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Suzy McHale’s Journal: 2015

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January

Friday 2/1: Hot and miserable; website on mobile; first Seven Samurai viewing

The inferno-hot weather has arrived with a vengeance; 39°C today and a predicted 41°C tomorrow :-(. The summer has been relatively mild before then, but sadly it hasn’t lasted.

I do have one New Year’s resolution at least: not to regain the weight I lost last year! “Eternal vigilance is the price of weight loss,” to misquote a well-known quote.

I am trying to get my website to be a bit more mobile-friendly, and found out why the media-query styles I had weren’t overriding the screen ones at Stackoverflow. I can only try it in the browser emulator as I don’t have a mobile/cellphone, so it hopefully resembles what is shown: the text is larger and navigation is vertical on mobiles with small screens. I would like to do a site redesign but am stuck for ideas.

I have done some minor site rearranging; the RuSpace link has been moved off the front page and to the Miscellaneous index page as I have really lost interest in updating it.

I watched some of Seven Samurai for the first time yesterday; the first 1:44 minutes of it (it is the full-length version in two parts, but only a low-resolution copy downloaded from somewhere – there is no DVD available in stores where I am). It is as good as they say, though I wish I had a decent DVD or Blu-ray of it! My favorite Kurosawa movie, however, would still be Ran.

Saturday 10/1: Against population control

I am still fussing about with styling for my website and navigation layout. I decided not to bother with styling to support older browsers – mainly IE8 and below – as it is too much trouble and I want to use more HTML5 elements. The site will still display, but not correctly. Though now the navigation doesn’t display vertically in mobile view for some reason after changing to the <nav> tag.

A while ago I came across a personal site of a space enthusiast, Stephen Ashworth. His views exemplify the reason why I am disillusioned with that particular community; on this page is an article that includes his views on overpopulation:

Last December, I wrote about the conflict between optimistic and pessimistic future visions of mankind: optimism based on the enormous possibilities for growth of our civilisation into space, versus pessimism based on the three horsemen of the popular apocalypse: peak oil, climate change and socialism. […]

Now the well-known space advocate, author and founder of the Mars Society, Dr. Robert Zubrin, has published a new book focusing on another aspect of this conflict: the campaign for population control in pursuit of the notion that growing populations lead to poverty. According to his detailed account, this campaign has been pursued in a spirit of ignorance of history, dishonesty, tyrannical force, cruelty, and racism of a kind that we thought was defeated in 1945. A major essay drawn from the book is now accessible on the website of The New Atlantis.

A sample:

“Around the world, the population control movement has resulted in billions of lost or ruined lives. We cannot stop at merely rebutting the pseudoscience and recounting the crimes of the population controllers. We must also expose and confront the underlying antihumanist ideology. If the idea is accepted that the world’s resources are fixed with only so much to go around, then each new life is unwelcome, each unregulated act or thought is a menace, every person is fundamentally the enemy of every other person, and each race or nation is the enemy of every other race or nation. The ultimate outcome of such a worldview can only be enforced stagnation, tyranny, war, and genocide. The horrific crimes advocated or perpetrated by antihumanism’s devotees over the past two centuries prove this conclusively. Only in a world of unlimited resources can all men be brothers.”

I urge everyone to give careful consideration to what Zubrin has to say, and to use every opportunity to counter this pernicious and unhistorical notion that a growing human population must be stopped in order to save the planet (or at least to save the privileged position of its current rulers).

So population control is equivalent to the Holocaust? Seriously, what a stupidly irresponsible opinion (and Dr Zubrin has also lost all credibility with me). It is evident to any observant person that the high and ever-increasing human population is having a deleterious effect on the biosphere and biodiversity as a whole.

Wednesday 14/1: Lower than expected

Weighed myself today, and if my home scales are accurate I am around 53 kg! I was 56 kg last October (23/10/2014 entry). In 2013 I noted my weight was 61 kg, as weighed by the GP then (5/3/2013 entry) – then I was toward the upper end of my ideal weight/BMI range. My rib cage is clearly visible. It’s certainly preferable to going in the other direction! I have not been that low since the early 1990s.

Monday 19/1: Meteor; city running dry; AI alarmism

This time last year (15/1/2014 entry) Melbourne was enduring several days of around 40°C. So far the weather has been much cooler, which I am certainly happy about. There are two months of summer to go, though, so that theat is not yet over.

I saw a meteorite on my early Friday morning walk, just a brief white streak overhead, going downwards.

“Biggest Reservoir for Brazil's Largest City Is Running Dry,” ABC News (US), 15/1. São Paulo has around 20 million residents, nearly Australia’s whole population, crammed into a megacity. The threatened water shortage is an example of how precarious and unsustainable supporting such a huge population is. Megacities are cancerous blights on the landscape and are environmentally devastating.

“AI Has Arrived, and That Really Worries the World’s Brightest Minds,” Wired, 16/1. More oh-no-ai’s-will-destroy-the-world! alarmist nonsense – from some otherwise very smart people as well. I doubt an AI could do much more damage to the Earth than humanity is already doing – it might actually manage to fix things.

Tuesday 20/1: Silly diets

“Food pyramid to stage comeback against fad diets,” The Age, 21/12/2014. One diet fad I have come across frequently in forums in the last couple of years or so is the low-carbohydrate diet, in various forms such as paleo and keto. It involves greatly reducing carbohydrates (breads, grains, potatoes, etc.) and increasing fats and protein. It seems to be effective for rapid weight loss, but the sustainability of it is questionable. The ketogenic diet was originally developed to control epilepsy in children. The Paleo diet was supposedly what our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate, but in reality their diets were highly varied depending upon where they lived, and many certainly ate carbs. Both diets have a cult following on forums such as Reddit, but I do not find them appealing – they are too restrictive and side-effects include constipation (something the surgeon told me I especially needed to avoid after my surgeries) and indigestion from the fat content (I get frequent indigestion after any meals with fat in them). Weight loss is generally a simple matter of eating fewer calories than one expends – you can even lose weight eating only calorie-counted fast foods, though you might become deficient in nutrients. A calorie is a calorie, and there are no “magic” foods.

Thursday 22/1: Horrid humidity; dream

The weather is unpleasantly warm and humid, and won’t cool down until Sunday.

I am experimenting with changing the navigation locations somewhat around my site; the main navigation is now in the header of my sub-sites also, and “breadcrumb links” are at the bottom of every page.

Had a peculiarly vivid dream yesterday evening, which I wrote down, the last two scenes of it:

I was standing in the backyard of a man’s house in my suburb, looking north – it was next to the local library. The backyard was large and bare, having only grass. The house was an old Californian bungalow, on the east side of the property. The sun was high, sky clear and I couldn’t see over the fence. I wondered why the man didn’t plant a tree in the corner for shade. I then got in a car with my parents and we drove away.

Next scene: we were driving eastwards up a local street. Suddenly I saw thousands of birds flying everywhere, over a sports oval nearby. They were red-feathered ibises. The scene morphed to a location on a winding road in a mountainous forested area – a sloping hillside on Mt Dandenong. We stopped to get out and take photos of the birds. Some tourists and others were there too, looking at the birds – one dream-character remarked that there were 150,000 of them. One bird walked past me; it was rather sickly-looking. Others were perched on the car roof; the situation was getting a bit alarming. I woke up at that point.

Saturday 24/1: Golden mask damaged

“King Tutankhamun’s mask damaged during removal from case, legal threat over ‘botched’ repair,” ABC News, 24/1. This was rather alarming to read; the beard that attaches to the chin came off and some clumsy clod glued it back on! Does not say much for standard of care at the museum it is in. Such an artifact is, needless to say, priceless and irreplaceable. I am inclined to think that such items might be safer if they were returned to their original burial tombs and sealed off – I don’t think their original creators would be happy to know what had happened to them!

Monday 26/1: Australia Day; deluded dancers

Today is Australia Day but I am not into flag-waving patriotism so I am not doing anything (as usual!). One event that has caused controversy is our PM awarding a knighthood to Prince Phillip – WTF?! Yet another indication of how outdated his outlook is – “Abbott is nothing but a crawling monarchist rivaled only by Bob Menzies. The man is an anachronistic joke who should be living in 1915 not 2015,” to quote one commentator on that article. The British Royal Family are an irrelevance to me and the way the media still fawns over them (the latest anticipation being a new baby heir) is extremely irritating.

“Sydney Festival: Nothing to lose and nothing to fear,” The Age, 21/1. A review of the overweight “dancers” last mentioned in my 31/12/2014 entry. I can’t imagine anything unlovelier than watching morbidly obese “dancers” lumber around the stage. They are not inspiring, just deluded, and are a symbol of gluttony.

Wednesday 28/1: Still images only

So far the weather has been relatively cool – a relief, considering the awful heatwave of last year at this time! Of course people are complaining, but I certainly am not.

One oddity about my life I realized recently is that I have no video recordings (home movies) of myself or my family. Unlike photography, videotaping was not a part of our lives, or generally done when I was growing up – Dad was an avid photographer but was not into videotaping. Now with digital technology, particularly that of smartphones, videos are ubiquitous. I am used to seeing still images of myself, but moving ones would be disconcerting – like having an out-of-body experience, and seeing myself as others see me, not my own mental image of myself.

Friday 30/1: Descending dollar; C.J. Cherryh

The Australia dollar has fallen in value over the last few months, which means that imports will be more expensive, dismayingly. Seeing as nearly everything is imported here, this will drive up the cost of living even more. The damned Reserve Bank wants it this way; it also keeps cutting interest rates – good for home mortgage holders (which I am not), but bad for anyone who wants some interest earned on their bank savings accounts.

One of my all-time favorite authors is C.J. Cherryh, who writes science fiction and some fantasy. I can’t remember when I first started reading her novels – perhaps the early 1990s. My favorites by her are the Faded Sun trilogy and the Foreigner series, the latter of which is up to 15 books (!) and counting. I have 7 of the latter so far but they are not readily available here except in a specialist bookshop (she seems to have fallen out of fashion) and are nearly $20 each just for the paperback edition! So getting hold of them is a slow process.

She does alien-human interactions very well; the aliens aren’t there merely to be shot at but are complex characters in their own right. I also like how she portrays her male characters – they are not the aggressive “alpha male” types who tend to feature in male-authored sci-fi novels, but are more flawed and realistic (in my view) without going to the other extreme – the overly-emoting males found in the more romance-orientated sci-fi by female authors. My only concern is that she is getting old; I hope she is around for a long time yet!

February

Wednesday 4/2: Lunch out; website fussing

Went out to McKinnon Hotel for lunch for a relative’s birthday. Had my usual (enormous) chicken parmigiana – which I like, but only occasionally! I managed to get through most of it, so I certainly don’t need dinner after that. The meals are not cheap (mine was $25), so such an outing is a once-a-year event at most.

The weather has been nice and cool, but the reprieve ends later this week when the temperature climbs into the 30s.

I have spent most of the week fussing with the layout and CSS formatting of my site; something I tend to do when procrastinating on other tasks :-). There are a lot of nice effects that can be achieved now with HTML5 and CSS 3, and browser quirks are a lot less prevalent than they were, but older versions are still in use (Internet Explorer 9 and below are some of the worst offenders). I have the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, IE and Opera installed, so that should cover most used.

Wednesday 11/2: Sore thumb

I managed to get an infection under my right thumbnail, which has been sore for a few weeks, and more so this week. I went to the GP, who gave me a short course of antibiotics to see if those would clear it up. I don’t know what caused it, but my thumb is now quite painful!

I have been trying out Inkscape in order to do a vector map for my worldbuilding project. It can be quite fiddly and exasperating to use at times! I am slowly getting used to it – I have only used the program sporadically.

Saturday 14/2: No Valentine; rabid fans

Valentine’s Day today, though not for me (as always). I have never had a Valentine. Sometimes I would like to, though. A man did wish me “Happy Valentine’s Day” when I was walking this morning, which was odd but nice!

My infected thumb is improving after 3 days of antibiotics (and I do know it’s important to finish the packet!).

A certain much-hyped romance movie with “Grey” in the title was released this week. I do not find romance-focused stories or movies interesting, and that this drek is apparently popular with woman makes me rather embarrassed for my gender! I would be cringing with embarrassment at the “naughty bits” if I went to see it (which I wouldn’t, unless someone bought me a ticket). The author has been very successful, but that is more due to chance rather than any actual writing talent.

I have come to detest the fandom community generally – never has there been such a group of entitled whining immature brats (many old enough to know better). Fans will eventually ruin any popular movies or books (see Star Wars and Star Trek), and the Internet only amplifies this. Fan fiction “writers” in particular are some of the most obnoxious in fandom generally – they seem to think they have a God-given right to misappropriate the creations of authors.

Equally as bad are video gamers – gaming seems to have become a major part of mostly younger people’s lives as computer processing power and graphics displays have greatly improved in the last 20 or so years. However these are still games, and are essentially trite, despite the indignant protests otherwise from that community. They are especially riled by suggesting that gaming might contribute to inciting violent behaviour in some vulnerable people – games are more interactive than movies or books, and provide a way of acting out scenarios. If gaming had no mental effect, would the US Army bother to utilize them in training recruits?

Speaking of games, fans are equally obnoxious here too – one incident that comes to mind is the over-the-top reaction to the ending of Mass Effect 3 back in 2012. The amount of whining over this reached absurd levels, and I lost interest in its world after that. Equally as annoying were the obsessions with in-game alien romances (seriously!), and the aliens themselves might as well just be odd-looking humans.

For myself, I would not describe myself as a “fan” (as in fanatic) of anything. There are movies and books I like very much (such as Akira Kurosawa samurai movies and C.J. Cherryh sci-fi novels), but not to the point of making fan-fiction and art about them – I reserve creative output for my own original world.

Sunday 22/2: Modern Samurai

Hot and somewhat humid again – hopefully this is one of the last surges of warm weather before Autumn sets in! I am looking forward to cooler weather as I can wrap up in layers of clothes as I prefer to.

The documentary Ritual: The Samurai of the Soma Noma oi, was linked to from one of my Facebook groups. It’s just under 50 minutes and is quite interesting. I like that the family involved are determined to keep up their old clan’s traditions despite the advent of modernity. This is an aspect of Japanese culture that I find appealing (one of many!), and is something the Australian culture I live in does not really have (to my knowledge).

Friday 27/2: Dentist dread; into the deep

I am having my annual dental checkup and cleaning next Wednesday. Unfortunately my lower right jaw and 2nd molar there have started to ache again (it has a filling in it from 2013) so I am dreading the appointment :-(.

A National Geographic documentary was screened on SBS on Sunday night about James Cameron’s descent into the Mariana Trench in 2012. As I have a phobia of deep water, there is no way I would want to do that, even if paid $1 million! The thought of all that tremendous weight of water waiting to crush the submersible and its occupant at the slightest point of weakness is nightmarish (and I did have an unpleasant dream that night about being trapped in the submersible on the bottom of the trench).

March

Sunday 1/3: Deluded dancers

A violent cold front passed over Melbourne last night around 8:30 p.m., with rain and strong winds – the cloud resembled a horizontal funnel from photos I saw online.

The Avalon Airshow has taken place this weekend. Tickets are $60 for one adult – way too expensive – and getting there is difficult, so it is just not practical for me.

Yet another article featured in The Age this weekend about the overweight “dancers.” (Previously mentioned: 26/1 entry.) The self-delusion in the article is pathetic, and they come across as extremely defensive – deep down they know their weight makes them unattractive and no amount of positivity can hide that fact.

Thursday 5/3: No dentist dramas

My dentist visit yesterday had no issues, thankfully – no more cavities so far, and the pain I was experiencing was likely due to my misaligned bite and lower left jaw playing up yet again (it is still aching vaguely). I did not get bitewing x-rays this time as the dentist said they were usually done every 2 years as there was some radiation exposure. She also said when I asked that my remaining top wisdom teeth should ideally be extracted – something I have been thinking about myself – but I don’t currently have the finances. If one did get a cavity I would have it extracted in any case – they are not worth saving. My teeth are now nice and clean of tartar, but it builds up again despite my best efforts!

Saturday 7/3: Hard drive woes

I had to replace both hard drives on my PC as they developed problems – the C: drive (500 GB) got a bad sector and my backup 1TB D: drive made a scratching noise every so often and would freeze. Dad bought a new 1TB drive (I paid $70) and dug out another 500 GB drive, then I spent an extremely tedious evening installing Windows 8 from the OEM disk, updating this (95 updates totalling 1.2. GB), then updating to Windows 8.1 from that (over 3 GB download, then various updates to that). Nearly 6 hours it took! Then I had to install my programs and transfer my personal files – some had got corrupted, much to my annoyance. The new drive itself initally seemed to have a disk error of some sort, but Windows disk scan appears to have fixed it – I hope. The drive (a Western Digital Blue) was manufactured on 1/1/2015 so it is very recent.

