ET or BS

In another bizarre piece, appropriately headed "ET or BS", Fox News linked to a Denver Post story about some grainy footage of "aliens" peering out of a Denver window.

The frame, above, was apparently extracted from a 3 minute video, taken after a guy installed surveillance cameras because he thought someone was spying on his teenage daughters.

I've told you "Stargate" is a documentary. And Cheyenne Mountain is in Colorado.

Homeless

There was an Associated Press piece today on the Fox News website that I thought I'd share with you.

Apparently, a homeless woman was arrested in Japan today after living undetected in a man's closet for the last year. She was caught after he became suspicious that food was disappearing, and set up comeras to relay images to his mobile phone.

Police found the 58-year-old woman hiding in the top compartment of the man's closet and arrested her for trespassing, police spokesman Hiroki Itakura from southern Kasuya town said Friday.

The resident of the home installed security cameras that transmitted images to his mobile phone and one of the cameras captured someone moving inside his home after he had left. He called police believing it was a burglar, but when they arrived they found the door locked and all windows closed.

"We searched the house ... checking everywhere someone could possibly hide," Itakura said. "When we slid open the shelf closet, there she was, nervously curled up on her side."
The woman told police she had no place to live and first sneaked into the man's house about a year ago when he left it unlocked.

She had moved a mattress into the small closet space and even took showers, Itakura said, calling the woman "neat and clean."

This raises two important issues.

First, someone else was living in his house and he didn't notice? I think I'd notice. Wouldn't you?

Adn second... this guy had room in his closet? Seriously? What's his secret? It wouldn't matter how many closets I installed here, they'd be full in a week.

Illusion

I was (metaphorically) thumbing through Scientific American online today, and came across a great piece on illusion. GO HERE.

The pic above is an example. Square A and Square B are actually the same shade of gray. No. I didn't believe it either, so I copied the pic into photoshop, cut out a piece of B, and watched amazed as it disappeared when I moved it over A.

The point of the article? Nothing is real. What we see and feel of our outside world is only an immaginary construction by our brain of what it thinks the outside world is like...

...which all comes back to a point I've made time and time again here... beware of what you see. Beware of what others see, and try to push on you as "truth". It's all just made up.

Patches

Ideology Drives An Awful Wrong (Or Two)

In what can only be described as a stunning, sickening decision, a court in Melbourne last Friday granted a twelve year old girl permission to begin hormone treatment prior to a sex change operation.

Lawyers for the girl's mother successfully argused that the girl, at twelve years of age, had a full understanding that she was actually a man trapped in a girl's body. Those lawyers were paid for by the Victorian Government, heavily supported by ideological special interests.

Are they mad?

Look, as far as I'm concerned, once you're 18, do whatever you like with your body. It's none of my business. Change it from female to male. Change it back again. Even change it into an elephant for all I care. It's your body and you're an adult, making your own decisions.

But is a twelve year old really equiped to make this decision?

The story's here.

Which brings me to the other furore involving a twelve year old this week... a photographic exhibit at an art gallery in Sydney featuring photographs of nude male and female 12 year olds.

Furtunately, the police reacted swiftly, impounded the offending "art works", and are pressing child pornography charges against the gallery and the "artist".

Let's leave the issue of what the children's parents were thinking when they granted permission. This is bigger than that.

What's amazing about this is that the art elite are incensed. They believe "art" is somehow "pure", and "artists" are above the law.

I'm sorry. There's something not right about taking full frontal photographs of a naked 12 year old girl or boy, even in the name of "art".

It's stunning that the "art community" doesn't get it. Their warriors, some of them curators at the biggest publicly owned art galleries in the country, bombarded the media in defence of the artists right to express his creativity. Somehow, they thought it was ok.

Really... they just don't get it. What's the difference between their "artist" taking pictures of naked children and selling them for tens of thousands of dollars in the name of "art", and some low life taking pictures of naked children and posting them on the internet? As far as I'm concerned, there is no difference.

And I'm sorry, even if I buy the "art" line... I don't care how pure the art is... some sick bastard is going to look at that "art" and get his jollies. You might not be a paedophile, but you're certainly feeding them.

The ideological left is screaming. "Censorship", they cry. Yes. It bloody well is... because you start drawing that blurry line between "art" and child pornography, and you're on a very slippery slope.

*SIGH*

Is the world going mad?

Human Global Warming Now Apparently Effecting Jupiter

Jupiter's Three Red Spots Credit NASA, ESA, M. Wong, I. de Pater (UC Berkeley), et al.

This picture, taken by the Hubble Telescope, was published on the NASA website a week or so back, along with the following description;

Explanation: For about 300 years Jupiter's banded atmosphere has shown a remarkable feature to telescopic viewers, a large swirling storm system known as The Great Red Spot. In 2006, another red storm system appeared, actually seen to form as smaller whitish oval-shaped storms merged and then developed the curious reddish hue.

Now, Jupiter has a third red spot, again produced from a smaller whitish storm. All three are seen in this image made from data recorded on May 9 and 10 with the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. The spots extend above the surrounding clouds and their red color may be due to deeper material dredged up by the storms and exposed to ultraviolet light, but the exact chemical process is still unknown.

