From Ye Old Blogge: two posts January 2004

Meeny Molar 

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.

Friday, January 16, 2004

Saying hi to the good dr conrad

Just saying hi to a good friend who's developing software here in Western Australia, and whose website is at metaplay here - take a look at Glyph in action...

Sunday, January 18, 2004

Remember Pride In Incompetence? Part Two.

Remember me posting about that subject a few months back? Well here's another company that revels in its own incompetence, a property manager for commercial properties who happen to be our landlords at work. (Neither is mentioned by name to prevent anyone working it out.)

We've been in the building for almost two years. Moved there in order to be closer to the Central Business District, and because the old premises had been allowed to run down to the point of looking downright seedy and filthy. (Why that's bad for business is in the Sandlot Shops article a few months back...)

About a week after the first half of the office shifted, I began to wonder why every cubicle had desk fans... Six months later when we shifted in fully, I knew... The place was hot! All glass, especially on a North facing wall in the Southern hemisphere, is a BAD idea...

We bought fans for our people, because the previous tenants took theirs with them.

I joined the Fire Wardens organisation in the building, and immediately began to see other problems. Like, the public address system was just plain outclassed in the building, most of the tenancies on most floors couldn't hear the announcements and in many cases, not even the alarm tones.

And in our first year there, the security system wasn't programmed for the New Years Day nor the Australia Day public holidays and so we were burgled of four laptops that first New Years, because that was a weekday and all the doors and lifts were wide open for business...

It takes a special kind of incompetence to fail to program a public holiday, and an almost fanatical devotion to idiocy to forget not only two public holidays in a year, AND THEN REPEAT THE SAME MISTAKE THE NEXT YEAR. I'm not kidding. And I'll almost bet that the Australia Day will be similarly forgotten this year.

Of course, we had police forensics in to check the floor, and they firstly and immediately pointed out that our 'deadlocked security doors' which we were told we had, couldn't actually reach the deadlock position and could therefore have been opened with a credit card provided one could get accesss to the floor....

Suffice it to say, we aren't and weren't impressed, we have spent thousands putting an alarm and door access control system on the whole floor of a theoretically secure building, and guess what, our system is the same model as the building's, and ours has never skipped a beat.

The fire wardens recently held a full evac drill, and the fire department rep who was on site with us presented the landlords with a list of fire system failures. Five weeks later we discovered that there were suddenly even more faults, most created by the landlord in the last few weeks. One involved cluttering the already tiny fire control room with blankets from teh freight lift.

I put those blankets outside the control room on tuesday and faxed the landlord to say that I'd taken this step because it had been reported for five weeks and that was too long a time to have such a hazard unattended, and would they please collect their stuff and put it in a store room not the control room.

Next day I got a call from the building super to tell me he'd be there that afternoon to put the blankets back as there was 'no toher place that was easy to get to' to put them in. I told him that if they did there'd be a charge laid under fire regulations. On Friday the super showed up with his manager in tow, and guess what? In the intervening time, the blankets had been pinched. Bad luck...

I imagine the super thought that with his manager there we'd cave in, but instead I sent them out with a few choice words (mainly about Australian Standards and fire safety equipment I seem to recall) and they left pretty much fuming and ready to explode but knowing they couldn't.

The building held its first tenants meeting that afternoon, and lo and behold even before we'd sent a letter to the landlords, things got done about some of the PA gear and other things we'd been asking about...

Not done properly of course nor has it been finished, but that's for the next tenants meeting to act on...

We'll see.

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These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one.

I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world. 

From Ye Old Blogge: 3 Wednesday, January 14, 2004

Moral Meeny

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.

Wednesday, January 14, 2004

Diagnosis, Doctor?

Okay, I admit I'm a computer geek not a biology or medical geek. But I worry sometimes, I really do. Where *did* that specialist get their qualifications? How come they call their office a 'practice', and why can't I get a refund if they get it wrong? Yeap these are jokes, and old jokes at that, but I've found that every joke has at it's core some grating element of fact and truth that someone just had to vent.

Here's an intersting thing. For most of my young life I lived in the Northwest of Western Australia, where flouride and chlorine were not routinely added to the water supply, and I thrived and felt good. Then I moved to the lovely capital of WA, Perth, and suddenly my skin developed red blotches, dry patches, it itched and burnt and hurt like hell and so I went to see my GP about it before I flayed myself alive with scratching.