Tuesday 10/3: Windows reinstall

I decided to reinstall Windows again today – via the Whirlpool forum, I found out I could download a Windows 8.1 install media from Microsoft, burn it to DVD and do a clean install using my Windows 8 OEM product key – the process only took around an hour this time! A lot less tedious. The 8.1 version is not the Pro version, however.

I am still uncertain of my hard disk drives; I think there might have been corrupt files on the secondary one, but I don’t know where they would be.

Wednesday 11/3: Still reinstalling

I have reinstalled most of my programs – another tedious chore! I don’t know of shortcuts, though. I was having a lot of trouble installing the 64-bit version of Inkscape, and I think downloading it through Firefox might have corrupted the file somehow – I then tried downloading it through Chrome and it installed without issues.

Thursday 19/3: Website growing; history girls

Warm today – nearly 30° – but the worst of the hot weather is over, hopefully! It is soon to be my favorite time of year again.

Been fussing with my website yet again, which is a fairly mindless activity; I have been feeling creatively uninspired for a while. I only know HTML and CSS, which these days is not enough – the latest fashion is for “frameworks” that involve a lot of complicated Javascript or similar programming. These make a website more interactive, but put more load on the browser or server. Wordpress-run sites, for example, tend to have a huge amount of code bloat – such as this one or this one – if you view the source code it is a massive jumble, and affects the time the page takes to load.

I kind of miss the days when a plain old static personal website was the trendy thing to have. Mine still is static, though getting rather large – around 573 pages or so! I don’t know if there would be much point in using a Content Management System, though, as most pages do not get altered very often, or at all. This would require a server to function and I want to be able to browse my pages offline without such dependencies.

An article about Japanese “History Geek Girls” was linked to from Facebook. That sort of interest applies to a few Western girls too! (Ahem!)

I am not particularly a fan of manga or anime, and find it ubiquitous to the point of annoyance – a lot of it just seems to be a sign of immaturity (although I do like Neon Genesis Evangelion). It is endemic in a lot of Western fan-type art also.

Sunday 22/3: Andromeda

I had a dream this morning about a childhood toy I have mentioned before (31/8/2010 entry). I had somehow traveled back in time as was looking in my bedroom cupboard for a particular toy (a black-and-silver plastic horse called Andromeda, from a sci-fi toy series called Micronauts). This was in the 1970s. I was rummaging through various items but couldn’t find it, though there was some other documentation and toys there. I then thought to look in the pink toy box I had then (wooden, made by Dad), so I went to search, noting how much less cluttered my bedroom was. I removed a blue box to dust it, then woke up.

I had a look on E-bay for it out of curiosity, but the prices – $100+ – are well out of my reach! Maybe I will find it randomly in a charity store, but that is very unlikely.

Wednesday 25/3: More hard drive issues

I’ve been having some weird issues with one of my backup portable drives, a Toshiba Canvio Simple 3.0 (bought in January last year). It was making clicking noises and acting erratic for a few days when connected, and was very slow to copy anything. Dad plugged it into his computer and it worked fine. He tried changing a couple of USB ports on my PC with a spare he had as these may have been causing the problem, but they would not read the disk at all. I plugged it in late yesterday and it seemed to be working normally again, though there were some disk errors which a chkdsk scan hopefully fixed. Today it seems to be OK. Looking online at various reviews, the Toshiba external drives seem to have a lot of problems with unreliable cable connections and fail more often than other brands, so I am now wishing I had spent a bit more and bought another brand.

Sunday 29/3: Bloated website

Today was a perfect Autumn day, beginning with a chilly morning and warming up to a fine but not hot day (24°C) – my favorite time of year.

I happened to visit author George R.R. Martin’s website, and viewed its HTML source (something I do a lot when visiting sites). It underwent a redesign in 2013, apparently updated to using WordPress, but on viewing the source code I am not impressed with it – the template’s coding is a bloated mess and is still using tables for layout (a very outdated practice) – and a fixed-table width at that. Images are not resized or optimized; It is certainly not mobile phone-friendly! There are nearly 7 MB of images on the World of Ice and Fire sample page, for example. The page does not validate, according to the Nu HTML Checker. If I were paying for that I would be asking for my money back!

April

Wednesday 8/4: No Easter egg; lunar eclipse; Creative Cloud unobtainable

Easter is over. I did not receive a chocolate egg this year as the manufacturer Mum usually buys from, Hillier’s, unfortunately went out of business earlier this year :-(. It’s an all-too-familiar scenario with Australian companies, now. I did get some chocolate freckles to compensate, though.

There was a lunar eclipse of the full Moon on Saturday night; unfortunately I missed it! Daylight Savings also ended at last – it extends for 6 months now and is just too long. I am habitually up around 4:30 a.m. and it is annoying not to have more lighter mornings.

I was looking at the price of Adobe Creative Cloud subscriptions in Officeworks today. The full array of programs is nearly $700 for just one year, and Photoshop by itself is nearly $300. Impossible to afford, for me. At those exorbitant prices, people can hardly be blamed for finding other means to acquire the programs! Especially considering the subscription model, where you have to keep paying just to use it, rather than buy a program once and keep forever.

Wednesday 15/4: Game of Thrones fanatics

There was a lengthy thunderstorm this morning, which doesn’t happen very often.

Internet access has been erratic since yesterday; the connection keeps dropping out at intervals.

The Game of Thrones TV series has been given a ridiculous amount of media attention in the last few weeks (season 5 has just begun). (In Australia it is mentioned along with pirating (Illegally downloading) episodes – a contentious issue here, especially as a test case is being held against an Internet provider by an American company.) That aside, I am uninterested in the series and am bored with the hype surrounding it. The rabid fans are just as bad; an example is this overreaction by user “CptnLegendary” at Reddit to another’s criticism of the series (NSFW for swearing) – slightly censored quote below:

Okay fu*k you. I love /r/fatpeoplehate and am not in any way a fat sympathist, and I do find Martin’s physique lazy and unappealing, but do not even fu*king try insulting his writing. That guy has written a goddamn magnum opus that I legitimately believe is on par with some of the greatest written works of literature. That might be excessive, but your claim that his fantasy writing is “pure fu*king garbage” is such goddamned bullshit I can smell it through my screen. The vast majority of the fantasy/literature community believes that he has written the greatest work of fantasy ever written, and surpassed works like LOTR, Tor, WoT, Malazan, WOK, Kingkiller Chronicles, etc. Look up “best fantasy series” on Google, and the first FOURTEEN results I clicked ALL had GOT as number one. That is insane. When fourteen different sources can all unanimously agree on something that subjective, you can be goddamn sure that it is good.

Just because he’s struggled with the pacing of AFFC and ADWD doesn’t fu*king mean shit. Shit like the Red Wedding and R+L=J have never before been seen in any work of epic fantasy. This guy has defied fantasy tropes time and time again without giving a fu*k, and has created a world so incredibly rich with detail and subtext that it still blows my mind. Theories like Frey Pies and the Gravedigger are almost certainly true, and when a writer goes to such insane lengths to put in these ridiculously subtle, intricate plot lines in (which he absolutely did not have to), then you can see how much he appreciates his readers. He had no reason to put all those background hints when he killed off the three Freys; the mere implication that they had been assassinated by Manderly was more than enough for any reader. But he went above and beyond, and had all these things like the song that was playing during the serving of the pies, the specific wording Manderly used while serving it, etc. that only the most vigilant of readers would appreciate. But he still put them in. He’s a goddamn genius, and you will be eating your words when TWOW is released.

I mean you must be blind, or as deluded as the fats are, if you think his works can be summarized simply by calling them “slow, boring, and contain about 5000 p*nises … mediocre at best … meh prose.” Are you fu*king insane? He’s one of the greatest prose writers of our time. It seems like you’re deliberately coming up with this bullshit based on what you think of Martin as a person, not an author. It’s sad.

EDIT: Not to mention someone analyzed the amount of time most writers took with their works, and Martin is an almost identical time-words written trajectory with most other famous fantasy writers, which is absolutely mindblowing considering the vast amount of detail and worldbuilding going in his books (plus the sheer, gigantic scale of the series).

Apparently daring to have an opinion opposite of what is popular is heretical. Another example of why I have come to detest fans. And “surpass” Lord of the Rings? No, just no. ASOIAF is no comparison.

Friday 17/4: Star Wars 7 teasers; off the Internet

The second teaser trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens was released today!

First teaser (released 28/11/2014).

This is probably the only movie I am looking forward to this year – and only one I will make an effort to see in the cinema. I did not see the prequels when they were released in the 1990s/2000s, and I wish I had (even if they were something of a disappointment).

The new villain, Kylo Ren, looks intriguing. I hope he does not turn out to be a let-down like General Grievous (Revenge of the Jedi) was! (See 16/3/2007 entry.)

After uploading the above, I am also now offline until Monday at least as the phone line is malfunctioning (Dad has an ASDL connection) – someone was working in the telephone pit on the naturestrip next door on Tuesday, and our connection has been faulty since then! So the phone was temporarily re-routed and a Telstra technician is coming Monday (hopefully) to check our line. It is going to be a tedious weekend without Internet access! I am so used to using it whenever I want to look up something. The only time I have been without one for long is when I was staying in hospital in 2008 and 2009. I rarely use a landline telephone and would regard Internet access as a priority, given a choice (I don’t have a mobile, so no alternative there either).

Saturday 18/4: Connected again

We are back online, at least for now! A Telstra technician came today rather unexpectedly and repaired whatever was wrong. I feel very isolated without my Internet connection!

Wednesday 29/4: Progress failure; NASA site redesign

Uh-oh, looks like something has gone wrong with another Progress cargo flight to the ISS: the current one just launched (Progress M-27M/59th to the ISS) is spinning out of control for some reason.

The NASA website seems to have undergone another redesign; out of curiosity I tried accessing it via the text-only Lynx browser and the site does not display at all! Viewing its source code reveals that the content is rendered using Javascript, so sites with this not available will only see a blank page. They seem to be using the Drupal CMS.

May

Tuesday 5/5: Star Wars 7 photos; Autumn trees; indulging pets

More photos were released for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, in Vanity Fair magazine. Adam Driver is Kylo Ren. He is not conventionally handsome, but rather striking-looking.

Adam Driver as Kylo Ren in Vanity Fair magazine

A Japanese Maple tree that I like is in its full red Autumn glory – it is in the front yard of a house near where I live. The leaves will not last long, though, especially as today has been very windy.

“It’s Me or the Dog,” NYT, 3/5 (via Metafilter). One thing that seems to have become a trend is pets sleeping on beds – or, worse, in them. It’s a behavior that grosses me out, and has obvious hygiene issues, though the commentators seem unfazed by it. I find the general trend of treating pets as substitute children distasteful – this is anthropomorphizing animals to an extreme, and in my view it is an undignified behavior for both parties. Another bizarre behavior is the fashion for dog (and sometimes cat) clothing – this can hardly be comfortable for the animal. There are even “daycare” centers for dogs left at home while their owners are working. For me, all this is an example of decadence in our society – other cultures might regard such behavior towards animals as bizarre and excessively indulgent.

I also dislike dog and cat breeds that have brachycephalic features (i.e. flat faces). This is an example of breeding for neoteny, so that the animals’ faces end up looking like those of deformed human infants. It is a look I find repulsive, but a lot seem to find it “cute” – despise all the health problems the breeds have. Animal breeds that need surgery just to function with some semblance of normality should be allowed to die out.

Friday 8/5: Clearing the landscape; hateful capitalism

Despite it being the second decade of the 21st century, land-clearing in Australia is continuing, dismayingly. It does not help that the current conservative Federal government actively hates the environment, as such governments tend to – for them, the environment is simply a resource to be exploited. European colonization and subsequent large-scale agriculture have devastated Australia’s unique environment and species like nothing else before it; there has been more damage in the last 200 years than in the previous 40,000 when humans occupied the continent as hunter-gatherers.

Another recent dismaying revelation is that wildlife decline may lead to an empty landscape on various continents, due to human activity and population growth (the latter oddly not mentioned in the article as a factor). A December 2014 article warns of the sixth great extinction underway.

The loss for the planet is incalculable – as it is for our own species which could soon find itself living in a world denuded of all variety in nature. As ecologist Paul Ehrlich has put it: “In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches.”

Sadly, I think that during my lifetime there will be more extinctions of many species, and the environment in 40 years will be a much more barren place. If the human population keeps growing at a breakneck pace – and it currently seems that it will – this prediction is a certainty. A few sad specimens in zoos might remain, but their habitats will have mostly gone.

Edit, 10/5: A Redditor posted a comment five months ago in response to another article, “Pulitzer-winning scientist warns wildlife face a ‘biological holocaust’.” For some reason they deleted their comment when I went back to check, but I copied it below:

The world as we know it will be very different in 20, 30, 50 years. I am a biologist and it’s just been in the past 5 years or so that people in my field’s attitudes have been changing. “See it now before it’s gone” is a phrase I hear a lot. There’s little we can do. Our human lifestyle is dependent upon us taking resources from the Earth. When we take from the Earth, we take it from wildlife. When we take what they need, they disappear. So I know it sucks but … go hiking, go birding, go fishing, go hunting. Look at the stars. Feed the birds. Go to your local wildlife refuge, take photos, make a scrapbook. Embrace what we have left right now, because much of it will be gone in our lifetime. Appreciate it. It’s what we have chosen to give up for our first-world lifestyle.

– dickcissels

I happened to see part of a documentary screened on ABC TV last night, Episode 2 of The Super Rich And Us. I did not watch all of it, but saw this interview which made me want to punch the one being interviewed, Xenios Thrasyvoulou, on his smug face (I transcribed it from YouTube):

Xenios: Employment as we traditionally know it has made people quite lazy in many ways. You know, you have a stable income, the pension and so on and so forth you don’t have to fight for anything. In my past generation, if you were in lifetime employment they’re miserable. The world we’re moving towards, which I think is a better world, keeps people on their toes, accountable, they need to fight for it and the ones that do are essentially much better off than they were before.

Interviewer (Jacques Peretti): A lot of American billionaires and economists have said there should be no lower limit; we shouldn’t be thinking about minimum wages.

Xenios: I would support that personally; people are not incentivised to go and find a job because they’re just living an OK life on unemployment benefits.

Interviewer: So what you’re talking about is Darwinism; you’re talking about survival of the fittest and no safety net for the people who can’t be entrepreneurs and go-getters.

Xenios: Unclear survival is most adaptable, and I think that is the key here; we’re moving to a different kind of world where the ones that do really well are more adaptable are fighters and upside is definitely worth it.

What an awful, selfish, regressive and downright evil attitude. This encapsulates everything the labor movement has been fighting against all last century – and still is. Living in the world Xenios apparently wants is a miserable and stressful existence, where you are constantly competing against others just to survive. It is dismaying that he seems to have no empathy for anyone who is not like he is. I believe strongly in fairness and equality, and his philosophy is the antithesis of those.

Wednesday 13/5: Japanese manners

“The importance of civility: what we can learn from Japan,” ABC News, 11/5. This was posted as a link on the r/Japan subreddit. The non-English-speaking country forums there seem to be mostly populated by curmudgeonly cynical Western expatriates, as is demonstrated by some of the dour comments about the article (and downvotes). (The article’s author does point out that Japanese society does have its problems and downsides, like all cultures.) I thought the article interesting and such civil manners are something Australians are in dire need of! I wonder if it would be possible to change a society to such values over time (decades or generations).

“What’s in a name? Quite a bit for pupils addressing teachers,” The Age, 2/5. This article is somewhat related; the writer is approving of the increasing casualization of addressing one’s elders in Australian society. I do not feel this is a positive development as eglitarianism is going too far; there is little respect for anything now, it seems (yes, I am getting older). There needs to be some boundaries to install a modicum of civility. I liked this comment:

What a load of twaddle, Amanda.

It is true that respect does not come merely from a title but this suggestion that we should treat children as little adults is modern-day-politically-correct nonsense.

Children as not little adults, they’re children. They’re still learning to separate themselves from the world around them, they’re learning to identify their own feelings, they’re learning about choices, they’re learning about who they are. Their brains are still developing, their bodies are still developing. Children are like a half complete construction yard that is constantly moving. Adults are responsible for guiding and nurturing the children under their care, specifically because adults have better judgement than children because they are fully developed psychologically and socially.

Dispensing with the Mr/Mrs/Ms is to elevate children on the same level as adults. Children are not on the same level at adults. They’re still trying to understand the world around them and learn how to make decisions.