For scale, the Great Red Spot has almost twice the diameter of planet Earth, making both new spots less than one Earth-diameter across. The newest red spot is on the far left (west), along the same band of clouds as the Great Red Spot and is drifting toward it. If the motion continues, the new spot will encounter the much larger storm system in August.

Jupiter's recent outbreak of red spots is likely related to large scale climate change as the gas giant planet is getting warmer near the equator.

Of course, Al Gore has already issued a statement blaming the increaseing storm activity on Jupiter on Global Warming, and the UN International Committe on Climate Change has recommended further drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. Bureaucrats are already drawing up appropriate protocols, and climatologists have again altered their modelling to accomodate these new Jovian variables.

Do I need to say any more?

Chester At War

It's official. In response to repeated incursions into my privacy and sleep, Chester formally declared war today on his two neighbours.

This is a real David and Goliath struggle, because on one side, the neighbour is a BP service station and convenience store, and on the other side, it's a construction compound operated by one of the largest builders in the country.

"You live where?" I hear you ask.

It's kind of a long story. When Dr J bought her townhouse twelve years ago, it backed onto a mechanic's workshop. About 6 years ago (before I met her), BP acquired said workshop and built a mega "BP Connect" centre there. At the time, Dr J was distracted by other things and didn't pay attention to the Notice of Proposed Development stuffed into her mailbox.

So now, right over the back wall, we have a 24 hour petrol station lit up so brightly you could, I'm sure, see it from space. Compounding the problem, the actual convenience store closes at 10pm "for security reasons", and customers pay for their fuel at an outside "pay point", which, of course, means that at all hours, said customers shout something like "pump number 4 mate, and can you get me a pack of Benson & Hedges Extra Mild, a carton o' milk and a sausage roll with sauce" through glass about a foot thick.

A few weeks ago, another Notice of Proposed Development l0bbed into the mailbox. BP has decided it wants the site seen from other planets and not just low earth orbit, so it needs more illuminated signage.

Not on your bloody life, and the first shots in the war were officially fired in response to this callous provocation.

Before that, we've had border skirmishes but nothing you'd call real war. We regularly complain about deliveries at 11pm, or 5am on Sundays. They've pretty much ignored the complaints. We regularly complain about the shouting customers. They ignore us.

I even regularly poke my head over the back fence and shout something pithy and eloquent at roudy customers at 3am... usually something like "hey dickhead... shut the fuck up". This generally doesn't work because as anyone living in Sydney will know, those who are awake at 3am have most likelybeen clubbing since about 9pm, and are therefore too pissed to respond with anything more intelligent than "fuck off".

So in response to the Notice of Proposed Development, the Bear penned a nuclear tipped strategic missile and aimed it right at the local town council. The weapon went through BPs application with surgical precision, citing case law and slamming the applicant's callous disregard for human life (aka, my life). It also contained lots of big words and a few important sounding expressions like "amenity of the adjoining property", and "failure to organise their business activity to ensure minimal impact".

Boom. Round one to The Bear, and a shocked council planning inspector was forced to come to my back yard and actually look at the devastation first hand. Now irrevocably drawn into the conflict, he responded the way only bureaucrats can... with a letter back to BP.

Round two happens on Tuesday when I meet with BP's lawyers. They expressed "shock, distress and surprise" at the war declaration. They wish to sue for peace, but they'd better come prepared to meet our terms.

Across the street, the guerilla war's been raging for years.

The construction compound was created to build a new underground tollway, and while the land's zoned residential, they have planning exemption to use it for what can only be described as "neighbourhood destroying activity".

The compound created two problems. The first, during the day, is the incessant "beep beep beep" as assorted bobcats, back hoes and dump trucks flit around the site. It's an extremely annoying distraction, but there's not much I can do about it.

The second is far more important. They sometimes do it at night, and unlike the BP station, which is on the other side of the house to my bedroom, the compound is right at the bedroom window.

This week, they escalated, turning the occasional incursion into full blown war games. I say "games" because that's clearly what's happening. The workers on the site have obviously been briefed about the grumpy neighbour with the sharp and offensive tongue, and so they sneak onto the site at 4.30 am, do some beep beep beeping, and then bolt as soon as they see my flowing white bathrobe appear at my front door. One brazen truck driver actually turned towards me and gave me the finger this week as he gunned his giant two megawatt diesel motor.

Fortunately, they're nearly finished, though their "decomissioning" process involves lots of jack hammers, after which, they'll sell the site to a property developer who, I'm sure, will deliver another year of hell.

After that, if the world if still here, it should be quiet.

Familiar, Comfortable World

Over at my other blog, Chester Writes A Book, I wrote a piece a few days ago about the need to create a comfortable, familiar, consistent and contiguous world in which to set my story.

What I didn't realise was how important that idea is to my other great creative endeavour, Wroof! (Or maybe deep down I did but just hadn't been bothered to do anything about it.)

