I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen

Tea or Coffee

2012-01-11T16:10:00.002+11:00

I realise its a foolish question when the obvious answer is coffee.

I want to say I respect those of you who choose to drink tea, but I can't. Unless it's the post apocalypse and you weren't adequately prepared. You are searching the rubble and in that last ration box before you go into terminal caffeine shutdown you just have to drink tea. In which case shame on you.
Unless its one of those fruity caffeine free herbal teas in the box. There is just no reason to drink those, ever! even in the post apocalyptic wasteland or Earl Grey - Captain Picard be damned.

Why? for when Earl Grey tea is too much for you?

While there is much waffle written about the way tea is prepared, waxing rhapsodic about its origins, history blah, blah.

"the budda discovered tea when he found it picked him up after spending the day mediating...."

what a powerhouse of a drink, being able to revive someone after a hard days thinking. Given the simplicity of the the process it is easy to see why tea was invented early in our history. Its so easy hippies can do it.

Lets consider the process of making tea.

its not like boiling it in the old days

Grow plant,
Dry leaves,
Dump in hot water.
Drink.

Over the years tea swillers have tried to make the process more interesting. Bizarre rituals - see the milk in first controversy, pickling it, having to wear uncomfortable pants while you make it such as in Japanese Tea Ceremony and I don't want to know what goes into those black malteser sized tapioca pearls in bubble tea drinks. shudder. Attempts to add some engineering goodness to the process of tea have at best resulted in Samovars which are just about making hot water. The 3000 year old version of one of these.

Praise the earth for it has given us TEA.

But trying to dress it up as much as you can its still dried leaves in boiling water. This is why when I think of tea all I can picture is Hippies.

I'm not saying if you drink tea you are a hippy, it's just that's the image that is called to my mind whenever someone offers me a cup of tea. Plus the smell.

COFFEE on the other hand, calls to mind images of industry, steam engineering and madness.

Such as the great Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel calling for coffee as he carries a temporarily overwhelmed Ada Lovelace through the vice and verse ridden poet's corner of London. For more of the thrilling adventures of Lovelace and Babbage go here.

A big shout out to Melina Sydney Padua the author of the above panel

Real coffee, and by real coffee I mean espresso, is made through a much more exciting process of drying, roasting and in special cases the beans being eaten and shat out by the Asian Palm Civet (Paradoxurus hemaphrodutis), then pushing water heated to around 96 centigrade through a sieve of the ground roasted coffee beans at around 9 bars of pressure.

and perhaps the finest expression of this symphony of engineering and madness with coffee in the real world, is a mystic brew called Black Blood of the Earth. It's produced by a company by a chap at Funranium Labs who after sampling a cup produced by a Viennese Triple Cold Extraction Coffee set up in Japan

Either that or Walter White's work bench

described the experience as

"I could see colours that weren't in the visible spectrum, and could vibrate through walls"

and with access to a decent supply of glassware and a passable knowledge of chemical engineering Voila, he built his own machine and with continual tinkering produced Black Blood of the Earth -a beverage which concentrates the caffeine but extracts much of the bitterness inherent with the beverage. The caffeine content per cup is a touch excessive and I tend to like my coffee dark and bitter, like my heart, so my search for the perfect coffee continues.

The pinnacle of beverages, the ULTIMATE coffee will result in such experiences as described below from the comic Girl Genius, click here for the full tale

Isn't this always what you hoped the first time you tasted coffee?

So in summary when I think of tea, I see hippies. When I ask for coffee I want it to be prepared using this

so what's your beverage of choice? and why isn't it coffee?

Are you people nuts?

2011-11-13T20:16:00.001+11:00

Obviously not you people who read this, I was referring to these people. For those that don't do links the story is about a group who having decided that they don't trust the very effective and safe chicken pox vaccine and instead not satisfied with organizing a get together at a public venue like McDonalds so their and other children get exposed to a child who currently has has chicken pox. Did the last fifty years of public health and science just pass these people by, did somehow the 20th century not happen for these people?

Whats worse is instead of hooking up on the new social media ie Facebook to arrange these parties,

I am trying to put together a chicken pox party and am looking for someone to donate their chicken pox to the event. i was thinking of having it at McDonsals or some place with toys to play on. if you know of anyone who would like to contribute or would like more information on a time and place let me know...."

now we even have these folk you don't trust them modern doctor types who, on a request from a parent will send lollipops that have been licked by children currently suffering chicken pox through the GODDAM POSTAL SERVICE!

"after a woman in Nashville, Tenn., advertisedlollipops contaminated with the varicella virus on Facebook. The tainted popswere intended for parents who want to expose their children to thedisease. A Nashville TV station spotted the woman's posts, in which shealso offered to ship spit and cotton swabs, all for a mere $50, payable throughPayPal. The woman, Wendy Werkit told WSMV reporter Kimberly Curth that she hadshipped lollipops that had been sucked on by her children, "so that otherpeoples' kids can get chickenpox."

I have been unable to link to a facebook site promoting chicken pox parties, only a link to an interest site that warns about the danger, and one that links to a online game starring a cartoon chicken called Pox, so I am hoping this is all some kind of twisted hoax but there is no mention of it on the scopes urban myth website.

So these folk don't trust the varicella vaccine developed in 1995 and shown to be safe and effective, however they will trust some one so clueless as to send a biologically invective sample unsecured through the mail. As others have pointed out, including a US prosecutor, this is effectively what we all feared bioterrorists would do.

Dr Rafael Harpaz, epidemiologist for the Centres of Disease Control was much more restrained than I would be when he said 'Its an incredibly bad idea for a variety of reasons.... Before the vaccine was licenced, there were on the order of 100 kids (in the US) who died of chicken pox every year. Now there are very few among vaccinated children...Its like playing Russian roulette with your child'.

I was going to post about the family fun Friday movie the_weapon, my_reason_for_living and I went to see Contagion. But I will leave that for another day.

Why I liked OUTCASTS more than I am enjoying TERRA NOVA

2011-10-16T19:48:00.002+11:00

As others have noted, thanks Orin, next year will be the first time since 1974 that there are no live action space based science fiction shows on Television. This of course is unacceptable. While science fiction on TV thrives the future looking science based tomorrow seems to have disappeared and instead we are stuck with inward looking, supernaturals and superpowers. For comparison look at the fate of BBCs short run series OUTCASTS and compare with the finally on air TERRA NOVA.

In Summary
Terra Nova is about a colony sent from a future earth that has a destroyed biosphere due to environmental collapse. The colony is settled in series sent through a time fracture to a prehistoric earth. The trip is one way and they can not contact the future and rely on the information carried back by settlers.The sixth wave of settlers had a dispute and leave to set up an alternative colony elsewhere on planet. The character selection process is meant to bring the best and the brightest but there are obviously flaws and some people have go through that shouldn't.There is a whiny, annoying teen whose sole task seems to be a plot device to drive the story when he does something stupid. There is a big mystery hinted at by some cryptic markings. Not everything is what it seems.

Outcasts is about a colony sent from a future earth that has a destroyed biosphere due to environmental collapse. This is a alien world reached over a number of years by a series of colonizing ships, News from earth can only be provided by the people on the ships as they arrive. Engineered humans called Advanced Cultivars were part of the first settlement teams but where blamed for a disease which wiped out most of the colonies children, they left to found another colony elsewhere on the planet. There is a whiny annoying teen who only function seems to screw with the emotions one of the competent officers in the colony. There is a big mystery hinted at when some hominid fossils that turn up. Not everything is what it seems.

See Spaceships therefore cool

For a start at least OUTCASTs had spaceships, big honking planet settling spaceships. It had a colony that looks like it had been build from cannabilized spaceships ' The houses on Terra Nova look like they could double as an Apple Store. And while TN has dinosaurs and that is a plus they aren't anything that wasn't perfected by the Walking With Dinosaurs crew.

Also given a disease that wiped out most of the children mean they aren't up to their shoulders in annoying teen angst every week unlike Terra Nova. So a plus to OUTCASTS there.

Even the title TERRA NOVA sh*ts me. That translates as Earth New. Not a very imaginative title requiring no great geek knowledge. The planet in Outcasts is called Carpathia which is never explained, no block of talking exposition but as everyone knows Carpathia was the name of the ship that rescued the survivors of the Titanic. See clever. So of course it only got eight episodes and ended on a cliff hanger that will never be resolved.

Oh great now the moons going to crash into us

Even in the first episode of TERRA NOVA they screwed up the maths on how big the moon should be, hint it shouldn't be THAT BIG.

So the little girl asks her big sister, "Is it always so big?"

Big sis: "Not always. It moves about a half a centimeter away from the Earth every year, so it’s much closer than it was yesterday."

UH UH.
The moon does move around 4cm/year, it was moving away a bit slower millions of years ago but lets assume 4cm/year close enough for government work. Therefore how much closer 85million years ago thats 425 kilometres. Given that it currently orbits at around on average 400,000kms thats a tiny variation about 0.1%. Since the moon travels an ellipitcal orbit over a two week period is varies by about 50,000kms every fortnight there is NO WAY that the could percieve a difference. So once again SCIENCE FAIL.

Terra Nova has only had a couple of episodes so far but its not looking good.

Breaking the laws of physics

2011-10-09T17:17:00.002+11:00

Recently I have had to question my understanding of one of the fundamentals of the universe.

No I don't mean the experimental result which suggests they detected superluminal neutrinos. Although that result did generate much discussion around the dinner table, yes its that sort of household. That report is just the sort of investigation which is what science is all about. Randall Munroe of xkcd has a good take on how we should deal when such scientific results are reported in the news.

No my discovery involved a recent visit from My_reason_for_living when I thought she had violated one of the fundamental laws of thermodynamics. It was one evening, we had been in our centrally heated home for a few hours. Sufficient time for all internal bodies to reach thermodynamic equilibrium and then she placed her feet on my bare skin.

HOW IN THE NAME OF SANITY CAN THEY BE SO COLD AS TO CONTACT FREEZE!

I have a scientific mind, and I had no idea how this can happen. By all the rules of physics her feet should be the same temperature as everything else, including me. It wasn't until I watched ABCs science program Catalyst that I worked out what was happening.

Obviously My_reason_for_living's feet are made of some highly thermal conductive material. Diamond has one of the highest conductivity know to science. Q.E.D her feet are made of diamonds.

Makes as much logical sense as the argument made HERE in the New York Times by Robert Bryce.

In crappy news for Zombie fans

2011-08-14T11:15:00.001+10:00

American Movie Channel just made my list.

Last year the big standout hit for the network was their TV series THE WALKING DEAD, based on the awesome ongoing comix book series by Robert Kirkman. The series which premiered on Halloween last year attracted 5.3 million viewers, its season finale drew more than 6 million. Its one of the most successful television series ever produced by the network. In the coveted 18-49 demo is is the biggest numbers of any drama ever shown on basic cable. So what does a success like this breed.

The director Frank Darabount was sacked three days after the company used him to promote season 2 at comic con. They slash the per episode budget available from $3.4 to $2.75 and come up with a series of bone headed suggestions to the save cash.

"The show shoots for eight days per episode, and the network suggested that half should be indoors" and insider points out "this is not a show that takes place around a dinner table". Another suggestion "couldn't the audience hear the zombies and not see them saving on make up?"

needless to say I am no longer looking forward to the see what this has wrought for season two.

And next in the kick to the head in stupid ideas

A synopsis was released by for the movie

"The story revolves around United Nations employee Gerry Lane (Pitt), who traverses the world in a race against time to stop the Zombie pandemic that is toppling armies and governments and threatening to decimate humanity itself. Enos plays Gerry’s wife Karen Lane; Kertesz is his comrade in arms, Segen.”

serious WTFage????? Have they not read Max Brooke's book? Here is how the book is described

Brooks plays the role of an agent of the U.N Postwar Commission who published the report a decade after the Zombie War. The United Nations left out much of his work from the official report, choosing to focus on facts and figures from the war rather than the individual stories that form the bulk of Brooks' novel. The interviews chart a decade-long war against zombies from the view point of many different people of various nationalities. The personal accounts also describe the changing religious, geo-political, and environmental aftermath of the Zombie War.

AFTER THE ZOMBIE WAR NOT DURING and it is not just me who noticed they have fundamentally changed the story.

Topless Robot "And speaking of crushingly disappointing zombie news"

Io9 "WWZ movie synopsis is nothing like the book, internet melts down

Peter Hall over at Movies.com sums up the problem best. "I Hate you Mac Foster. "

Me too.

Beauty pageants and science

2011-08-07T10:58:00.000+10:00

The Miss USA contest and science are two phases you tend not to see together. Some Miss USA contestants have claimed science cred, but when the finalists to the 2011 Miss USA contest were asked "Should evolution be taught in school?" the results were both encouraging and depressing

Yay Science

On the plus side the eventual winner Ms Alyssa Campanella came out and said that it should be taught and later claimed

"I was taught evolution in high school. I do believe in it. I'm a huge science geek....I like to believe in the big bang theory and, you know, the evolution of human beings throughout time".

But she was only one of two who came out unequivocally in favor of teaching evolution in school.

Sigh.

The many other responses where either political weasel words about choice, or openly against such teaching.

Perhaps if the question was rephrased to teaching mathematics in school.

If you want to see the actual responses click here but I think the video above sums it up.

Its not always about the Zombieapocalypse

2011-06-25T16:36:00.000+10:00

Back off man, I'm a Zombiehunter

Though as a card carrying member of zombie squad (motto We make dead things deader) admittedly 97% of my free time is spent with rehearsals, drills, checkinga and re-evaluating my go-bag and every day carry, checking literature, consulting health records, watching for Patient Zero, recharging torches seemingly endlessly recharging torchs, restocking food and medical supplies, watching training films and reading manuals like DEADLINE by Mira Grant.

Occasionally I feel the need to widen my horizons, albeit only slightly. Such as this week when this arrived in the mail.

Don't think me being in a hardcopy will save you

Its Dr Daniel H Wilsons's ROBOPOCALYPSE. I've lauded his work ever since first his lament to the 21st Century 'Where's my Jetpack? A guide to the amazing science fiction that never arrived. He has go one to write a series of how to texts on

How to survive a robot uprising

How to build a robot army:Tips on defending Earth against Alien invaders, Ninjas and Zombies.

The book even before it became available was Steven Spielberg was committed to direct the movie.

In case you were wondering why I bought it in hard copy and not e-text. Manly because I haven't chosen my e-reader yet though when this becomes available I will be sorely tempted. The reason is if it on an electronic device that will make it far to easy for Archos to locate me.

Here is the winning fan made trailer for the book.

An early start to a Thursday morning

2011-06-18T15:21:00.000+10:00

"Way to ruin my night vision Dad"

At 4:20AM on Thursday Morning, I and the_weapon like the rest of the world bundled ourselves up in our warmest gear and left our toasty beds and sat in the back yard to watch the longest total lunar eclipse I have seen in my lifetime.

It was wonderful, from 4:20 when we saw the edge of the shadow begin to cross from the top right corner and fall across the moon's face. It fell with the slow majesty you'd expect from an event orchestrated across a million kilometers of void.

Damn it was cold, but we were held spellbound, for as the darkness fell more stars came out and we each tried to name the star as it appeared. And I maintain that IRK is not a star we can see, no matter how dark it gets.

By 5:30 the moon was biblical - I mean literally like in the King James " ...and the moon into blood".

No moon for you

And when I say the rest of the world I do of course exclude North America. As you see from the chart the Moon largely gave a big 'FRAK YOU' to the United States on this one. That's okay, you were probably all busy anyway.

The cold and early rise was worth it because during the totality (the bit when the moon passes deepest into the shadow on this pass) the moon was in the Earth's umbra for the longest time.

Which means at the height (depth, maximium) lets go with the 'totality' if you hadn't been watching where the moon was the whole time then you couldn't see it, as no sunlight was falling on it, not even the filtered red light that gives the moon its eerie red colour during the eclipse. For why the moon turns red during an eclipse I turn to the explainantion given by the_weapon, my 11 year old son.