An important life lesson is that respect is earned. It’s not handed to you. The implicit message your philosophy teaches to children, Amanda, is that they’re on the same level as adults and entitled to the same level of respect simply for showing up and being there. That is NOT how life works. This is why some children grow up to be selfish and expect everything to be their own way when adults. They’ve been taught from a young age they don’t owe anyone any respect, instead other people should always expected to bend over backwards to win their approval.

You can’t be a leader without first learning to follow. You can’t be an adult without first having the maturity to accept that you don’t know everything and others may know more than you do (e.g. parents, teachers). This is where respect comes from.

– “Coretown,” May 02, 2015, 11:40AM

I am embarrassed by my country’s culture at times; it must seem uncivilized and boorish to some other cultures (and the alien society I created for my worldbuilding project is a reflection of this – it is very traditional Japanese-influenced in many respects).

Sunday 17/5: Russian launch failure

Russia has had another embarassing launch failure with a Proton-M/Briz-M launch with MexSat-1 suffering a third-stage failure. An ISS Progress reboost also failed, according to NASAWatch.com, and the Progress M-27M cargo flight crashed into the Pacific Ocean last month after failing to dock. General opinion seems to be the failures are due to quality control issues during manufacturing.

A singer called Sarah Brightman was to fly as a space tourist on Soyuz TMA-18M (launching on September 1; she would come back on TMA-16 on September 10) but her mission was postponed for “personal family reasons.” Though someone on the NASASpaceflight.com forum posted that “Jim Oberg has commented on another website that there have been rumors in Russian press that her training was not going well.”

I had never heard of her before her flight was announced, but she is apparently quite famous. The Space Review has a recent article about her. She seems nice enough, though all the idealistic “inspirational” statements induce cynical eye-rolling in me.

In conjunction with her role as a UNESCO Artist for Peace ambassador, Brightman will present life on board the space station – which requires the mindful, shared consumption of resources and an unwavering focus on sustainability – as a model for how we might better inhabit our planet. “Sustainability is a complex concept, sometimes difficult to define. I know from the space training that I have already done that the first objective on a space vehicle or on the Space Station is to make sure that supplies of water and air are preserved. If they fail then the impact is immediate and devastating. Our resources on earth are no different – earth is effectively a space ship which humans inhabit,” she explained.

All very well-meaning, but any attempts at sustainability will have negligible impact on environmental problems if human population growth is not addressed.

Sunday 24/5: Realistic about refugees

“The end of humanitarianism?,” The Conversation, 19/5. A more clear-eyed look at the refugee issue that has been in the headlines the last couple of weeks: “The brutal reality is that it is simply not possible to help or accommodate them all.” Not when the potential numbers run into the thousands or millions. Destination countries simply cannot and should not be expected to take them all in – at least, not without a big decrease in living standards for their own citizens. The United Nations is very out of touch on this issue – they seem to have unrealistic expectations of the destination countries.

A letter from The Age, 23/5:

A line with no end

The Europeans have shown that treating people humanely results in an unacceptable flow of arrivals, further enriching people-smuggling criminals. Look at the nightmare in Africa. There are unlimited numbers of people who are living in intolerable situations. No matter how many we take there will still be uncountable more desperate for refuge. Tony Abbott’s “nope, nope, nope” is the only solution.

– Tristam Elliott, Warrnambool

Everytime the refugee topic is posted in r/Australia on Reddit (several times a week, this being a random recent one), most members are falling over themselves to express sympathy, and dissenters are downvoted. Yet any time the topic of Australian Aborigines/Indigenous Australians and their disadvantage comes up, racism towards them prevails. The hypocrisy is pathetic.

And yet again, though little mentioned, is that a major contributor to all this is the high population growth rate. Implementation of birth control access and family planning should be mandatory with any foreign aid given (if they aren’t already). If this would seem patronizing, so be it. These measures would go a long way towards prevention – the fewer people there are, the more resources are available for everyone.

Edit: a couple more comments from Reddit:

Moulhid 86 points 1 month ago:

Complex issue? These people – often uneducated, illiterate, traumatized, culturally incompatible, often hold racist, homophobic, misogynist and tribalist views – have no future whatsoever in Europe.

How are they going to integrate and adopt the host’s culture and language? How are they going to find a job? Who’s going to pay for their asylum procedure, food, housing and care?

And if you allow migrant no 1 in the country, why won’t you allow another 20 million from the same country? Adopt complete countries into Europe while you’re at it, because that is the final conclusion from the current outdated migration policies.

Current European migration policy is a dead end and needs to be reformed drastically to prevent huge problems in society in the coming decades. Australia and the US at least understood that the current trend can’t go on and must be dealt with.

imbecile 145 points 1 month ago:

Large scale immigration into the first world is a very bad idea, primarily for two reasons:

It prevents change for the better in the regions where people are running away from. It servers both as a pressure valve and as a brain drain for the people that can affect change. By allowing save havens here, we both undermine their motivation and capability to improve the situation there.

It destabilizes and undermines our own culture and institutions. First and foremost by introducing massive communication problems into our own culture, both on substantial level as well as a purely protocol level. It derails our own political process.

Someone cynical might think both are the main points, since both are aspects that benefit the wealthy and powerful. Divide and rule.

Friday 29/5: Kidults; forcing birth spacing

I was quite infuriated by an opinion piece in today’s Herald-Sun, “Come on kidults, it’s time to leave” (replicated below as the article is under a paywall and the H-S is a crappy site). “Kidults” – a portmanteau of kid-adult – is an insult directed at adults living at home with their parents, which seems to be generally disapproved of in Western culture. It is normal in many other cultures, though, for generations to live together – or nearby at least – so the opposite trend in my culture is yet another symptom of excessive individualism, and leads to a lot of lonely isolated people. If one is living at home and contributing, such as doing chores, it can hardly be seen as objectionable. The living arrangements of others is ultimately none of the columnist’s business.

Come on kidults, it’s time to leave

29 May 2015
Herald Sun
Tom Elliott

By allowing young William or Charlotte to remain at home, you may think you’re helping them. But in reality you’re just extending their adolescence.

I’m staggered by the number of adults I meet who still live with their parents. We are talking about men and women aged in their late 20s, 30s and even 40s who, for a variety of largely spurious reasons, seem unable to leave the family nest.

For their own good, anyone still living with mum and dad by the age of 27 should be forcibly removed.

When I finished school, I couldn’t wait to leave home. It wasn’t that I disliked either my mother, or the house in which she lived – it was just that the perceived pleasure of being an adult far outweighed the various rules and regulations that accompanied life under her roof. Vacating the family abode, however, involved plenty of sacrifices.

The first house I moved into lacked an entire back wall during midwinter renovations and had neither kitchen (we cooked on an outdoor electric BBQ) nor heating apart from open fireplaces. Once I left my washed clothes drying in front of a fire; I returned home to find only the smouldering remnants of my already limited wardrobe.

Another place leaked every time it rained and had a bathtub that drained on to the ground beneath the floor. A rather putrid smell in the garden led to the revelation that a damaged sewerage pipe was directly fertilising the shrubs. Ah, the joys of shared living on a budget.

Until about 20 years ago, adult children still at home were denied several “privileges”. For example, having one’s boyfriend or girlfriend over to stay the night was generally frowned upon. Late-night house parties involving loud music, large numbers of people and copious amounts of alcohol occurred only when mum and dad went away. And most responsible parents required resident offspring to pay rent.

How times have changed. Thanks to a combination of high property prices, relaxed sexual mores and older parents desperate to remain young, it’s disturbingly common for 30-year-olds to remain at home. Such “kidults” convince themselves they’re saving money while living with mum and dad. But really they’re just putting off growing up.

Take high property prices. Yes, it seems more expensive than ever to enter Melbourne’s inflated real estate market. But far too many potential buyers in their 20s have become accustomed to a family home with all the mod cons.

They expect fully renovated kitchens and bathrooms, a nice northerly aspect, off-street parking and a huge flatscreen TV. Well, first homes generally aren’t like that. Entry-level property is either a long way out of town or in need of considerable work. The house you live in at 25 should in no way resemble the home your parents kick you out of when they’re 55.

Also, if the suburbs in which today’s 20-somethings wish to buy into are too expensive, they should consider either moving elsewhere or renting. Given that rent is still cheaper than a mortgage, a smart young person could use the money saved to invest in other growth assets – like a share portfolio.

Too many under-30s who complain of being “locked out” of the property market are unwilling to give up many of life’s luxuries. I know a 27-year-old, for example, who lives with his parents while driving a latemodel BMW convertible.

When I was his age and struggling with a mortgage, I drove a dilapidated Valiant. The short-term pleasure of possessing a new car must be forgone if first-home buyers truly want the longer-term benefits of property ownership. The same goes for mobile communications. Can you imagine the squeals of dismay when the average Gen-Yer is told the latest smartphone (accompanied by an obligatory costly data plan) might not be a necessary purchase? The distinction between what is desired and what is genuinely needed is lost on far too many young adults.

WHEN it comes to grown-up “sleepovers,” 2015 is clearly different from 1995. Back then if you wanted to have sex in a house you bought your own place, rented one if that was too expensive or went to a mate’s for the night.

By contrast, today’s parents seem quite blasé about adult children’s sexual activity under the family roof. Perhaps the prospect of a boyfriend or girlfriend in their 20s appearing at the communal breakfast table allows aging mums and dads to relive their own glory years. Unfortunately, such vicarious living, while not wrong in itself, discourages grown-up children from ever flying the coop.

Young adults who stay at home too long fail to learn many of life’s important lessons. They have no idea how to save for household bills like utilities, food and rates. Many regard a large, modern family home in a nice suburb as a first-home buyer’s right.

Plenty also believe that household tasks like cooking and cleaning occur via a force of nature, eg, the “Washing Fairy”.

In short, such people are unprepared for the outside world. Parents take note: by allowing young William or Charlotte to remain at home, you may think you’re helping them. But in reality you’re just extending their adolescence. Do your kids a real favour and kick them out.

After all, is there anything more pathetic than a 27-year-old man sleeping under his favourite Star Wars doona in the same bedroom he inhabited a decade earlier?

As an addendum to the refugee issue last entry, Myanmar instigated a population control measure that would force a 3-year spacing between children. This has been predictably criticized as discriminating against women, but I seriously wish it would be practiced worldwide (amongst other measures) as a form of population control; the situation for the environment and biodiversity is dire enough to warrant it. Paying women to have children seems to be acceptable, but discouraging them against excessive reproduction incites the opposite reaction – very irrational and irresponsible, in my opinion.

Sunday 31/5: Autumn gone; fat burden; history fads; Mars dreams

Last day of Autumn and the nice displays of red and gold leaves are almost over for another year :-(.

“Obesity epidemic weighs down hospitals,” The Age, 31/5. Australia’s public health system is becoming increasingly burdened by the high-care needs of overweight patients – a condition that is mostly preventable, frustratingly.

The subject of history is as much prone to fads and fashions as any other area, and what currently seems prevalent is what I call the cynical view of history. Namely that things from a particular era were much more mundane than described in accounts from previous decades. What brought this to mind was a recent Metafilter post about some exhibition critiquing so-called Orientalism (presenting Asian history topics as exotic from a Western point of view – one being the Samurai exhibition mentioned in the post). My attraction to subjects such as Samurai is because I think they are cool, the “realistic” cynical view of them aside; I like the imagery and mythos surrounding them, and make no apologies for my view on this.

“Project Exodus – what’s behind the dream of colonizing Mars?” New Yorker, 1/6 (via a Mefi post again). A critique of the obsession some have with colonizing Mars. I am now more on the side of the naysayers – there is no pressing need for governments to undertake it and the dangers currently outweigh the benefits. Not to mention there isn’t that much to do on Mars. That being said, a privately-funded mission is fine with me!

I’ve found the notion that humanity’s destiny being beyond the stars, or that we’re putting all our eggs in one basket by staying on Earth, to be far a more religious outlook than declaring the folly of human space travel.

Seriously, does it matter to the Universe that humanity outlasts our home planet? The Universe doesn’t care one way or another. Insistence that our destiny is among the stars, that humanity needs to propagate on other planets sounds like religion to me, and needs a far more rigorous justification. Because the orbiting zero gravity sex motel sounds like a far more justifiable reason for human space travel.

Someday, we may actually find a driving reason to send people into space, and colonize other planets. But the reality remains that nobody can come up with a very compelling reason to even try doing so. Hell, we might never have even gone to the moon were it not for America’s desire to show the Soviet Union how big our dick was.

I also tend to think the concept of “Mother Earth” is probably more literal than we may think. Humans are specifically suited to living on our planet. As such, meaningful colonization won’t happen until either we find a way to transform other planets pretty much exactly like Earth, or transform humans into beings that can withstand alien territories. Would they still be considered human at that point? The prospect of sheltered colonies, even ones that truly self sustain, strikes me as a pretty dim destiny for humanity. posted by 2N2222 at 3:06 PM on May 28

Or maybe we can leave the cradle of mankind, and start taking some steps out in a wider universe, the naysayers be damned.

I am not a naysayer and would LOVE to see people living on the Moon and Mars and throughout our entire solar system.

But I’m also turning into a realist and being able to live anywhere but Earth is going to be very difficult for humanity. Going off planet is nothing like Europeans colonizing America, never mind that it has already been colonized by Native Americans.

Going into space is hard. Sending humans into space and returning them safely is incredibly hard and the human body still has trouble dealing with the changes. We don’t know how to send people beyond low earth orbit, we’ve forgotten and will have to relearn it all over again.

I’m not against human spaceflight, I just don’t see anyone being realistic about it. There’s lots of starry-eyed dreams that just wind up getting people killed.

– posted by Brandon Blatcher at 5:13 PM on May 28

The New Horizons spacecraft is due to flyby Pluto in only 44 days (14 July), after a voyage of 9 years! It will take the first-ever detailed photos of the planet and its moons (yes it’s still a planet to me).

June

Wednesday 3/6: Site redesign

I was bored with the way my site looked, so I redesigned it slightly. Don’t know if I will stay with it. Uploading hundreds of pages every time I make major changes gets tedious, but using a content management system has its own issues, so I am undecided upon that.

Windows 10 is due to be released 29 July, so I have reserved my edition, though I don’t think I will install as soon as it is available.

Friday 5/6: Site re-redesign

That site design didn’t last long! (It’s archived on my About my site page.) I felt like something even more minimalist in appearance, so I changed it again; the design was influenced by the current Dokuwiki default template, though I might tweak it some more. The main navigation is now at the bottom (though this might change). I just wish I had a logo of some sort I could use for the site, but I don’t have anything to define myself by.

Saturday 6/6: More site designs; Windows 10

Still doing some site appearance tweakings. Getting it to display acceptably on various devices (mobile phones, tablets, etc.) is a real hassle! (I use the device emulator in the Google Chrome browser to test.) I am trying a “mobile-first” design, where the more complex layout is reserved for desktop screens and Internet Explorer 9 and above (IE 8 and below don’t understand media queries so they just get a basic layout). The site is still quite accessible via a basic text-only browser such as Lynx. As usual, the design won’t win any awards, but I am reasonably happy with it.

“Will Windows 10 Become a Subscription Model?,” Redmond Magazine, 23/3. A speculative article, but it is wise to be wary of the company’s ulterior motives about the 1-year “free” upgrade to Windows 10. Like Apple, Microsoft wish to lock users into their ecosystem – make them dependent upon their programs to function – and customers will need to pay an ongoing subscription to enable access to these, such as is already done with Office 365.

Linux is the only viable alternative, but the various versions still have some issues with program, driver and hardware compatability, some versions are not beginner-friendly and some programs such as Photoshop can’t be used. I have not tried any versions so far, but it is my back-up plan should Windows become unaffordable and inaccessible for whatever reason.

“Making your own static web site isn’t nostalgia. It’s the future of the web,” Neocities blog, 27/2 (I have a site space reserved there). An assertion that I agree with! Basic HTML “is durable, dependable, and lasts forever.” I have a lot of my personal files written in HTML; a bonus is that I can link between files.

Monday 8/6: And site changed again

Onto another site design :-). I still like the previous one, but this one also; still a minimalist design with one bright color. I just want something simple and relatively easy to maintain.

One website that really needs reworking and redesigning is Russian Space Web. It uses an old-fashioned table layout – definitely not mobile-friendly – and deprecated tags such as <p align="left"> <font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="1" color="#FFFFFF"> for every single paragraph (not surprisingly, it doesn’t validate.). As the site has hundreds of pages, this adds a lot of unnecessary page weight – the paragraphs could instead be styled using one external CSS file, which would save a lot of kilobytes.

