There’s a push on to ‘return’ to the idylic times where a man would work the farm chatting to his cows while his lovely wife baked a loaf of bread (probably with a dab of flour on her nose) while a pail of milk (direct from the aforementioned cows) stands on the bench beside her.

There’s a push on to do-it-yourself. To be handy around the garden and home. To plant one’s own vegetables and to bake one’s own bread.

But is that really good for the environment? I doubt it (though I haven’t done the research to prove it)

See, if I run my oven for long enough to bake a loaf of bread it would use N units-of-energy. But the oven has just a single loaf in it! It’s big enough for four such loaves, and while it will take more than N units-of-energy to bake four loaves, it wont take as much as 4N units-of-energy.

But at the evil factory down town, you can be absolutely certain that they maximise the number of loaves in each oven to reduce (dollar) cost to the lowest possible value. Reducing dollar cost means saving energy where you can, and that’s good for the environment.

Factories are really good at saving costs. The milk factory that takes the raw milk from all today’s cows pastuerises the milk in enourmous vats, again carefully calibrated to steralise the milk at the lowest possible cost. If every farmer was to do their own pastuerisation, the cost would go up. Not to mention the cost if everyone had their own cow and had to do their own pasteurisation, homogenisation, skimming, churning, curdling and every other process milk goes through before we consume it.

Let’s think back to our idylic couple. Was it really that good? Of course not. The guy out in the fields is using a hand-plough behind a couple of flea-bitten old horses that don’t want to work at all, let alone go in straight lines. He’s blistered and tired. He doesn’t come in at the end of the day all pleased with himeself for his “hard day’s work”. He comes in expecting a meal then goes to bed, just to wake up before dawn the next morning just to do it all over again. Day after day.

She’s in the kitchen making bread with one hand while keeping an eye on the boiling kettle full of clothes and nursing the new baby on the other hand.

So where should our environmental desires be focussed if not at the factories?

I’d suggest the farm. While there’s been incredible change on the farm in the past century and even the past hand-full of decades, there’s still a long way to go. Imagine if we brought the full impact of modern technology to the farm rather than praising it for it’s rustic past.

Let me design just a couple of machines that could be used on every farm. Maybe they exist, but somehow I don’t think they do. Or at least they haven’t been taken up yet by farmers. Their sons or their grandsons will be the ones ready for the next major shift in farming.

First invention is the automatic weeder. Think of it as a Rhoomba for the farm. The “Weeda” hangs above a crop, is powered by solar panels and travels up and down the crop day-and-night doing the weeding: removing weeds increases yeilds. However the device doesn’t spray chemicals onto weeds (though it would have the precision to do so) instead it carefully plucks the sprouting weed before it gets a hold. We have this technology. A camera and pincer would travel up and down, back and forth, scouring the ground for weeds. The camera would know what was a sprouting weed and what was a crop. We have this technology already — we use it to stop terrists at airports and known-to-be-felonius-teenagers at shopping centers. So we’ve removed all the weeds, and done so using the power of the sun.

Next invention could even be mounted on the same boom arm, but it does the totally opposite job. This device finds the crop and waters it. At the moment, we water crops using massive irrigation sprinklers that spray water in unmeasured, uncontrolled relatively random patterns. But why not use our recognition systems to identify plants we do care about and use sensors to determine the exact amount of water each-and-every stalk of wheat needs? We can measure the stalk density to determine if the plant is too dry, and check the ground to see what water the plant has available. Now we stop wasting any water whatsoever. Every drop is used to make sure each individual plant is the healthiest it can be. And we stop watering weeds.

One last thought comes to mind:what if we pluck the weeds and put them in a special hopper. As the sun hits the hopper, it bakes the weeds. We then capture the escaping moisture and feed it back to the plants. (OK, I’ll admit that the cost of this reclamation scheme would probably well outweigh the reclaimed moisture, but we do need to kill those weeds somehow, right?)

That’s my two-and-a-half inventions. Have I sparked any in your head? Do you agree that farm life wasn’t to idylic and that baking bread at home isn’t as environmentally responsible as it feels?

At first I just couldn’t understand how they made it so damned hard. Then I saw a ballot paper. For my non-US readers, each November there is (non-compulsory) elections held. It isn’t every four years, it’s every year. So how come we don’t hear about it every year? Because along with voting for the President and VP they vote all the way through many many many public officials. Can you imagine voting for the president of the schools board? Or what about voting someone onto the roads commission? That’s how it works. Don’t believe me? Check this. At the top of this particular ballot you can vote a “single party ticket”. This means you just pick “Democrat” or “Republican” rather than voting Brian L. Denman onto the Drains Commission. No wonder everyone calls themselves a “Republican” or “Democrat”. It’s too hard to be anything else!

OK so the first thing: get rid of all that rubbish. Seriously. If I don’t care who’s on the Drains Commission, why should it appear on the same piece of paper as the President of the USA?