Wroof! is an internet Content Manager. A what? Ok. It's a way to make a website look like a magazine or on-line newspaper... sort of a bit like Blogger only a)it works, and b)it does way more.

Wroof! has been 95% finished for a very long time, but it's now so big and so complicated that each time I try to smooth out the edges so that anyone other than me can use it, I break a bit.

Last week, for instance, I broke the shopping cart, which was bad because customers could order something and pay for it, and instead of ending up back at a web page that says something like "thanks for ordering", they got an error message that went something like "No $to parameter in line 47 of mailer.php". Bad.

What I realised, though, after my CWAB piece over the weekend was that this philosophy probably more applies to Wroof! than it does to some as yet unwritten book. I realised I need to make the whole Wroof! environment familiar, consistent and contiguous so that navigating your way around its control panel (blogger calls it a dashboard, which I rather like), needs to be comfortable and intuitive.

It's something Microsoft has known for a very long time (though they seem to have forgotten with Vista and Office 2007) and it's something I bleat on about whenever I look over what other people do, but applying that to something I've done... it just didn't occur to me.

The best part is that once I started going through Wroof! screen by screen to make everything look familiar and comfortable, the whole process of finishing the bloody thing got easier. I shelved plans to rewrite it from scratch with a better design, because I realised that, other than a few bugs that I've been fixing along the way, what I have actually works. The reason I didn't think it did had more to do with the look and feel of the thing than the actual functionality.

It's a very big leap forward.

AGW Skeptics Gaining Momentum

I know. I sort of promised that I wouldn't rant about global warming any more because it's getting boring. What I really meant is that I was getting boring, because the Global Warming debate is really hotting up.

For years, the champions of Anthropomorphic Global Warming (AGW), that is, the "Humans-Did-It-Evil-CO2-Emissions" crowd, have had ascendency. It's an easy sell for the media... doom and gloom, and apparently, you're responsible. Politicians have staked their careers, not to mention the future of nations on adopting it as Dogma too.

Sadly, there is more and more evidence that we humans don't have much to do with it. There's an excellent website, www.climatedebatedaily.com, that has two columns... one on the left for the AGW Champions, and the other on the right for the AGW Skeptics. What's becoming more and more clear is that world climate is influenced by two core factors. The first is sunspot activity, as mentioned in my last posting on this issue, and the second is variations in our orbit around the sun. I add a third, which is geothermal forces, though I suspect these are linked to orbital position.

Many of the scientists who have been shouting unheard for years are now finding listeners. They argue that rather than catastrophic global warming, the earth's headed for a rapid transition to a new Ice Age. We're talking rapid, imminent transition... that is, within our lifetimes.

For example, each previous Ice Age was preceeded by thirty or so years of increasing temperatures, rapid retreat of glaciers and melting of ice caps, followed by a few years of climate instability. And then whammo, the Ice caps started reforming, and just kept growing.

Some parts of the Ice Caps have, according to some of the data, begun to reform.

Do I believe we're headed for an imminent Ice Age? I don't know, but the scientific evidence is compelling, in that there is a direct straight line correlation between our orbital position and global climate, going back more than a million years.

I'm not going to say much more on this issue... but please stay informed by going to sites like ClimateDebateDaily. (Who am I kidding... I can't stay silent, but I will be less frequent.)

Changes Afoot

I know I've been slack lately, not just in updating my own blog, but also in visiting blogger friends. You already know what sort of month I had in April, but this trend's been apparent for a lot longer than a month so I'm not sure the dramas of the last 30 days are the real reason. Instead, I'd rather admit that I've been distracted in ways only someone with ADD will understand.


And besides, I've written just about all I can about bloody global warming and it's probably getting boring. I mean, how often will my readers be bothered with my sanctimonious tirades.

Therefore, I'm making changes. Chester's going to share his pontifications a little less often. Exactly why I'm cutting back brings me to the focus of my ADD. I know. That's an oxymoron. Focus and ADD can't go together... except that, bizarrely, they somehow do.

You see, I've decided to write a book. A novel.

There's been an idea running around in my head for years. I even wrote a chapter a very long time ago, but that draft is sitting deep in landfill somewhere making a very nice home for worms. Over the last few months, the idea's been bubbling back to the surface, distracting me from just about everything.

So the other change is that, I'm going to share the process with you in a new blog... Chester Writes A Book. Don't worry. I'm not going to spoil the plot, or reveal any part of the story. All I'll tell you is that it's actually two books, the first set in World War II, and the second more or less now. It's nothing high brow or noble. Rather, it's a rollicking adventure story unlikely to win any literary awards, but if I'm any good, it will be a page turner. Either that, or it will be what most who set out to write a great novel end up producing... which is a badly written, rambling and predictable story full of cliches, bad grammar and awful prose. Time will tell.

Whether the new blog's interesting enough to read, only you can decide. That's not the point. What I need is a way to focus, and setting down progress in a blog will both organise my thoughts and motivate me to get the book written.

Which isn't to say this blog's dead. Far from it. I'll still update, but posts will perhaps come a little less often while I focus my limited creativity on something more useful.

I invite you to join me on my new journey.