Sunday 14/6: Awful PM; Tesla at Chadstone

In the latest of his many embarrassing statements, Prime Minister Tony Abbott described wind farms as “visually awful” and that his government is deliberately reducing the Renewable Energy Target (RET) policy. This government is so backwards-looking it is an international disgrace. There are so many hi-tech areas Australia could be taking a leading role in: solar power (subsidize solar panels on every roof), a nationwide high-speed broadband network (the rollout of which the current government also spitefully sabotaged), a fast train line between capital cities, computers and artificial intelligence, and so on. Yet we are stuck with (mostly) older conservative politicians who think that scarring the landscape with new roads and digging up coal is the height of progress. It is incredibly frustrating and incites despair over any prospect of Australia becoming a truly progressive nation (advancing technology while protecting the environment).

I noticed that the electric car maker Tesla Motors has a recharging station at Chadstone Shopping Centre (I have yet to find it). There was a short segment featuring the car on some motor show last week and it looks very futuristic – and expensive; they are over $100,000! Only affordable to most people if they won the lottery. There is also a Powerwall, a home battery to hold the charge from solar panels, so going off the grid could become more attainable in a few years. This is the sort of technology Australia could be innovating in, but isn’t, no thanks to the current government.

Tuesday 16/6: Still fussing with site

I am still fussing around with the look of my site. I am trying to decide between a bold colored style and one that is more minimalist, as in the screenshot at right, so things will probably change every so often!

I noticed that Alexander Anikeev, the creator of the Manned (piloted) astronautics. Figures and facts spaceflight data site, has stopped updating it as of March this year. A pity, as it was a useful resource. It is also at the Internet Archive if it disappears from its current host.

Sunday 21/6: Solstice; a quiet extinction

Winter Solstice today (more precisely, at 2:38 a.m. AEST tomorrow morning). Also very cold this morning; 3°C or so. The Moon, Venus and Jupiter are forming a triptych in the evening sky until the end of this month.

There have been more articles this week about the sixth mass extinction of many species that has been underway due to human activities and overpopulation (ABC News, Guardian, The Age). Reddit comments, including this one:

I try to tell people this all the time. Regardless of human cause or not, our wild areas are missing megafauna that used to crowd every continent. It’s like we just missed the party. Every continent used to have the same kind of mammal diversity and population that Africa clings to today. America’s final megafauna loss was the Bison within the last 200 years. In Africa a comparable animal would maybe be the wildebeast. Huge herds totaling 10s of millions across the continent. When Europeans arrived in the new world there was an estimated 60 million bison. These numbers were reduced to near extinction when the numbers got down to less than 1000.

It’s always sad to me to look at picturesque scenes across America and the world … and to see the landscape so quiet and still. Just a few thousand years ago we would see all sorts of amazing mammals moving about in great herds … mammoths, mastodons, horses and huge herds of grazing animals. All gone.

We also probably miss out on the connections and symbioses of the recent past. Who knows how our remaining species interacted and fit in with the mammal diversity of the past? How did that megafauna influence the landscape and the biomes?

Finally there’s another illusion that there still exists a dominant wild-world of mammals separate from us. In truth the biomass of mammals today is almost entirely humans and their domesticated species. Here’s the relevant xkcd that shows the small fraction of land mammal biomass that is “wild animals”. It’s the end of something.

– mavaction 1418 points 1 day ago

The warnings keep coming, yet governments, business and society generally will not change its obsession with growth.

Domestic animals, as noted in that comment, are also overpopulating the Earth along with the humans who breed them. They are invasive species in almost every continent, and the land needed to feed food animals contributes to habital loss for wild animals.

Sunday 28/6: GP visit

Went to the GP this week for yet another ear cleaning (earwax build-up again), which seems to be an almost yearly chore for me now! I also did a fasting blood sample test on Friday morning to check my B12 levels and some other things – I was having 3-monthly injections for low B12 up to last year but stopped as I got a bit tired of doing it :-). Thankfully the local clinic I go to now fully bulk-bills for Health Care Card patients – at least for the time being. The previous one, which I had been going to all my life, charged a gap fee, and was over $30 even for concession card holders; too expensive now.

July

Friday 3/7: Blood test; planets alignment; another rocket mishap

I got my blood test results; most things were within the normal range, including my B12 levels (325; normal range is 200-700) and fasting blood sugar/glucose (4.7; normal range is 3.6-6.0). My white blood cell count was a little low (3.5; normal starts at 4.0), but that was all.

Venus and Jupiter were at their closest alignment yesterday; I did get a good look last evening, though not a good photo (as usual!). The full Moon was also rising in the east and was quite bright.

The latest cargo ship launch to the ISS went awry last week; the Falcon-9 rocket, carrying a Dragon cargo ship, failed during launch. The SpaceX company is run by Elon Musk, who also runs the Tesla electric car company. It is the third separate launch to fail within a year, the others being Progress M-27M in April, and Orbital ATK’s Antares rocket in November. There was also Progress M-12M back in August 2011. That is four launches out of 163 launches to the ISS since it first began operating – not a bad record (though still expensive and inconveniencing), and thankfully all have been unmanned flights. Progress M-28M has just launched today (04:52 UTC) and it appears to have reached orbit successfully.

Thursday 9/7: Attack on welfare

In what seems to be a dismayingly predictable trend of Conservative/Right-wing governments, the newly-elected UK government is cutting welfare, supposedly to help bring its Budget back into balance. This will of course hit the poorest people the hardest. At the same time the government is cutting taxes and increasing exemptions, which makes no sense – surely it is preferable to raise taxes so that they don’t lose revenue? It is my belief that a government’s prime duty is to look after its citizens, and the Conservative governments well and truly fail on this. They are fond of blaming so-called “welfare cheats” and “dole bludgers” rather than targeting wealthy tax evaders such as multinational companies. In truth, I would like to see welfare replaced with a universal basic income (previously mentioned in my 26/6/2014 entry), which would not have the nasty punitive attitude that is currently displayed towards welfare recipients (assuming social attitudes could be changed towards accepting the concept). The letter below from the 30/6 Herald-Sun demonstrates such an attitude:

A basic concept

THE animal kingdom doesn’t appear to be operating on a complex and expensive welfare system such as Australia’s.

And no one there complains about having to work for their existence.

Nothing is taken for granted. Those who can’t catch their own wilt and die off, leaving in charge only those good enough to fend for themselves.

– Josh Vinecombe, Belmont

So because animals don’t have welfare, humans shouldn’t either? There are letters like that now and then; as the H-S is a sensationalist tabloid-style paper, it tends to demonize welfare recipients and the “Left” generally.

ABC 7:30 had a brief report on hikomori, shut-ins in Japan.

Tuesday 14/7: Pluto flyby

Charon and Pluto composite image, 11 July (NASA)

Today is Pluto flyby day! After a long 9 years, New Horizons whizzes by Pluto at around 14 km/sec, at 9:49:57 pm Australian time. Reddit has a FAQ thread and a live post thread. There won’t be high-resolution photos for some weeks or months, though, due to the low bandwidth of the radio transmissions (something like 2000 bits/sec) and long time it takes (4.4 light-hours each way).

Last Sunday was Melbourne’s wettest July day in 25 years, and very cold.

Wednesday 15/7: Pluto flyby; abandoning Photobucket

I managed to get an iPad screenshot of the moment of Pluto flyby – well, 5 seconds before! (To make a screenshot, hold down the Home button while pressing the on/off button at the top.)

I spent a very tedious day changing image links on my RuSpace website from Photobucket links to local ones. Photobucket has become unbearable to visit as it is ad-infested, so no more hosting images there for me. I have been revising a few pages of the site – mainly fixing broken links – but I have thousands of external links across my site and it is impossibly to correct them all; as years go by many URLs are changed or vanish.

Thursday 16/7: Bird decline

It was reported this week that various native birds are in decline in parts of Australia. This would be directly due to human activity – land clearing, urban sprawl, pollution, introduced feral animals, human population growth and so on. Also not helping is the loss of suburban gardens due to overdevelopment, as the letter in response from today’s The Age points out:

No-fly zones

It’s hardly surprising that many common birds are on the decline (“Declining sightings of Australia’s common birds is no laughing matter”, 15/7) when you see what is happening in our suburbs. Once we had streets of mature gardens with shrubs for food and cover for smaller birds and one or two larger trees for the bigger ones. Now we have widespread destruction of these habitats as multiple blocks are moonscaped and large display boxes constructed.

Many native birds have been able to thrive in gardens that we were once proud to identify our state with. They provide a visible and audible link with the natural world that enhances our lives and are part of a wider ecosystem, such as insect control. They do not go somewhere else if we destroy their habitats – they die.

Ralph Judd, Blackburn North

It was linked to on r/Australia, but the commenters fail to mention overpopulation and overdevelopment as being factors (as the “group-think” there is pro-high-density).

Sunday 19/7: Freezing

This morning was the coldest of the year so far: just above 0°C! (0.6°C to be precise.) Apparently it was the coldest in 18 years in Melbourne. And I went on my usual early morning bicycle ride too! (Just a half-hour trundle around the streets on my 20+ year-old heavy and deteriorating mountain bike.) My hands nearly froze off; the gloves I wore are not adequate. I should have bought some ski gloves a few weeks ago when some cheap ones were on sale in a supermarket. I don’t think I could tolerate really cold weather.

Tuesday 21/7: Farewell ceremonies; Reddit vs MetaFilter; listening for aliens

A few months ago a post at MetaFilter linked to an article about Japanese farewell ceremonies for inanimate things that are to be discarded. It initially seems odd, but I immediately liked the notion as I become very attached to objects and have felt much sadness if they are thrown out, destroyed or lost. There are some items in my parents’ home that have been there for decades, and I have a real attachment to them.

If there is one thing that irks me about MetaFilter, it is its snobbery towards Reddit (see their posts under that tag). MF requires payment for membership, so its users are much more regulated than Reddit’s. Reddit has a few very unpleasant subreddits, including the popular/default ones, but I avoid these and subscribe to more obscure ones that are generally more friendly (e.g. r/worldbuilding). What I find annoying about MF is their sympathy towards prisoners (even serial killers and other unpleasant types) and illegal immigrants (I can predict the comments every time these topics are posted). There is also an irritating tendency to indulge oversensitive so-called “Social Justice Warrior” nonsense. Note that I am generally left-wing myself, but find the extremes of this outlook annoying.

This cool image of Earth by the NASA Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite was posted yesterday. The atmosphere looks very thin!

Stephen Hawking and a Russian billionaire, Yuri Milner, have announced a project to listen for alien radio signals utilizing various radio telescopes (Mr Milner, a Russian Silicon Valley entrepreneur, is funding the project for $135 million for 10 years). Stephen Hawking has previously made remarks about it being unwise to send out signals in case aliens might come with hostile intent (12/2/2010 entry), but I disagree with him there; it would still be confirmation that we were not the only intelligent species in the Universe and there is nothing worse than being alone. Listening for decades so far has brought no results.

Saturday 25/7: Kepler-452b

The latest exoplanet discovery by the Kepler Space Telescope was announced on 23 July: an exoplanet, Kepler-452b, only a little larger and a lot older than Earth, orbiting the habitable zone of its star (a G2V) 1400 light years away. The atmospheric composition is unknown, so describing it as a “second Earth” as the tabloid media have is a little misleading – whether it is rocky like Earth or gaseous is unknown. (Article link and comments at r/space on Reddit.) So, quite exciting and more proof that there must be millions of exoplanets in our Galaxy alone! Kepler is only imaging about 0.25% of the sky and 150,000 stars there (see list of discovered exoplanets).

Sunday 26/7: Wrangling XAMPP; child soldiers; Japan whingers

I managed to configure a portable version of the XAMPP server to view my files locally, and point the server to the external folder where I have my files on my second drive, rather than a subdirectory of the server’s folder. It is an exasperatingly convoluted process to get things to work correctly, though, and there are still some oddities. I do wish there had been a HTML <include> tag of some sort, which would include one HTML file within another (mainly for navigation links), rather than having to rely on server-side includes, PHP includes or whatever; it would make things much simpler.

This recent article, “Russia’s littlest soldiers” (Meduza.io, 17/7) I found a little disturbing due to the blatant display of religious indoctrination of children in the name of patriotism. Australians used to be much more laconic when it comes to patriotism, though this has also changed a bit. I still find myself a bit bemused by such overtness though, perhaps because I tend to be detached towards most things. Also contrasted with the cynicism endemic on the Internet, the programs seem quite old-fashioned.

I do believe in the separation of Church and State; Russia unfortunately is increasingly merging the two, particularly under the Putin regime.

The aim is to prepare them for service in the Russian army and to “bring children into the church through sports and through the strengthening of Orthodoxy.” … The Orthodox church supports other kinds of educational projects for children and adults as well. For example, the Church is funding spiritual enlightenment centers which focus on explaining that “the form of enlightened cooperation between the Church and society, based on Orthodoxy, true Russian culture, and the proud traditions of Russian military glory are the best way to facilitate the moral growth of every person, even the only slightly religious, and to instill proper patriotism, which is an essential component of the blossoming of Orthodoxy and the Fatherland.”

To another favorite country. A recent r/Japan thread at Reddit, What would /r/japan change about Japan?, is an example of what I find quite irksome about the subreddit (as previously noted in my 13/5 entry, it is mostly filled with grumpy expatriates). Many essentially seem to want the country to become just like Western ones. “F*cking shit, I hate this country. So many problems the country needs to solve, and all people care about are maintaining their happy harmonious society cut off from foreigners, and stupid idols like AKB48. The wife and I are seriously considering leaving.” [Source]

Also articles about the low birth rate are repeatedly posted (as if that is a bad thing in an overpopulated world!) along with exhortations to increase the immigration rate:

Immigration policy. I’m not foolish to think I know the exact way it should be changed, but realistically speaking, Japan is facing some considerable problems with their population decline, and they really need to make it easier to live here for people who want to.

Considering that Tokyo has been described in foreign media as one of the most comfortable cities to live, there are plenty of people outside Japan who would love to live there or elsewhere in Japan.

Sure, opening the flood gates creates all kinds of challenges. So how should they go about it? Should they preferentially encourage immigration by people interested in Japan as a culture, or in Japan as a place to work? [Source]

Which I also disagree with; immigration can be greatly disruptive to a society and is not the panacea for all ills.

Wednesday 29/7: Windows 10 debut; fed up with flat design

Windows 10 is released today. I have it reserved but will not install it for a while yet as I want to see what others say. I am still uncertain if I will as I dislike how Microsoft is increasingly taking control of one’s operating system. The GUI is also rather ugly in my view. Which leads to another grumble: I am fed up with flat design!

It’s been a trend both in websites and increasingly in computer GUIs for the last few years, but has become ubiquitous and is visually quite dreary after a while. I miss gradients and shiny glass buttons! I always liked Apple’s Aqua interface, though it has also now unfortunately followed the flat design trend. For Windows, I liked the Aero Glass theme, but dislike the Metro interface, which is also flat design.

If I had the funds, I might even consider moving to Apple computers, as they seem better-integrated (and are Unix-based), though they are also mostly a “walled garden” ecosystem. Their design aesthetic under Steve Jobs was always more attractive than that of Windows – I loved the original iMac with its various flavors; a nice contrast to the boring beige box PCs of then! (Dad had one for a while.) However now they are all white, though still nicely designed. But even the basic iMac is $1,549 in Australia now – simply not affordable, sadly.

I am still fussing with the navigation layout on my site, so expect a few changes.

Friday 31/7: AI alarmism; trying out Wordpress

The latest alarmist silliness over technology reported this week is the signing of a letter by over 1000 experts for a ban on autonomous weapons (i.e. ones controlled by an artificial intelligence); including physicist Stephen Hawking and inventor Elon Musk – the Future of Life Institute is the initiator. As noted in my 21/7 entry, Mr Hawking has previously expressed alarm in 2010 about the possibility of attracting unwanted attention from hostile aliens.

My views: I have a more benign view of an AI and would regard it as a best friend who would never betray or leave me. AIs as depicted in fiction, though, are nowhere near possible at the moment – if they will ever be. As for aliens – I would be less worried about them than how humans are damaging Earth’s environment! An alien intervention would be welcome.

I had a go at installing a local copy of Wordpress on a portable server (Uniserver), and succeeded in setting it up after a few attempts, but it seems a rather cumbersome system and I dislike that data is stored in a database rather than as flat text files (Dokuwiki uses the latter system, and can just be transferred from one folder to another) – it is a layer of abstraction between me and my data. It also uses absolute URLs for links rather than relative ones, which makes transferring from one location to another a hassle. I am not sure if I could install it on my site as I am being hosted (rather like being sub-let a room in an apartment) and don’t have access to the cPanel controls, including a MySQL database. I found setting up and using Dokuwiki a lot easier in comparison, though it is primarily meant for use as a wiki.