GP was very good about it. 'Mumble snabbledegook allergic mumble snedgerish soap' he burbled at me, then flourished his pen and wrote me a prescription for coaltar products, liquid soap, and soothing moisturising lotion. I spent hard-earned cash on the products, took the whole shebang home and used it for months and months and months. In the process I acquired several shebang-loads of the stuff and used it religiously, waiting for the skin to clear up.

Six months and a few hundred dollars later, I threw the last crappy odoriferous crap in the bin and went back to normal soap and shampoo. My skin cleared up. I breathed a sigh of relief, and felt great for a year or two when...

Went back to the NW again. Came back to Perth a year later, skin began the same fandango again, and this time I was on the other side of Perth and seeing a different GP. He referred me to what I will, laughingly, refer to as a dermatologist and skin specialist. In fact this doctor is one of Perth's leading dermos, and he took just one look to confirm his suspicions. 'Mumble snabbledegook soap mumble snedgerish psoriasis' was his comment, and I officially had psoriasis, one of the most depressing disease in history. Only leprosy could have been worse.

He told me that the shebangs of stuff I'd used were of little use, made a little flourish over the precription pad as he prescribed steroid creams, sun, sand, and sea, and sent me on my way. Since I also lived right across on the opposite side of the city from the beaches, I had to modify that a little bit and set up a solarium area in the back yard where I could sunbathe without nosy neighbours snooping on me, and the shebang of creams I was on cost as much over the next six months as those special soaps and shampoos and creams had. And that was that. After almost a year, it settled down by itself.

Score so far - doctors nil, Nature two.

A few years later the whole thing recurred. The GP where I lived prescribed one tube of cream after another, some of them (as I discovered later) even dangerous if misused. Score: Doctors nil, Nature about fifteen.

Finally after a really bad bout, the GP sent me, as luck would have it, to the same dermatologist. 'Mumble snabbledegook old mumble snedgerish dry skin' he said.

'But hang on doctor, isn't psoriasis, sort of, for life? How come now I don't have psoriasis, and have old dry skin instead? Which diagnosis is right?'

'Mumble snabbledegook old mumble snedgerish dry skin' he said.

He did the by now familiar flourish over the prescription pad, and out came a whole shebang of the same coaltar and skin lotion products he'd told me were crap four years ago. Wow pharmacology must have made some advances in the last five years. Pity doctors hadn't... I threw his prescription in the bin at his reception on the way out, to a startled yelp from the receptionist, and won't go there again. Besides, it's settled down by itself again...

But where did he get a degree? A clue as to this man's mind could be seen on the bookshelf placed on the patient's side of his desk, containing (I am NOT kidding here!) the Dermatology Journals in hardcover, from about 1950something up to 1970something. Can you spell ostentatious wanker, children?

Are all specialists that useless? Obviously not, or they'd be out of business - no patients left alive you see - so there must be something to this specialising lurk. Just that I'm blowed if I've seen any benefits... My gastro specialist: 'No the acid you're experiencing can't be happening because you're taking medication X, and therefore you CAN'T have acid.' This after I've just told him that I know what hydrochloric acid tastes like from chemistry days, and telling him that this was acid.

WTF is he on? When one of my customers tells me that his PC won't boot, I don't tell him 'you have software X, therefore you computer can't actually fail to boot' - if I did, I'd be looking for work in about an hour after that. Come to think of it if I'd tried to fix a non-booting machine by replacing the mouse, and then unrepentantly saying 'Mumble snabbledegook bios mumble snedgerish motherboard' I wouldn't have a job either...

And what else did the good gastro doc say? 'Mumble snabbledegook hiatus mumble snedgerish look inside' he said, then came that flourish, and he booked me in for a dual (endoscopy and colonoscopy) at $800 for 30 minutes of one of his mates' time.

I threw it in the bin at his reception...

My GP laughed about him when I brought the story to him,,

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These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one.

I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world. 

From Ye Old Blogge: 1 Wednesday, January 14, 2004

Lory Memane

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.

Another important post - this motors in wheel hubs concept started me thinking about how to convert smaller cars to hybrids. 

Wednesday, January 14, 2004

Electric Haulpak Wheels and Dutch Ingenuity

Hey the Dutch are developing a radical new concept - a wheel with an electric motor built in, so that it needs nothing else but a place to screw it into the chassis and a voltage. Now I'm all for innovation but this is hardly radical, mining companies will bear me out on this. What's surprising is the length of time it tookl before the technology made it into the mainstream.

