufacture of dirty plants. I was disappointed by the way he was deposed, but didn't feel personally betrayed by it since I, as a voter, don't remember ticking a box saying "I want Rudd as PM", it was just a consequence of the way we all voted, and maybe a factor in it as well. I'm not that impressed by Julia Gillard, frankly, but she has done some good things.

On the other side, I am personally disgusted by a lot of what Tony Abbott believes and find him, as an individual, to be just a bit creepy. I don't like many of his colleagues either, but then again I don't have much respect for many Labor parliamentarians so I suppose that's all right.

In actual fact, I maintain that the only two major figures who got through the entire campaign with dignity intact were Malcolm Turnbull and Bob Brown.

The simple fact is that I have progressive social views, a strong sense of social justice and a firm belief that the job of a government is to govern, lead and develop not sit back and let private enterprise do it for them, so I am constitutionally inclined, if forced to choose between only the two majors, to pick Labor.

But I'm not impatient or annoyed or upset by the outcome. I'm more interested by this hung situation than I could have been by any other outcome. This horse-trading currently going on as the two parties sit just short of majority and three traditional conservatives plus one (now Adam Bandt has formally sided with Labor) are desperately courted by two leaders who would prefer to ignore their existence, is the best show we've had in politics since Rudd spanked Howard (not literally, we should be so lucky) at the last election. 

It's certainly more interesting than anything that happened during the actual election campaign itself, leaks included.

And, bizarrely, it's shown Bob Katter to be a reasoned, considered man of noble principles and not (only) the half-crazed loon the city-centred rest of Australia thought he was.

But there is one thing I can no longer keep silent about (yes, there was a point, I was getting here, honest).

"The Australian people spoke."

May I just say: Piss off.

What is this "Australian people" of which you speak?

"Australians managed to engineer the only result which made sense." How? By colluding? Sorry, I don't remember getting instructions to vote this way so the result would go that way.

This idea that the outcome of millions of individual decisions reflects a group-think is old-fashioned, very wrong and, in my view, deceptive, discourteous and probably disingenuous as well. It's a convenient shorthand but it reflects sloppy thinking and it shouldn't be used.

The result is the result of many factors, possibly including a protest-vote which may have been influenced by a belief that Labor would win anyway so it was safe to do so. Possibly including a genuine sense of dissatisfaction with the major parties and a turn to minors, yet I notice the major parties did still manage to win 145 out of 150 seats (at present counting). Possibly including a genuine lack of compelling electioneering which resulted in people defaulting to party lines and sorting out the swinging voters into who they really do lean towards.

I don't know, and frankly I don't care. What I do care about is that we stop saying "the will of the people" was expressed, or "Australians wished" or "The electorate decided" or, more appropriately, "the electorate failed to decide".

This member of the electorate made a decision. So did millions of others. Independently of all save maybe family members or friends. And the result of all of those independent decisions, when filtered through an electoral system incorporating preferences, electoral boundaries and a system of government predicated upon a mini-democracy of seats voting along party lines, is a hung parliament.

There is no "will of the people" involved. There is the consequences of the wills of the people.

Termites build geographically aligned mounds without a guiding intelligence. Flocks of birds or schools of fish stay together without traffic control. Ants find and exploit food by each individual ant following a hierarchy of simple rules, not a grand centrally-coordinated master plan.

Please don't take the easy way out of thinking and accuse me of insulting voters' intelligences: I wish to point out that simple rules, expressed many times, produce complex outcomes.

The "will of the masses" is an illusion, albeit a very powerful one. It is a ghost arising out of the machine. It is pareidolia of politics. It is a chimera constructed from millions of individual inputs, each one meaningful, together adding up to a result which is not meaningful, it simply is.

Both major parties failed in their bid to convince a sufficient majority of voters across a sufficient majority of electorates to vote for them. This is the real and only message here.

If we work backwards from that, asking why not, we may begin to pick apart the reasons, we may begin to find the policies that, through popularity, reflect a majority of opinion.

But please, for the love of whatever deity, faith or otherwise vow of passion you believe in, don't put the cart before the horse and think that "Australia" "passed judgement" or that "the electorate wanted this". I suspect you would find, if you could survey all individual voters, that instead of being satisfied with this outcome they're alternately annoyed, sick of it and apathetic.