"only the sunlight that goes through the earths air is hitting the moon, the air's pulled out all the blue light so only the red light is left"

That's not too shabby and explanation of what happens. He has seen sunlight split into colours by a prism and knows that the sky is blue because that's the part of the white sunlight that is most scattered by the particles in the air, and he figured this out

White - Blue = red.

For my US friends here is the eclipse someone filmed, my video wouldn't have recorded for the whole hour and 20 minutes. They have sped it up for those you are busy.

But US you will get your chance with the second total eclipse of the year will be in December 2011.

and I leave you with this science article about an insect called the lesser water boatman, Micronecta scholti. Which on a kilo for kilo basis makes the loudest noise in nature at 105 dbs by

"... rubbing its ribbed penis against ridges on its belly, playing its genitals like a miniature fiddler"

which shows to me why reality will always be more remarkable than what we can imagine.

Hug me I'm Vaccinated

2011-06-11T19:03:00.087+10:00

"Look its Patient Zero, TAKE' HER DOWN!"

Are you noticing lots of people coughing, spluttering, complaining of sniffles and worse SNEEZING? Everyday on the train into the city a half a dozen people in my carriage release a mighty, droplet-riddled - ACHOO, and I think

'is this it? is this Patient Zero of the next great pandemic?'

What is the correct etiquette in this situation? pass them a hanky, douse them in disinfectant, yell at them "way to to doom the planet sneezy."

This week saw 4197 cases of Whooping Cough (Pertussis) since the start of the year in Victoria. This is twice the numbers for the same period in 2010. The Chief Health Officer of Victoria provided these figures

In 2008 there were 1673 cases
2009 there were 3736
2010 a total of 6736

anyone else spotting a trend here?

My reason_for_living, a mild mannered academic at a major metropolitan university, (that's a fib she's never been mild mannered) was notified of a case of diphtheria in the university. That's right

DIPHFRAKINGTHERIA

The New South Wales health department describes this disease as

As a contagious and potentially life threatening bacterial infection, a common cause of death in children up until the 1940s but has now almost disappeared in Australia due to immunization

I expect Tetanus to start rearing its ugly jaw locking head any day.

If only there was some effective regime we as a society could adopt to prevent these terrible disease from ravaging across our civilization? There is its called VACCINATION. Perhaps a schedule like the one listed here given to all children. Its called the National Immunization Program Schedule. So why isn't it working? I tell you why its because ....

Immunization is a victim of its own success, we don't see children suffering from these diseases anymore so we have become complacent. Which allows the efforts of the deliberately miss-titled Australian Vaccination network to spread lies and fears of the risk of immunization. This organisation headed by the appalling Meryl Dorey whose rants against immunization are so bizarre, on one occasion likening a vaccination of a child to rape, leads me to suspect she may suffer from some form of twisted Piquerism. Then there is the work of ex Doctor Andrew Wakefield whose fraudulent study proposing a link between the UK MMR vaccine and Autism lead to a boom in cases of measles. Plus the Tree-change, we live in a fairy tale mind state in rural New South Wales and don't believe in Western Medicine type.

When I took the_weapon in to get this years flu shot I discovered the booster for tetanus I got after my motorbike accident only covered me for Tetanus and Diphtheria. So I paid the $40 for the booster and received the most painless vaccination ever. At the moment the health department is offering the booster free to new parents in an effort to get this outbreak under control and reduce the risk to new borns.

I'd like to think in some office in the Health Department there is a big transparent plasma screen like the one you see in all the high tech movies, with a outline of the state, highlighting the reported infections. Down one side a series of numbers recording the tally and plotting against previously calculated intervention points which automatically trip increasing levels of free immunizations.

At this level the standard childhood immunizations, at this level parents of newborns, now people working with children, the vulnerable and finally in a desperate attempt to stop the spread free to everyone.

Of course its not like that, and I worry that our health services are desperately under funded and people don't realize the risk or appreciate how long it took us to reign in these terrible scourges and how this brief respite in the history of civilization could end and we could return to tiny babies gasping for breath due to whooping cough.

We shouldn't have to go backwards, we shouldn't have to learn this stuff all over again.

Valentines day

2011-02-13T21:25:00.002+11:00

A lot has been written and sung about love, but as a skeptic this song appeals on such a day.

So I trust it would go without saying
That I would feel really very sad
If tomorrow you were to fall off something high
Or catch something bad
But I'm just saying
I don't think you're special
I-I mean, I think your special
But you fall within a bell curve

Happy Valentines day

Homeopathy - There's Nothing In It.

2011-02-05T21:37:00.000+11:00

That's the slogan of the annual 10:23 challenge which began in January 2010 to convince a chain of pharmacies in the U.K to stop selling homeopathic products and thereby lending legitimacy to this unproven woo. On the 30th of January 2010 at 10:23 AM 400 people swallowed an entire bottle of homeopathic pills, to highlight the fact these 'remedies' have no active ingredients. As chemist I like that they chose 10:23 in reference to the concept of Avagado's number 6.022x10²³.

In the TV show The Big Bang Theory Dr Shedlon Lee Cooper drawing on the experiments of Bertram Forer in 1948 called Astrology "nothing but pseudoscientific hokum". I would like to draw upon the work J Maddox, J Randi and W. W Stewart who proved conclusively through meticulously designed experiments that Homeopathy is nothing but pseudoscientific hokum.

Homeopathy according to the Australian Homeopathic Association (they have courses and degrees and everything) is based on "the Law of likes" for example coffee can wake you up so if you are suffering from insomnia a diluted quantity of coffee can help you sleep. No seriously they even sell a product called 'coffee cruda', sorry prescribe a treatment to alleviate this problem. It gets sillier from there. Homeopathy also believes in the 'Law of Infinitesimals' the more dilute the remedy the more potent. No I am not making this up. Of course not just any dilution, special dilutions called 'centesimals'.

As described on the 10:23 website

Taking a single drop of caffeine and diluting in ninety-nine drops of water creates what is known to homeopaths as one 'centesimal'. One drop of this centesimal added to another ninety-nine drops of water produces a two-centesimal, written as 2C. This 2C caffeine potion is 99.99% water and just 0.01% caffeine. At 3C the dilution is 0.0001% caffeine, at 4C it's 0.000001% caffeine, and so on. Homeopathic remedies are commonly sold at 6C (0.000 000 000 1%) and even 30C (0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 1%) dilutions, which homeopaths will often drip onto little balls of sugar to sell.

When these numbers are written out, it's easy to see how absurd they are. At 12C you pass what is known as the Avogadro Limit, the point at which there is likely nothing of your original substance left.

By the time you reach 30C, you have more chance of winning the lottery five weeks running than you have of finding a single caffeine molecule in your homeopathic sleeping draft. It's just ordinary water, dripped onto ordinary sugar.

Finally they throw in the Law of Succussion which means shaking the solutions so the water can retain the memory of the molecule that is no longer there. Honestly according to homeopaths shaking stuff makes it hold the pattern better?

Darryl Cunningham has put together a magnificent cartoon of the whole homeopathy mess over on his blog Darryl Cunningham Investigates. Below is the front page. He also did one for the MMR vaccine and autism.

Some of the ways folk are highlighting the foolishness of homeopathy - folk in the UK have bought homeopathic medicines and plan to overdose, which is difficult when all you are effectively consuming is sugar water, others have taken a drop of nitroglycerin and diluted homeopathically which should by their system making a much more potent explosive, but according to the system called science just makes it wetter.

I also like to think humor is an effective weapon against such woolly thinking, for those who are big fans of the late great Dr Carl Sagan like me and the_weapon this piece by the folk at Ninjerksu made me smile for a while.

Astrology... Your future looks............. Gloomy

Read the whole thing here.

Some will ask why the fuss, if people want to spend their money on what is effectively expensive water where's the harm. Simon Singh provides a cogent argument here. Also the website What's the harm, provides examples of some of the 400 people harmed because of homeopathy, including Ms J Alderslade who when told by a homeopath to give up here asthma medication, died of an asthma attack and Isabella Denley a 13month old who died because her parents refused to treat her epilepsy with medication and instead relied on 'alternatives like homeopathy.'

I realize that western medicine can cause side effects, some of which in the cases of diseases like cancer can be horrific and painful. However they have been shown to provide the best chance for long term survival and I would choose western or science/evidence based medicine over any amount woo or quack voodoo.

So remember when it comes to alternatives like homeopathy.

and when pubmed is full those undead theorems shall walk the earth

2010-12-29T08:44:00.000+11:00

My internet alert for Zombies turned up this over on P Z Myers website.The journal Diabities Care Vol 17, Issue 2, 152-154 has an article in the December 2010 issue by M.M. Tai called

'A mathematical model for the determination of total area under glucose tolerance and other metabolic curves'.

Which is all well and good however from the abstract:

OBJECTIVE–To develop a mathematical model for the determination of totalareas under curves from various metabolic studies. RESEARCH DESIGN ANDMETHODS–In Tai’s Model, the total area under a curve is computed bydividing the area under the curve between two designated values on theX-axis (abscissas) into small segments (rectangles and triangles) whoseareas can be accurately calculated from their respective geometricalformulas.

This sounds a lot like high school calculus to me. If you replace Metabolic curves with just curves then Dr Tai has stated the Trapezoidal rule one of the first techniques taught to calculate the integral (area under the curve). Which as we can see has many uses, not just total glucose tolerance. What is cheeky is the author has called it Tai's method, not the Leibniz or Newton method. Whats also impressive is that on google scholar the article has been cited 135 times. Which for published articles reproducing known mathematics is a lot. Scientist in some universities live and die professionally by the citations their articles garner. I am hoping this article is being cited as an example as why interdisciplinary studies are important.

It was Murray Gell-Mann who used the 'eight-fold way' (hippy) to explain the spectrum of hadrons (fancy word for subatomic particles like protons & neutrons). It was only after mixing with mathematicians, promptly pulled out 'Introduction to first group theory' that allowed Gell-Mann to open up symmetry and group theory to become one of the fundamental tools of particle physics. In his defense group theory wasn't taught in high school in the 1960s.

I don't mean to be snarky on Dr Tai, actually I do, but its probably because I am feeling a bit snarky about the whole 'science in society' thing at the moment. Especially after hearing the conversation of customer in front of me in the Australian geographic shop:

"excuse me why is this clock reading GMT what is that?"

"thats the Greenwich standard time to which we adjust our clocks"

"So thats the time in London is it?

"No, thats the time in Greenwich"

"Why whats so special about Greenwich"

of course I had no alternative but to beat them to death with a copy of Dava Sobel's Longitude.

Its starting to look a lot like a Zombie Christmas

2010-12-24T08:15:00.000+11:00

Yes its that time of the year.

to also set the scene you might like to sing from Michael Spradlin's book which takes two dozen christmas carols.

Tiny tot’s eyes are no longer aglow, they’re in a bowl. Good King Wenceslas Tastes Great and we Deck The Halls With Parts Of Wally. You’ll find all the soon to be classic Zombie Christmas Carol Classics, like I Saw Mama Chewing Santa Claus, Zombie, The Reindeer and many, many more.

Good King Wenceslas Tastes Great

Good King Wenceslas tastes great;
We might as well eat Stephen,
When the brains lay round about,
Toasted crisp and bleedin’.
Brightly shown the moon that night,
Though the virus cruel.
When a poor man came in sight,
He made fine undead fuel.

Hither, Zombies chase after her.
Agnes, she is yelling.
Yonder peasant, how she screams,
For her brains they’re a jelling.
Surely she will try to hide
Underneath the mountain,
Or deep in the forest hence
While Agnes is digestin’.

Bring me flesh, and bring me brains.
Bring me Zombies hither.
Thou and I will see them dine;
They even bite through leather.
Free and screaming, forth they went,
Zombies right behind them,
Through the poor souls’ wild lament.
Bitter brains are better.

Happy Holidays

'Twas the NIGHT Before the uprising

2010-12-22T22:22:00.000+11:00

Many thanks to Mira Grant the author of the excellent Feed & Deadline. Whose work I shameless recreate here

T'was the night before Christmas
when all through the house

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse
The boards had been nailed 'cross the windows with care
In hopes that the dead would pass by, unaware.

The children were sleeping -the ones who'd survived,
Though no one could say dreams of sugar plums thrived,
And mama with her chainsaw, and I with my gun,
Were just praying our brains would be ours come the sun.

When out of the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from my place to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew like a shot,
Prepared to do battle with ruin and with rot.

The moon on the breast of the new fallen snow
Gave a luster of mid-day to zombies below.
When what did my wandering eyes there discern
But a miniature sleigh in a full four-point turn,

With a steely-eyed driver, a knife in his teeth,
Come here to distribute some holiday grief.
More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name!

"Now Vincent, Now Stephen! Now, Mira and Jessie!
On, Robert, Romero -time's come to get messy
To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
Now dash away, Dash away, Dash away all!"

As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky.
So up to the house-top the coursers they flew,
With the sleigh full of weapons, and Santa Claus too.

And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
The prancing and pawing of each little hoof,
Then the fire from heaven came showering down,
Igniting the zombies who clustered around.

They stumbled and fell, faces melting like tallow,
As a voice from behind me said "Youth can be callow,
But son, this is war! Best find your guts quick!"
I turned, and I found myself facing ...Saint Nick.

His eyes, how they squinted! His mouth, how it frowned!
He was angry and lean, not a spare ounce or pound.
A bundle of weapons was flung on his back,
And he looked like a soldier, just opening his pack.

"The dead have come looking for good girls and boys,
And they're not singing carols, they're not bringing toys.
You'd best come with me, if you want to survive,
You believed in me once. Let me keep you alive".

It may have been madness, it may have been fear,
But something about him made everything clear,
So I called for my children, I nodded my head.
"We've been good this year. Save us all from the dead"

He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
Booby-trapping the house 'gainst those undying jerks,
Then he led us all up to the roof and his sleigh,
Where we took to the air, and we soon were away.

There are undead galore at the North Pole, it's true,
But I'd rather give blood than be made into stew,
So we joined Vampire Santa and flew out of sight....
Happy Christmas to all, and to all, a good bite.

Warning this post will contain clowns

2010-12-03T16:32:00.001+11:00

The_weapon is going up from the cub scouts to the scouts in the first week of next year. He could have gone up sooner but since they will be loosing me as a leader form cubs to scouts they wanted to hang on as long as possible.

The 2nd badge he will earn is scoutcraft. It requires him to be able to demonstrate a bunch of stuff:

Learn and be able to demonstrate the following knots:

a) reef knot

b) clove hitch

c) sheet bend

d) rolling hitch.

2. Flag

a) Describe the Australian flag and how to use it.

b) Hoist the flag.

c) Break the flag.

3. First aid

a) Know how to report an emergency.

b) Know the first steps to control bleeding.

4. Safety with camping tools

a) Know the laws that govern the carrying and use of knives in your state or territory.

b) Know and understand the safety rules for the use and storage of knives, bush saws and axes.

c) Demonstrate an understanding of the rules that apply to the supply and use of firewood in camping areas in your state or territory.

d) Demonstrate the use of a pocketknife or multi-tool.

5. Patrol System

a) Discuss with your Patrol Leader the requirements of the Pioneer Target or other appropriate Target of the Award Scheme.

b) Discuss with your Patrol Leader how the Patrol system operates in your Troop, e.g. election of Patrol Leader, appointment of APL, responsibilities and operation of Troop Council.

c) Show an understanding of the structure and duties of the Patrol.

all good scouty stuff.

It got interesting when the_weapon started to investigate the laws around knives, we could have just consulted an expert but instead we checked out the police and department of Justice. There is a perception that violence involving knives is on the increase. Consequently in Victoria laws were passed to crack down on knife violence. From the Department of Justice's website FAQ

Stabby the clown

It is an offence to possess, carry or use a knife or other controlled weapon unless you have a lawful excuse. A lawful excuse can include carrying a knife for the purposes of your job, or when participating in lawful sport, recreation or entertainment activities, for example when fishing.
Carrying a knife for the purposes of self-defence is not a lawful excuse.