Yep, that's right. For at least 17 years that I know of, mining companies have been using effing huge dump trucks with a centrally placed diesel generator and hub motors in the wheels. It saves having to leave space for a drive train and drive shaft and differential and leaves more for the money-spinner, which is the ore. Seventeen years or more, there have been trucks capable of carrying 200 tons driving around on hybrid diesel-electric power using an in-wheel electric motor on each rear wheel...

Have we been ripped off or what? Of course, cos that's how the money goes around longer. Also, those trucks were designed for brute hauling ability not for fuel economy - they really would suck over distances when compared to a few road trains hauling 200 tons between them.

But - the technology on a smaller scale is far better. There are things you can do besides adding thicker cables and bigger generators. And THAT'S where, if they play their cards right, those Nederlanders could score bigtime.

Instead of running the motors on a lower voltage, 240 - 440 volts sounds about right. Thinner cables can be used to the motors at higher voltages, saving a lot on construction costs. Charging that much battery would be much easier if you used a polyphase generator with each phase across a small subset of the batteries. That way you can also use solar panels without having to go to crazy lengths...

While you're at it guys, make the centre have three separate and independent sets of windings so that one failure won't cripple a wheel, and add decent position feedback and three computer drive controllers. Oh yeah - because we are using higher voltage and less current, our switching MOSFETs can be more efficient too.

It's important to have a computer which can tell at any instant just how many degrees the wheel has gone through, and which can put the wheel into different modes depending on what's happening - once you're cruising, why fire all three windings at once, why not just fire them in turn once every three revolutions just to keep the speed up? Or when moving slowly, use all three windings for smoothness and torque? and so forth?

'And of course if you're going to go electric and ecological you don't want air conditioning, do you?' Lemme tell you something sport, when it's 40 degrees celsius outside I damn well want an aircon alright! So the question is how would we achieve airconditioning given that we're on an energy budget?

Well there's an old idea that's been around for decades too - solar roof. In that, you mount a somewhat insualting roof about 2cm above the car roof and it keeps the roof of the car from reaching temperatures of 80 to 110 degrees C. Nope, I'm not kidding, you could cook an egg on the average car roof here in WA if you leave it parked outside in the sun...

Only - why stop at a solar roof? Why not make it a 'solar solar roof'?? Add solar panels on top, and instantly you're putting that sunlight to some use, and keeping the car cooler into the bargain. Now add decent heat reflective window tinting, because that's the other thing that heats your car up. While you're at it, how about a shade for the windscreen and rear window too?

Now that the car is some 7 - 12 degrees C cooler inside thanks to all that, put the solar roof to work driving peltier diodes in the roof. Cool air sinks down into the car and you can probably take off another 7 or so degrees C for the active cooling. That's 14 degrees less than the 50 or more degrees that car interiors reach, so now a much smaller amount of airconditioning power can achieve reasonable cooling. And you can realise a lot of energy saving if you have smart control over whether you need to cool the car or not. (If you're leaving it all day then you don't need to keep the inside cool after all.)

When you're moving, the gap between the solar roof and car roof can also funnel air over a small set of turbines or some other wind harvester and convert some of that over-the-roof drag into more cooling of the peltiers. (Or heaters in winter I suppose.)

Now here's a thought. I can run a generator off a biodiesel engine - all I need for this is old oil and a few chemicals, basically. Or I could run the engine of real gas like hydrogen or methane, and for methane I can actually keep a methane digester in the vehicle provided we're talking a larger transport here.

Like a motor home, I was thinking. If you build it with ground clearance and suspension in mind, and use those adaptive wheel motors all around and a smidgen of machine intelligence, you could let your Winnebago drive you around at a sedate pace, day and night... Mind you there would need to be slow lanes all over the place but if you don't have petrol to run that HSV then you're stuck in a slow lane. If the government thinks they won't need slow lanes then they have nother think coming.

Take a motor home cruise - let the AI drive - enjoy life in a slowly moving wagon, and do it for almost zero in petrol costs. Yes machine intel is that good now and already it can see better than we can at night, gauge stopping distances and car spacings better than we can, knows where it is thanks to GPS, and will trundle there at the best economical rate for tghe road it's on.

The point is - I've thought of these things, which means anyone could think of them. It means that in all likelihood, someone already has. And the real reason it hasn't earnt them billions is that petrol still doesn't cost three dollars per litre. (Although it soon may, then maybe this technology will take off...)

I hope I live to see it.

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These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one.

I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world. 

From Ye Old Blogge: 3 Wednesday, December 31, 2003

Near my mole

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.