Don't ask if the electorate would pass a Turing test - not because it might not, but because it's the wrong question to ask. "The electorate" is only intelligent if an ant heap is intelligent. It's just far, far more complicated and difficult a job to engineer a result from a collection of voters than to engineer a result from a collection of ants.

Probably.

Nokia N97 mini: SlideIT and LightNotePad

(Prescriptus: I finally fixed Blogger's formatting bizareness: There is a button for "remove formatting", which finally returns things to nice, simple HTML. I have no idea why, after I copied the text from a plain text file, it was messy, complicated and wrong HTML in the first place.)

Part of the challenge faced by smartphone manufacturers is how to get text from the user's mind onto the screen. The N97 mini has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, but it's only really average in quality and sometimes you just can't be bothered.

There may also be better options.

So let's look at this, shall we: How do we get text into the phone, and where do we put it?

Text entry

Take the very shiny SlideIT keyboard.

Like the somehow more famous Swype, you draw a line connecting the letters of the word you want - in order, obviously - and the software works out what the word is. It's like supercharged predictive text. You can also tap out words and then add them to the dictionary from the keyboard instead of having to drop into another dialogue first.

And it works really well and I'm not sorry I paid for it - although I wish it had dropped in price before I paid up. There are paths that cover quite a lot of words and there are subtleties of usage which you learn over time to improve prediction, but you can also tap out letter-by-letter and be offered predictive suggestions as well as the option to add or delete that word from the dictionary. These blog posts were mostly written using SlideIt.

It is, indeed, very shiny and quite the most relaxed way of entering text I've ever used on a small screen. But its integration with the system leaves something to be desired.

When called it doesn't resize the window you're entering text into but floats over it instead, which inevitably means that it's going to end up covering the text, and quite quickly.

Luckily, there's a button to switch it between top and bottom of the screen, which is a functioning workaround but still feels like a last minute "Oops, we really should fix that!" kludge.

However when you switch the phone to landscape mode the SlideIT interface changes to have its own entry area and replaces the application itself in the same way the system keyboard does.

Unfortunately, although the keys are nice and big in this mode, it introduces an extremely annoying performance bug. The screen has a visible refresh rate. You have to wait for words to be drawn on screen before entering the next one, and gods help you if you want to change the system's selection - it deletes the old word one. Letter. At. A. Time, then draws the new one in.

The grammar model could also do with some work: it automatically capitalises the first word after a full stop, but not after exclamation marks. At least, not always. Generally, when it feels like it. 

It also insists upon capitalising the first letter of some text fields but not all, and refuses to let you capitalise in the middle of a word, both of which make entering decent passwords impossible. You have to disable it, even on the N97 family where the hardware keyboards don't work, by launching a separate application - you can't do it from within the keyboard interface itself.

It would have been nice if they had put the word "Symbian" in the dictionary for the Symbian version.

And one more thing - I CANNOT get it to give me "this". At first I thought I was just being a victim of a particularly common path, but then I found out that said word wasn't in the dictionary. "This," wasn't in the dictionary.

So, of course, I added it.

The next time I needed it, it had disappeared. I had to add it again. And again. It has become a saga in its own right.

The final problem is that it doesn't work with the two programs I most often need text entry in - Gravity the uber Twitter/Facebook/Google Reader client, and LightNotepad the barely-adequate-but-best-choice text editor (see below). Which leaves me at the T9 entry. And that's really, really annoying.

On the the whole however it really is a very cool system, and really would make the difference between me living with a touch only device and me throttling someone.

Text Editors

As far as I'm concerned, every computing device needs a text editor. It's the ultimate basic tool. With a basic text editor you can write letters or emails away from a word processor or an email client, replace a note book, take phone numbers or addresses or other contact details easier and usually faster than using the device's contacts application, and even use it as an ebook reader for device agnostic formats like pain text or html.

So what's available on Symbian? Stuff all, actually.