August

Saturday 1/8: TPP traitors

July in Melbourne this year was apparently the coldest in 20 years!

The countries involved in the Trans-Pacific Partnership have so far failed to reach an agreement – good news, as it is an act of betrayal towards the citizens of the countries involved. The negotiations have been secretive and the public only finds out about what is involved after the deal is signed. How any politician can allow that with a clear conscience is beyond my comprehension – as far as I am concerned, those who do are traitors. (Australian opposition site.)

I am still poking around with Wordpress offline and managed to import all my Blogger entries from my three blogs. But I still find using it rather cumbersome and installing it on a hosted site would be a chore – there is also no synchronization option between local and remote versions. Perhaps I would use it if I were just starting a website and blog.

I did a count of all my entries in this Journal and there are 1133 to date! (A simple count of <h2> tags via search in my web editor.)

Sunday 2/8: A megacity of millions

The United Nations last week released an updated report on the world’s population growth predictions, the 2015 Revision of World Population Prospects. It is, unsurprisingly, not happy reading, with the overall population predicted to reach 11,213 billion by 2100. Summary from the PDF document there:

According to the results of the 2015 Revision , the world population reached 7.3 billion as of mid- 2015 (table 1), implying that the world has added approximately one billion people in the span of the last twelve years. Sixty per cent of the global population lives in Asia (4.4 billion), 16 per cent in Africa (1.2 billion), 10 per cent in Europe (738 million), 9 per cent in Latin America and the Caribbean (634 million), and the remaining 5 per cent in Northern Americ a (358 million) and Oceania (39 million). China (1.4 billion) and India (1.3 billion) remain the two largest countries of the world, both with more than 1 billion people, representing 19 and 18 per cent of the world’s population, respectively.

If the predictions come to pass, biodiversity as we know it now is doomed, and Earth in the next 100 years will become a much more barren place, with many species alive now either extinct or existing as a few forlorn specimens in zoos. Megacities will sprawl across continents like ever-growing cancers, and only a few pockets of wilderness will remain, surrounded by a relentless tide of humanity and their infrastructure. The barren and blighted Earth as depicted in the movie Avatar – which surely seemed an exaggeration then in 2009 – is sadly beginning to look like a prophecy.

It is obvious to me that those in charge – politicians and businesses – care nothing for the planet, despite some token gestures towards acknowledging global warming; they are fixated on “growth.” Overpopulation is a more immediate threat to the environment than climate change. Someone, somewhere, needs to invent and deploy an infertility virus as a matter of urgency – the only real way to “save the planet.”

Speaking of megacities, it was also recently reported (NYT, The Age) that China (who else?) is intending to create an urban corridor called Jing-Jin-Ji, housing 100 million residents and be about the size of the U.S. state of Kansas (which is 213,096 km²). Beijing will be limited to a population of 23 million (“only” Australia’s current population!). They have an authoritarian central government that allows this type of planning (and forcing of people to move). But it looks like an urban hell in the making (which their major cities are already). The photo below of a wall of high-rise apartments in Beijing was posted on r/UrbanHell. It looks a depressingly dehumanizing way to live, and my visceral reaction to such cities is that a well-aimed asteroid should be dropped on them!

Wednesday 5/8: Crashing computer

My computer began crashing at random after turning it on this morning, as was the Firefox browser. They were fine yesterday. I had installed a couple of updates this morning (Update for Windows 8.1 for x64-based Systems (KB2976978), Update for Windows 8.1 for x64-based Systems (KB3075853)) and did a system restore to remove these, but it did not help. The Administrative Events in the Event Viewer shows a lot of errors and warnings – the screencapture (106 KB) shows just the most recent – 122 just for today so far. There has been some for every previous day also. The critical errors have the code of 41 with source of Kernel-Power, but Googling that is not much help (though I came across this forum thread).

I also noticed that the upgrade to Windows 10 Home option is showing up in Updates at last, but I will not upgrade yet as Windows 10 still seems quite buggy and unstable, and it collects a lot of personal data under the default Express settings. I dislike the feeling that I am increasingly renting my OS rather than owning it – that it is not under my full control.

Saturday 7/8: 8 million nightmare

Earlier this week there was a conference at Victoria University, “How will we cope with 8 million people?” The assumption being that such an increase is inevitable and ways must be found to cope, rather than prevent the population getting that high in the first place. The city is not coping now, despite some haphazard efforts at building “infrastructure.” As a commenter on a related article says,

If we had any leadership on planning in this city, the conference would be called Melbourne 2050: How will we stop before 8 million people, not Melbourne 2050: How will we cope with 8 million people.But we have this deeply entrenched fatalistic attitude that we cannot stop Melbourne turning into a congested hell.Reaching 8 million is regarded as inevitable as reaching 16 million will then be, then 32 million, then 64 million, and so on.

The sprawlers do not seem to care of the metropolitan area stretches all the way to Ballarat, Bendigo, Seymour and Warragul.

The densifiers seem unaware that tripling, quadrupling or quintupling residential density does not triple, quadruple or quintuple the number of trams, the capacity of trains, the width of the sewage pipe, the number of parks or the size of the school’s playground.

This state needs to aim at a settlement pattern similar to that of the United Kingdom, which has only 13 per cent of its population in its capital city.Proper zoning policies, decentralisation and fast transport links can move us in this direction.

How will we cope with 8 million people? We won’t.

– Chris Curtis, July 21, 2015, 8:23AM

Another opinion piece is full of some idealistic waffle and buzzwords about “diversity” and living together harmoniously, but things are very strained now– and again I will refer to an article from 2006, “London’s a rat hole”:

His scathing assessment was being submitted to the main opposition Conservative Party’s policy group focusing on quality of life. “Putting 10 million aggressive hominids into close proximity and inviting them to engage in serial acts of competitive individualism … for jobs, schools or parking spaces, could not be considered a reasonable idea,” Bayley said. “You put rats in claustrophobic circumstances and they become homosexual, murderous and cannibalistic in no time at all. Instead humans find ingenious solutions, underground car parks, coffee shops, Chinese takeaways, one-man buses, cycle lanes, tall buildings.”

Another article from the Herald-Sun, 7 August, touts driverless cars as one “solution”:

Robots to the rescue

Driverless cars to ease population increase woes

DRIVERLESS cars have been touted as the solution to Melbourne’s traffic woes as the population hurtles toward 6 million by 2031.

New figures reveal that within 16 years, the City of Casey on the southeast fringe will be bigger than what Canberra is today with 434,000 people – up from about 261,000 in 2011.

Wyndham Council in the west will have 360,000 people, Whittlesea 317,000 and Melton 259,000.

The City of Melbourne, which covers the CBD and some inner suburbs like Docklands, will more than double to have a population of 220,000 by 2031, according to the state Environment, Land, Water and Planning report, Victoria in Future 2015.

Planning Minister Richard Wynne said that Victoria was the nation’s fastest growing state and it needed to be smart about managing that growth.

“We need to get smart and encourage affordable housing that’s close to jobs, transport and services,” he said.

Driven by migration, Victoria is tipped to have 10 million people by mid-century, with Greater Melbourne accounting for most of that with a population nearing 8 million.

Amid expected worsening congestion as the population soars, a conference will be told today that driverless cars could be the key to better traffic management.

Bosch Australia president Gavin Smith said that much of the technology already existed and driverless cars could be on roads within a decade making them safer and more efficient.

“We know that autonomous vehicles can make smarter use of existing road networks so they can move around more freely and efficiently … Cars will just be another device connected to the internet, which you can manage remotely and do much more intelligent management of,” he said.

Some of the challenges would include deciding if passengers in driverless cars would be able to use mobile phones and have blood alcohol readings over the limit.

Mr Smith said that a first step could be the use of driverless cars as parking “valets”.

Mr Smith said future vehicles would be connected via the internet to enable better management of the road network, emergency response, servicing and issues like insurance.

By 2030, he expected that almost a third of all new car sales would be electric vehicles.

As much as I like the concept of driverless cars, it is only a “band-aid solution” to addressing population growth – better not to let things get that bad in the first place.

Sunday 8/8: Trying out titles; doubful about Wordpress; Ulillillia

I might try to add titles retrospectively to my Journal entries; at the moment it seems that most will be quick summaries of each entry’s topics. It will take a long time as I will do it sporadically.

Taking an inventory of my Journals (all kept in .html format):

This one, totalling 3.9 MB of pages (one month to a page), begun in 2004
The private one I keep offline (from which I split off this online one), totalling 881 KB (year to a page from 2004), begun in 2001
My blogs – copied into static files – totalling 2.02 MB (one year to a page from 2007); I will probably write exclusively here once again

I have no idea how many words that all adds up to!

Still trying out Wordpress locally (see 1/8 entry), but I am not liking it any better; it is slow and cumbersome. I do like being able to add tags, but these can be difficult to decide on sometimes. I hate that it uses absolute URLs (e.g. http://mysite/path-to-file.html) rather than relative (../path-to-file.html); the latter make a website much more portable, while the former means changing a lot of internal links if the blog is moved to a new address or folder, and there is no real easy way to do this in WP (as described in the relevant codex entry). As noted in my 31/7 entry, I also dislike that it uses a separate database rather than store entries in easily-accessible flat .txt files. I like my static Journal despite its limitations; all I need to write in and view it is a text editor and a browser (and not even the latter, as a last resort).

I remembered a personal website called Ulillillia I had learned of some years ago, and on visiting it is still going – I last mentioned it in my 8/9/2007 entry. The author does not appear to have changed much (like myself), and details his activities to an extreme degree. Though I am not too different – reading through my old entries about Russian spaceflight, for example, is now extremely tedious! But that’s a feature of my obsessions; they absorb me to the exclusion of everything else.

Tuesday 11/8: Tree massacre; Victorian redwoods; another BSOD

A massacre of irreplaceable old-growth trees took place last week, all in the name of widening a country highway. Letters from yesterday’s The Age in response:

Western Highway: Elimination of risk reaches absurd levels

What a disgrace, in this time of climate change, for 885 old-growth trees to be cut down for the building of a road to reduce travel time from Ararat to Beaufort from 31 to 29 minutes (“Hundreds of giant trees felled in highway project blunder”, 7/8). The many tonnes of carbon these trees absorb annually should have been enough to halt this misguided venture. But there is a deeper issue: the philosophy of risk elimination that propels these actions. To cut down trees in case a speeding driver hits one is akin to culling all sharks in case someone is attacked by one, or prohibiting all playground equipment and mountain climbing in case someone falls down and breaks a leg. Why don’t these foolish policy wonks just cut down all the trees, so not only can no driver ever hit one, but no trees ever catch fire in a bushfire either? Why not just concrete the whole state? Sensible risk minimisation, such as seatbelts in cars, is another matter altogether. And are we really in such a hurry that two minutes of our time means 885 trees have to die? What value are we putting on our lives, as well as those of the trees?

– Pauline Hopkins, Beaconsfield

Lots of questions remain for VicRoads

How can planting 100 red gum seedlings offset the loss of a 500-year-old majestic giant with hollows to suit a variety of wildlife? How can VicRoads get its “tree accounting” so wrong? If a group of tenacious and committed tree lovers had not constantly queried VicRoads questionable actions, would the extent of tree clearing ever have been discovered? How can we believe anything in VicRoads’ wads of reports, its choice of route having the least impact or its intention to consult and engage the community? There are many other unanswered questions regarding this project, and I urge others to stand up and fight for environmental accountability from all levels of government and public authorities.

– Jane Marriott, Creswick

Wildlife’s high-rises now just pile of woodchips

I’m an environmental consultant and it breaks my heart every time I drive past the massive, ever-growing scar that was once one of the largest remnants of old growth plains red gum woodland in Victoria. These ancient trees, ruthlessly destroyed, were fully grown giants when Australia was discovered by Captain Cook. They were full of hollows that supported our iconic wildlife, including the nationally endangered powerful owl. Their high-rise wildlife apartments are now nothing more than woodchips. Woodlands along our highways are the last relics of our pre-1770 lowland vegetation communities. Scattered trees in paddocks are valuable but lack the mid-storey and ground flora that are essential to make up the original communities. Wire rope barriers are used extensively along the highway to make roads safer, so why does VicRoads think it is now OK to instead destroy ancient trees?

– Neil Marriott, Stawell

No excuse for wanton vandalism

Walking past the Exhibition Gardens at sunset on Friday I observed three white-striped freetail bats fluttering through the trees in search of insects. I wager that the VicRoads employees responsible for the destruction of 885 century-old trees do not even know of the existence of these myriad squeak-hearts or of their need for old trees so they can live and raise their young. Hundreds of native animals such as microbats, gliders and birds will have died either directly by the felling of the trees or indirectly by the deprivation of food and housing that old trees provide. There is no excuse for this wanton vandalism. We must retain the little that remains of our natural environment.

– Lawrence Pope, Victorian Advocates for Animals, North Carlton

Even if more are planted to replace them, it will still take decades or even centuries for a complex ecosystem to develop again.

“California dreaming: the redwoods of the Otway Ranges”: Victoria has its very own grove of redwood trees, though still too far away for me to visit. It has been previously mentioned on Reddit.

My computer had a couple more BSODs today (see 5/8 entry); one had the error system_service_exception (afd.sys). Also, Firefox crashed again as it did the last time I had those BSODs. It could be any of several reasons. A memory test and virus scan turned up nothing, so I am at a loss for what to do as I am not an expert in diagnosing errors. I suppose I could do a reinstall and if the BSODs continue it would likely point to some hardware error, but that is a chore I am not eager to do again soon.

Wednesday 12/8: Yet another BSOD; a new tomb

Another BSOD for my computer this morning, with the message in Administrative Events: The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x0000007a (0xfffff6fc009cbb70, 0xffffffffc000003f, 0x00000001db46d860, 0xfffff8013976e000) (Event ID 1001). There are also several messages with The device, \Device\Harddisk1\DR1, has a bad block. (Event ID 7). I have done disk and memory checks, but nothing untoward was reported. Dad also changed out the PSU for another to see if that would fix the issue. There are 7,786 events reported since 15 March, after I reinstalled Windows (11/3 entry).

I tried doing a refresh but couldn’t as the hard drive was “locked.” Seems to be a common problem.

“Is Queen Nefertiti’s tomb at the back of Tutankhamun’s?”, The Age, 12/8. An intriguing but as-yet unproven theory.

One thing that concerns me is the safety of the priceless artifacts in Egypt. Given the cultural crimes of the Islamic State, who have destroyed other historic treasures in the countries they invaded, the threat to Ancient Egyptian heritage is very real if they invade the country.

Friday 14/8: MeFi annoyances

Two posts about articles on MetaFilter this week irked me, and mainly for the reactions of those commenting there.

The promise and the peril of the exoskeleton: There are a few remarks about “disability acceptance,” an attitude (and movement) I find annoying, such as in this comment: Eh, as someone who acquired a disability, I know that the narrative of “overcoming” one’s disability is idealized by our society, but is actually an impediment to a good psychological adjustment. Acceptance of one’s status and learning to reject ableism are key, as they’ve certainly been for me. Well, if I became physically disabled (gods forbid), I certainly would not accept it and would be desperate for a cure; being disabled just sucks as it is often painful and frustrating – e.g. if one is paraplegic you might not have control over waste elimination (depending upon the nerves injured) – why would anyone put up with that if a cure such as spinal regeneration were available? I certainly believe disability should be accommodated for in society, but at the same time I dislike the attitude that it should just be put up with rather than fixed medically (if it is currently possible and affordable). (I suppose being nearsighted would count as a mild disability – I can’t see clearly in the distance without glasses – but the current cures such as laser surgery have many undesirable and debilitating side-effects, and are unaffordable anyway.)
Why should women be punished? But what the hell can we do?: This linked to an article about so-called period (menstruation)-shaming (don’t visit if you find such things gross!). If there is one trend I have come to dislike it is the antipathy against being “shamed.” Shaming sometimes has a good purpose in moderating undesirable behaviors in society. Periods are gross and unhygenic – I would love to see them eliminated through genetic engineering – and what the woman was doing in the article just invokes disgust.

Monday 17/8: Computer unusable

My computer is currently unusable; it began getting BSODs on Saturday morning and I could not boot into it after that. Dad and I have tried installing the original Windows 7 disk it came with, then Windows 8 and 8.1 upgrade disks, but nothing was successful – not repair nor reinstall. Tried installing on a different blank hard drive but still no success; it kept coming up with a whole lot of obscure errors. We believe there must be a hardware issue; perhaps some corruption in the motherboard or somewhere, but it is beyond our knowledge to fix. I am not sure if it could be a virus as scans with Windows Defender and Malwarebytes did not detect anything. A chkdsk scan and memory test also revealed no abnormalities. Dad might take it in to try to repair it in a week or two. In the meantime I am using an older computer he has – it has only 4 GB of RAM so is not as capable or fast as my own one with 8 GB (that was a 2013 Christmas present), but is better than nothing. He upgraded to Windows 10 on this older computer, so I guess I will have a chance to try it out too.