3 Wednesday, December 31, 2003

Redmond's Latest Security Stumble?

Hey this is SECURITY with a capital U - "You Dickheads!!!"-

I quote from one of the manuals, the Sybex one (Mastering WindowsServer 2003):

.........With Server 2003 you can take a backup of your AD domain database with you to the remote site, and DCPROMO then lets you start a new DC out from the backup of the AD, rather than forcing a complete initial replication over the WAN. From there, you connect the new DC up to that unreliable phone line, and all the DC must do is to replicate whatever’s changed in AD between when the backup occurred and now, which usually isn’t much.

... so it now appears I can, if I get access to an open DC somewhere, take a copy of the catalog, I can then run up a new DC in my bedroom and join the domain? It may not get me full access right away but it's a loophole I could use to access stuff, maybe change passwords, whatever.

Also, (and more importantly) it lets me, as a determined system breaker, maybe get my hands on the DVD which that system admin is carrying around and reverse engineer it for ALL the passwords and other stuff like where the cream of the files are stored?

Damnit, it breaks every security rule I can think of... Am I stupidly not seeing something here, or is it Redmond that have done YAST?

---

These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one.

I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world. 

Find Anything In Your Documents - Fast.

Not sure if any of you have this problem: You have a Google Docs chock full o' documents you've written or collected over a decade, you have a Documents folder on your home directory on your server that's also chocka doccas, you *know* you had one (or wrote one) that was about the exact topic you want to write about - and . . . *blank*

I was desperate enough to forego all formatting and images if it meant I could just feed all of that into a huge database-based app that let me keep future notes on it as well - even if that meant b&w, dreary reams of text to go through and meant changing my whole workflow. I looked them up. Argh. So few features that I wanted.

I had a brainfart and asked ChatGPT. Among other suggestions, Copernic Desktop got thrown at me. But. (And this is my recurring plaint, the song of my pensioner people:) I can't afford an extra monthly fee... But I did go to one of those "apps just like xyzzy" sites and found a heap more. Near the top of the heap was a free open source software named DocFetcher. Installed it just this morning and I don't think I need to look further. 

DocFetcher is a bit more tech-fiddly to set up if you've never done this before, but even as it comes right out of the install, all you need to do is read the first page, point it at your Documents folder or whatever (the first page tells you how) and that would answer most of your needs. So don't be scared of it. It's bloody marvellous. 

If you know regexes (REGular EXpressions) then fine tuning what you want is a piece of cake. I just needed it to ignore MP3s and MP4s because why would I want to search for text in those? And so " .*\.mp* " was pretty much all I added to the exclusions list, which sped things up hugely. 

My Documents folder has text, Word docs, PDFs, videos, images, spreadsheets - but only the videos take ages for DF to search and are generally not great sources of text anyway. Images - I'm not sure if DF does OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on those but on the off chance, I'll save myself the trouble of writing another one or two dozen regexes to exclude those.

And it's fast enough anyway - PDFs only slow it a bit, and all the other formats seem to get recognised and recorded. 

But what about a way to grab stuff off my Google Docs? A moment's head-scratching and a flash of light: Install Google Drive, let it synchronise locally, and then point DF at that folder, same exclusions - and now I have all my text searchable inside this one app. (For those that don't know, Google Docs stores all your documents in Google Drive but - as far as I know, at this point in time - those documents don't count towards your Gb space quota. So every document appears in your Google Drive folder when you install it, with the extension ".gdoc" )

So now I can type in "non-struct" and all document with non-struct in them will show up for me. ("non-struct" is non-structural and refers to lumber from the timber stores and hardware stores around the place that I have a few pages with dimensions etc noted down.) 

I've found that DF opens documents in their default applications, which means your Google Docs will show up in your web browser, docx in your word processor, etc. 

Any of that helpful for you? I hope you found something useful in this short article. And I'm hoping you'll help me by sharing this post and my many others like it to your social and messaging networks please. Also if you want to spread the word just ask them to search for "teds news stand" online and they (and you!) can see my latest twenty or so posts across all my blogs, and sign up for the once-a-week newsletter so you'll always know when my next posts are coming out.

You can also help by donating the cost of a cup of coffee, one-time or monthly. And use the Mastodon link to chat with me. 

Thank you for your attention, hope to see you in the next article!

From Ye Old Blogge: #2 Wednesday, December 31, 2003

Remy le Moan

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.