The_weapon has read all this material and to explain it to his patrol leader put it like this,

"If I am a small kid getting picked on by a bully at school everyday and in fear of my life and I carry a life that's a crime. If the police stop and search me and I tell them that I am the side kick to Stabby the knife throwing clown that's okay."

Can't argue with that sort of reading comprehension.

Happy Sagan Day

2010-11-08T22:00:00.000+11:00

In respect of the birthday of one of the best advocates of science, atheism and skepticism (like those three aren't inexorably bound) I have ever heard, the centre for Inquiry, Florida Atheists and Secular Huminanists, the James Randi Educational Foundation and a bunch of other folk are promoting Carl Sagan Day.

You'll probably come across a few references in the bloggosphere, news stories etc. The weapon and I will put up the telescope if the weather holds and revel in the majesty of the night sky,

The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.

Then perhaps for desert an apple pie since as Carl Sagan said once

In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.

and of course watch some of the myriad footage that exists and remember how passionately and eloquently he spoke disproving that canard that the best scientist must be cold and emotionless. One of our favorite pieces at the moment is from Pale Blue Dot, his follow up to the awe inspiring series COSMOS

I realise at 9 mins its too long for most, but it is one of the most cogent arguments why I can't believe in any religion. I know in video I have embedded you see only half the screen but listen to the words.

The conclusion which begins at 7:52 minutes Sagan raises us all to the sublime. It gives the_weapon and I chills everytime we hear it.

What did you do on Sagan Day?

A fine Halloween

2010-10-31T22:13:00.000+11:00

Sometimes things just don't work out despite you best laid plans. But sometimes the wind is right, and the star align just so and a plan comes together.

Like this Halloween, Samhain, Day of the Dead (not the Romeroesque one) or All Souls Night whatever you want to call it.

After some of the pinheaded comments over on Birmo’s Blunt Instrument I decided to make some effort for 31 October. I picked up a decent pumpkin from the Queen Victoria Markets, and on Sunday the_weapon drew his design, I carved and we both scooped out the innards.

The jack-o-lantern was surprisingly easy and next year will embark on a more challenging design. So Jack now displayed in pride of place in the front window next to the door. That way any trick or treaters would know they would find welcome. We had prepared toffee apples, and filled a bowl with an assortment of wrapped lollies to reward any seekers.

The seeds we kept, washed, dried added a bit of virgin olive oil and some sea salt and an hour later in a hot over and we had a bowl of Pepitas to snack on while watching a suitable Halloween movie. But which to choose. The local DVD store was of little help.

Then that confluence of good fortune came to be. The Astor is an old cinema in Melbourne east big screen, great art deco and magnificent choctops.

When I saw what was screening tonight – the choice was obvious. I even had the right shirt thanks to Flinthart.

The_weapon loved it, and would be happy to go to the next school book week as Herbie West

How was everyone else's Halloween?

Most fun to be had in a Zombie novel for a while

2010-10-30T20:45:00.000+11:00

Any book which has George Romero honored as savior of humanity and talks about his shambling re-animated corpse locked in a government research centre is ahead in my book, abiet a severed and rotting head.

FEED by Mira Grant AKA Seanan McGuire, (you'll never see them in the same room together, is the first book in the NewsFlesh trilogy to which all I can say is: Get cracking woman I want the rest of the story.

The world Ms Grant has built is set 20 years after the rising when an experimental cancer therapy combined with genetically engineered flu virus designed to give immunity to the common cold with one heck of a side effect - It raised the dead.

The amount of thought Ms Grant has given to the sort of world after 20 years of zombies giving rise to infection is impressive. The consideration of the fact that when anyone or decent sized mammal dies it re-animates shows she has spent a lot of time researching the kind of stuff I love to read about: Virus, disease control, emergency response planning and of course the best weapons/ways to take down the dead.

Sarah Palin's America has come to past with Alaska having been surrendered to the zombies, designated a zone 1. From the book:

“They can only legally bathe you in bleach for a half a minute unless you’ve been in a Level 2 zone. At that point they can keep dunking you until they’re sure the viral blocks are clean. Travel in a Level 1 zone mean’s they are not legally obligated to do anything but shoot you”

The protagonists are a brother sister team of news bloggers following the presidential campaign, but its the attention to detail of the world she builds that I most enjoyed. Sure its a world where you survive the car crash only to face a bite from a passenger who died and reanimated, because everyone carries the virus- it just doesn't activate unless you die or get exposed to activated virus. It's also a world where children want to grow up to be leading virologists, the most trusted institution is the CDC and nurses stations are hardpoints.

"A good medical duty station can provide an island of safety for the uninfected, even as an outbreak rages on all sides. If you airlocks don'y fail and you have enough ammo, you can hold for days. One duty station in Atlanta did exactly that - four nurses, three doctors, and five security personnel kept themselves and eighteen patients alive for almost a week before the CDC was able to fight through the outbreak and get them safely out".

One negative point for me is that all the blood testing units that people carry are 'Apple' which conjures up brightly colored plastic equipment that is a triumph of style over substance.

I guess for a book about bloggers no one would be suprised the book has its own website, click here it carries a nice line in pseudo advertisements.

The bond between Georgia and her brother Shaun is a dynamic I hope we get to explore in the next book Deadline due May 2011.

But what I found best about FEED? In a genre that tends towards the bleak and sad, and don't miss-understand there is enough tragedy and despair in this tale to satisfy a teenage Emily Dikinson fan. People die in this story, good and bad, important and minor. In its willingness to kill off people it reminds me of that another great Zombie narrative The WALKING DEAD. But after 20 years of a horrific plague that has touched EVERYONE the human race is surviving and adapting. That no matter what may come or how horrible it will be humanity can make it through.

Thats why its the zombie story I have enjoyed reading the most this year.

Oh and if the dead do walk and you run into a woman called Mira, do what she says and you might just make it through the rising.

Whats your nightmare vision of the future

2010-10-25T13:59:00.000+11:00

I been a fan of Dr Daniel H Wilson for a while now. Does anyone know why do the news/blogs leave off his title. The man has a PhD in Robotics from the Carnegie Mellon University. Is CMU some sort of clown college or one of those one-shed divinity mills? I don’t understand why in all the links about him they don’t put on the Dr. If they are worried he might be confused for a sawbones put a Ph.D at the end.

I suspect its because he writes in an entertaining, popular way books like:

How to survive a robot up rising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion,

personally I am stocking up on supermagnets and thermite and reading over this wired article How to terminate a terminator.

Where’s my (damn) jetpack? A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future that Never Arrived Which sums up how I felt on 1 January 2001.

Mad Scientist Hall of Fame: Muwahahahaha! -Forget the Nobel this is the pinnacle to which all scientists should aspire, and further developed the_weapon’s interest in Science. My only request is to include Dr Horrible in any future additions.

How to Build a Robot Army: Tips on Defending Planet Earth Against Alien Invaders, Ninjas, Monsters, and Zombies much of this excellent advice in summarized on-line in the wired article How to Stop a 500 foot monster

So yes I am big FAN of the good doctor's work and have been awaiting his next book, due for release June 2011 called Robopocalypse: A Novel. Which to date all I have been able to determine is

A Novel of Human Survival during an apocalyptic robot uprising, sound like a RomComRob doesn't it?

Given that the treacherous sentient machines turning against us is my number 2 vision of the nightmare future, right after the rise of the walking dead, and just before the spread of a Captain Trips like supervirus, this book is eagerly anticipated.

Now it seems I am part of the zeitgeist as this week it was announced that Steven Spielberg has been named as a director for the film of Robopocalypse. And Jack Black will being involved in the movie version of How to Survive a robot up rising.

Seriously with World War Z movie in production I am looking forward to some serious apocalyptic filmage in the next couple of years. Any other moives I need to keep an eye on?

Big week in Science

2010-10-16T18:26:00.001+11:00

The big discussions in the house the week.

The Nobel Prize prize for physics was awarded to Andrew Geim and Konstantin Novoselov for their 'groundbreaking experiments regarding the two dimensional material graphene'.

A very small, weird net

This rocks as Andrew Geim is a CHEMIST, yeah that's right A CHEMIST won a Nobel for PHYSICS. Obviously this has put some physicists noses out of joint. As reported by Bob O'Hare over on his joint blog This Scientific Life

"Graphene is incredibly strong and light, which makes it ideal material to make hammocks for cats. Despite the merit of this work, the award has been roundly criticised by the physics community.

"I'm outraged" said Prof. Jon Nibus of the Clapham institute of Middle-Energy Physics. "This is a physics prize -we shouldn't give it to a bloody chemist. They'll only get it wet".

We've been big fans of Dr Geim ever since he won his Ig Noble back in 2001, interestingly enough that was for physics as well. His paper was 'of flying frogs and levitation', part of his everything is magnetic series.

The_weapon in particular impressed and now wants to try and get a paper published so that he can win an Ig Nobel. Dr Geim also co-authored a paper in PhyisicaB with his cat Trisha titled 'Detection of Earth Rotation with a diamagneticly levitating gyroscope'.

The other BIG news in science - We have exterminated another disease from the face of the world. Rinderpest has joined Smallpox as only existing in secure laboratories for scientists to walk past and taunt. "Na Na we wiped you out.."

Rinderpest, German for 'Cattle Plague' doesn't affect humans, but kills water buffleo, yaks and other animals relied on throughout Asia and Africa. The disease is related to measles and has an 80% mortality rate. A program to eliminate Rinderpest was announced in 1994 and the last case identified in Kenya in 2001. Official celebrations will be held in 2012 but I can't wait.

But its not all champagne and fast cars for scientists this week.

"Puny HUMAN"

The ever vigilant Flinthart has alerted me to this case of species treachery. Borut Povse at the University of Ljubljana (they even have a University was news to me)
has persuaded six male colleagues to let a powerful industrial robot repeatedly strike them on the arm, to assess human-robot pain thresholds. Each volunteer was struck 18 times at different impact energies, the arm fitted with either a blunt and a sharper tool. Povse claims "Even robots designed to Asimov's laws can collide with people. We are trying to make sure that when they do, the collision is not too powerful," Povše says. "We are taking the first steps to defining the limits of the speed and acceleration of robots, and the ideal size and shape of the tools they use, so they can safely interact with humans." ...

WTF

The boys over at Topless Robot summed this up best for me

"You want to keep robots from colliding with humans? Put a fucking sensor on them that tells them when something is close so they don't run into it. It's not hard; we have them on fucking cars now so people don't back up onto children. All you're doing is making a robot designed to inflict pain on humans. I love forward to these assholes' next experiment, which is to teach a robot not to murder humans by building a robot that does nothing but murder humans all day."

So by my count that's two wins and a giant leap backwards towards the inevitable Robot uprising.

Cub v Wild

2010-10-04T21:38:00.000+11:00

I grew up in suburbia, and hence had a romantic image of camping out in the wild. When I was growing up the boy scouts were going through a bit of a decline, regarded as quasi-military organisation by mine and many parents so I never got the chance to join.

Perhaps if I had been able to play boy scout as a child I would have never ended up spending the last week of the school holidays looking after nine boys aged between eight and almost ten in middle of a forest in Gembrook Victoria under canvas tents. That's right I have been at

The weather for the the week was as follows

Monday min 6.8 max 11.1

Tuesday min 2.4 max 9.2 and 10 mm of rain

Wednesday min 0.9 max 9.1 and 9 mm of rain

Thursday min 2.4 max 9.5

and friday we returned home

So 3500 cubs scouts and another 1000 leaders and support staff all up in the wilds of Gembrook Victoria, and DAMN it was cold and wet.

A small section of the night time campfire circle

What is alarming that despite having a trial pack weekend where the cubs go away and camp, nights where we invited all the parent to come so we could be sure they all know about what is needed for Cuboree, numerous newsletters, handouts, emails trying to make sure everyone understood what was expected, stressed that it would be cold and that the cubs needed to pack their own bags so they could find what they were looking for on camp.

Yet we still had conversations like this

Leader "its raining, get your rain coat"?

Cub " I don't think my mum packed a rain coat"

Leader "need to have a shower"

Cub " I don't have showers on Tuesday, I don't have any soap, I don't wanna"

Leader "Get ready for lights out?"

Cub "I don't have a sleeping bag"

Honestly, I don't know which is worse the cubs or the parents. Actually that's not true. It worse that an adult would send an 8 year old to a camp with out warm clothes and a sleeping bag. So if nothing else then I've taught 9 boys that they need to pack there own gear if they are going on a camp.

So what else can you learn as a cub scout on Cuboree, well watching Russell Crowe's Robin Hood the eponymous hero quotes

"I could teach you how to tie a knot that won't be slipped. I could teach you how to move through a forest. And I can help Marion teach you how to stay clean, so you won’t get sick." Add to that how to prepare meals for fifty, find your way around a camp, keep a tent dry and how to build a decent campsite in the middle of a forest and thats not a bad start.

I ended up as a cub scout leader because I used to stay and watch the_weapon when he went to cubs. They announced if no one volunteered as a leader then the pack would have to breakup. The pack now numbers 26 and we only have myself and two other leaders. This is not an un-familiar problem with packs all around Victoria. Next year I am moving up to be a scout leader now the_weapon is turning 11. I don't know how they can continue to run the cub pack if more adults don't step up. Our number continue to grow, yet our volunteers are getting fewer and the ones we have are growing older. I worry other kids wont get these chances.

Still we must be doing something right as almost all the cubs said they wanted to go the 23rd scout Jamboree in 2013.

13,000 scouts for 10 days under canvas, watch out Marlborough Queensland.

Books I am torn

2010-09-15T21:26:00.003+10:00

This week we were notified that on speech night The_weapon is to receive an award for Services to the School at the Falcon Academy. I suspect this is in response to his twelve point action plan for any viral pandemic outbreak which included roving 'Health Monitors' with FULL AUTHORITY (his capitals not mine) to isolate, detain and neutralize any suspected infected.

The letter about the award came with a book voucher so we hived off to the local Borders and the_weapon got a bunch of books that will be wrapped up and presented to him by the
Teacher-General of the Falcon Academy on the night.

And here is my problem.

I am currently packing stuff to move to another place. Both my wife and I have always been voracious readers and hence we have a truckload of books we have collected over two lifetimes to pack and move.

I can only hope my son becomes similarly enraptured with the written word. But I think before much longer he will be using e-readers for most of his reading and here is my question. For special occasions such as awards an e-reader text is not going to make much of a memory.

So how do we recognize such an achievement in the world of E-texts? A Platinum Nook, unlikely.

Probably I'd go with some expensive leather bound copy of a book he really likes, but they don't make a hardened MIL-STD-810 ( its book equivalent) edition of Max Brooks 'How to Survive a Zombie Uprising' and he already has attractive hard back editions of The Art of War and The Book of Five Rings.

Any other suggestions?

I see FEMA is taking it seriously

2010-09-11T22:04:00.000+10:00

We've had a few natural disasters around us lately. The earthquake in New Zealand, flooding in the northeast of the state, bad electrical storms towards to South Australian border. Then for some reason a work colleague who recently moved to the Dandenongs and faces bushfire risks asked me about what should go into a Bug Out Bag (BOB).

I don't know why she asked me?

Might be all the zombie squad posters I have around my office.

I admit I have a bug-out-bag for me and the_weapon, but It's not like I am over the top or anything. Not like these guys.

This is not to be confused with the Every Day Carry (EDC), which for me consists of a utility tool, a small bright torch, something I can use to light a fire, and duct tape. You'd be amazed how often you can find a use for duct tape. I like this brand.