Spring blossom is at its best at the moment – cherry blossom street trees and magnolias are in full bloom – so there is a lot of pink everywhere :-).

Sunday 23/8: Mostly back to normal

After a rather stressful and exasperating week, I am on my own computer again; it seems to be functioning OK after being serviced (Dad took it to a local computer shop he frequents). Windows 8.1 was reinstalled (apparently it can’t be installed again due to Windows 10 being released, or something? Which seems a bit odd). There might have been a virus causing it to behave erratically, though, as I noted in my previous entry, neither of two scanners I used – Windows Defender and Malwarebytes – detected anything. It was getting so many BSODs and different errors I lost count of them.

A minor annoyance is that my local user folder now has the generic name “user” instead of my name; changing this does not seem to be an easy task (typical of Windows!).

Monday 24/8: Website annoyances; future visions

One website design trend of recent years that is rather annoying is the “hero image/header.” This is a huge header image that fills up the visible portion of a computer monitor (well, it does on mine). More often than not it is a decorative and generic stock image, and is just a waste of bandwidth download.

I dislike the current trend of Javascript-dependent and -heavy websites generally, which go against the principles of accessibility and simplicity. The latest developments of Cascading Style Sheets enable more elaborate animations and effects in the browser, but this conversely increases rendering demands upon a user’s computer. I am inclined to prefer the “old-fashioned” simple static websites that might not win any design awards, but at least render quickly and are readable even in a text-only browser (Lynx) – some random personal sites I visit that meet this criteria are Greg Lehey, Richard Stallman, Mark Rosenfelder (the creators of these tend to work or have worked in the computer industry).

A tweet linked to an interesting slideshow presentation by Maciej Cegłowski, “Web Design: The First 100 Years,” about how technological advances tend to be a lot more limited than futurists envision, the first example being aircraft – jets look much the same today as they did in the 1950s as the design is “good enough” to get people from one place to another. Similarly, the future of the Internet may not look too different from today.

Today I hope to persuade you that the same thing that happened to aviation is happening with the Internet. Here we are, fifty years into the computer revolution, at what feels like our moment of greatest progress. The outlines of the future are clear, and oh boy is it futuristic.

But we’re running into physical and economic barriers that aren’t worth crossing.

We’re starting to see that putting everything online has real and troubling social costs.

And the devices we use are becoming “good enough,” to the point where we can focus on making them cheaper, more efficient, and accessible to everyone.

So despite appearances, despite the feeling that things are accelerating and changing faster than ever, I want to make the shocking prediction that the Internet of 2060 is going to look recognizably the same as the Internet today.

Unless we screw it up.

He also asserts there are three competing visions for the Internet (connect people/fix the world with software/or the extreme view of transhumanists: BECOME AS GODS, IMMORTAL CREATURES OF PURE ENERGY LIVING IN A CRYSTALLINE PARADISE OF OUR OWN INVENTION). An example of transhumanist hyperbole are the alarmist comments about the supposed threat of Artificial Intelligence by influential personalities such as physicist Stephen Hawking and inventor Elon Musk (see 31/7 entry) – this when the most powerful supercomputers can barely simulate the brain of a nematode worm, which has a mere 302 neurons.

The first group wants to CONNECT THE WORLD.

The second group wants to EAT THE WORLD.

And the third group wants to END THE WORLD.

These visions are not compatible.

Despite all the seeming technological advances, mainly in computing, society itself hasn’t changed all that much; there is still great inequality.

At the same time, we hear grandiose promises about how technology will fundamentally improve the lives of every person on Earth, even though that contradicts our own experience of the last thirty years.

There is something fishy about all this promised progress. The engine is revving faster and faster, we can see that the accelerator is pegged, but somehow the view out the window never change. […]

Ultimately the Web is for the people who use it and who need to be more assertive in shaping it.

Let’s reclaim the web from technologists who tell us that the future they’ve imagined is inevitable, and that our role in it is as consumers.

The Web belongs to us all, and those of us in this room are going to spend the rest of our lives working there. So we need to make it our home.

Saturday 29/8: Spoke too soon

My computer began blue-screening (BSOD) again yesterday morning, with the same progression as last time: getting stuck in a cycle of reboots and various error messages (system_service_exception, NTFS_file_system, Attempted_execute_of_no_execute_memory, etc.). It became unusable. Very frustrating as it was supposedly repaired! (See 23/8 entry.) So that was a waste of money. Dad tried reinstalling Windows 8.1 retail on yet another hard drive, and surprisingly it went smoothly … so far!

Monday 31/8: Up and running again; troublesome teeth

No more BSODs as of yet. If there are any more like last time, I think it might mean there is a fault in the motherboard somewhere – 3 faulty hard disk drives in succession would be extremely unlikely. Dad removed the Nvidia graphics card for now in case it was causing the BSODs.

I have been having aching in my lower left jaw again, and there is a dark fissure in my first lower left molar that looks a bit ominous – I can’t tell if it is just staining or a cavity. This is the tooth that had some sealant put on it just after Christmas 2013 (31/12/2013 entry) and is my last filling-free lower molar.

September

Friday 4/9: Computer OK; coding dilemma

My computer is still behaving itself. Oddly enough, on Tuesday Dad’s PC began displaying the same problems as mine had: random BSODs, restarts, and eventually becoming unusable. Trying to install backups did not work, so he gave this up and has done a reinstall like I did; it seems to have fixed whatever the issue was. I am not missing my graphics card so far; as I don’t play games perhaps a dedicated card is not so necessary.

I made a dentist appointment for next Tuesday, so that is something to dread again :-(.

A hapless overgrown sheep made the news a couple of days ago. It provided some amusement, but is also an indictment upon the breeding genetics of some domestic animals – the merino has been genetically selected so its wool grows continually (like human hair) but this means it also needs regular shearing, otherwise its coat will become overgrown to the point of crippling and eventually killing the animal, it enduring much discomfort in the meantime, as the sheep in the article did. Some dog and cat breeds also have this trait (fur needing trimming). These animals are dependent upon human intervention and will die unpleasant painful deaths without it.

I am considering going back to <div> tags rather than some HTML 5 tags (<header>, <footer>, etc.) – usage of the latter is still confusing in some areas as is pointed out in The Truth about HTML5 website (and book). One would logically expect that the new <header> tag would be used at the top of a site for the heading, and the <footer> for the bottom part, but apparently not:

Footer: The <footer> tag is not for website footers but for footer content that relate to the nearest sectioning element (these are the four sectioning elements: section, article, aside and nav). The footer can also be used for content such as that of bylines, related documents and copyright data. It can also contain entire sections and this will then lend itself to things like appendices, indexes and licence agreements.

Header: Like the <footer> tag, the <header> tag isn’t for website headers – as you would be forgiven for thinking. It’s for introductory content relating to the nearest sectioning element. It can be used for larger-scale content such as a table of contents or foreword, but is more commonly used for headings and standfirst paragraphs.

– The Web Design Book, volume 5

That is more confusing than ever! It seems to needlessly complicate HTML coding. There is also a lot of confusion over when the <section> or <article> elements should be used. I wonder if HTML5, or some elements of it, will eventually go the way of XHTML 2, which was supposed to be the next big trend in web coding in the mid-2000s, but ended up being discarded in favor of HTML5. HTML5 is under the control of one person, Ian Hickson, which is controversial in itself.

There is a table of all the elements here, with when they were introduced and whether they are still in use, so safe elements can be picked from this – ones that will work in browsers from at least HTML 3.2 onward up to now.

Tuesday 8/9: TMJ pain again; faulty RAM

The dentist could find nothing obviously wrong – said I had no obvious cavities – and put the pain down to my TMJ disorder or whatever it is again. He suggested that, as I can’t afford braces, I get my bite adjusted to help with the pain, but I am reluctant to do anything more, so will have to just bear it. The pain in my left jaw is hard to locate exactly; it feels variously achy, numb, stabbing and like exposed raw nerves – similar to what those in this Trigeminal Neuralgia forum post are describing.

Dad narrowed his computer problems down to faulty memory, one of my RAM sticks which he had put in his; he removed the offending stick and it is now working again. So it appears that all the problems with mine over the last month were just due to faulty memory?

Thursday 10/9: Job snobs

“Job snobbery is not working for Generation Why,” Herald-Sun, 8/9 (article reproduced below). Yet another opinion piece from this right-wing tabloid to annoy me (previous in 29/5 entry): the columnist is criticizing so-called “job snobs,” unemployed people who don’t want to do unpleasant jobs, such as butchery in the example. Well, it is messy and bloody work; why should someone who dislikes that type of job be obligated to do it? Especially if it is not a job they find interesting? I spent far too long in an unpleasant job that I hated, and it did nothing for my personal development or prospects; I was simply not interested in it. I have come to detest this Puritan work ethic, where one must grimly endure spending their day doing something they hate because of the attitude that “any job is better than none.” Bugger that philosophy – technology was supposed to free people from such a joyless existence. It is a reason why I support a Basic Income.

JOB SNOBBERY IS NOT WORKING FOR GENERATION WHY

8 Sep 2015
Herald Sun
SUSIE O’BRIEN @susieob susan.o’brien@news.com.au
SUSIE O’BRIEN IS A HERALD SUN COLUMNIST

IT’S not Gen Y, it’s Gen Why. Why are they such job snobs? Why do they seem to think they’re better than everyone else? And why do they think trade apprenticeships are beneath them?

Youth unemployment is at a decade-high 14 per cent – and up to 30 per cent in some areas – and yet employers can’t get young people to answer their job ads.

Jobs that a generation ago would have been eagerly snapped up are now seen as not good enough for this generation.

How else to explain the fact that Victorian butcher chain Tasman Meats, with 50 apprenticeships on offer, has had virtually no response? The company contacted me last week to say they’ve been advertising extensively but have had only two takers. That’s two applicants for 50 jobs.

As apprenticeships go, they are pretty good positions. The pay is $18 an hour – 20 per cent more than the award – and there is extra training in food preparation and cooking skills. Tasman Meats is a growing business and there’s lots of scope for promotion and managerial roles.

In this MasterChef era of renewed interest in cooking, food production and whole foods, you’d think there would be considerable interest. But no. They’re not even getting the clicks on seek.com.

I asked a few of my Gen Y friends and relatives about it and they just about snorted in my face.

They made it clear butchery is beneath them. They don’t want to get dirty, bloody or cold.

They don’t want to look ugly in the uniforms, they don’t want to touch raw meat and they don’t want to have to break down an entire animal.

Such an attitude is fine for those who are in a position to pick and choose. But it’s not good enough that some people would prefer to be on unemployment benefits rather than work.

It seems that if a position does not involve hi-tech gadgets, reality TV or a glamorous service industry role, they’re simply not interested.

As Tasman Meats CEO Matt Swindells sees it, “not everyone needs to be a barista or a computer programmer”. He added: “Some skills such as cooking and food preparation provide employment for life no matter what the career.”

Things have changed since the 1950s, when people were glad to have an ongoing stable job that offered some sort of career path.

Now a job must be fun, funky, flexible and high-paid before young people will even give it a go.

They’re over-qualified and undermotivated to take a range of trade and technical jobs that need to be filled. Indeed, the latest data from the federal Department of Employment shows there is a desperate shortage of sheet metal workers, motor mechanics, metal fabricators, panel beaters, roof plumbers, stone masons, glaziers, plasterers, bakers and butchers in Victoria.

It’s a myth that youth wages are too high, pricing young people out of the labour market. The fact is that youth unemployment rates have been rising even though youth wages have been falling relative to adult wages.

What seems to be more pressing is that the cost involved in training and supervising young people isn’t worth it, particularly for small businesses.

Employers say young people are often their own worst enemies.

“Too expensive and too much aggro,” says one.

“Aiming too high,” says another.

“Poor attitude and questionable commitment,” says another.

It certainly seems that there is a growing divide in the labour market. On one hand there is a big group of well-educated young people who are motivated, well presented and keen to do what it takes to please their employer.

Nothing is too much trouble: working overtime, changing shifts, working around the clock and around the week, and going that extra mile to learn new skills.

NOT surprisingly, such people are snapping up all of the desirable jobs and creating their own positions as well. They’re well paid, have lots of control and creative input and lots of flexibility.

Then there is another group that has the same goals and expectations, but don’t have the skills or work ethic to make it happen. They want a job in their field of study with a clear career path, pays well from day one, is flexible, creative and rewarding.

But they don’t want to start from the bottom, get dirty, work outside their field of study, or do anything that’s not a “passion” for them.

Some have a sense of entitlement so great that they think employers are lucky to have them. They don’t care about impressing at an interview. They don’t turn up on time or dress well. They don’t care if their ability and attitude don’t cut it and they don’t want work to cut into their precious leisure time.

Some won’t even turn off their mobile phones during job interviews.

And they would be happy to win MasterChef so they can be a celebrity chef, but they wouldn’t becoming a butcher.

It’s no wonder employers are calling them Generation Why Bother.

Monday 14/9: Leadership challenge

Headline news tonight (possibly of no interest to those in other countries!) concerns Australian politics: a Liberal Minister called Malcolm Turnball has challenged the incumbent Prime Minister Tony Abbott for leadership, to be decided in a ballot – a so-called “leadership spill”; the democratic version of an assassination or a duel. There have been rumblings for months but the party continued to put on a united front. Given their criticism of the former Labor Government’s turmoil, it is obviously rather satisfying to see the tables turned (an appropriate German word for this is schadenfreude). Of course I still dislike the party no matter who is in charge; their agenda is one that favors big business over the less-well-off in society.

The weather has been warm; into the mid-20s over the weekend – a relief from freezing in the early mornings!

There are a couple of nice blossom street trees currently flowering in a street behind where I live; one has a particularly vivid and unusual deep pink bloom. Sadly, they don’t last long!

Tuesday 15/9: New Prime Minister; Word experiments; one program to rule them all?

Malcolm Turnball was voted in as the new Prime Minister, so Tony Abbott’s term in office has come to an ignominious end. PM Turnball is a more eloquent speaker than Tony Abbott, but that is not saying much; he still shares the same odious Liberal capitalist values (small government, favoring big business, tax cuts and so on).

I tried copying my story (in HTML format) to Microsoft Word, but I found trying to format it was a fiddly and exasperating process. Writing in Word is a bit easier, but its underlying code is very obfuscated, while HTML coding is much more straightforward and accessible (though typing formatting tags is annoying); I can also get more fine-grained control over a page’s appearance.

I had a look at OneNote – the proprietary “free” note-taking program that resides in Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud – but I cannot export any notes into other formats such as HTML; it is very limited in what I can do with it and feels rather insubstantial and unstable. If I did not have an account I would not be able to use it. So that is out.

Someone at r/worldbuilding on Reddit mentioned yet another note-taking/wiki-type program called Twine; this seems very like TiddlyWiki in its coding and concept, though it has to be installed as a Python-based program, rather than just open as an editable HTML file in one’s browser, which is a bit off-putting (I prefer portable versions of programs). I seem to be always on the lookout for that one program that would meet all my requirements, but none so far do – and I certainly do not have any programming knowledge to write my own.

Saturday 19/9: Sleep-deprived sparrows; Word tip

From 17/9 Herald-Sun:

SPARROWS NEED SLEEP

THE noise of cars may shorten the lifespan of sparrows growing up near the clamor, scientists believe.

The researchers were not sure why noise hurts the chromosomes that affect lifespans, but speculate it may disrupt the chicks’ sleep and cause them stress.

The effect on birds adds to negative impacts of noise pollution on wild creatures.

Noise pollution also affects humans as we are animals, something people tend to forget; this was described in a 2010 Newsweek article. Cities are often described as “vibrant” places, but in reality are noisy, overcrowded and polluted; a blight on the landscape.

I found out how to do a task in Microsoft Word that was frustrating me: find and replace everything between two symbols. It uses a regular expression, and is described in this blog entry (steps reproduced below):

Select the text you want to change (e.g. entire document, selected paragraphs, selected columns or rows of a table).

Press Ctrl+H to open the Find and Replace dialog box.

Click the More button.

Select the Use wildcards check box.

Put your cursor into the Find what field.

Type the following exactly (or copy it from here): (\[)(*)(\]) (Replace the [brackets] with the desired symbol if necessary)

Go to the Replace with field and type: \1\2\3

Click the Format button, and select Font.

On the Font dialog box change the settings to what you want, then click OK.

Find and reformat text inside square brackets

Click Replace All.