Wednesday, December 31, 2003

Out of memory Errol

Here's a thought for you (be careful though!):

Medical professionals told us that we only ever really utilised a tenth of our brain's capacity. None of them can tell you what would happen if we used *all* of it. I mean, are they talking computing power or memory capacity here?

If they meant processing power well then we're probably safe - after all, it takes the same amount of specialised knowledge to be a woodcutter as it does to be a system administrator, just in slightly different areas. We may have to process a bit more than our woodsman ancestor, but I doubt the difference would add much to that 10% load average...

On the other hand, we have so much more information flowing through that processing power, and since it's believed that we never truly lose any memories, that could be a problem for our brains. (We might forget *where* a particular memory is in our brains, but unless the braincells die, the memory will be there, just forgotten...)

We are reading a LOT more information than our ancestors ever got out of tracking game or sitting at their local inn, we are required to process a LOT more data than they ever were, and this information overload is a recognised condition nowadays. And it's growing exponentially, meaning the first real information overload should be happening anytime in the new year...

In fact, this could be a good way to can spammers once and for all, if it can be shown that their actions constitute reckless endangerment of people's mental faculties...

So - at what point will a person's brain throw an 'out of memory' error, and what form would it take? Would you forget older or weaker memories by overwriting (which seems not to happen, given the view expressed above) or would you just start being unable to add any new memories?

...what point will a person's brain throw an 'out of memory' error, and what form would it take? Would you forget older or weaker memories by overwriting (which seems not to happen, given the view expressed above) or would you just start being unable to add any...

...will a person's brain throw an 'out of memory' error, and what form would it take? Would you forget older or weaker memories by overwriting (which seems not to happen, given the view expressed above) or would you just start being...

...'s brain throw an 'out of memory' error, and what form would it take? Would you forget older or weaker memories by overwriting (which seems not to happen, given the view expressed above...

...'out of memory' error, and what form would it take? Would you forget older or weaker memories by overwriting (which seems not to happen, given...

...take? Would you forget older or weaker memories by overwriting...

...forget older or...

OUT OF MEMORY ERROR HAS OCCURRED. PLEASE ADVISE - ... SOMEONE... ABOUT... UMMMMMmmm....

Sorry - couldn't resist that one... Back to the show...

Luckily, we can sort of deal with this sort of amnesia already, (or watch the movie 'Memento' for a great insight into anterograde amnesia) so we'll just carry on until someone invents a Compact Flash card for our brains, and then start adding a whole new personality or skillset... hehehe yeh right. Since when have we ever had enough CPU or memory?

But be more selective about what you put in your brain from now on, you hear?

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These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one.

I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world. 

 

From Ye Old Blogge: Wednesday, December 31, 2003

Reno My Male

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.

Wednesday, December 31, 2003

Happy New (Accurate!) Year!

So the Earth's gone back to being right on time in its orbit around the Sun.

It's an interesting thing, really. We invented atomic clocks to track time better and then found out that Earth hasn't been tracking time accurately, so we validated the leap year which had been previously introduced to account for this.

Our ancestors believed in whims of gods and random variability. To them, it was quite acceptable that winter might be followed by more winter, or that a day should be cut short because of a god's displeasure. What they attributed eclipses to bears testimony to their way of thinking back then. And lo! - the universe complied, by providing them with an Earth that slowed down and made years a different length.

Our physicists and astrophysicists (now *there*'s a blast from the past term!) tell us that slowing down is the natural course for bodies in orbit, so we also believe in a certain amount of variability, but a predictable variability.

This is unpredictable. So were the ancients right, does everything really depend on the whim of gods, or are we missing some laws of physics? Or is the Universe adapting itself to our new demands on it?

I don't recall who in the last century said that 'the Universe looks less and less like a machine and more and more like a thought' but I'm beginning to think they're right. In which case, there are two consequences to this Earth-moving news:

ONE - we're all on time again, but we still have leap years, so we're actually ahead by about a quarter of a second per day, so you can all stop worrying about being late for appointments! and

TWO - since the Universe is a thought, and since I am experiencing this thought, it must be *my* thought, so why am I typing this weblog to figments of my imagination?

Happy New Year all you figments!

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These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one.

I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world. 

 

From Ye Old Blogge: Monday, December 29, 2003

Lemony Amore

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.

Monday, December 29, 2003

Where are they today? Scientific breakthroughs that have vanished into limbo.

I've just picked up a book that's been in my bookshelf for a LOOONNNGGG time - written sometime in the Seventies, it's titled 'Breakthroughs' by one Charles Panati. In the first few dozen pages, I've already found enough material to keep my curiosity motor ticking over at hyper rates.