Here in Australia, you get one piece of paper for the Lower House and one for the Upper House. For the lower house you order your candidates (about 5 or 6 normally — see above) in the order of your preference. For the upper house you can number every candidate (there’s about 120 of them!) or just pick a single party “above the line”. Sure that 120 is ludicrous, but at least there’s just two things I’ve voting for, and they are on separate pages. You then take these two pieces of paper and put the white one in the box marked “White ballot papers” and the green on in the box marked “Green ballot papers”. There’s even an official there to make sure you know your green from your white.

Once you vote for someone to hold public office, you entrust things like drains and roads to them. It’s their job to make sure the best qualified person manages the drainage. I don’t want a Liberal or Labor shill making sure my sewerage works, I want someone who has a doctorate in poo.

Next thing: Don’t do it all on one day. Sure it feels like it’s easier, but it isn’t. You’re just confusing everyone. Every 4 years vote for national politicians, the year after vote for state, the year after that for city and the left over year you can have a holiday or, if you must, vote for the drain guy.

But my biggest piece of advice is the main purpose of writing this post. Everything else is just padding because this is so blindingly stupidly simple that writing it by itself would be a waste of pixels.

Electronic voting is useful for one big reason: fast results. It doesn’t make things more transparent, but rather the opposite. Once you cast your (electronic) vote, you just have to hope that the computer doesn’t have any bugs. But at the end of the day, some dude (who you probably voted for) clicks some buttons and declares the results. And then it’s all over bar the shouting (about being removed from the electoral roll).

So get some damned transparency back into the system: voting electronically is a great idea. We should all be doing it. Fast results are good. But those results should be non-binding. They are the unofficial results.

When I click to confirm that I really do want to vote for Brian the Drain Dude (rather than Joe the Plumber?) the computer records it as an unofficial vote (for speed counting) but it prints out a slip of paper confirming my vote for Mr Denman. I’d expect this slip to have (a) the election I’m voting in: “2004 Drains Board”  (b) the candidate I’m voting for “Brian L Denman” and (c) a barcode that maps to my computer-registered vote.

Now if the piece of paper that popped out isn’t who I wanted to vote for, I go to an official and complain. They then use that barcode to void the computer vote and I get to vote again. When I’m happy that my piece of paper reflects my decision, I put it in the box marked “Drains Dude” and go on my merry way.

At the end of the day, they press the magic button on the computer and get the unofficial result. This gets reported and we know almost immediately who the winner is. But the official vote comes later. The box marked “Drains Dude” is then opened up and the votes are counted by humans. If this count disagrees with the computer vote by a given percentage, it’s recounted. If it’s still out and is independently verified, then the PAPER votes are the official vote and that result is the official result.

But now it’s news again. Art Monthly Australia have decided to run a picture of a nude child on their latest magazine cover to protest the censorship of nude children in art. And KRudd has decided to jump back into the issue.

“… frankly I can’t stand this stuff,” he says to the ABC Insiders program. “How can anyone assume that a little child of six years old, eight, 10, 12, somehow is able to make that decision for themselves?” Well that’s a good question, and one I answered last time this was an issue: it’s called responsible parenting.

Read on to see the cover and introduction to Donald Brook’s article “Art and (not or) Pornography”, or read the Editorial and notes on the cover at Art Monthly Australia

03 Art and (not or) Pornography DONALD BROOK
Issue 211, July, 2008
From time to time there is a great fuss made about whether some object is a work of art or pornographic. Experts are invited to testify, and mostly ridiculed for their trouble. Witnesses with no expertise at all are treated more courteously; often being commended for their assistance in establishing a community standard. This manoeuvre is prejudiced in two ways. First, those without expertise are not invited to testify in statistically significant numbers, and their opinions are mainly selected and filtered through the calculating minds of lawyers. Second, and perhaps more importantly, no conservative judge and jury seriously believes that a change of mind will ever be the appropriate response to evidence that a more radical opinion than their own is the community standard. (Or vice-versa, for more a radically minded judiciary and a more conservative community standard). All these good people are determined to do the right thing, and no evidence that in the domain of nutrition (for example) eating beef is the community standard will persuade a vegetarian to approve of it.

Taken from the Art Monthly Australia website.

I’ve been meaning to write a blog post entitled “What is art: I’m right, you’re wrong.” But it’s a difficult one to write. Basically I think there’s a lot of ‘art’ produced today that is better filed under ‘decoration’ and even ‘rubbish’ and a lot of the time ‘wank’. So I have a carefully built up ‘art meter’ in my head that has been working for years on a definition of art. However writing it down in plain English has so far been an elusive task, despite several aborted attempts.

But now Bill Henson’s photography has given me cause to skip that post (for now) and talk about an actual, controversial case.

Bill Henson’s use of nudes is not new.

Several years ago Fatima and I went to the Ian Potter Center at Federation Square to see one of his exhibits. There were nudes in that collection. I tell you this so that I have at least some credibility. I’ve actually seen some of the work. I’m not just hearing about it on the radio or hearing it from a friend of a friend over a latté.