The built-in Notes application can handle large quantities of text, but that's about it. There's no find, no undo (which has already made my life unpleasant) and this is how you get files in or out to work on them: 

• In: open in the built-in file manager (or select "Open with system" in Xplore), which thinks it's dealing with an email attachment and asks if you want to save it to Notes.
• Out: you can't "export", you have to "send". Yes, send via bluetooth, MMS or email, but not actually dump it to a text file on the phone's file system. Yes, you have to email it to yourself.

The only reason I am using Notes at all is that SlideIT doesn't work with most non-system software - when I've finished a chunk of text, I select the text on screen and copy it across to LightNotePad. Unless it's too much, and it doesn't all get copied at once. I have a sneaking suspicion this is due to SlideIt not a system limitation, but I keep forgetting to check.

Then there's DEdit. If you have a non-touch Symbian device, stop looking now. Jbak's text editor is incredibly powerful and has more features, keyboard shortcuts and options than I got close to using.

And it has one very, very useful feature. It can remember your location in a file, and go back there when you next open it.

This makes it an almost complete basic ebook reader if you're desperate, and is invaluable if you have large files.

And it doesn't work in Symbian with touch. Jbak's other invaluable tool the TaskMan task manager does but DEdit hasn't been updated in a while and I'm afraid he may have lost interest in it.

Or, probably more likely, it would be a huge effort to make all the keyboard hotkey combinations work on touch and he hasn't, or hasn't finished, or won't.

I was most upset when I found out I would have to search for a replacement.

Without paying slightly stupid sums of money for a mobile office suite, which would be complete overkill not to mention potentially less actually useful, I only really found one alternative - LightNotePad. The "light" part may refer to its inability to handle files greater than 200kb, which goes beyond short story territory into small novel.

It's fairly basic. It has a find function, a page down button but page up using the green key (which launches the phone dialer at the same time, whoops) and, very useful, the ability to set a bookmark for the file.

No undo, however, which is slightly annoying.

You may think I'm being a bit obsessive with this bookmarking feature but navigating through a file on a small screen can become tedious in the extreme and you can save yourself an enormous amount of time by not having to do so.

And besides: there's ebooks. (quick note to say; on Symbian, if you do want an ebook reader: ZXreader. It's a Russian site, so use Google Translate or something. I use Google Chrome or Chromium, which detect the non-English and offers to translate it for you, very seamless).

I started off being astonished there was such a small selection, but I'm forced to concede I shouldn't be. The number of people who want a text editor on a handheld device and don't want it to read Microsoft formats is, in all honesty, very, very limited.

Dammit.

Motorbike accidents in the media - Part 14

No, I don't know of any 14-cylinder motorbikes, either.


Also: Yes, I know the formatting is a little strange. I don't know why, it's Blogger's fault.


Something strange happened.


Stories dried up.


I'm not sure if I just missed a lot, or if there really was a late-winter lull, or if suddenly they weren't being reported, but August was a barren month for motorbike crash stories.


Then, suddenly, they appeared again.


So hear we go. Again.


I shall begin with a story from the Courier Mail, way back on July 26.


It is called, wait for it:

Motorbike rider killed after hitting 170km/h before slamming into car and crashing through sound barrier on M1 at Ormeau

I have mentioned the CM habit of excessive headlines before, but this is just a joke.

Also: sound barrier? I'm guessing they mean a concrete barrier to prevent houses near the motorway getting all the noise, but the term does have one other meaning. Ambiguous is not good.

The opening paragraph is:

AN allegedly speeding motorcyclist has paid the ultimate price, after slamming into a car then catapulting into sound barriers on the Pacific Motorway at Ormeau last night.

Is this news, or editorialising? Or script-writing perhaps?

Spot the distinction between the headline's "hitting 170km/h" and the opening paragraph's "allegedly speeding". Spot the useless euphemism of "ultimate price". Spot the equally useless verb forms "slamming" and "catapulting".

Rewrite: AN allegedly speeding motorcyclist has died after hitting a car and sound barriers on the Pacific Motorway at Ormeau last night.

See? Says just as much but doesn't waste time, space or punctuation.

Second paragraph: informative and brief.

Third paragraph:

His large high-powered road bike was spotted prior to the crash travelling northbound on the M1 at estimated speeds of between 160 and 170km/h.