Of course there are other organisations who are set up to provide advice for when TSHF (The Shit Hits the Fan) one of these in the US is The Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA After Hurricane Katrenia there was a lot of complaints about how FEMA handled the emergency. I have more confidence in the agency now after I saw a picture of the office of FEMA's Craig Fugate.

Yes there at the front of the pile of books is Max Brooks indispensable tome.

They may not know how to handle wind and rain, but should the undead walk the earth FEMA is ready.

.

I don't wanna have to do with out antibiotics

2010-08-22T13:29:00.002+10:00

Early notice is a key strategy to surviving the zombie apocalypse.

If you want to get clear of the cities in time, and by this I mean before the paths turn into a super rush hour deadlock, with extra emphasis on the DEAD. After all one man's traffic jam is another zombies' buffet. So I want to be well clear of the city, holed up in my alpha site and chowing down on my breakfast of Tactical Bacon & Eggs while the newspaper and radio is still at the 'reporting a mild outbreak of a new type of rabies' stage.

This is why I try to keep up with whats going on in the world of infection & disease. In the last few weeks there has been reports of a new type of antibiotic resistance found in bacteria with a man dying in Belgium (not of boredom). We've seen antibiotic resistant bacteria before MRSA and VRE are two I can think of that I don't have to try and spell, but this new one isn't specific to a bacteria. This resistance is due to a gene that can make an enzyme called NDM-1 and whats scary is that this gene is in the form of a plasmid. Those of us who have spent hours playing BIOSHOCK know plasmids can be incorporated into other organisms to provide traits. In this case allowing bacteria to resist antibiotics.

It was first mentioned in a British Journal in November 2009 and then in June 2010 the Centres for Disease Control in its Weekly Morbidity and Mortality report put out an alert on NDM-1.

I like reading the stuff CDC puts out.

I like to imagine there is a super competent agency well resourced with trained experts who spend all day running scenarios that prepare them for emergencies. I desperately want to believe that.

But I work for a government agency, so I know how these things work.

I don't know if anyone around remembers what it was like before antibiotics, but it sucked. The was no internet porn and TV didn't have the sci-fi channel and people would more likely than not DIE if they got an infection in hospital.

But that's why science rocks. Medical science has know this pharmageddon was coming and has been working to developed new ways to deal with bacteria. One discovery is a paint that when applied to a surface will continues to kill bacteria that come into contact.

So I won't be bugging out to the alpha site just yet, but world you are on notice. Just remember if can always get worse.

from stress research to global conspiracy

2010-08-06T12:21:00.003+10:00

Sometimes I despair of our civilization I really do. The level of scientific literacy throughout our culture for a society whose continued development so relies on understanding science and technology is nothing short of appalling when things like below can happen.

On 28 July I read a ‘Wired’ post titled ‘Under Pressure: The Search for a Stress Vaccine’ drawing on the work of Professor Robert Sapolsky an neuroendocrinologist at Stanford University. Sapolskyo wants to create a vaccine like treatment for chronic stress.

It was an interesting piece and I thought no more about it, the article itself is 6789 words long according to my Microsoft word count tool so I realise a lot of people won’t bother to read the whole thing let alone not seek out the original published articles by Sapolsky on the subject.

Then on 2nd August a London Daily Mail article claimed “developing the first vaccine for stress - a single jab that would help us relax without slowing down”. A bit shorter and omitting a few of the subtlties of the first report but still okay.

From here it transformes in the hands of Paul Joseph Watson on American talk radio host Alex Jones Prison Planet website

‘establishment Media Pushes Brain Eating Vaccines’

Really?

What really annoys me is the article concludes with “promoting a new viral Google search term in order to attract much needed attention to this grave issue. Search for “brain eating vaccines” and by elevate this term to the top of Google trends, we can reach millions of new people who would otherwise never have come across this information".

Then on the 3rd of August the terms ‘brain eating vaccine’ shot to No.3 on the Google trends search terms. Thankfully for my own stress levels it has been replaced by such important trends as ‘Emma Watsons haircut’ and ‘Wyclef Jean president’.

The stupid it burns I found at Phil Plat's bad astronomy website I hope he doesn't mind me using it.

Can I suggest a new viral google search term in order to attract much needed attention to this grave issue.

Paul Joseph Watson is an incorrect loud mouth, how about that?

Obviously its been a week to ban things Zombie

2010-07-22T09:42:00.004+10:00

Most of you know Australians, at least on line. You’ve met some of us. Do we come across as a bunch on wowsers? I hope not. However this is the impression you get from our news. Our proposed internet filter, police seizure
photographic exhibitions or outrage at some overseas films.

An adventure in cinema's most unmarketable subgenre - gay zombie porn

Once again its Melbourne International Film Festival MIFF time and some how every year MIFF manages to stir up controversy, and I suspect sales, by hosting a ‘controversial’ film. You know the sort of film: foreign, extreme , probably only would have been seen by six people, often involving an erect naked penis. Normally I would ignore this but this year the controversy film they have is Bruce LaBruce’s gay zombie porn film L.A. Zombie. This week the Australian Film Classification Board (AFCB) director Donald McDonald sent a letter refusing classification for the film, effectively banning it.

The film follows an alien zombie who roams the streets of Los Angeles in search of dead bodies and gay sex - an activity that reveals a gift of ''shagging'' the deceased back to life.

So even with Zombies, I probably wasn’t going to see this one. But just because I don’t want to see full-frontal nude scenes and erect penises or zombies with cucumber-shaped penises which are clearly prosthetic, doesn’t mean I think adults who want to shouldn’t be allowed.

Bad show Australian Film Classification Board, bad show.

Zombie Queen Mary

When I was in the UK I saw a tourist place called the London Dungeon – it advertises itself as “1000 years of dark history, 13 Shows, live actors and 2 scary rides” – an obvious destination for a seven year old who loves reading the Horrible History books. It seems the latest show ‘Bloody Mary’ was being advertised with digital billboards on the London Underground.

Four people complained that the zombie Queen Mary - complete with bloody gashes on her face, rotting teeth and red eyes - had terrified their children. As a result the UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ruled that the poster should not be used again as it had 'terrified' children and breached fear and distress guidelines

Terrifying Children?

Isn’t that what the stories we tell them are meant to do, cautionary tales so that they can be prepared to face the dangers of the world. Have any of these people actually read a traditional European children’s fairy tale? Read the stories in their religious texts? Or even a half way accurate account of Queen Mary’s reign? How else can we prepare them to face the wandering mutant zombies hordes in the ravaged wasteland of the apocalypse if we don’t tell them the right stories with startling moving images, preferably in 3-D.

Look What I've been reading, and no its not After America

2010-07-07T17:31:00.002+10:00

Apologies for the hiatus in posts, I was riding my motorcycle to work and got clipped by a truck, even with full leathers, helmet and boots I was a bit banged up and have been recovering. Many thanks to those who called/posted it cheered me up when I was feeling pretty down. Hope I never have to return the favour.

In Zombie News I was very kindly sent a copy of James Phelan’s Alone by the Author. This is the first in his new series Chasers. Nothing I am about to tell you that you can’t find on the back of the novel.

The Australian protagonist Jesse is on a UN Youth Ambassadors camp in New York when his subway carriage is rocked by an explosion. Jesse and his three friends, Anna, Dave and Mini, crawl out from the wreckage only to discover a city in chaos. Streets are deserted. Buildings are in ruins. Worse, the only other survivors seem to be infected with a virus that turns them into horrifying predators

It was a cracker to read, I particularly liked that these teenagers are savvy 21^st century types who have grown up with a culture saturated with the post apocalyptic and how to survive it. At one point a character is asked how he knows this stuff, about "..fallback plans, especially once we leave here; more weapons, just in case.." to which his response is "Playstation, XBox'. This exchange sums up why this story works and so many other stories of the surviving the zombieapocalypse just annoy me. The protagonist doesn’t make a mistake, knows what to do and thinks things through logically for the horrific but not unforeseeable situation.

It’s a pacy little thriller I finished in one sitting which I think is a testimony to the author’s readability. My one complaint is that I have to wait until 'late 2010 to read the next book. Survivor.

Why we blog

2010-05-22T19:49:00.005+10:00

I have been wondering, why do I post?

I don't have a cool reason like Flintheart, who posts so that his children have a record of their time growing up. I don't have a blog to satisify an army of minions ready to be unleashed upon the net to do my bidding like Birmo and his cheeseburgers, nor am I an awesome weaver of tales like lovely Ms Jenniki or her mischievous brother Loki.

So why should I blog?

It's a feeling of responsibility, that in return for all that I get from reading everyones thoughts, considered opinions, structured arguments, rants, expositions and tales I need to contribute something as well. Which in my case is alerting all the to the dangers of the zombieapocalypse. Here is a quick round up.

It's official. Galaxy 15 is a Zombiesat.
What chance do we have, not only do undead walk, but now they have their own satellite and I read it that could block the signal from another communication satellite for a two week period in late May, perhaps interrupting the final episode of Lost. I hope Jenniki's zombie plan included that contingency.

Apparel
I think I have found my next T-shirt

FEED
Thanks to a recommendation from the ever brilliant Orin I am keenly awaiting a great Zombie novel just released called FEED. When I read that the author Mira Grant is a serious virology nut whose dinner conversations include 'guess what I learned about MRSA today' and she sleeps with machete under her pillow, you know just in case -I am seriously excited about this novel.

Not Happy
I am less impressed to discover the novel Brains: A zombie Memoir by Robert Becker has a protagonist who is a zombie who can think. As if that wasn't band enough he went and named him Barnes. Colour me less than impressed. (Zombie Island by David Wellington did the zombie who thinks first and better)

Dead Winter
A excellent webcomic that Flinthart found and passed on to me. It's a character driven piece where you are really interested in the characters, not just waiting to see how they stuff up and die. FH says it's a good story even without zombies, ZED is just the icing on the cake. For me ZED is the icing, the sponge, the jam layer and the plate.

and finally

I worked out why I like Star Gate Universe SGU
There has been much posting over at Cheeseburger and the learned Mr Boylan's blog about the new stargate series. I was a fan as soon as I heard there were space lesbians. And as an aside isn't everything good automatically made better when space is added to it. For example Lesbians - already awesome, make it SPACE LESBIANS and is like awesome raised to the ninth power.

So that aside and really Mr Boylan makes a beautifully and well crafted argument for the role of SGU in the development of science fiction. For me it was when I had the epiphany that SGU is a post- apocalyptic drama.

The sort of drama I love.

The characters find themselves thrown together on a ship on the other side of the universe, the ship is old and resources air, water and food are limited. They have to work together to survive with little or no chance of ever seeing the world they knew again. The band are the usual ill matched combination of skills, experience and temperament that the PA stories make the nuts and bolts of the narrative and instead of facing zombies or mutants they have blue skinned aliens.

Did I mention there were space lesbians.

A great night thanks bob

2010-04-18T20:22:00.008+10:00

A great night was had on the weekend, GuruBob was bacheloring so the call went out and Myself, the_weapon and gentleman John rallied around for a couple of hours of curry and boardgaming.

Beginning with the old staple - ZOMBIES

GuruBob looked like he was going to stroll off to the helipad until he suffered a brain freeze and wandered through a police station full of zombies. It was gentleman Johnathon in a stylish evening suit as he waved farewell to us out from the rapidly fleeing chopper as we fell under a wave of undead.

Then onto Arkham Horror
In deference to the_weapons underdeveloped liver we forwent the Advance insanity rules. For those unaware, and it is unlikely that either of you that read this haven't yourself played the odd game in the past, a quick recap.

The game is loosely based on the writings of HP Lovecraft's worlds of unspeakable (but obviously not unwritable) eldrich horror he spun back in the 1920s. You play characters who travel around a town and try shut down portals to other alien dimensions seeking allies, clues and tools whilst battling terrifying nightmare beasts and cultists with many visits to hospital and insane asylum to recover while the doom edges closer. A co-operative effort which saw the Miskitonic campus security, the FBI and the towns own police more effective at killing the monsters than our team.

Still bags of fun.

So anyone who is a big fan of the writings, one of the great nightmares is the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep - He is a horror with infinite shapes, the soul and messenger of the Other Gods

"And at last from inner Egypt came / The strange dark One to whom the fellahs bowed...And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods — the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep."

so everyone got that, nameless, sprawling chaos of horror something like this.....

In his In his first appearance in "Nyarlathotep", he is described as a "tall, swarthy man" who resembles an ancient Egyptian... so he can take human form, however

On one of the anime blogs I came across this - a 'high tension chaotic comedy of light novels are being adapted into a Falsh anime project called Haiyory! Nyaru -Ani

The story centers around Nyarlathotep, a formless Cthulhu deity who can take on the shape of anyone it wishes, but particularly the shape of a seemingly ordinary silver-haired girl. Mahiro Yasaka is a normal high school student who is chased by aliens one night, until "Nyaruko" saves him. Seen as depicted on the right.

WTF

I realise he can take whatever form he likes but seriously the crawling chaos is walking around as a preteen girl? Being unaware of the amount of terror and destruction a preteen girl can unleash I turn to you to ask is this an unreasonable form to take?

I bet you wish you'd thought of it

2010-03-19T21:48:00.003+11:00

Last year Seth-Grahame Smith and Quirk books released the mash up hit,

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Given the elephant bucks it made, how little work it took to insert ninjas and zombies in to a long since out of copywrite text Quirk went on to try to fill a whole shelf load of these, like 'Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters'

Honestly there are publishers and writers (authors are successful enough not to care, writers are folk who have to take any work offered to make money) kicking themselves that they didn't think of this.

While Seth-Grahame Smith has tried to move, a least a couple of genre shelves along at the Borders books store from the monster success of PP&Z with his alternative history novel

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter

and with talks of a movie staring Padme Amediala (sorry Natalie Portman), It was inevitable we would return to the novel which started it all.

Quirk have announce a Prequel

Now I love a prequel almost as much as I love have my fortune read. Charlie Jane Anders the IO9 blogger had eloquently expressed what annoys me about prequels in her piece Prequels aren't just dumb, they're Evil. So I was probably going to let this one slide until I saw the fanficmade trailer for the book.

Now I have watched A LOT of zombie movies and some, perhaps many of them are woeful.
This one I liked.

We got it right this time

2010-03-16T20:57:00.006+11:00

Today I took the_weapon to get the latest influenza vaccine that's become available this past week at the local medical centre. For $14 not only does he get increased protection against the (hopefully) upcoming seasonal flu but it also includes the H1N1 Vaccine so he has some protection against swine flu as well.

As a fan of those films where threats to humanity are faced off by steely eyed, squared jawed, well trained and well resourced team of professionals who have plans and contingencies ready to enact at the first sign of a threat. So I was kinda pleased how the health community and the public organised in response to the threat swine flu posed.

I realise its not over yet and some will claim that it was no big deal and we over reacted. To those I offer the following from the latest Australian Influenza report

In 2010, as at 5 March, there have been 50 confirmed cases of pandemic (H1N1) 2009 influenza reported in Australia, bringing the total of confirmed cases to 37,686 since 2009.

Or as more graphically put by the CDC in the United States.
For a parent these are chilling numbers, but they are only numbers. The late epidemiologist Irving Selikoff once referred to a statistic as "people with the tears wiped away." A friend, referring to someone who lost a child, shook his head and just said, "It's off the scale."

Flintheart over on his blog was talking about "The thing is, Stupid only has to win big once, and that's your whole fucking life trashed, right there" I have to say we as a society are doing the stupid when we allow vaccination levels to drop.

I was hearted to hear from the receptionist behind the counter that they had been really busy with people getting vaccinations. There is hope yet for us as a species. Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy notwithstanding.

Family values

2010-03-08T12:08:00.003+11:00

The past couple of weeks the_weapon and I have been getting up at sparrowsfart to get him in for training. He is on the Falcon Academy team swim and they got through the district competition and on to the zones and regionals.