What has happened here is that the Ridiculous Right has gotten wind of his work (How did it take so long? Where have they been all this time?) and decided that any depiction of a nude teenager is child pornography. There can be no discussion: the girl is naked, thus is child porn. They then reported child pornography to the NSW police department, who had no option but to investigate. The police then went to the gallery that was about to open a Bill Henson exhibit and removed his photographs, pending investigation. The Ridiculous Right’s media soapbox — early evening ‘current affairs’ type TV programs — reported on this with all the moral outrage they could muster. Calls for jailing this ‘dangerous pornographer’ rang in the streets. One thing I’ll give the Ridiculous Right: They’re great at sound-bytes.

“It wasn’t OK for a 14-year-old model fully dressed to be on the catwalk for Australian Fashion week, [so] it’s definitely not OK for naked children to have their privacy and childhood stolen in the name of art.” – New South Wales Opposition Leader Barry O’Farrell

Even the Prime Minister was able to get in a good “revolting” in a TV interview, “Kids deserve to have the innocence of their childhood protected,” he said.

Child protection advocate Hetty Johnston says, “It’s child pornography by any name you want to call it.”

But then the tide began to turn. The arts world did a double take and said “whuh?” Unfortunately of course, a more moderate view doesn’t come in nice sound-bytes. But still, the Media began to turn. Even the bastion of the Ridiculous Right here in Melbourne, the Herald Sun, was able to see the argument enough to run a full page cover story dedicated to Prime Minister Rudd’s apparent close association with the “arts world” at the recent 2020 summit.

So let me amongst the voices with no sound bytes: this is not pornography.

Henson’s work is amazing and not in the slightest bit erotic or titillating. His images are provocative in that they show people truly ‘raw’.

If we’re to ban his work because it depicts naked children, we’ll need to go back to a lot of earlier work by the renaissance artists and paint some pants on them. The images are as titillating as a Michaelangelo statue.

Anyone who ‘gets off’ on these images, despite Henson’s intent, is already finding a lot worse on the interweb. They don’t need tasteful nudes, by a respected artist, hanging in a gallery, to get them all excited.

When considering publishing this piece, I had to answer one question that stumped me for a minute: Would I let Jack, as a teenager, pose nude for Bill Henson to exhibit?

But it only stumped me for me for a minute. If I believe in the photographer; If I believe Jack wants to do the modeling; If I believe Jack to be mature enough to make such a decision; If I believe Jack could understand that these photographs would be available to his school friends and work colleagues for years to come and he was OK with that; then there is absolutely no way I would stand in his way.

The pointlessness comes in the confusion over why this is a good idea.

Turning your lights off for 1 hour will save approximately zero energy. Though, for a lot of people, this seems to be their reason for participation. In fact, even Australia’s national broadcaster, the ABC, seems to think this is the point of the excercise. Their article proclaims “Energy use dimmed during Earth Hour“. That’s right, during “Earth Hour” we saved about 10% of the electricity we’d normally use — 24 tonnes of CO₂ wasn’t expelled.

It’s the equivalent of taking 48,000 cars off the road for an hour. Sounds a lot right? Hang on, let’s do some math: 48,000 cars divided by 8,784 hours in this year = 5.4. Yes! That’s right .. earth hour last night was the equivalent of taking less than 6 cars off the road for a year.

Of course, the organizers do know what they’re talking about. They do know that taking 5.4 cars off the road for a year is pointless. According to EarthHour.org, the point is “to deliver a powerful message about the need for action on global warming“. That’s right. It’s an awareness campaign.

Now if everyone is turning off their lights in order to keep those 5.4 cars on the road, Earth Hour has been a monumental flop. Totally pointless. Most people who participated thought they were helping to save the planet simply by turning off their lights.

At least The Age (an official press-partner of Earth Hour) acknowledges that the immediate environmental impact of the ’switch off’ will be little to none:

Given the complex auctioning process that determines the different energy sources that are fed into the national electricity grid each day, there may not be a cut at all.

So if there’s going to be Earth Hour 2009 (and I’m guessing there will be) then lets try and make sure people aren’t of the notion that Earth Hour has any sort of immediate affect on the environment. If you’re going by candlelight for the hour, use that candlelight to send a handwritten letter to a politician or business demanding some sort of specific change.

If you turned out your lights last night, don’t stop there. Make sure you take notice of the real reason for the event. Now you’ve made the statement, make sure you now do something about the environment.

Lolcats are images combining photographs of animals, most frequently cats, with a subjectively humorous and idiosyncratic caption in broken English referred to as Kitty Pidgin[1], Kitteh, or lolspeak.

They’re all over the place and they’re really dumb and annoying. Try searching flickr for lolcats. You get the idea.

Then I saw a few people using services like roflbot to add the same broken English captions to politicians, and I couldn’t help but get into the spirit of it.