This is trash journalism, it really is. If you know what the bike is - put it in. If you don't - leave it out. Saying "large high-powered" not only begs for an "and" or a comma - both of which should be telling you to consider rewriting a news sentence - but is meaningless. A Honda Goldwing is "large high-powered". A BMW K1200LT is "large high-powered". They are also both luxury tourers ridden by wealthy retirees. Come to that, a Range Rover is "large high-powered".

Not only but also, it is possible to hit speeds in excess of 170km/h on bikes that are "small" and, comparatively speaking, "modest powered". In fact, it's more likely on a small bike. Superbikes these days are the size of yesterday's supersports.

My bike is heavier than a sports bike and wasn't super powerful in 1982 when it was launched, but it still has a listed top speed of greater than 200km/h.

Next point: Estimated by whom? Police, who at least have some training, or other motorists, who can't be relied upon to spot bikes at all unless they're speeding, and generally can't judge their own speed let alone someone else's?

That entire sentence can be usefully distilled down to: Other motorists said he was speeding as he headed northbound on the M1.

The final five paragraphs, three of them about the accident and two about the road toll, are brief and to the point. Only the paragraphs dealing with the motorbike are poorly written and should never have been delivered by a competent journalist, let alone passed by a halfway decent editor.

I don't often say this, but that article was rubbish.

Okay. We can trust the ABC not to do that, can't we?

From August 3 comes "Woman crushed after motorbike hits cow."

Now if that doesn't grab your attention, I don't know what will.

The gist is that it was off-road, on a farm, and she ran into a cow. The bike and the cow then fell on her and she is alive and being treated for serious head and back injuries.

The first point to make here is that there is no way to write about a cow falling on someone without suppressed laughter. It's just an inherently funny thing to happen, unless it's you or someone you know.

Getting that out of the way: "four-wheel bike". Pedant hat on for a second: A "bike" is from "bicycle" which is from "bi-cycle" which translates as "two wheeled". It's a "quadcycle". Repeat after me: "Quad. Cycle. Quadcycle."

Right.

Getting that out of the way, there's nothing I can say to fault this. Not sure how she managed to have a quadcycle fall on her unless she ran up the side of the cow and it flipped, and not sure how she managed to hit it unless she was, to use a technical term, "larking about". 

But the article was brief, to the point, and clear.

Finally, we have one article from the CM again, from August 18:

Motorbike rider dies after losing arm and leg in Bundaberg crash

Strangely, this appeared in the RSS feeds twice, under different headlines. They've done this sort of thing before. Not sure if it's because article publish automatically and somebody then changes the headline, or what the story is.

Unfortunately, the opening paragraph adds exactly two pieces of information and one adverb: "horrific", "died in hospital" and "overnight".

The actual information is in the second paragraph, which gives us where and how, but also gives the bike credit for causing the crash of its own free will.

The rest of the article isn't too bad, with reasonably succinct sentences and a logical flow, although I have issue with this: 

A Department of Community Safety spokesman said the man suffered "traumatic injuries" that included the amputation of an arm and a leg.

If the injuries really did include amputation, the journalist should have rewritten .

I'm intrigued by the comment that speed hasn't been ruled out as a factor but there were "inconsistencies" with that theory, but if it was still under investigation there probably wasn't any more information available at the time.

It's actually a reasonably complete article, and not bad.

At this point in the year the main factors uniting all stories so far have been sloppy or incomplete reporting, and euphemisms. Things like "his bike clipped a guard rail" can be forgiven as standard practice, but "paid the ultimate price" should have been repaid with corporal punishment.

If you want to write like that, go and work for a tabloid.

If you want to comment on the Courier Mail, keep it to yourself.

Nokia N97 mini: Pity they stopped before finishing it

After two years and no little agonising (look back over this blog's archives if you really want to know) I ended up, thanks to a ridiculously cheap contract which is technically cheaper than buying it outright, but amortised over two years, I have a Nokia N97 mini (Nokia site).


The main reasons for buying, apart from the price, being that it has a good camera, OK speakers, mature OS that I already know, the almost certainty of regular firmware upgrades into the next year, and doesn't actually fall down on any criteria, whereas all other contenders fell down badly on at least one or two criteria. 