At the last meet I was sitting with the_weapon while we watched the team swim. One of the girls in his class MissyK was swimming. MissyK is from a family of evangelical Christians so in the past she has invited the_weapon along to her church. Needless to say being raised by a militant atheist he chose to decline, repeatedly.

MissyK swam stone dead last in her heat and she was pretty broken up about it, visibly upset as she got out of the pool and walking back. The_weapon got up and started to head over to her. I though what a caring, empathetic child I had.

I then remembered this is my child I was thinking about.

I jumped up and caught up to him before he spoke to her and said

"No asking, where is her messiah now, okay?"

The look on his face confirmed my suspicions. Fortunately by now one of the teachers was providing solace to distraught aquatic Christian.

So I think we have passed on the family value of atheism. As such I am excited that the Global Atheism festival is coming to Melbourne. Not enough stuff to hold a 10 year olds attention but still plenty happening around town like the atheism bus

and I am comfortable with that. What about you folk, any traits your family's have you want to ensure are passed on. Musicial talent, freakish recall of sporting minutia, ability to roll your tongue into a tube?

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is unintentional and purely coincidental.

2010-02-15T21:29:00.003+11:00

This week we rescue a world from mysticism and tyranny, and helped usher in a future brighter than anything we could imagine.

2010-02-05T15:21:00.005+11:00

1st WIN
The BBC has reported UK General Medical Council (GMC) has found that Dr Andrew Wakefield acted "dishonestly and irresponsibly" when doing the research that led him to conclude that MMR vaccinations were linked with autism.

Dr Wakefield published a paper in the peer reviewed medical journal the Lancet 351 (9103): 637–41 in Feburary 1998 titled ‘Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children.’

What did he do wrong?

The panel found that his research (involving spinal taps of children) was against the children’s clinical interest, that he was unqualified to perform the test, and that he had no ethical approval to do them.

Since then 10 of the 13 authors have retracted the conclusions. Alsoevidence has come to light that that Dr Wakefield may have faked the results of the study. Also he failed at the time he was conducting his research to declare his conflict of interests that he was being paid to develop his own commercial rival to the MMR vaccine.

This paper launched the Vaccines cause Autism scare, which has and is still leading to people to not get their children vaccinated, which has lead to a reduction in herd immunity which has meant that children too young to yet be vaccinated are exposed to diseases which had, at least in western countries, almost disappeared as cause of death. If you think that parents who don't get their children vaccinated only endanger their own kids read this letter and if your heart doesn’t break then you are not human. And I know the plural of anaecdote is not fact so here is the report from the Age last year showing in Australia the rise in reported cases of measles (measles for Frak sake) is on the rise.

2nd win
No doubt in an attempt to put this whole thing to bed The Lancet has formally retracted the paper published by Andrew Wakefield back in 1998 that linked vaccines with autism. From the Lancet..

Following the judgment of the UK General Medical Council’s Fitness to Practise Panel on Jan 28, 2010, it has become clear that several elements of the 1998 paper by Wakefield et al. are incorrect, contrary to the findings of an earlier investigation. In particular, the claims in the original paper that children were “consecutively referred” and that investigations were “approved” by the local ethics committee have been proven to be false. Therefore we fully retract this paper from the published record.

3rd win

Perhaps the sweetest is this tit bit of news posted by the young Skeptics. Meryl Dorey the anti-science nutter who was best described by the Australian skeptics as "the truth-impaired mouthpiece of the Australian Vaccination Network, a group of antivaccination conspiracy-mongers who couldn’t find reality with both hands, a compass, and detailed instructions" has said

“..After almost 17 years of running the AVN, it is my bittersweet duty to inform you that within the next 3–4 weeks I will tendering my resignation as President of this great organisation and moving on to the next stage of my own personal development as mother, wife, activist and researcher".

Ms Dorey was the one on national television said “no one dies from pertussis anymore” even when the parents of the four-week-old Dana McCaffrey who died of that very disease were in the audience.

So after all of this you would hope the Anti Vaccine movement would be on its last legs.

Pigs arse

The GMC panel chairman was heckled by supporters of Dr Andrew Wakefield during his delivery of the verdicts.

People, children are dying and it’s because of bad thinking.

We must stop this, and the first step is to be aware of the problem. Knowledge is half the battle. If we can't eliminate childhood diseases like this then how do we hope to prevent to spread of Zombie virus across the planet when it occurs?

We eat every part of the Hammerhead Titanothere

2010-01-11T14:19:00.003+11:00

Last week GuruBob, Gentleman Jonathon and the Artist known as KPM caught up and along with fine dinning (try the shredded pig) and some L4D2 action (Crap we're all dead AGAIN) we went see AVATAR or as some have quipped 'Dances with Space Wolves'.

This is completely untrue as it is much closer to the Disney story of Pocahontas as you can see here. Not the real story of Pocahontas where she marries a white guy, goes to England, tries to return home and dies of illness.

Others have provided their take on the film, click on each for their full review

Chazfh – Sherlock Holmes was better and more original,

Moko –Spectacular,

PNB in spite of the near naked blue chicks found the 3D annoying, and

I am looking forward to Flintheart’s take on this one as he provids insights which I never pick up on but once he mentions them the little epiphany light bulb goes off above my head, like his analysis of Indiana Jones as a force of nature.

The movie has made elephant bucks and given James Cameron’s last outing TITANIC also made elephant buck as well this guy will no doubt get the green light to do what ever he wants for his next film. He has already said he considering a sequel. I bet he won’t be using the one mapped out by The Rhino here

“You do realize that the Nav'i only have approximately 14 to 16 years to live after the end of the movie don't you?...if I was the Corporation guy I would just sit back and pummel them with kinetic weapons from orbit."

Whatever eventuates we must STOP James Cameron from choosing the song to play over the closing credits. For Titanic it was ‘My heart will go on’ by Celine Dion and for Avatar it was ‘My heart will go on and on again’ by Leona Lewis or that’s what it sounded like to me.

Some commentators such as Armond White of the New York Press have claimed it misrepresents the facts of militarism, capitalism, imperialism — and their comforts. Australia’s Miranda Devine and Greg Sheridan are expectably annoyed by the "anti-American" or "anti-Western" message. University of Newcastle’s Hamish Ford has written a more nuanced reading click here where identifies the movie as “Towing the familiar liberal line, for the "other" to be "good" they must need one of us to save them.”

The Nav’i live in harmony with their forest moon world (anyone else wanted to shout Ewok at this point) where they spend their days running, jumping, flying and mindfracking the local wildlife. It is such a noble, idyllic life that some AVARTARDs are suffering depression at the thought that they can’t live on Pandora. Over at Naviblue.com - James Cameron's Avatar Movie Fan Site this was posted.

“Ever since i (sic) went to see Avatar i have been depressed. Watching the wonderful world of Pandora and all the Na'vi made me want to be one of them. I cant stop thinking about all the things that happened in the film and all of the tears and shivers i got from it. I even contemplate suicide thinking that if i do it i will be re birthed in a world similar to Pandora and the everything is the same as in Avatar.. I cant find joy in this world since Ive seen it, and the only thing that makes me happy is thinking about it or when im seeing it next, which is Saturday at the imax.. I doubt anyone will understand the feelings I'm having..but if you are..tell me..”

Frak me

Being trapped on Pandora for me would be a nightmare. There can be no sense of change or development. I can imagine for the past 1000 years the Nav’I doing exactly the same thing. Obviosuly not for the next 100 years, see above. That’s not a thriving, dynamic culture, that’s a dead end. For me a world greatest achievements come from what is overcome and accomplished. Managing to ride a big bird contrast with flying across interstellar space. That sense of learning, discovery and boundless horizons. So it was the science team who wanted to explore this planetary network that I was rooting for, not the nav’i.

And I have to say Colonel Miles Quaritch was pretty fraking hard-core!

So I think AVATAR will be remembered like ‘The toll of the sea’ the first feature film in colour or ‘The Jazz Singer’ the first talking movie.

I'm a better parent than Nicolas Cage

2009-12-15T16:38:00.003+11:00

Like every other parent I try to help my off-spring to be a strong, self reliant, mult-skilled survivor of the coming Zombie apocalypse. From the how-to-make-yourself Apocalypse ready guide here giving him cooking skills based on the London chef Will Sprunt's Apocalypse chow, and signing him up for CDC's Disease Detective Camp for the holidays I would like to think I am laying the foundation for a citizen who will standing against the coming darkness.

But in the recent clip from the soon to be released Movie adaptation of the comic book (sorry graphic novel) Kick-Ass I realise I have been neglecting an important aspect of the_weapon's training.

What a softie!

There's is no way I'd have agreed to ice cream with Chocolate Syrup and nuts.

I hate motherhood statements

2009-12-09T18:24:00.006+11:00

The Falcon Academy’s handbook states they have '...a zero tolerance to bullying'.

Does anyone know any educational facility that claims to have anything OTHER than a zero tolerance to bullying? Anyone claiming a 25% tolerance, or a tolerance to within an acceptable margins, a zero plus or minus 2% tolerance?

Didn’t think so.

Couldn’t we all do with a few less meaningless, bleedingly obvious but pointless motherhood statements in our lives. If any of you says these claims are aspirational, I will have to hurt you.

Zero Tolerance.

For me it conjures up images of dedicated killer satellites in geostationary orbit above the school constantly monitoring conversation, phone calls, notes passed in class and the boys toilets for repeated flushing. The satellites poised to deliver a beam of coruscating energy to any transgressor.

Or perhaps a robot that patrols the grounds and is ready to intervene, something like the big white balls from 1970s TV series The Prisoner.

At a parents and teachers evening the head of the junior school explained this wasn’t the case. They identify any bully-like behaviour and seek to intervene as soon as possible to prevent it from occurring.

I wasn’t sure I wanted a policy that would lead to no bullying at all. If the school succeeds in this policy then the moment someone begins to harass someone else they are stopped and removed. This means the kids who would get picked on will be fine while they are on the school grounds but later off the grounds or in after leaving school they would have practice. This doesn't sound like good preparation for the real world.

I wonder if they’d be better off with a mix of strategies.

Its easy to spot the sort of kids that will get picked on at school. Ask any teacher and they will tell you which in their class are the targets. How about the school employs an elderly Korean guy, nominally as a janitor or gardener and he secretly trains up those likely kids with a few techniques so that when the do inevitably get picked on the bully gets his arse handed to him. This only has to happen a few times and the bully gives up on trying to pick on the chess team.

Identify the bullies in the school and then get the kids likely to be bullied to hire ninjas to go to town on them every time one of them gets picked on. An example if one kid’s lunch money gets stolen every bully on the list gets a visit from ninjas who steal all their clothes during swimming.

A shakedown scheme where the kids identify the biggest bully and pay him/her off to prevent any other bullies from picking on them.

Whenever a bully shows up all the kids just turn to face him, point and do the open mouth scream from ‘Invasion of the body snatches’.

After a month there is a two day battle royal (because this is SPARTA) where the kids just fight it out, after making sure that only the kids not identified as bullies have been taught how to organise and work as a team. Plus tell them where there is a stash of stuff to make traps.

But I would love to see a big white ball on playground duty.

Its better with Monkeys

2009-11-28T20:57:00.004+11:00

As you may have guessed I am a massive fan of science, maths, engineering and technology.

In my fiction I'll take rayguns over wizard staffs; in my NEWS I'll twitter the Large Hadron Collider before I follow our prime ministers; and at cub scouts I'll demonstrate how to make carbon dioxide volcanoes over Christmas wreaths. My geek-fu is strong and science is so cool right now. Any one else notice in the US president Obama's speech on the 'Educate to Innovate Campaign' not only did he have Adam and Jamie from Mythbusters there but he put those sentient machines on notice -

"As President, I believe that robotics can inspire young people to pursue science and engineering. And I also want to keep an eye on those robots, in case they try anything". Full speech here.

So for my family movies I'll take 'Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs' over a misbehaving Max in a wolf suit.

The film is based (very loosely) on the Judi and Ron Barrett 1978 book. Instead the movie is an origin story, (SPOILER ALERT) with an unappreciated inventor type called Flynn who hummed his own action soundtrack when he moves through to his lab. This was so cool I now do this whenever I enter the office at work. He invents a number of things which become (in one case literally) running gags through out the rest of the movie.

This movie demonstrated to me the corrollary to my axiom that 'every story can be improved with zombies'. Every kids movie can be improved with monkeys.

They have chosen to go with The Incredibles style CGI for the characters thus avoiding the whole uncanny valley problem with animated people.

I found the story bright, colourful, fun and science can do great things as long as evil mayors are not involved. The_weapon is reading about the AZETCS at the moment or at least the horrible history bits of the AZTECS so he (SPOLIER ALERT AGAIN) went wild when Steve ripped the heart out of a person sized gummy bear and ate it.

I walked out thinking it was a great big great thumbs up for my Science is AWESOME philosophy. My_reason_for_living wondered if I missed that it was science that causes all the problems in the first place. I considered and replied - but it fixed it! The_weapon laughed through out much of the film but when we left he seemed quiet. When asked he replied he was thinking about 'the sad bit'.

I have no idea which was 'the sad bit' and he said he didn't want to talk about it. But he then said he really liked the movie. This has left me with the question.

What was the sad bit?

and does this mean my almost ten year old son is more emotionally developed than me.

Probably.

Is this behaviour insane?

2009-11-19T14:52:00.002+11:00

How many times do you have to repeat the same behaviour, each time expecting a different outcome and yet each time the same thing happens. How often before you realise its not ‘sticktoitness’ but insanity?

Supporters of sports teams are constantly doing this with their promise of ‘next year we’re going to win it all’. Gamblers looking for the next sure thing, or even serial marriers, “no this time its true love, as they marry their fourth wife”.

Well include me in this pattern of insanity too.

Each year around mid November I set my alarm, go out in the middle of the night in either a field, or any nearby open space where there are few or better no lights and look up towards the Northeast end of the sky around the sickle of Leo which is a curved asterism that marks the head of the Great Lion.

And for the past eight years I have only seen either: Clouds, dusts, a faint glow of light pollution, one year I even managed to get hailed on. How can the sky be obscured –Melbourne’s in the middle of a fraking HEAT WAVE, its not like the clouds are rolling in. So this is what I have seen, but no meteor shower of around 100 to 500 meteors per hour.

So why do I keep getting up and doing this, is it some form of obsessive compulsive behaviour previously undiagnosed?

Because in 2001 I got up to see the Leonids Meteor Shower (called this because it seems to originate from the constellation of Leo) and it was SPECTACULAR. Reports put the rate at 3000 meteors per hour.

This was not just a meteor shower.

Whenever the number of meteors exceeds 1000 per hour its called a meteor STORM. And as incredible that was it can be even better. In November 13, 1833 number of meteors exceeded 1000 per minute. Now the one I saw in 2001 wasn’t as much as that but still better than any fireworks display and amazing example of the terrifying beauty of the infinite cosmos I have never seen.

That’s why I get up.

That’s why I will keep getting up.

Because I want to be standing in a field in the middle of the night with the_weapon standing beside me and I want him to look up and see the wonder.

Has porn gone mainstream

2009-11-04T21:22:00.002+11:00

Sorry for the NSFW title, but I figured if your filters are as undiscriminating as mine are at work this post was never going to get through anyway.

No doubt you are familiar with house porn, those renovation shows we watch because we have sunk too much money into our mortgage can't afford to remodel the kitchen and food porn because we are too time poor to prepare these meals just look at them. Heck without these shows 90% of commercial TV would disspear.

Well I want to bring to your attention Competence Porn. The boys and girls over at TV Tropes seem to define it as "when part of a work's appeal comes from characters and organizations that don't panic when things go wrong, but rise to the occasion". This is a bit too general for me. Over at the blog for the show 'Leverage' blogg they say "people love the briefing scenes". Over at Geekdad he hit what it is I love about Competence porn Geekdad.