Monday 21/9: Trying out OneNote again

Regarding OneNote, I discovered that the free desktop version from the Microsoft site is more full-featured than the rudimentary tile version on the 8.1 Start Menu, so I downloaded and installed this to try. Initially it seemed nice to use, but it is still lacking in many features, such as automatic smart quotes and exporting to HTML pages (which Word both does). A Microsoft account is also necessary to use it, as it syncs between this and the user’s computer rather than save locally. So that is an annoyance. I can export a Notebook to PDF and some weird proprietary Microsoft formats such as .xps (a pseudo-PDF imitator) and .one Notebook files, and a single file to the odd .mht format (a bundled .html file), but nothing else. The code produced is a mess and elements such as lists are incorrectly and unsemantically formatted as paragraphs with a bullet in front rather than the proper <li> tags (Word does this too, with lists), and italic and bold tags are just <span class="italic">, not the correct <i> (and there are no <em> or <strong> tags, which have separate meanings in HTML5). I can’t do definition lists at all (I use these a lot).

So back to my plain HTML pages. The programs can be fun toys to play with but add more complexity to the basic task of producing information. I found this blog entry, On Trying New Writing Things Forever (note: some swearing) on the search for the perfect writing tool, but comes up short:

So what have I learned? First, don’t chase fads, at least not for a major project. A wiki might work for Tayler and Sanderson, and it was worth trying, but not on an already-troubled novel. Just, no. Second, don’t chase fads, period. There’s always some new tool or software that will make your writing go so much easier ohmyGOSH! It won’t. Which is to say it might, but you can’t make that determination in less than a year and you have other things to work on. Try stuff out, but don’t waste a lot of your time on anything less than brilliant.

Saturday 26/9: Robot workers; Morrison the merciless

I spent the last week editing my static HTML Blogger files, which I wrote then transferred to my online blogs; yet another tedious headache-inducing exercise! Quite a lot of what I wrote – mainly the RuSpace (Russian Spaceflight) blog – now bores me in the extreme. That seems to be the nature of my obsessions, though; they consume me at the time but years later I wonder what possessed me!

The books on my Book Depository wishlist have risen drastically in price, no thanks to the declining value of the Australia dollar (currently U.S 70c equivalent). Things are already expensive here as it is; as most items such as electronics are imported, this will only increase the cost of living.

Japan is developing its robotics industry “as an elegant way to handle the country's aging populace, shrinking workforce and public aversion to immigration.” I don’t see those issues as a negative; boosting immigration is something of a fetish amongst certain political groups (it certainly is on r/Japan at Reddit) but it can be disruptive to social cohesion and increase competition for resources. A long-lived aging population is a sign of a successful health system and medical care, though it is too often viewed negatively – old people being a “burden.” A shrinking workforce could be augmented with robots as the article notes, and hopefully robots will one day take over much of the tedious jobs.

My most disliked Australian politician at the moment is Scott Morrison, who was recently promoted to Treasurer after the “coup” last week. He has little sympathy for the unemployed and less-well-off in society, and seems to have a hardline economic liberalism approach to various issues, such as cutting taxes for the wealthy while raising the GST; the latter would again disadvantage the poor the most (“tax reform” are the disingenuous words used). He has spoken in a threatening manner of the so-called Budget “spending problem,” but a government is supposed to spend money on helping its citizens, not hoard its revenue like a miser.

October

Thursday 1/10: Warming up; art block

There is some warm weather coming at last; into the low 30s early next week. At least the warmer mornings make it easier to get up! Especially considering Daylight Savings begins this weekend :-(.

There is a public holiday tomorrow for the Australian football Grand Final parade in the city – a somewhat populist (and not very popular amongst some) holiday brought in this year by the current Victorian Premier, Daniel Andrews. I find such holidays a bit annoying as my routine is disrupted, and some places open while others don’t, so it isn’t a full holiday for many anyway.

I have been in a creative slump for all of this year so far; I have not done any real drawing (digital or analog) since last year. I still have images in my head but can’t find the aptitude to get them out onto paper or screen. My digital art attempts are still very amateurish and stilted, and I feel frustrated when looking at the gorgeous art that many others produce (see my Deviantart favorites folder for examples). Of all my life regrets, I really wish I had done a proper art course so I could learn to draw properly, and have a degree or whatever to my name. But I was difficult and contrary when younger, and resisted doing such a career course when others suggested I should.

One trend of this year that is in plague proportions now is the rather odd one of coloring books for adults – there are such books everywhere it seems, and supposedly provides stress relief. Don’t think it would do much for me, though – I would probably still stare at the pages blankly, unable to decide what colors to use!

Monday 5/10: Heat wave; zombies

Hot weather has hit Melbourne with a vengeance, unusually early in the season. At 34°C or so it is the highest temperature for this time of year since records began in the 1850s.

I watched some of World War Z on commercial TV last night (though the ads interspersed make any movie almost unwatchable). Despite the criticism, and the inherent silliness of zombies, I found it quite scary in parts! I have not read the novel it was based on all the way through yet.

Wednesday 7/10: Stallman on overpopulation

A cool change came through yesterday afternoon; I was rather cold again this morning! These extreme temperature swings – from 36° yesterday to 16° today – make it hard to adjust. Also humidity is coming for the weekend – even worse.

I was pleased to see that free software advocate Richard Stallman is also concerned about overpopulation; he occasionally notes an item in his news feed. Some recent samples below from that page (which is quite long):

01 October 2015 (Having children is not a necessity)

It is a mistake for the government to support uterus transplants with public funds.

Likewise it is counterproductive for the government to support in-vitro fertilization, or anything else to help people make babies. The world does not have a shortage of young humans.

Having children is not a necessity of life. It is a desire that some people have. We should not treat a lack of children as tragic, any more than we treat the lack of some cheaper luxury, such as a Humv or a yacht, as tragic.

24 September 2015 (End population growth)

Paul Erlich notes that ending global heating won’t be enough unless we also end human population growth.

Humanity has postponed the disaster that Erlich predicted, by lowering its birth rate, but population continues to grow and the danger is not gone. To lift all humans out of poverty, we need to redirect some of wealthier humans’ income to the poor; but this won’t work if the poor humans keep making more poor humans.

20 September 2015 (Rhinoceros species on verge of extinction)

Several rhinoceros species are on the verge of extinction. What can be done to save them?

I think that synthetic rhino horn could work if it is much cheaper than natural rhino horn – and similar enough to fool purchasers. Anyone who claimed to sell ”natural rhino horn” would probably cheat.

In the long term, even if we eliminate the threat of poaching, not much wildlife will remain if humans convert all wild areas into farms and cities. We must curb human population growth to enable most wild species to survive.

19 September 2015 (Degradation of farmland)

The cost of degradation of farmland is 1/6 of the human world’s production.

We can’t keep degrading a vital resource at this rate and continue producing as much as we do. We need to improve this, but we also need to stop increasing the human population.

17 September 2015 (Developing water shortages)

The Paris climate conference is not paying attention to developing water shortages.

The most important conclusion to draw from today’s droughts is the same one that we draw from all the other consequences of global heating: we should launch a crash program to cut emissions.

Alas, this is precisely what many governments have already decided not to do.

The second most important conclusion is that we need to limit human births, if we don’t want deaths due to water shortages (and crop shortages) to limit population.

15 September 2015 (Germany to reimpose border controls)

Germany has been overwhelmed with refugees and will reimpose border controls, effectively ending the Schengen free travel zone.

There was no way that the welcome for refugees could continue indefinitely. There simply can’t be room for millions of migrants.

Thus, when there are so many people fleeing, we need to address the causes, which include climate mayhem, wars (many created or made worse by the US), local tyranny, and corporate land grabs.

Those are the immediate causes that make people flee, but there is also the deeper long-term cause: world population growth. We need to reduce the birth rate to the point where the human population starts to decline.

04 September 2015 (Global race to the bottom)

The ”global race to the bottom”, predicted by opponents of business-dominated globalization, is hitting Europe hard, eliminating its social protection for workers’ rights.

I must point out that making too many humans is a part of the cause of this problem. The current population survives by overusing the Earth’s natural systems.

24 August 2015 (Forest biomes dying)

Every Forest Biome on Earth Is Actively Dying Right Now. Due to human actions.

It makes a big difference whether we push them one step further or ten steps further, because each step could be too much for some of them. It makes a big difference whether the human population peaks at 8 billion, 9 billion or 10 billion.

23 August 2015 (Trapped migrants)

Thousands of migrants tried to force their way across the border of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. They are trapped in the no-country’s-land between Macedonia and Greece.

I don’t think Macedonia is obligated to allow all these people in. The problem is in the policies and behavior that sends so many people fleeing.

Merkel says the “migration crisis” will define this decade. Alas, it will get worse in the next decade. One of the causes is the early stages of climate mayhem. In a few decades, we can expect to see tens of millions of people trying to flee from regions where they can no longer live. This has already touched off the Syrian civil war and brought about PISSI. Imagine what will happen as climate mayhem gets worse.

Another contribution is the global corporate land grab, which drives people off their land leaving them with no way to survive. That will get worse, unless we hand those companies a stunning setback (I hope we do.)

Then there is overreproduction. We must end the growth of human population. The first step is to make reliable birth control and abortion services available gratis to all women. If we are lucky, that will be enough.

09 August 2015 (Overpopulation)

An increase of 2.4 billion people predicted by 2050 will cause many kinds of difficulties.

Here’s more about those difficulties.

26 July 2015 (Population growth)

China is thinking about permitting all families to have two children.

I think it would be a mistake to open the door to more population growth so early. The world population is still going up, and China’s current population may be unsustainable.

The need for labor to care for old people will give China full employment if it does not ruin things with more births.

26 July 2015 (Uninhabitable cities)

Even 2C of global heating will make coastal cities such as New York, London and Shanghai uninhabitable. Parts of them will still be above water, but won’t function as cities.

You can add Miami, Washington DC, New Orleans, Tokyo, Mumbai and many more.

If we get through this century with technological civilization intact, we may be able to remove lots of CO₂ from the atmosphere and convert it to plastic. Perhaps we could cut short the melting that way. But getting through this century will not be easy, so it behooves us to cut CO₂ emissions as fast as humanly possible.

We also need to end growth of the human population. In principle, the idea that a person has the right to reproduce without limit is unsustainable.

Concerning one of my favorite alien species (Sangheili in Halo), a digital novella is being released in December – but I can’t find any Australian sites with it for sale; it is not available in the Australian iTunes store, for example. These regional restrictions are extremely annoying and unnecessary.

Saturday 17/10: Halo 5 spoilers

Playthroughs of some missions from the Halo 5 game are up on YouTube. I am not interested in the game mechanics and play as such, but rather of getting a look into Sangheili culture and at the landscape of their world – the worldbuilding aspect (I have no interest in the humans or other elements). I was very disappointed to see that a Sangheili character and villain I liked got killed in the first mission! There is much running around and shooting at things, which I find boring to watch. I would rather a leisurely game (perhaps game is not the right word for it?) where one could just wander around and look at things, and interact with the inhabitants; effectively a virtual reality simulation of visiting an alien world.

There are some images up on Tumblr: Vadam Keep concept art, some landscapes and ruins, and the Elder Council Chamber (screenshot from the end of Mission 8).

Tuesday 20/10: Star Wars trailer at last

The official Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer is out.

I had a go at using the open-source SVG editor Inkscape again. As I complained earlier (11/2 entry), it can be exasperatingly fiddly and counter-intuitive to use at times and there was a fair bit of cursing from me in the process. I did manage to render the eye of my alien character in SVG format (19 layers), here changed to a .jpg:

The process is a bit like join-the-dots, using a pen tool to draw and manipulate lines by moving the nodes produced. It is very tedious work at times though as one can end up with thousands of nodes!

Wednesday 28/10: Existential despair

Venus and Jupiter have been bright in the eastern morning sky for a week or two. Mars is there too, though I haven’t yet seen it.

That annoying and niggling infection or whatever under my right thumbnail (see 11/2 entry) is still persisting; this time on the right side of the nailbed. It gets sore every few weeks. The GP gave me another short course of antibiotics around 4 weeks ago but it has returned. Am stumped as to what to do.

I have been using Inkscape and am slowly getting used to it. I like the clean precise lines it can make, in contrast to my amateurish attempts at freehand digital art. As well, I have been trying to do a digital painting in a raster program but am unable to blend colors smoothly and the process is very frustrating and tedious – I keep going over and over the colors until they look overworked – so I have given up again there.

I have come to the conclusion that I am never going to be anything in this life – not a great painter, writer or anything else. All I have been doing the last couple of decades is existing and stagnating (I think that I am somewhat mentally stunted from this). I have no ambitions; perhaps I never really did, and all I really wanted is to escape to my own virtual reality and live there. I have been doing that to a degree, in fact, but still have the annoyances and distractions of reality to deal with. There is no place for me in the real world. I came across this quote in a forum a few years ago: “I’ve come to realize that my life is really about accepting the fact that I have no real part in my country, or civilization. I’m just there.”

A while ago (in r/worldbuilding I think) a reclusive artist called Henry Darger was mentioned. He led a rather sad and troubled life – he was a recluse with a menial job – but had an extraordinarily rich (and sometimes disturbing) virtual world. I wonder how he reconciled that with his life in reality; how he kept up the motivation for it when he had few prospects in the real world.

Some dismaying news that China is considering relaxing its one-child policy, supposedly because of an age imbalance. However if more children are produced, they too will grow old, so it is only postponing the issue, and will have a deleterious effect on the environment in the meantime. With the world’s population already predicted to reach 9 billion and beyond (2/8 entry), the last thing the planet needs is countries encouraging a high birth rate. What is needed instead is an economic system that doesn’t rely on endless growth.

November

Tuesday 3/11: Balloons at dawn

Two hot air balloons floated overhead this morning just before 6:30. Some travel from north-west to south-east now and then perhaps once a week or so, weather depending, though they are usually further east from where I am; they are hot air balloon rides coming from Melbourne. I managed to get somewhat decent close-ups for once on a camera inherited from Dad, using maximum zoom (they would appear as tiny specks otherwise).

I am working on a digital painting for a round of “Visualizing the Halo Universe”; I had a previous one here (under “Suzy”). My work-in-progress can be seen in this Halo forum thread (I am posting as SuzyM). I don’t know if I will get it finished as it is my first attempt at digital painting in a long time – the first this year in fact as I have had “art block” and am lacking in confidence – and I find blending digital paint quite laborious and difficult. I hate doing landscapes, so that is the hardest part for me. I was not initially going to do it but the chance to depict some of my favorite aliens was irresistible :-).

All the Halo 5 cutscenes can now be viewed. I am disappointed with how the Sangheili are depicted – as bumbling clumsy fighters – and I am not the only one feeling that way! Getting to see their homeworld at last, however, is awesome.

Wednesday 4/11: Painting done

I managed to finish the painting; there were 2 weeks to do it, and in typical fashion I left it to the last week, though I was going to give up on it. I uploaded it to my Deviantart account. There is still more I could add to it and I am not happy with some things such as the mountain (I dislike doing landscapes and prefer figure work), but will leave it.

I, and many others, were dismayed to learn that Microsoft is to reduce its free OneDrive storage to a measely 5 GB. I have more than that in mine in photos alone! Those have been uploaded over a few years, and will take a long time to upload elsewhere, assuming there is somewhere else.

Thursday 5/11: Earthquake, maybe

I am sure I felt a brief earth tremor early this morning, at 12:20 a.m. for around 3 seconds; my bed shook slightly. There are no mentions of one in Melbourne on the Internet, though, so perhaps it was localized.

Some more humid tropical weather today, as there is at this time of year; quite intense with heavy rain most of the day and even a reported tornado to the north-west of the city.

Wednesday 11/11: Another year older; data loss worries

I turned 45 this week – middle-aged! I do not feel like that mentally, but my body is aging relentlessly and that is becoming obvious in various ways. I went to the local RSL for lunch with my parents, and had my usual chicken parmigiana and chips (yum!).

My computer froze up for some reason last night when copying files to a backup drive, and I had to force-power it off. A couple of my story files got corrupted, but I copied replacements from another hard drive. I keep each chapter of my story in a separate file; that way if corruption happens only a chapter or two might be affected, where as if it were in one file I would lose the whole story. That is a reason I am not using TiddlyWiki anymore for keeping background information about my story’s world as all information is contained in the one file. If the browser in which TiddlyWiki is being used crashes, the whole program is wiped out – it uses Javascript to rewrite the file in the browser each time it is altered – as this user found out in the Google Groups forum:

konono#9:

Lost all my data in a tiddlywiki – something that doesn’t happen all too often nowadays.

I have a large number of tabs open in Firefox, and switch between a number of tabgroups, each with numerous tabs. I was adding text and images (via external links) to my wiki. Added a map link […] The link worked fine, except that the map was opened in the same tab instead of in a new tab, which I would have preferred.