Not great, but pretty good everywhere.


And that's how it presents: Not the smoothest, fastest or prettiest, but consistently powerful and has so much functionality built in it's almost complete out of the box. 


But, me being me, I just have to start picking holes the moment I pick it up and turn it on, and have to keep finding holes the longer I use it. See my "Notes from the N95" series if you doubt my nit-picking tendencies.


I shall, for the moment, draw a veil over the time taken to refresh each screen or to change between portrait and landscape and back, because if I start mentioning that I may start crying, and I want to finish this.


Some of the Mini's problems are obvious, like not having a sunlight friendly transflective layer on the screen. But would you really expect charging to be a problem?


It is.

I have a powermonkey, a rubberised little beast of an external power source which made my infamously small-batteried N95 approximately twice as useful and became indispensable to me.

It doesn't work with the mini.

I was to discover that both the N97s are "notorious" for being "picky" with chargers, some people having trouble with genuine Nokia accessory chargers.

This does me not a happy bunny make.

 Powermonkey, however, are brilliant. I sent them an email saying "Got one, love it, doesn't work with my new mini, is this a known problem?" they sent an email back asking for my address so they could send me a new microUSB tip, in case that's the problem. No demand for proof of purchase, just "here, have a new tip, see if that works." Customer service win.

It's long postage from the UK to Australia, so I haven't received it yet.

I shall now mention the stereo ear buds that came in the box. They are, in all but one crucial respect, rather nice. In fact, much nicer than the set that came with my N95.

They have little rubber cups over them that fit really well in your ears and effectively isolate you from the outside world ( although my God does eating toast echo in your head), the cords seem stronger and the control is a very attractive unit, as opposed to the ugly chunk of the N95's unit. And when I plugged it in, I got a message saying to use the phone microphone. Not an actual full hands free, then?

Specific moments of fail (or, on twitter, #fail):

• system settings and email settings both appear as an application called " settings", which makes life interesting when you're trying to assign a shortcut and you have to choose from a text only list;
• in old S60 3rd Ed, settings dialogues that had multiple pages had visible tabs. In 5th, there are tiny little arrows instead, very easy to miss. Fail;
• this is more a design thing: when you select a text field to edit with the soft keyboard, what you get is the keyboard replacing the application you're in with its own sort of scratch buffer, instead of just popping up and resizing the application. You get the full amount of existing text and I suppose it neatly deals with the problem of badly designed applications, but it looks incredibly amateurish;
• The screen lock switch. Easy to use, but the cheapest and tackiest piece of design and manufacturing on the whole device. It actually rattles;
• it gives you a message to "unplug charger from wall to save power" whenever you unplug phone from charger. Annoying enough. But, it gives you the same message when you unplug a USB cable. Can't it check, and realise that would be a stupid message to give?
• there is no transflective layer on the screen, making it all but invisible in bright sunlight. News flash, Finns: some of us live in countries with bright sunlight, and would like to be able to use your phones outdoors. Particularly the rather excellent camera you provided, which can't be properly aimed if we can't see the screen;
• I think I have just diagnosed one of the worst offenders of lingering-even-after-dead RAM hogging. Nokia's own Podcaster. The one they declined to donate to Symbian. I wonder if I've now found out why? I was having hideous problems with running out of RAM to the point where the only way to get the image gallery to load was to reboot. And everything has improved suddenly, and the only change I can identify is that I switched to the development, official Symbian Podcatcher, which is also better designed and nicer to use;
• The home screen keeps crashing, and needing to reload. Please note, it has received two firmware updates since release, already, and it's still happening.

So, after all that, what is the single biggest thing the mini needed to be a truly great phone?

Double the RAM. It really is that simple. The screen is unnecessarily annoying in direct sunlight, the lock switch is a little cheap, it could have done with at least one more firmware generation before being released - possibly three.

But the single biggest issue with it is performance, and we all know that the single best way to improve performance of any computer is - more RAM.

It just runs out too damn easily. It has 128MB, and that is just not good enough. It has about 40MB free after booting, and that drops pretty quickly.

The benefits of the most mature and sophisticated multi-tasking mobile device operating system start to disappear when applications running in the background start closing down every time you run something interesting in the foreground - the HOME SCREEN keeps crashing, and that's just stupid.