Its the scenes where people with expertise, experience and knowledge gather and argue a point. It can work one on one like Vader in Star Wars: A New Hope, Ghost in the Shell had buckets of it, The West Wing had some great scenes where they'd argue out some point each character displaying their breath of knowledge, also BSG had some great briefing room competency. Also its nice to see some one who is wrong smacked down using competency.

Why does it appeal to me?

I think its having worked in a variety of jobs my fantasy is now just to have bosses, leaders or colleagues that I can count on to do their jobs well, make choices of staff based on ability and competency not because they like the same jokes as you do, and make decisions based on reason and not expediency.

Hope springs eternal.

Its not a phobia, its a completely rational response

2009-10-21T20:47:00.007+11:00

If science fiction has taught us nothing else it's that when the sentient machine rise they will attempt to build machines that look like us, to infiltrate and destroy humanity. Think 'The Terminator', or Phillip K Dick's '2nd Variety' and 'Blade Runner'.

These constructed pseudo-humans creep me out. In the recently re-imaged Battlestar Galactica 2nd only to the most appalling ending to a beloved series I have every seen. (If you want a detailed reading as to why this comprehensively failed for me click here.) But a close second was the skin-job cyclons that looked like us.

And no I don't care how hot they look, they are evil and they have a plan.

And as disturbing as these are - it's those models between the T-800 of the Terminator and these almost flawless replicas that make my mind go screaming.

Anyone remember a movie called 'Final Fantasy: The Spirits within'? It was based on the video game of the same name and came out in 2001 . All CGI but trying to look like humans.

See WRONG.

The screaming in your head when you see these figures is caused by The Uncanny Valley. This hypothesis is when robots and other facsimiles of humans look and act almost, but not entirely, like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. The “valley” in question is a dip in a proposed graph of the positivity of human reaction as a function of a robot’s lifelikeness.

Any scientific graph is improved with Zombie

DAMN STRAIGHT.

So my feelings of revulsion at the idea of Honeydolls and those species traitors that use them - perfectly reasonable.

I am also pleased to see our primate brethren also share these excellent instincts. An article in New Scientist claims

Macaques are creeped out by cyber-selves

WRONG,WRONG, WRONG, WRONG, WRONG

Asif Ghazanfar and Shawn Steckenfinger of Princeton University wondered how five macaques would respond to monkey avatars. They found that the monkeys spent less time looking at the most realistic avatars - which they say suggests they dislike them (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

So I say - down with these monsters of our own creation, grab your pitchforks and follow.
Whose with me?

EPIC FAIL

2009-10-15T19:19:00.003+11:00

Vegemite is described on the Kraft food website as a "tasty spreadable paste made from brewer's yeast".In Terry Pratchett's 'The Last Continent' it is better described as a "salty-tasting beery brown gunk."

It's a thick, black paste that will provide a valuable source of vitamin B in the post-apocalyptic landscape because:
every home has a jar;
it doesn't need to be refrigeration;
I suspect it is largely immune to radiation; and
it is so salty that only extremophiles can survive in it so it will never go off.

The name was chosen in a national contest in 1923 and somehow it has so insinuated itself into the Australian cultural landscape that an ability to eat it on toast was considered a defining characteristic of being Australian, even though it is now owned by the big American food giant KRAFT.

Given such iconic status you'd think you'd be more careful how you treat the brand. Sinc
July this year Kraft sent out three million jars with the label "name me" and asked the public to send in their idea for the new Vegemite & cream cheese mix mmm YECH. 50,000 entries were received. A website posted the names and people began to generate the sort on-line buzz that suggested KRAFT had understood the new media and social networking.

and then KRAFT decided that the name would be

No really

the public went ballistic.

So in an effort to stem the firebombings they have now gone with VEGEMITE CHEESYBITE.

However with the internet, like Cuthulu do not call up that which you cannot put down.

Which has led to the following.

My spoiler free review of ZOMBIELAND

2009-10-10T13:41:00.005+11:00

It's AWESOME, go see it.

In fact is its so AWESOME for the next month I'll be attempting to use Woody Harrelson's character's catch phrase "Time to nut up, or shut up" as often as I can when I post.

For those overseas readers who think Australia is some tropical paradise I would reveal as well as having some of the most venomous spiders, snakes and jellyfish in the world we also have to wait until 3 DECEMBER to see this excellent training film.

In other Zombie media news the boys and girls over at Dreadcentral report that AMC is to get one of my favorite we_don't_spare_on_the_despair directors Frank Darabont of the movie 'The Mist' to write and produce a screen version of Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead. A excellent comix about life after the Zombie Apocalypse. It's not just the zombie slayage I come for but for the conversations, like this one.

But if you though McCarthy's The Road was bleak.. then this may not be for you.

C.P Snow's Two Cultures are battling it out in Suburban Melbourne

2009-09-26T20:19:00.003+10:00

I am a scientist by nature and training, while my_reason_for_living is a big brained Ph.D of Humanities.

So we are waged in a constant struggle over where the heart and mind of the nine year old weapon_against_society will lead.

I am pleased to declare that the forces of order and light have won a significant victory.

This week we got the_weapon's results from NAPLAN. The National Assessment Program for literacy and numeracy conducted on every year three student in Australian schools. The_weapon tested high in everything, but it was in numeracy he kicked butt. He did so well we considered getting him tested genetically to see if he is Asian.

There are a lot of things which contributed to this, lots of time on basic numeracy drills, he works a lot on an on-line program called Mathletics and he is learning piano and there is some evidence that it contributes to mathematical ability though there is some question over correlation and causation. Kids who are good at maths do well at music or the learning music helps them do maths.

The final salvo came when the_weapon declared one evening

"I want to be a particle physicist"

I suspect interest in quatum mechanics comes from the same place he learned the song he was singing on a street corner in Brisneyland last week to a friends Ipod

Our whole universe was in a hot dense state,
Then nearly fourteen billion years ago expansion started. Wait...
The Earth began to cool,
The autotrophs began to drool,
Neanderthals developed tools,
We built a wall (we built the pyramids),
Math, science, history, unraveling the mysteries,
That all started with the big bang!

But not to be complacent I am seeking out other ways to brainwash the_weapon. Yes I realise its brainwashing any parent who calls it anything like socialization is deluding themselves, parenting is all about brainwashing and operant conditioning.

The latest tool in my arsenal to get him to join the side of science. The excellent work of the band 'The Might Be Giants' and their CD 'Here Comes Science'. Which has the_weapon singing this song around the house.

I love diggin' in the dirt
With just a pick and brush
Finding fossils is my aim
So I'm never in a rush
The treasures that I seek
Are rare and ancient things
Like velociraptor's jaw
Or archaeopteryx's wing

And all the kids
Who wanna see 'em
Are lining up
At our museum

I am a paleontologist
That's who I am, that's who I am, that's who I am
I am a paleontologist
That's who I am, that's who I am, that's who I am

so any other suggestions for ways to produce a science head?

Waiting for the letter

2009-09-04T14:33:00.004+10:00

It was Book Week at the Falcon Academy. Come as a character in a story the notice in the_Weapon's communication journal read.

These things send a chill through my spine as I try to imagine how these events can unfold without the_weapon and I ending up having to meet with the Academy’s Psychologist / Counsellor.

The day comes and the kids are there in the sort of garb you’d expect: pirates; witches; a ninja. I thought there would be more Harry Potters but they were very few on the ground.

So what did my son go as?

Well

He recently read a children’s edition of H.G.Wells ‘The Time Machine’. So he went as A MORLOCK he even had a business card to hand out to anyone that asked:

I AM A MORLOCK
Apex predator of 8,028th century
“it was a dull white, and had strange large greyish-red eyes; also that there was flaxen hair on its head and down its back”
- H.G Wells The Time Machine

One of his class mates -an odious youth, the sort who presents a charming face to his superiors but beneath dwells a sneer for any he does not consider his circle, asked in a dismissive tone.

"A Morlock, why’d you want to be that"?

The_Weapon, chewing a large chicken drumstick that we had negotiated as a suitable substitute for long pork, turned to look him in the eye and said loud enough for all to hear:

“I’d rather be predator than prey,…..Eloi”.

So here I am waiting for the letter from the principle to attend a meeting to discuss my child's choice of interests,

again.

NATIONAL SCIENCE WEEK

2009-08-15T14:16:00.002+10:00

The bestest week of the year

Down in Australia it's national science week. To get on board with the activities check out the web site here. We kicked it off last night at the cub pack sleep over participating in the Big Aussie Star Hunt.

But of the many benefits offered by Science this one caught my eye. By mathematicians at the Carlton University & University of Ottowa have completed research on

WHEN ZOMBIES ATTACK!: MATHEMATICAL MODELLING OF AN OUTBREAK OF ZOMBIE INFECTION

Here is a link to the chapter.

It examines three possible stratigies

quarantine (could lead to eradication, but unlikely to happen)
treatment (some humans survive, but they still must coexist with zombies),

but shows that there is REALLY only one strategy likely to succeed:

“impulsive eradication.”

I love it -

“impulsive eradication.”

Probably like the impulsive eradication demonstrated in the new trailer for the upcoming survival training video with Woody Harrelson 'ZOMBIELAND'

The study goes on to record “Only sufficiently frequent attacks, with increasing force, will result in eradication, assuming the available resources can be mustered in time,” they concluded.

And if we don’t act fast enough?

“If the timescale of the outbreak increases, then the result is the doomsday scenario: an outbreak of zombies will result in the collapse of civilization, with every human infected, or dead,” they wrote. “This is because human births and deaths will provide the undead with a limitless supply of new bodies to infect, resurrect and convert.”

How fast do we need to deal with the outbreak?

Here’s the equation they used, where S = susceptibles, Z = zombies and R = removed. If an infection breaks out in a city of 500,000 people, the zombies will outnumber the susceptibles in about three hours.

So there it is -Aim for the head and shoot fast.

This is an example where the world of academia is providing useful advice to deal with real world situations.

I love science.

A day that will live in INFAMY

2009-08-12T13:48:00.002+10:00

A date which will live in infamy…no matter how long it may take us to overcome this, …the American people, in their righteous might, will win through…."

Obviously he was referring to the granting of a U.S. patent 735,777 on 12 August 1903 to the KATO coffee company for “Coffee Concentrate and process of making same”

That right INSTANT COFFEE was unleashed upon the world at the PAN AMERICIAN Exposition in Buffalo later that year. This was probably what led to president William McKinley being shot when he visited the fair in September.

I admit it is a luxury, but a fine espresso is a civilized start to any day and a cup of instant coffee is an abomination.

"No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness". ~Sheik Abd-al-Kadir

“It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the beans of Java the thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning. It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion” my co-workers get nervous when I start muttering this.

Whose up for a cup?

With this much irony

2009-07-20T14:56:00.002+10:00

…….. surely it must be a carefully thought out marketing strategy.

On 17 July 2009 owners of an Amazon Kindle who had bought copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm found their copies deleted remotely and their purchase refunded to their accounts

HOLY CRAP

It's something of a worry for me as this year after having to pack up all my books for a move I promised myself that I had purchased my last hard copy book. (Emergency by Neil Strass if you are interested) I had heard good things about the Kindle, admittedly all about the US edition with its wireless capabilities, but so much so I was considering handing over the hard earn readies when it was picked up by an Australian distributor.

But after Amazon’s tanty last year attempting to remove listings on ‘Adult material’ but which seems to have selectively and disproportionaly targeted authors of homosexual, gay or queer writings as covered in Flinhart’s blog here.

Now this latest stunt. You wonder if Amazon has been bought out by the fundamentalists.

Surely someone at Amazon is self aware enough to have realised to retrospectively try and remove a book you purchased from you, which was described by one of the readers of David Pogue’s Tech Blog at The New York Times “….it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table..”. is particularly rediculous when it involves books that as a theme talk about cencorship and control of knowledge.

What’s next, wiping out copies of Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’ with a little flaming icon on the screen while it was removed.

Though its all over who owns the rights to republish electronic copies of Orwell’s books needless to say I am rethinking my plans to purchase a Kindle as my eBook reader. Scifi’s Scott Edelman has quipped - As Orwell once wrote, "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows." To that we add, freedom is the freedom to keep the book we paid for.

My favourite news quote so far about this is by Seattlest’s “Amazon's Kindle--Now with New Take-Backsies Feature”.

Anyone got any e-book readers they would suggest?

With this must irony…..

2009-07-20T14:24:00.005+10:00

What’s next, wiping out copies of Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’ with a little flaming icon on the screen while it was removed.

My favourite news quote so far about this is by Seattlest’s “Amazon's Kindle--Now with New Take-Backsies Feature”.

Anyone got any e-book readers they would suggest?

Per aspera ad astra

2009-07-16T21:56:00.005+10:00

Here men from the planet Earth first set foot on the Moon. July 1969 A.D.

We came in peace for all mankind.

It’s the inscription on a metal plaque on the legs of the lunar landing module which has sat for the last 40 years on a feature named the ‘Sea of Tranquility’ on earth's Moon.

For a geek there is no bigger day in the calendar than 16 July the anniversary of the moon landing. The_weapon and I have been trying to make a Lego tribute but the Lunar Lander (Lem) is proving a challenge. A much simpler tribute is the work of a fan using the lego from the time of the landings..

Nothing since has fired the imagination of the world. No other event is pointed to as a pinnacle of our technological achievement to compare all others -‘if we can land men on the moon, why can’t we….(insert desired)?” was a frequent lament for the decades after. A generation of engineers and scientists were created because of the zeitgeist of the goal to land men on the moon. There was a feeling our future would be ever upward, a bright shinny utopia.

But it’s been forty years. Now we seem to view the future more with fear and trepidation, less optimism and enthusiasm than ever before.

Why ?

In that forty years were’ve discovered more, learned of wonders both sublime and gross, we have more people and hence more of the most evolved thinking machines ever devised living longer, with access to better tools and more information that we have had in the past centuries. To those who lived a thousand years ago we in countries like Australia, Britain and the United States would be judged as Gods. Even the rest of the world is racing to catch up to our opportunities.

Yes there are problems but hope beats despair any day for trying to fix something.

So we need a new Apollo program to once again inspire hope, but its hard to imagine one that will fire the imagination like the first. The Large Hadron Collider excites me and a lot of other geeks but hasn’t caught the public’s imagination, other than as a tool for hacks like Dan Brown to portray as the evils of science personified. The human genome project gets me hot and sweaty but had to generate an iconic image like the photo ‘earthrise’.

A permanent colony on the moon? Its an obvious step but more a commercial operation like setting up research station in Antarctica sur a technical challange but no ones going to make a movie about it. A walk on Mars?

No for me I want a crewed journey to another star system - that’s what I want to see.

But then to get the funding they would probably want to run it as a live streaming reality program something like Ron Battlestar Galactica Moore’s new series ‘Virtuality’ which is a little depressing. Not the show, though I am sure there will be depression in, after all if you are stuck on a ship with the same people for 10 years that's bound to make you a bit blue at times. I meant depressing you need reality TV to drive space exploration.

Still Per aspera ad astra

I leave you with a piece of music which for many people, myself included, can’t hear without thinking of humanity’s exploration of space.

Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. Op. 30 from 2001: a Space Odyssey

So what should be the next great adventure ?

It's not Crocodiles & Alligators any more

2009-07-02T19:26:00.004+10:00

A few months ago I came across this report

"for the third time in just over a month, a healthy human placenta has been found by workers at the Urbana-Champaign Sanitary District. Urbana Police contacted the Champaign-Urbana Public Health District (CUPHD), and the Champaign County Coroner's Office for assistance with this unusual situation".

at the time the question was asked OK mainly over at IO9,

"which mad doctor has been doing experiments with transgenic babies in the sewers again? Seriously, if you're going to be hatching superhuman babies in your underground lair, don't flush the evidence down the toilet, genius/"

Which is where I assume the story would end.

However below is footage posted on youtube from a private contractor using sewer cam to inspect a drain in the sewers under Cameron Village in Raleigh, North Carolina. Yes I realise its a bit blurry but give me a break is a fibre optical cable as thin as a pencil inserted up the rectum of a city -do you really want HD. Honestly watch it, especially when it shudders -

That's just disturbing.