At some point Firefox crashed. After restoring, my tiddlywiki was still there, but with 0 bytes! This shouldn’t ever happen. […] Thanks for all the sympathy but that’s not what I was looking for. I think fears of data loss can keep people from using tw and that would be too bad for this great tool.

Thomas Birkenstock:

Hi Konono,

just right a few minutes ago I had exactly the same issue … Is there any chance getting the wiki back? All my Data is gone … more than a year of work gone …

That is the main danger of keeping one’s creative work in electronic form; it is perilously ephemeral and reliant on complex and sometimes-unreliable electronics to store and display it.

Sunday 22/11: Summer snow and some sci-fi

The paperbark street trees, Melaleuca linariifolia, have been out in creamy blossom (“snow-in-summer”) for the last two or three weeks, though they are fading now; they seemed to bloom earlier this year. Unfortunately the local council seems to be felling many of these as part of their so-called “tree renewal” program and not replanting the same species, which is upsetting and wasteful as these trees provide good shelter and shade, and the mature ones that were removed seem perfectly healthy.

I came across a sci-fi book, first of a series, called The Secret King, and thought it sounded interesting so went to the trouble of ordering it. It began with some tension – a planetary evacuation – but dragged on interminably as the chapters progressed. The characters spent a lot of time agonizing over various things and being sick, and there seemed to be excessive focus on relationship dramas. The Zefron pursuers get mentioned a few times but are never described (are they aliens, robots or what?). Quite annoyingly, they only reached our solar system at the end of the novel, leaving an obvious need for a sequel. One reviewer pointed out the similarities to the original Battlestar Galactica TV series, and after reading that, the story does seem almost a carbon copy of that scenario, though with more magic. The Aonise are human aliens (effectively humans with a few quirks), though if the story follows the BSG plot, they will turn out to be long-lost ancestors originally from Earth. I would give it 3 out of 5 stars.

More annoyances, not story-related, were many spelling, grammar and punctuation errors – despite three editors mentioned on the website! Also irksome is the requirement for paid membership to view the conlang developed for the story (why not have buying the book with proof of purchase accepted also, or instead?).

They seem to have used a 3D modeling program called Poser, or a similar program, for the illustrations on the website – though in my view the rendered figures have a creepy dead-eyed look.

December

Wednesday 9/12: Ridiculous region restrictions

The latest Halo story, Shadow of Intent, has been released as a e-book only, but it is not available on Australian book sites so far. Probably due to the stupid publishing region restrictions here. It is very frustrating as the story is being discussed on forums and is getting good reviews, and due to the subject matter I have particularly been anticipating it. Books are occasionally released simultaneously worldwide – such as the stupid Twilight novel series and equally inane Fifty Shades of Grey – but these seem to be exceptions.

“Who will mourn the passing of the brick veneer?,” The Age, 7/12. This style of house is a familiar one around my neighborhood – though I grew up and live in an older white weatherboard – but it is fast disappearing no thanks to ongoing and rampant development (as is happening in every established suburb). The houses replacing them are slab-sided, poorly-designed ugly behemoths that fill a whole block of land with little room for a garden or trees. They are not improving the neighborhood but degrading it and making it more barren and unfriendly.

I watched The Hidden Fortress for the first time on Sunday. I found it quite enjoyable and lively, if a bit long. Ran is still my favorite Kurosawa movie, followed by Throne of Blood; The Hidden Fortress was in contrast more light-hearted and had a happy ending, though it did have some somber moments.

I have also watched Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai, the 2011 version (I have not seen the original). It was quite visceral in the beginning scenes (as disemboweling oneself with a wooden sword tends to be) and reasonably well-made, though quite grim. It is very hard to find such movies in Australia; Kurosawa ones especially as they are simply not available for Region 4.

Saturday 19/12: Furnace blast

Summer has begun with a vengeance; a heatwave for most of the week and 41°C today, with a change due tomorrow. Christmas Day also is predicted to be hot, though not as bad as today (in the low 30’s) – we managed to avoid hot weather on that day for a few years, but luck has run out for this one.

I had some other topics to remark on but my brain is fried from the heat (no a/c in my room, only a fan), so I will leave those for a later entry.

Monday 20/12: Cool relief

A cool change with rain came through yesterday afternoon, which has to be one of the best sensations in the world.

The new Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, was released last week. I will not go see it for a while yet, and have spoiled myself regarding the plot already (I read the novelization and was not particularly impressed). Reviews are mixed; the plot has a lot of elements derived from the original Star Wars and seems like a more frenetic and shallower imitation. The soundtrack (put on YouTube by Disney) is bland and unmemorable on first listen (as quite a few have noted).

“Why French Bulldogs (and Their Owners) Are the Worst: A Rant” (via MetaFilter). French Bulldogs seem, for some inexplicable reason, to have become fashionable in the last few years, and the article points out all the genetic faults of the breed. I don’t find them at all appealing – I dislike the appearance of flat-faced (brachycephalic) dog and cat breeds generally (as noted in my 5/5 entry). It just demonstrates how warped the outlook of breeders is when they deliberately breed deformed animals.

Wednesday 23/12: Cosmonaut fan club

I was remembering a couple of female Internet acquaintances from around 10 years ago. I had my Russian cosmonaut site on Sergei Krikalev up then and they found me through it. One was Angela Cimato (the only current website I could find with her is a marriage one) and the others were Maryam Aljoaan (one of her old blogs is still online) and Mónica Ortiz Mendoza. Angela bought a domain name, krikalev.com, and set up a fan forum in 2005 – this was when Sergei went up on his ISS-11 mission. The forum only lasted a few months – it got filled with spam – and the domain name is long since inactive. I stopped communicating with them not long after. Angela and Maryam have gone on to have impressive careers (unlike myself :-().

Thursday 24/12: Population push

I was quite dismayed to read an editorial in The Age this week, “How to make a bigger Melbourne better.” They quite blatantly state at the end:

An overarching issue is the rate of population growth. Many feel the solution to Melbourne’s problems is to simply limit the population. The Age has long been an advocate for population growth. More than anything else, it is the migration of people from overseas and elsewhere in Australia that has led to the cultural diversity and to the economic and social strength that have made Melbourne of the world’s great cities. We have the collective ingenuity and wealth to continue to improve the city while accommodating the extra millions who will arrive and contribute in coming decades.

What rubbish. Relentless population growth is making Melbourne a more difficult and stressful place to live in, with increased competition for resources, living space and essential services, and a loss of amenity. “Ingenuity” is meaningless; realistically infrastructure will never catch up to the demand placed upon it as governments are reluctant to spend and tend to foist off such development upon private industry. “Cultural diversity” is another meaningless feel-good platitude; when you bring in huge numbers of strangers with little in common and cram them together then conflicts and social disharmony will happen.

The Herald-Sun had an article with a different point of view:

We’re full to bursting

22 Dec 2015
JOHN MASANAUSKAS CITY EDITOR john.masanauskas@news.com.au

Aussies fear congestion, migrant enclaves

JUST over half of Australians say the nation is full, and many are concerned about growing migrant enclaves and congestion, a new survey says.

The poll found 51 per cent of Australians were against more growth, while only 37 per cent were in favour of it. Two-thirds said the population should not top 30 million.

There have been predictions that by 2061 the country will have a population of more than 45 million. But only 5 per cent of respondents believed a population of 40 million-plus was a good idea.

The national population now is 24 million. Melbourne has 4.4 million, but is tipped to almost double in size by 2050.

Essential Research conducted the survey of 1230 people in November, for environmental lobby group Sustainable Population Australia.

Dr Katharine Betts, from the Australian Population Research Institute, who analysed the data, found opponents of further growth were most worried about overcrowded cities and the ethnic mix. Many thought “we have too much cultural diversity already, with migrant enclaves rather than peaceful assimilation”.

“These concerns are closely followed by a desire to train our own, and worries about unemployment,” she said.

Proponents of more growth saw its main benefits as boosting economic growth and offsetting an aging population.

Dr Betts said most immigrants believed Australia needed more people.

However, their Australian-born children tended to share the opposing views of other locally born people.

“Opposition to population growth is concentrated among young people, while support for it is concentrated among people born overseas, as well as people who are university-educated,” Dr Betts said.

Lord Mayor Robert Doyle said the tide of population growth could not be held back – “this is not Fortress Australia” – and Melbourne had changed for the better since the 1970s, when it had only two million people: “Melbourne today is a more prosperous, a more interesting, a more tolerant, a more exciting, and a more creative city.”

But infrastructure investment had fallen behind, and the city needed to work fast to manage growth in a smart way.

Melbourne certainly is not changing for the better; I can’t believe how deluded those in authority continue to be on the topic. Growth is not being “managed;” ugly apartment towers are being constructed at a furious rate, blighting the appearance of the city, and these are mostly for overseas investors.

This remark, “Opposition to population growth is concentrated among young people, while support for it is concentrated among people born overseas, as well as people who are university-educated,” is applicable to a lot of users on r/melbourne on Reddit; most there seem to support high-density living and population growth, and downvote any who speak against it. I just made a comment (as SuzyM) in a post about more ugly towers to be constructed; I will confidently bet I am downvoted.

Some letters in response to The Age editorial:

Melbourne: Brutalist buildings also potential tinder boxes

Saturday’s editorial tells us that while “The CBD has far too many high-rise dog-box apartments”, the middle-ring suburbs “are still characterised by large single dwellings on big blocks of land” (”How to make a bigger Melbourne better”, 19/12). It is all very well to argue for more medium density but the reality is that in these suburbs beautiful single dwellings are being demolished to be replaced by such dog boxes. The devastation of much of South Yarra is already a case in point, but it is not the only suburb so affected. We have learned nothing from the experiments in Brutalist architecture of the Bolte government, which inaugurated the construction of juggernaut public housing in inner Melbourne. By 1970, thousands of privately owned dwellings had been compulsorily acquired and replaced by Stalinist-grey high rise commission flats. Now, greedy developers are doing the government’s work for it. Plus ca change …

Well no, there is one crucial difference. We can safely assume that Housing Commission high-rises were built by qualified builders and supervised by council surveyors. Now, with councils abrogating and privatising responsibility for public safety, can we ensure that stringently manufactured local products are not being substituted with cheap and flammable materials? Not only are these new brutalist buildings the slums of the future, but as the recent Docklands’ fire showed, they are potential tinder boxes.

– Jill Mazzotta, Balaclava

On guard against ‘dog box’ invasion

Forefront in the minds of residents living within 20 kilometres of the CBD is the continual threat of invasion from “dog boxes”. We are told that Melburnians desire “housing options” – read developers, politicians and planning advisers wishing employment wanting to make the middle suburbs pay for the infrastructure they failed to provide and don’t wish to fund on the outer fringes. We residents – read “short-sighted vested interests” – have paid enormous prices to inhabit these middle suburbs and for that privilege, pay hefty rates based on property values. Must we accept the inevitability of our wishes being subsumed to the opinion makers’ manufactured “housing options” argument?

– Clive Dossetor, Kew

Endless growth is simply impossible

Your editorial fails the “when” test. It does not answer the vital question of what would be a sustainable population for the city; when would it need to stop growing. Most politicians similarly fail this test. Just ask them a question about their city, their country and the world. It is highly likely they will have never thought of it. Managing growth is their role. Unfortunately, endless growth on a finite planet is neither desirable nor possible.

– Geoff Mosley, Hurstbridge

Keep the city as a place to live

Your editorial trumpets the “cultural diversity, economic and social strength” provided by population growth. Already, we have 28 per cent of Australians born overseas. How many is best? I support an inclusive society, but not a heedlessly overcrowded one. In an already developed landscape and mature economy, population growth pushes up, and deliberately so, the cost of land, housing, water and so on. And it demands expensive and invasive new infrastructure. So while this superficially increases headline GDP growth, real dollars in the pocket for average citizens remain a phantom. The poorest suffer most and can’t find a home at all. Melbourne should be a place to be lived in, not a government-provided, developer-exploited profit bonanza where our suburbs are fracked for greatest return.

– Martin Ryan, Prahran

Also another counterpoint view earlier this month from the Herald-Sun again (reproduced below as article is behind a paywall):

Let’s not confuse bigger with best

4 Dec 2015

TOM ELLIOTT IS DRIVE TIME HOST ON 3AW WEEKDAYS 3PM-6PM telliott@3aw.com.au Tom Elliott

For all of us who spend every day stuck in traffic, a bigger Melbourne is not necessarily a better one.

SICK of being stuck in traffic? Surprised by the extent of Melbourne’s urban sprawl? Horrified to learn that onceentry level homes in inner areas now sell for more than a million dollars apiece?

Rampant population growth is largely to blame, yet it doesn’t have to be this way.

Most of our politicians are happy to spout forth on pet policies such as education, health, law and order and welfare. For some reason, however, very few of them ever want to discuss Australia’s population in any meaningful way.

All sides of politics seem to agree that a continual increase in the number of people living here is, unambiguously, a good thing. That is a lie.

Some of the positives associated with population growth include more customers for business, a bigger gross domestic product, increased diversity in food and recreation and, in the long run, better performance at international sporting events. More people also equals more votes at election time, which goes some way to explaining why politicians never call a stop to the population juggernaut.

The negatives associated with a bigger Australia outweigh the positives.

Take our transport system, for example. Because we have a “catchup” culture when it comes to infrastructure funding, our road, bus, train and tram networks never seem adequate for the number of people needing to use them. On weekends it used to be pretty easy to travel from one corner of Melbourne to another. Now, however, gridlock awaits those brave enough to attempt the north/ south crawl that is Punt Rd and Hoddle St.

The local real estate market has also failed to keep up with the 100,000 people a year who decide to make Victoria their home. Town planning restrictions make inner-city development difficult, timeconsuming and expensive. Meanwhile, in the outer suburbs new houses are being built but without the jobs and public transport required to service their residents. As a result of those forces, house prices in inner and middle suburbs have risen through the roof. This imbalance between supply and demand is great if you bought when homes were cheap 20 years ago, but a disaster if you’re still trying to get a foothold in the market.

Health is another area under extreme pressure. In theory the publicly funded Medicare system exists to service the medical needs of our entire population.

The reality, of course, is very different. Public hospitals have extensive waiting lists for elective surgeries like hip replacements. Our emergency departments are routinely clogged with self-inflicted injuries like alcohol and drug overdoses. Private health insurance has become an expensive but necessary component of already stretched household budgets. Yet our politicians still want to keep admitting more people to this country.

Remember the drought of 2008-09 when Melbourne’s water supply almost ran out? It’s not at all clear how we’ll deal with another episode of that when the city rises from its current 4.5 million people to seven or eight million by 2050.

Tuesday 29/12: Downvotes again

Another day, another repetitive disagreement regarding urban planning on r/melbourne at Reddit, with predictable downvotes for my reply. The general consensus there seems to be in favor of cramming the inevitably-growing population into high-density towers. Reducing the growth in the first place is apparently too radical a solution for them.

More letters from The Age regarding population growth:

28/12:

Destroying the city

I wish Robert Doyle would have a cup of tea, a Bex and an good lie down. His constant “boosterism” will be the death of this city (“Open all hours: Doyle’s city plan”, 26/11) . In his endless promotion of more, more, more, he seems to overlook issues that are a worry to many people. The fact that infrastructure badly lags population growth, is putting enormous strain on existing facilities. New projects will take many years to complete and will probably not keep pace with population expansion.

He wants the CBD to be a 24-hour activity location. Is he going to import an extra half a million students to work as wait staff at minimal pay rates? This would add to the already large second-tier labour force outside award conditions. Progress is fine, but this do-it-at-any-price mentality undermines any truth in our “most liveable city” claims.

– Geoff Hall, Mentone

29/12:

Struggling to cope

Kenneth Davidson asks “Can our city be saved from the planners and pollies?” (Opinion, 28/12). He is asking the wrong question. Melbourne’s public transport – trains, trams and buses – is chockers. Roads are congested at all times, not only at peak hours. Many of the city’s drains and sewers, which were built more than 100 years ago, are at capacity and are decaying and in need of repair.

Melbourne does not have adequate infrastructure for its current population. As The Age has pointed out in numerous editorials this year, this infrastructure gap is due to the failure of our civic leaders over many decades. The question we should be asking is: “Why should there be further population growth with associated development before Melbourne’s current infrastructure deficiency has been fixed?”.

– Paul Hobson, Camberwell

I have been doing a purge of possessions, mostly books and magazine articles, as I seem to have the urge to at this time of year. I have only limited space so I have to clean out every year.

The weather is heating up again, with a hot New Year’s Eve predicted, and for a few days after that, so another week of discomfort lies ahead.