If Nokia had given this thing 256MB, it would have made the WORLD of difference.

As it is, it feels like yet another own goal, nearly-there effort. And that bites when you're a customer trying to use it the way it could be used.


Next time: third-party software.

Motorbike accidents in the media, part 13

If there has ever been a 13 cylinder motorbike I really don't want to know about it. (Actually I do, but I hope there hasn't been!)


The Courier Mail are keeping up their habit of long headlines: "Car mounts footpath in rush hour, injures pedestrian and motorcyclst in Fortitude Valley" (July 21).


Three paragraphs, but bad formatting makes it look like two at first. It doesn't say how exactly the two cars, motorbike and pedestrian were involved, which is surely the big question. I mean - what? Surely the police would have some idea what happened if it was during rush hour?


Unless, of course, by the time police got there through rush hour traffic it had been so long that nobody could remember.


Oh yes, and: "motorbike-rider"? Really? That doesn't fit any hyphenation rule I'm familiar with!


Slightly shorter headline from the CM from the same day: "Police seek witnesses after black sedan hits motorcycle in Mackay" (July 21).


The second paragraph desperately needs reworking to get rid of the commas, but the entire piece reads far too much like a mildly reworked police media release.


Mind you, there is a potentially amusing note that the black "SS or SV6" Commodore (and don't tell me you were even slightly surprised by that), "may have panel damage to the front right handside." For bonus points, kick the editor who posted that without fixing it.


There isn't really much I can say about this apart from saying that somebody should have rewritten it so that it wasn't quite so obviously a massaged media release. All it says is what the police are prepared to say, how they are prepared to say it.


From guess who, another long headline: "Harley-Davidson rider killed by Toyota Camry as he turned into driveway at Jimboomba" (July 23).


Okay, they hyphenated it correctly, but once again I am forced to ask: Why are HDs always identified in copy, when other brands very rarely are? Do journalists get a kick-back from HD marketing, or something? And why haven't I been told?


I could also go into the attribution of action to the car not the driver, but I've done that before. It's stupid, and unhelpful.


As an interesting insight: This story first hit the Mail's RSS feeds as "Man dead after motorbike accident", and then again as "Harley rider killed by Camry". Exact same copy. Hmmm...


Eight paragraphs, five about this story and then mentioning another couple of accidents.


I think this one's worth quoting in full: 
POLICE are baffled by a fatal motorcycle crash at Jimboomba, southwest of Brisbane, in which a 64-year-old riding a Harley-Davidson bike was killed.


Now that's weird. They name HD, but find it necessary to add "bike". 


Police said the man was turning into a wide, sweeping driveway on Cusack Lane, when he was struck from behind by a Toyota Camry towing a trailer.


Apart from the extraneous comma, that just screams a driver who was not paying attention. There is simply no excuse for running into the back of someone who has not just slammed their brakes on in an emergency.

The bike rider, Robert Walsh, died at the scene and the 68-year-old male driver of the car was unhurt.


It's amazing how people inside big metal cages are unhurt when colliding with small vehicles like bikes, isn't it?

His 66-year-old passenger was taken to Logan Hospital suffering shock and chest pains.


Heart problems, I'm betting.


The Forensic Crash Unit is investigating.


I should hope so. Preferably by taking the driver into a small room and asking pointed questions.


Full credit to the Courier Mail for embedding Google Maps links in this story.


This story needed more editing, fewer cliches and a quote from the police explaining the "baffled" part, but hadn't been too badly written to begin with.


I think that'll do for this episode. Three items, one media outlet, three excessively long headlines. 

Thoughts on writing and sleep, written while unable to sleep

I have recently been working to a roster that doesn't even bear a passing resemblance to 9-5 or even daylight hours.

That's not a problem - I don't have any particular attachment to concepts of normalcy, and I work well after dark. It's not even the first time I've worked bizarre hours, although it's a lot less physical than serving food and it's a whole lot more regular than the weird, scattered shifts which characterise the various caring jobs.

That regularity, in fact, has given me a fabulous opportunity to investigate sleep patterns.