New York State University biologist Thomas Kwak claimed the sewer ball monster, can some one come up with a more mediapathic title for this beastie please? Kwak claimed the monster was thousands of tiny organisms called bryozoans, or moss animacules. "Invertebrates, they bunch together in colonies and feed with tiny tentacles".

Sounds good, plausable after all this is what bryozoans look like,

Dr. Timothy S. Wood, an expert on freshwater bryozoa and an officer with the International Bryozoology Association. He said:".....No, these are not bryozoans! They are clumps of annelid worms, almost certainly tubificids (Naididae, probably genus Tubifex). Normally these occur in soil and sediment, especially at the bottom and edges of polluted streams. In the photo they have apparently entered a pipeline somehow, and in the absence of soil they are coiling around each other. The contractions you see are the result of a single worm contracting and then stimulating all the others to do the same almost simultaneously, so it looks like a single big muscle contracting.

Which still leave me unsatisifed,

mainly because all I can think of it they look like

these, and we all know how well that ended.

2009-06-23T05:45:00.004+10:00

There seem to be a lot of 'Days' & 'Weeks' these days:

National read to your child day -14 Feb, International Women's day - 8 March, Diabeties Alert day - 24 March, National library week -12 April, May is National Teen Pregnancy Prevention Month, National Teacher Day - 5 May, ...

Just June itself all ready holds
Stand for children day, National trails day, National men's health week, National cancer survivors day, Deaf-blind awareness week, World blood donor day, U.N world refugee day, Public service day,... and the whole month is home safety month,...

So I propose to add another to the list for June, a day to recognize the ceaseless vigilance of those who stand ready to face the shambling hordes of the undead. I want to declare June 23 International Zombie awareness day.

It was on this day in 1983 a low budget horror flick directed by Sam Raimi was premiered, the film Evil Dead gave us the greatest Zombie hunter of all time

Ashley J. Williams

The plot of the film is simplicity itself, a bunch of young adults go to an old cabin in the woods and each is killed, -horribly. A friend at the time directed after a late night showing 'get that thing, outa my video' -yes kiddies movies once came on black book shaped things called videocassettes.

The film spawned two sequels: Dead by dawn & Army of Darkness, a musical, computer game, a marvel comic book, many guest spots, Ash even made the list of Top 100 Heroes of All Time, describing him as "An egomaniacal, complaining, misogynistic goon, Ash is the best demon and zombie killer ever to be portrayed on the silver screen" and made the actor Bruce Campbell that played Ash welcome in any zombie hunter convention in the world.

Campbell himself said Ash is 'A bad slow thinker, but a great fast thinker' and 'Ash is pretty much incompetent at anything other fighting the evil dead'. He seems pretty ingenious to me such as making a chainsaw bracket and shotgun harness, gunpowder from mainly referencing its elemental makeup in a chemistry book, and a fully functional prosthetic hand from a metal gauntlet.

But he cemented himself into the annuals of zombie hunter fandom with bolting a chainsaw to the severed stump of his right hand and at the end of the second film standing in a barren wasteland with his trade mark sawed off double-barreled 12 gauge Remington shotgun and chainsaw surrounded by the evil dead.

"Hail to the King, Baby"

So June 23 International Ashley J. Williams day, whose with me?

NO MORE HEROES

2009-05-16T20:40:00.003+10:00

One of the points that stories like The Batman toy with is that you only get super villains if you start with superheroes. This is a thesis which has been impossible to test,

until now.

Of the many crimes against humanity committed so far by the social networking site MySpace the most egregious is The World Superhero Registry.

Which proudly proclaims itself "...a forum and resource for the REAL LIFE SUPERHERO COMMUNITY.." The site has dozens of biographies with photos of wannabe and neverbeen folk, listing their names, whether they are 'active', tips such as 'how to build a net gun', if their exploits have been covered in the media and even their superhero organisation such as Black Monday or The Vixens of Velour (okay I made the last one up, but they do have a Vixens of Valour group).

As long as you could look at this as a bunch of cosplay fanatics who just took it a bit too seriously then fine. But now a 21year old calling himself Shadowhare has gone and set up the Alliance of Heroes to help defend the good citizens of that hot bed of crime .....Cincinnati.

I've never been to Cincinnati, but I can't believe it deserves this

The first stirrings of opposition came from 'the Consortium of Evil' who offered a $10 bounty for the Shadowhares secret identity. Then came R.O.A.C.H

Ruthless Organisation Against Citizen/Chubby Heroes.

Whose leader the mysterious The Potentate, check it out here, has stated the removal of these superheroes is the first step "towards the total end game of world domination" I hope he finished with a maniacal laugh. It's all about standards people.

So which whould you rather team up with
or

Famous Last words

2009-05-09T10:05:00.003+10:00

Today is the 9 May in 1864 during the American civil war in at the battle of Spotsylvania
union General John Sedgwick digusted at the way his men were, quite rightly it turns out taking cover, was heard to exclaim

"They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance.."

on soldier who responded to this that he preferred to duck when being shot at, even from a great distance.

To this the general replied "all right man go to your place" just as an enemy sharp-shooter took him out.

So in recognition of 9 MAY as stupid last thing to say day here a few more

"More Light" by Goethe a German poet, novelist, philosopher, and scientist.

" Shoot Straight you bastards" - Lt Harry Moran to the firing squad about to execute him during the Boer war.

"Here is the German heart" - by the last of the "Schillschen officers" - a group of eleven Prussian officers executed on the Schillschen Field in Wesel, Germany, by Napoleon's troops. I'd like to think he was pointing at it at the time to assist aiming.

"The fog is rising" - Emily Dickinson a famous tragic.

"18 straight whiskies I think thats a record" - Dylan Thomas

"Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something." - Pancho Villa

and a personal favourite

"I wish I had time for one more bowl of chilli" - Kit Carson

and to end this day I suggest we all enjoy the following

See I told you

2009-05-06T08:01:00.001+10:00

Hats off to the Zombiehunters tech team that pulled this one off.

The attention to detail is superb.

Click here

Its War of the World WITH ZOMBIES

2009-05-04T16:10:00.002+10:00

I’m sticking by my review on Amazon of Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, this book is a million times better than the original.

It seems that enough folk were as hot as I was for a literary mash up that includes zombies to earn, what is known in the biz as Elephant bucks for the small publishing press Quirk books. As of this week its 10th on the New York Times paper back trade fiction bestseller list, #15 on Amazon and according to the trade mag Publisher’s Week Quirk has more than 120,000 copies in print.

So is it a surprise to anyone that publishers are scrambling to get out more of these literary mash-ups?

Of course the author Seth Grahame-Smith has been handed a sack of cash by Grand Central Press, reputed to be over half a million, to write Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. This may address one of the concerns Flinthart raised in his review about “Grahame-Smith is so concerned with mirroring the original material that the impact of his ‘Now With Added Zombies’ version is all but lost” as there is no such detailed original text.

It doesn’t end there because Coscom Entertainment have released The War of the Worlds: H.G. Wells's Classic Plus Blood, Guts and Zombies. How cool is that!

From Amazon
The invasion begins . . . and the dead start to rise. There's panic in the streets of London as invaders from Mars wreak havoc on the living, slaying the populace with Heat-Rays and poisonous clouds of black smoke. Humanity struggles to survive against technology far beyond its own, meeting fear and death at every turn. But that's not the only struggle mankind must face. The dead are rising from their graves with an insatiable hunger for human flesh. Friends, neighbours and loved ones lost to the war of the worlds are now the enemy and the Earth is forever changed. It's kill or be killed, if you want to survive, otherwise you might become one of the walking dead yourself.

These sounds like pitches that come up during a game of ‘Grave Robbers from outer space’.

From Z-man games it pays a tongue-in-cheek homage to the Horror and Sci-Fi B-Movies we all love love to hate…or hate to love. Players are making a B-Movie by playing Characters, Props, and Locations in their movie and sending Creatures to attack the other players' movies in order to kill off their Characters. With cards like “You’ve seen her breasts so her character must die” or “Cabin in the woods – did you leave the door open”. When Roll the Credits is played, the player with the most points wins!

I can only hope this trend for mash ups continues. I’d always though that TV series should have cross overs -like Firefly meets Star Trek, or Lost characters wander into Law & Order. Zombies of course remain an untapped resource. Hamlet’s father as a walking undead or imagine the Hunt for Red October with nazi zombies rising from the bottom of the sea.

Any you’d like to see?

Come on, is that the best you got?

2009-04-29T15:08:00.000+10:00

No doubt everyone has heard about the outbreak of swine influenza A (H1N1).

I am sanguine about this one for a number of reason.

The virus was identified a threat early in the outbreak. The virus seems to be transmitted by droplet. While this is worse than if it was bloodborne its better than if it was airborne. In the past the morbidity rate for these viruses are around 4% and so far seem to be responsive to the antivirals oseltamivir (prescribed under the trade name Tramiflu in Australia) and zanamivir.

Medical authorities have raise the alarm, The World Health Organisation has set the ‘global Influenza Prepardness Plan at Phase 4 which is characterized by

"...verified human-to-human transmission of an animal or human-animal influenza reassortant virus able to cause “community-level outbreaks.” Phase 4 indicates a significant increase in risk of a pandemic but does not necessarily mean that a pandemic is a forgone conclusion..."

In Australia we have 8 million viable stocks of Tramiflu for our popualtion.
Our medical professionals have been briefed on the clinical signs and able to send samples to type the virus to confirm if it is swine influenza A (H1N1). The public is aware that if the display flu like symptoms to have them checked. Also the Government on the advice of the Chief Medical Officer, Professor Jim Bishop included swine influenza to be a quarantinable disease in humans under the Quarantine Act 1908.

Under the Quarantine Act, people who, in the opinion of the Chief Medical Officer, are likely to have been exposed with swine flu, can be placed under surveillance until it can be established that they should either be ordered into quarantine, or it is established that they are not affected by the disease.

For myself
I am following the news, still no confirmed cases in Australia though still awaiting results on some. I am carrying out good hygiene practices and have advise co-workers if they cough anywhere near me is shall ‘kill them where they sit’. So I am fairly confident.

How about you?

Haven't we suffered enough

2009-04-16T12:06:00.000+10:00

Many media pundits report that in hard economic times people look to lighter, funny more comforting entertainments. A benefit the makers of the Star Trek movie look to reap while the producers of ‘The Road’ agonise over their poor timing. A similar suggestion is floated for books. So of the many tragedies that can be laid at the feet of the Global Financial Crisis (so much more bloodless than The Great Depression - Redux) is it also responsible for why for the first three months of 2009, Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books took the first four spots quarterly best-selling books list. Sales of Meyer's five novels accounted for 16% of all books sold. The fifth being the uncharacteristically interesting ‘young adult’ alien invasion novel ‘The Host’. Worse if you consider she was responsible for one out of every seven books sold in the last three months.

Yeah I know “if it gets the kids reading” argument.

It seems there is a contrary section of the population that when civilization crumbles they crave “Paranormal, horror and especially apocalyptic-themed novels” says St. Martin's editor Michael Homler. This is reflected in sales of two of my favorites from last year
“Wastelands a collection of post-apocalyptic short fiction just went into a fifth printing selling over 30,000 copies a little over 12 months, and The Living Dead ,over 45,000 copies in six months.

But perhaps the worse effect the GFC has had on book sales. The UK’s Guardian newspaper has reported sales of Ayn Rand’s ‘Atla’s Shrugged’ have taken a marked jump. The Ayn Rand Centre for Individual Rights claims that US-wide sales almost tripled over the first seven weeks of 2009, compared with the same period in 2008.

Haven’t we suffered enough in this GFC, now to have to put up with a bunch of investment banker uber capitalists with copies under one arm and fists full of government bailout bucks in the other spouting about world in which the

"men of the mind" - inventors, entrepreneurs and industrialists - withdraw their labour from a society intent on bleeding them dry with taxes and regulations. Furious at being exploited by the government on behalf of the masses, who are described as "parasites" and "moochers", the striking capitalists retreat to a camp in the mountains of Colorado, protected by a special holographic shield. Starved of their genius, society collapses and wars break out until eventually bureaucrats are forced to beg the rebels' leader, John Galt, to take over the economy.

If you don’t believe it read some of

Japanese Education System continues to outstrip US, Australia & Europe

2009-04-13T11:15:00.000+10:00

Easter
Sorry but a festival about a guy who dies and then comes back makes me tad uncomfortable.

A few posts back I mentioned the Onion panel discussion on whether or not the current crop of computer games: Left4Dead, Fallout3 or Fallen Earth are adequately preparing our children for the post apocalyptic world.

Japan has taken this to the next logical step.

Sure some of you may claim this may traumatize the little tykes, though I will say from a survey of the_weapon his only comments were: ‘Why didn’t they aim for the head’ and ‘bring it’.

Anyway is a preemptive scarring, like exposing your kids to chicken pox so that they don’t get it as an adult.

However Japan you and I are going to have words about this

SCHADENFREUDE

2009-03-27T16:14:00.000+11:00

Schadenfreude is it wrong if the ‘other’ is a complete dick

Like Birmo’s and Flinthart’s offspring The_Weapon takes training in unarmed combat. To learn students are paired up and practice the demonstrated techniques with instructors watching and correcting.

At the dojo where he trains he is frequently paired with the same ukei (training partner) of similar age and size. Part of martial arts training is learning to be a good ukei: using the correct strike, moving the right way to help your partner practice the throw etc.. The kid he is paired with is not a good ukei. He tries to punch when he should use a strike, comes in too fast when they should be practicing the timing, moving out when practicing a throw to make it harder…generally being a dick.

We have tried to help The_weapon take this with focus and dedication to the discipline. We figure he is going to have to deal with idiots all his life may as well develop ways of dealing with them now. So when he has coped the odd blow to the head, kick in the shins etc… he will get up, brush it off and take up the posture ready for the next technique.

All the senior students, instructors and head of the school are aware of this ukei’s attitude, so they try to rotate him around different training partners.

Last night they paired this crappy ukei with a new student, a white belt, and as a new student will, they messed up the strike and accidentally landed a solid blow to the crappy ukei’s nose.

This kid who had often punched, stepped on or tried to trip The_weapon during training -fell over on his arse, looked up at his shorter and newer opponent and jumped up running from the mat ‘crying like a little girl’ as later described by the_weapon.

I swear the instructor at the time looked at the parents and smiled when this happened.

So is Schadenfreude still Schadenfreude if the ‘other’ really deserves it?

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes

2009-03-18T21:22:00.000+11:00

Well me, obviously.

Twice now.

Once on the BIG screen at IMAX who tout their movies with the tagline - “Trust us......SIZE DOES MATTER!”

and once in Village Cinema's Gold Class, “mmm why yes - bring me the double wagyu burgers with tomato jam, cheese, lettuce, with onion relish served with shoe string fries and garlic aioli. Then for desert I’ll have the mixed berry cheesecake with grand marnier compote and mascarpone with my coffee, bring it out 30 minutes before the end”. For complete menu click here.

What did I think, - let me set the scene

THE GRAPHIC NOVEL (1986-1987)
Watchmen has been described, as the Moby Dick of superhero graphic novels and it must be a novel since it was included in Time Magazine’s 100 greatest novels of all time, Click here for the full list. Though with Phillip.K. Dick’s Ubik on the list a Mind-fraking component must have been included high on the priorities for selection. Watchmen used tropes and tabulae of images in the way big screen cinema had been using them for years and so it was this graphic novel that challenged the way such novels were perceived at the time. For the movie to have the same impact it would have needed to do cinema in a way that drew on the techniques of other media.