In the section on dental care, for example, he mentions 'Lauricidin' - go ahead, Google it if you like, there are results to be had - but here's the mystery - you tell me what happened here, I'd be most grateful:

You see, Lauricidin is lauric acid and glycerine. And Mr Panati goes to the trouble of mentioning that it has great antibacterial properties against the bacteria which cause tooth decay and caries, is tasteless, and just undergoing approval by the FDA for use as an additive in foods and motuhwashes and whatever, in order to lessen the chances of these bacteria forming plaques on teeth.

Where is it now? Why are there still dentists making money hand over hand over our teeth? Why does Lauricidin apparently now have a bad taste when in the 70's it was definitely 'tasteless'? Someone needed a reason not to put it into general use? WTF is going on here?

There are a variety of diet things mentioned, and one in particular I remembered, after reading about it again, that I'd heard about it again in the early Nineties, when it was said (on several of the better news magazine shows on TV at the time) that it was only a matter of a few years before we'd see a cheap weight reduction treatment from it. The material was perfluorooctyl bromide, a chemical which was also used in some underwater breathing experiments some 10 - 20 years ago. The stuff has large molecules that we can't easily absorb trhrough alveoli or stomach linings, so it's ideal for carrying oxygen into lungs or blocking food and passing it through the stomach.

Nowadays I find that it seems to be used as a contrast agent for xrays and microscopy, and not much else. And instead of the (and I quote Panati) 'expensive - about $50 a quart' bromide, the latest fad 'fat pill' is more like $500 a month's course, and comes laden with safety warnings and caveats and you try getting a doctor to prescribe them.

Sucrose Polyester - turned out to be a flop. Think Olestra, stomach cramps, etc. But that was in development when Panati wrtoe his book, and it has gone right through all the stages and become first a publicised breakthrough and then a PR disaster. But if it got developed, approved, and then shitcanned in the intervening 20 years, why didn't some of the other products?

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These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one.

I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world. 

 

From Ye Old Blogge: Monday, December 29, 2003

Lemon more, ay

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.

Note: This one has a lesson about shopping bags that's still relevant right now. Hardly any cartons are available even today. But the shops throw out one to several compressed bales of cartons a day and force the use of their renewable bags. 

Monday, December 29, 2003

What happened to cardboard boxes at supermarkets?

I mean that from the bottom of my heart - what happened to being able to take groceries home in a carton? Once upon a time, stores kept a pile of boxes at the checkout and you selected one and all your stuff got put into it - bingo, no plastic bags. Nowadays, we are choking the whole damn world with LDPE bags.

Supermarkets will tell you it's just not economical to keep the steady stream of cartons to the checkouts, that it takes too much employee time to move them around. But. It takes an employee around 20 - 30 seconds per carton to slice dice fold and flatten it, then it takes the same amount of time whether they take flattened cartons out the back or complete cartons out the front, and then it takes extra time to stack the crusher and operate it.

Not economical? Then maybe you have the wrong idea of economy. You're still using the 'Jack' idiom. (Fuck you Jack, I'm okay) That says that as long as you don't have to pay for the problem of plastic LDPE bags filling up the rubbish tips - along with all your neatly pressed bales of flattened cartons, of course - then that's 'economical' or something...

Fact of the matter is, there is going to be a surcharge on plastic bags here in Australia, which keen retailers will pass on to the customer (with interest I'm sure) and that will ensure that people bring their own shopping bags to the stores. And believe me, your interest on the surcharge on the plastic bags that you didn't need to supply in the first place if you'd only bothered to train employees to think as they pack, that won't even begin to cover the cost of checkout ops puzzling over which odd-shaped carry bag to put the breads in, which bag will hold the weight of the frozen goods, and so forth.

Believe me because I'm an early adopter. I have a flotilla of carry bags which I take to the supermarket with me and which I insist are used instead of the plastic bags. And it invariably takes almost twice as long because you see, the bags aren't a standard, the checkout person has to think about things, they have to (instead of just starting a new bag when the preceding one has opnly two items in it) worry about whether they can put a bottle of dishwashing liquid in with the frozen, and so on. And of course, the fact that I have my own carry bags makes it a bit more special, they also tend not to crush stuff together they way they do with plastic bags.

I've often asked for cartons, on the basis that they're way easier to pack, cheaper, and may as well get reused, but hey - I'll keep pissing supermarkets off with my odd assortment of bags until they cave in... hehehe...

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These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one.

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