For a start, regularity breeds regularity. Anyone who's ever tried to sleep in on the weekend after a week of early rising and woken up anyway has had occasion to curse the force of habit. My sleep cycles appear to slip into habit so easily it's downright depressing, not to mention inconveniently inflexible.

For example, I am currently typing this on my phone at 2am, wondering if I'm going to get or need any sleep at all this night.

If I don't it'll be annoying, because it'll be another 25 hours from now before I get another opportunity, and with all the politics I'm going to have to handle in this election run-up, I'm going to need all the sleep I can get.

Which is another thing - how much do I need, exactly?

On a work night I get home at about 2:30am, give or take. It takes at least another half an hour to be ready for bed (I don't like to rush things) and some of that is winding down time after riding home.

I can't usually expect to be nodding off until 3:30.

This is were it gets interesting:

If I have a glass of wine when I get home, I feel happier, sleepier, find it a lot easier to get to sleep and then wake up on or after midday feeling a bit grumpy until I've had tea, food, tea, coffee and sat in the sun until my bones are warm.

If I just try to get to sleep, I'll wake up soon after sunrise, drift off again, and probably be up by 11.

But if I try to read in bed I will recover some energy, realise the time at 4:30, go to sleep and wake up as above but minus an hour which I don't actually miss.

The fourth option, however, is the most interesting.

If I lie in bed and write on this phone - it doesn't particularly matter what, and most of it gets discarded in the light of hindsight anyway - I lose track of an hour, go to sleep at 4:30 and then wake up at 10:30 far too energetic to stay in bed and feeling more restless than I normally do after any normal night.

This intrigues me greatly. Quite apart from being an interesting management strategy, it suggests that whatever mental state I'm in while writing is replacing sleep, and doesn't that just sound too good to be true?

What it suggests to me is a slightly altered state of consciousness - altered compared to my normal, anyway - analogous to meditation. Which probably explains why I've never been able to still my mind whenever I've attempted any form of meditation, and had random running thoughts/daydreams instead. It's just how I'm wired.

What I want to know is: do other writers notice something similar? The phenomenon of any artist, not just writers, losing complete track and conscious sense of time while being creative is well known. But I don't think I've heard of how it affects their sleep patterns, if at all.

And that intrigues me even more.

It is now half an hour of typing with T9 on a phone keypad later, I'm no more tired than I was when I started and it's beginning to look as though sleep just may not happen tonight. Maybe after the sun's up, just to be contrary.

Motorbike accidents in the media - Part the V12

Knowing that people have put V8 and V10 car engines in motorbikes, it shouldn't surprise you to hear that they've done it with automotive V12s as well. In this case, a BMW V12 in a drag bike, god help us all.

Perhaps the most well-executed monstrosity I have seen for a while, however, is the Millyard V12, a Kawasaki with two Z1300 inline six engines grafted onto a common crankcase to make a 2.6 (or 2.5 with rounding)L V12. Info here, pictures here and video here.

Getting that out of the way, I need to clear a backlog of accident stories again.

Let's see if I can get them in chronological order, this time.

July 2: Motorcyclist loses control, crashes into brick fence at Macgregor (Courier Mail)

What is with the Mail and their headlines? Also, does it seem wrong to you that "Macgregor" is spelt with only the one capital?

28yo rider, residential neighborhood, thankfully didn't die but did receive head injuries so don't celebrate just yet.

The critical point here is "just before midnight", in winter. Cold, late. Drinking a bit? Dog ran across the road? Cold-numbed? Dazzled by car headlights? Run off road by car headlights?

Three paragraphs does not for a highly informative article make, but they did get a police comment, as uninformative as it was. The headline is really the only thing wrong, here.

July 3: Man loses leg in motorcycle crash (Queensland Times)

First off: Ouch.

This time, the headline is direct and to the point, and then the lead paragraph brings in "sickening". Oh, well.

The 34-year-old was riding his motorcycle at the intersection of Queen Street and Smiths Road at Goodna when he collided with a Kenworth tip truck.

Why, exactly, is the make of the truck relevant?

First off, he was a local, which may have make him a bit cocky and unobservant. Or, the truck stuffed up.