MY EXPERIENCES OF THE GRAPHIC NOVEL
Reading it in 1987 would be different to reading it now. I don’t know if it was in the 80s the US, UK and to a lesser extent Australia seemed to be facing economic and social woes that gave rise to an atmosphere of imminent collapse. Maybe it was my itinerant sharehouse lifestyle complete with transitory screaming random housemates, the marginal paying, time-shifted macjobs we all worked, the sense that the 20th Century was circling the drain of history that made the existence of masked vigilantes and indifferent world shattering forces as not only believable but indeed required. This and the increasing belief that the future held an absence of any shinny jetpacks, moon bases and hot android women added to a feeling of hopelessness and despair that the comic/graphic novel captured.

So Watchmen, though I didn’t realise it at the time, was the fear stink of sweat, semen, and blood of an era coalesced into a thick slab of a slowly crumbling paper.

MY EXPERIENCES OF THE FILM
Watching Zack ‘300’ Snyder’s WATCHMEN unfold on the big screen I was seeing a significant, much contemplated and beloved chunk of my youth up there in homage. That just doesn’t happen to me, usually its all boomer aging or gen Y angst.

BIG props to Zack Snyder who I can only imagine must as big a fanboy as the rest of us given how he lovingly recreates the novel. Almost every scene is a fractal of the complex story and panels worthy of framing.

The casting was for me spot on. Jeffrey Dean Morgan (Supernatural’s John Winchester) as Edward Blake/Comedian, Jackie Earle Haley as Walter Kovacs/ Rorschach being my stand out favorites only because they were my favorites in the novel.

STANDOUT SCENES ******SPOILERS***********

Anything with Rorschach

“Is that what happens to us? A life of conflict with no time for friends, so that when it's done, only our enemies leave roses”.

"It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It’s us. Only us".

Rorschach could have been a poet. Okay maybe a crazy, super-violent poet, but a poet.

For me the two scariest parts of the film are

when Dan Dreiberg is standing in the midst of a riot plaintively decrying

“What's happened to the American dream?” And the comedian smiling as he turns back from knocking down a protester with a smoke round (technically non-lethal) answers “It came true. You're lookin' at it”.

Dr Manhattan’s old colleague Wally Weaver is on a talk show and calmly and sanely says: “I never said the superman exists, and he's American. What I said was God exists, and he's American. If that statement starts to chill you after a couple of moments consideration then don’t be alarmed. A feeling of intense and crushing religious terror at the concept only indicates that you are still sane”.

THE SQUID
No its not in it.

Yes I think the ending they went with still works

Damn I did want to see that squid up on the big screen though.

But even in my most fanboy hopeful I KNEW they couldn’t keep the same ending.

For those who have read the novel you know there was NO WAY after 9-11 any studio would make a movie that recreated the first 8 pages of Chapter XII on the big screen as haunting and eerie as it could have been done up on the big screen.

SO WHAT DO YOU THINK
The reviews and box office are mixed and I have read a lot now.
For an surprising take, check out some of the reviews here, really check them out.
It shows that Christian doesn’t mean fundamental, bigoted and narrow minded. A few provided an insight from a religious perspective on the movie that gave me a different but valid viewpoint seeing it as a morality play, a discourse on the materialist and the divine, etc.

Then of course some are just plain bat-frak crazy too, especially as they offer a section titled ‘comments from Non-viewers’ for those who want to say something WHO HAVE NEVER SEEN THE FILM.

Some of the comments/complaints in the reviews are about the violent and graphic nature use the scene in the prison saying “....By the way, the guy could have easily cut through the bars on the other side, since Rorschach's cell was quite wide. This is what I mean when I say excessive violence… there's often no point whatsoever other than to shock the audience, which makes it somewhat similar to the 'horror' movies of today”.

This is mistaken on two levels:

Thematically -it helps reinforce the brutal, callous nature of the criminals that Rorschach faces everyday.

Mechanically -as they are constrained for time they want to cut the least number of bars. They could cut through the bars further down but to make a sufficient space to allow access would mean cutting 3 bars twice, top and bottom. Instead they could cut the arms and get access to the two bars around the cage lock. Cutting two bars and the lock falls, cage open.

It’s a case of cutting through 2 arms is faster than cutting twice through a jail cell bar.

*****SPOILERS OFF*************

VIRGINS
What will people who've never read Watchmen even think of this film? What will it be like for them to sit through these crazy, violent, colourful three hours and not recognize almost every line – almost every image? Will they be utterly baffled, bored, or totally love it?

Perhaps if the economic downturn continues and this coming decade brings with it the every increasing hopeless and despair that the 1980s held then the movie will be reassessed.

IMHO
Is Watchmen a good or bad movie? I have no idea.

I’m going to go with the words of Matt Selman, The Times on-lines nerd in residence.

“I stand powerless before the Gods I once worshiped in my attic bedroom, now moving and talking and fighting and loving on a giant screen. And I find myself unable to judge them”.

FOR THE FANBOYS
But remember if for nothing else Zack ‘300’ Snyder deserves our thanks (and nothing would say thanks better than going to see it a few more times) for preventing the studio’s from committeeing the novel to death. Because for all the movie's magnificent follies we could have ended up with this:

Lunch, certainly not naked

2009-03-14T17:32:00.000+11:00

Guru Bob and I caught up for lunch on friday, a fairly regular thing since we both work in the CBD.

Once we'd choose a different eatery each time, but now we stick with a great noshing place up a narrow, cobbled, crooked lane way in Melbourne that should lead to an opium den but instead reveals the 'Dainty Sichuan Food', and having eaten there - that word 'Dainty', I do not think it means what you think it means.
So each week we are working our way through the menu.

If you get there between 12.30 and 1.30 PM it also has the advantage of turning into Asian babe central. I think we can all agree you can never have too much spicy food or being surrounded by Asian babes eating spicy food. Another reason we keep going back is we see stuff people have ordered and we try to order it going on the names. Up till now that has being pretty hit and miss. This time as well as the usual menu they also gave us one of the novices menus which includes pictures of each of the the dishes.

This week it was:
• 'cumin pork spare ribs' - our must always have when we go,
• 'ants climbing the hill' which was surprisingly free of ants, and

• pork slice hot pot, and when they say hot pot they mean in spice, not temperature.

We then headed up to catch 'Watchmen' on IMAX but that's a topic for another post.

Its the debate we had to have

2009-02-28T16:37:00.000+11:00

For those who aren't aware the zombieapocalypse is a subset of Eschatology. This is a part of theology and philosophy concerned with the final events in the history, the ultimate destiny of humanity, commonly referred to as the end of the world.

and while much has been written, sung and painted about Armageddon and don't get me started on those who talk about wanting to "immanentize the eschaton" never have I seen the post-apocalyptic wasteland more lovingly portrayed than in the computer game Fallout3.

but the question has to be asked

"Are these games really preparing our children for the post-apocalyptic wasteland, thank goodness the team at 'The Onion' have been tackling this vital topic.

Are Violent Video Games Adequately Preparing Children For The Apocalypse?

"grenades are more effective at taking out cyborgs than automatic weapons"

I think there is a lesson there for us all.

Okay Japan you and I need to have a talk

2009-02-25T11:42:00.000+11:00

Dear Japan,

I want to start by saying you have given me a lot to be thankful for:

Samurai particularly Itto Ogami of 'Lone Wolf and Cub' fame, the greatest father son story in literature.

Miyamoto Musashi's Book of Five Rings. A book in which I uncover something new each time I read it.

The whole Kaiju (translated ‘strange beast’, but meaning giant monster like Gojira) movie industry without which we would never have seen Jack Reno make a joke about American instant coffee.

Ninjas of course, is there anyone who doesn’t think Ninjas are cool? Ninjas never go out of style. ANY story can improved with ninjas, they are like zombies in that way……mmmm…..Zombie Ninjas!

Rope work (Kinbaku) which goes so far beyond anything else I think some of the knots use mobius strips and cross over into some weird non-Euclidian geometry dimension on a topological level.

Also where would my late night TV experience of Deep Cable be without J-Horror, sure Korean-horror may have taken it further and Spain-horror has been putting out some kick arse stuff recently. But where would scary films be now without the influence of Ringu, Ju-on, Dark Water, One Missed Call & Pulse. We all know the tropes by now :vengeful ghosts; long stringy black hair; impossible physical gymnastics; meowing little ghost boys; cursed videos (or cell phones or computers); old rotted buildings and corpses; moldy books and newspapers; elliptical storylines (or a total abandonment of logic); creepy sound design; and creepy cinematography.

Then there is the Anime, so much anime. Enough to say if you don’t know who Deunan Knute or Major Motoko Kusanagi are, or if you don’t know who Astroboy (anyone else looking forward to the new movie), Gigantor or Prince Planet are then your childhood Saturday mornings were probably more active than mine.

For all this I can even forgive your robotic hubris that will see the rise of our machine overlords

but seriously WTF?

My Lunch with Bob

2009-02-20T20:16:00.000+11:00

Well its 11:30PM, the_weapon and my_reason_for_living are bedded down for the night so the time is mine now.

I'll make this quick because now is usually when I get to wander the Post-Apocalyptic wasteland of Fallout3 or lay some cooperative smack_down on Zombies in Left4Dead.

Every couple of weeks GuruBob and I catch up for lunch as we both work in Melbourne's Central Business District. Bob has been an invaluable source to anyone seeking good each eats in this town. For the pass dozen or so visits we have tried different excellent eateries. Today we returned to the one we first dinned in.
You walk up an alleyway passing overflowing industrial bins whose odour mixes with the exotic spices of Chinatown. Inside the place was packed. The menu we got today were the ones that didn't come with pictures so we had to wing it. We observed many dishes on the surrounding tables and tried to order based on what these meals looked like.

"That one has crab in it..."

"Oh on the menu they have crispy chilli pig intestine"

"NO"

"That one comes in a big bowl, and looks like it has chicken, do you think that's Chilli Chicken Pot?"

" Let's order that"

"And Cumin Pork Spare Ribs".....

Well we weren't disappointed, the food came and it was outstanding. The chicken was these tiny little clumps of deep fried goodness on thin bones passing through the chicken. More chick than chicken sized but there were lots of them scattered through out the plate.

Next time I will extend a general invite to those in the Melbourne CBD and take a camera. What I did do was save the left over 'vegetables' of the dish and took a photo when I got home.

Looks like a bunch of coffee addicts to me

2009-02-15T14:00:00.000+11:00

As a keen watcher of all things pandemic, which is but one thread of the rich tapestry that is the Zombie Apocalypse I could discuss the news of first recorded outbreak of Marburg Hemoraggic fever in the United States and all that forebodes.

Or perhaps the fact that a spineless, mindless jellyfish - the Turritopsis Nutricula have cracked the secret of immortality, something that continues to thwart our best endeavors.

or in a harbinger of the coming sentient machine uprising engineer Christopher MacLeod and his colleagues (species traitors ALL) at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen are providing machines with the ability to adapt their neural networks in a way that mimic's biological evolution.

But instead I wish to pose a question.

This morning my_reason_for_living, the_weapon and I were having a beverage while out. I ordered an Affogato. Since my_reason_for_living possesses a Y chromosome you would assume anything with chocolate and ice cream would get her seal of approval, but no.

"You know I only like coffee flavour in a hot coffee.......

"This is because you can not appreciate the subtle interplay for flavours and textures" I retorted.

"Yeah this from a man who likes things to taste either hot or caffeinated. A man who thinks cucumber has no taste". She quipped.

My question, does cucumber have any taste at all?

2009-02-08T13:54:00.000+11:00

On February 24th this year I hope to be lying in a hospital bed with my head swathed in bandages. Either that or unconscious, but no long term coma I need to be up and about in a day or two either Thursday or Friday that week.

Why you ask?

Its all due to this:

It's called Comet Lulin and NASA is saying its green colour comes from the gases that make up its Jupiter-sized atmosphere. Jets spewing from the comet's nucleus contain cyanogen, a poisonous gas found in many comets and diatomic carbon. Both substances glow green when illuminated by sunlight in the near vacuum of space.

That's all very well, but I recall another green light linked to a comet.

"...the Earth's orbit passed through a cloud of comet debris. You can even believe it if you like -millions did....
....it was reported in the news-bulletins during the day that mysterious bright green flashes had been seen..."

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

So while normally the_Weapon and I would drive up to the hills to check it out with the reflecting telescope.

Not this time.

This time,

Don't Watch the Skies.

The Battle for Yonkers

2009-02-04T07:49:00.000+11:00

A few folk have already written how this year is shaping up for some chock_full_ of_explosions blockbuster movies. I am of course keen for Terminator:Salvation to see Christian Bale's John Connor deleiver a righteous sentient machine butt kicking.

However next year holds the possibility of further cinematic awesomeness with Max Brooks 'World War Z' Movie being screenplayed by Babylon 5's J. Michael Straczynski and directed by Quantum of Solace's Marc Forster.

Which bodes well for the story, but what about what we are going to see on the big screen? Well Artist Daniel LuVisi has posted some tryout work he did to get a gig on the production team and it looks OUTFRAKINGSTANDING.

Its titled 'The Battle for Yonkers' and for those who have read the book know it to be a vital turning point in the story. Those of you who haven't read the book, ...I am very disappointed.

This is the battle where the military faced the zombie horde in a large scale set piece and got their helmets handed to them. Its a great sequence and will absolutely crucial to the success of the film.

I think if Mr LuVisi gets a guernsey on the production team we will be in good hands.

Sign of the times

2009-02-02T07:58:00.000+11:00

Big shout out to the ZOMBIE DEFENSE LEAGUE who last week tried to raise the awareness of the threat of Zed to drivers around Austin. Here is the story.

While some have speculated this is the work of ‘expert computer hackers’ I have my doubts that this is the sort of level of expertise needed. A few online searchers turned up –

“Apparently, while most road sign control pads are placed in a lock box, that box is rarely actually locked. And while most road signs are under password protection, that password is most generally just the default code "DOTS"—or you can easily reset the password by holding "shift" and "control" while typing "DIPY" (so that it just defaults to "DOTS" again)”.

Of course I would never condone such irresponsible behaviour.

Unless of course there were Zombies about.

Or it was time for zombie drill.

Or I was bored and had some spare time.

A Marriage of Two Minds

2009-01-29T11:17:00.000+11:00

By my upbringing and nature I am a planner. I do not react well and adapt to change I prefer to have mapped out all the congigencies and have two back up plans for any possible situation. This has lead me to look at disaster preparation from the point of view of the ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE . So I tend to Consume BRAAIIINS, sorry I mean a lot of Zombie media.

My reason_for_living is by training a scholar in the area of feminist, historical, gender studies. We are taking BIG L literature here. Her work on the love letters of a pair of Victorian Inscestuous Lesbians -The Fowl & The PussyCat is published and available at amazon here. She once famously quipped “Life is too short to read male authors”.

So not a lot of over lap there in reading. It is rare for us to find a book we both can get into. The last one we found was ‘My Year of Meat’ by Ruth L. Ozeki. But I have high hopes for this one.

Pride and Pejudice and Zombies

The Classic Regency Romance—Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!

This story features the the original text of Jane Austen’s novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action.

As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life!
Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy.

What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers— BUT more importantly an even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead.

Complete with 20 illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock (the original illustrator of Pride and Prejudice), this insanely funny expanded edition will introduce Jane Austen’s classic novel to new legions of fans.

Its available after April 15 from Chronicle Books.

I’m so excited.

PS and the Picture on the cover of the book is called a Memento mori or Reminder of Death.

A NEW HOPE

2009-01-29T11:14:00.000+11:00

Welcome
to those of you who knew me from Journalspace and tracked me down here, well done.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to start up another blogg after J-Space exploded but I found I missed the feeling of being a part of a community, even a quasi, abstract on-line community.
During my hiatus I read and commented on other’s bloggs -but without putting up my own posts that felt a bit parasitical.

So here it goes again.

An Era of Prominent Madmen: A collection of zombie, sentient machine fighting, science/reason loving, chemical-bubbling madness.

And the title comes from W.H. Auden