The intersection in question (Google Maps) is major, and a roundabout. Roundabouts should in theory work really well, provided the roads leading in are of roughly equal value, but they introduce so many horror scenarios it's not funny. I'm extremely familiar with this particular roundabout, and it's not my favourite.

The accident happened about 8.20am. Police said the truck driver was unharmed.

Time is probably relevant - rush hour, maybe somebody was running late. Or, the driver of the truck wasn't paying close enough attention and ran over a bike below his line of sight.

However, I am forced to ask again: How exactly could a collision with a bike harm a truck driver?

Touch of over-writing at the start, but a decent article.

July 3: Motorcyclist dies after hitting ditch in road (ABC News Online)

This is, typical of a lot of the ABC's short items that don't have a journalist's byline attached, very concisely written.

However:

A man has died after being thrown from his motorcycle on Bathurst Street in Sydney's north-west.

The 56-year-old failed to negotiate a bend and hit a ditch in the road.

Question one: "Was thrown" or "came off"? I'm not sure how I feel about anyone other than owners using language which imbues mechanics with intent.

Secondly, the second paragraph fails on two points: "failed to negotiate a bend" is police-ese not journalism-ese, and what was a ditch doing in the road? Did he fail to make the bend and run off into a ditch, or came around the bend, saw a ditch-sized pothole, thought "OH, SHIT" and been unable to avoid it? Should there, in point of fact, have been signs up? Were there?

Post-mortem will try and determine cause of crash. How, exactly? Short of a heart attack, that's probably a job for accident investigators.

Kudos, however, to whoever tried CPR. Give them a medal, they're a very rare breed.

This article, on the other hand, frustrates the hell out of me. It just leaves too many questions unanswered.

July 3: Motorbike rider dies after hitting parked car (ABC News Online)

The entire article is:

A 29-year-old motorbike rider has died after a crash in East Brighton, east of Melbourne.

The man hit a parked car after 1:30pm (AEST) today.

A passenger on the motorbike escaped unharmed.

What happened?

I really do question the value of this. It's not enough to make an interesting story, there's not enough detail to inform friends or relatives who may not have heard yet, there's not enough detail to make people sit and up and wonder if perhaps they should keep a wary eye out when they hit the road later.

It's a nothing vignette, existing only to let people know there had been another road accident, and leaving entirely open the baffling question of why someone would hit a parked car in the first place.

July 8: Officer in motorcycle accident (Queensland Times)

Um... Yes? Officer of what?

A POLICE officer from the State Traffic Task Force was injured in an accident on the Ipswich Motorway yesterday.

Oh, right. Police. Why couldn't you say so?

Okay, in all honesty it was probably a reasonable assumption to make and a reasonable headline.

The officer was conducting highway patrols on a motorcycle, which ran into the back of a Subaru sedan on the Brisbane-bound lanes at Redbank – near the Shell service station – about 12.27pm.

Now I, as a motorcyclist who has been pulled over by the police for doing something technically illegal but safe (riding on the verge past near-stationary traffic), am finding it hard not to giggle at this point, with a touch of schadenfreude.

Police officers are extremely highly trained and have extremely good bikes - BMW, Yamaha and Honda tourers that aren't cheap even before all the police gear gets bolted on. Exactly how did he manage that? I'm guessing that if the car did something extremely wrong somebody, a colleague perhaps, but definitely somebody would have booked the driver then and there.

And the Ipswich Motorway is a horribly inadequate road, but midday is not the really busy time.

He didn't require hospitalisation, so it wasn't even a big shunt.

What interests me, however, is that the police have launched a departmental inquiry, not "forensic accident investigators will examine the scene."

Okay, one more:

July 14: Man injured in motorbike crash (ABC News Online)

Ummm... Yes? That's generally what happens.

This story has a byline, and that means we can assume a slightly looser, flowing style of writing, and that's what we get.

This may well be the first article that I really can't fault.

Man lost control in a jump while riding a dirt bike and training for a race, hit a tree, suffered spinal injuries, was taken to hospital. As an added bonus, the helicopter service provided two pictures, although they really don't add all that much except atmosphere.

There aren't any really unanswered questions here. I'm not sure it's of any interest at all outside the circle of locals and dirt bike riders, but it's not a bad little item.