Time

Some days are a real loss, or a win if you consider the writings of Dr Seuss.  Looking at the battery meter on the laptop computer, time is depicted as a draining potential.  But it has a fullness from which it has to start...

And so it is: Today was filled with pain, it was filled with longing, and finally, it was filled with reminiscence shared with souls of my kin.  This is a loss and it is a win.  I speak not of the lost time here.  I dare not mention time won, because time is an artifact we construct of necessity and guilt.  Time as an artifact of deliverance and guilt does not enter my life anymore.

I reconstruct the images.  The images reflect the experiences.  There is the image of my childhood friend.  She wears a simple dress and she kisses me, doll in hand as we imagine being husband and wife.  We know nothing, but we copy, and it leaves a mark.  It ignites a flame of commitment that I keep to this day.  Sealed with a kiss, we stand together.  Some walk away from this, with a shrug and a new-found love.  Pain has shades of intensity.

There is loss, and there is gain.  The images compress and the images dilate.  I see long summers and endless loneliness, I see winters filled with hope and letters smuggled  over school desks as I learn about the smell of nearness. 

We listen to music, we taste the shudders cuddled in a simple kiss.  The draining potential kicks in as soon as the link is made,  There is expectation and fear of loss, moments of unbridled optimism, and finally fact.  But time, I maintain, sits in the background, like a darkness, waiting to be constructed as a causality.  The doctrine of the what is and what will be lurks for those without the power of imagination!

I see toes wriggling innocently and with utter abundance.  It is the kick-start that gets energised by a walk down a passage and a sense of destiny.  There is no time connected to this.  These are just images that string together.  Some may call for causality, I call for the smell and the emotion of the image.  Yes, I defy the science and I defy the insistence on the ticks of time, I only see the movement of that fairy body and the golden hair that signaled my fate.  There is an image of the mother of my son that becomes my imagined future and a reality that dawns many images later.  Time passes, almost as an aside.

We look at the watches that hog our lives, the calendars that steal our love and our abandonment.  We read the days off and we count the hours.  These are the days of tragic loss as we calculate the seconds to our demise.

But I care not for these measures.  I live for the soft touch of lips, the moments of a shared hug when it is least expected, the handshake and the extended eye contact.  I live for the smell of self-love, carefully prepared after a warm shower and administered from a lovingly selected bottle of perfume.  I watch hair shift over a brow, and I see the varnish on a nail.  I see the sweat on a brow in a meeting and the intent in a frown.  I collect these images like shells at the seashore.

The tide comes in and the tide recedes.  It takes and it delivers.  I do not connect hours to these images.  Hours will detract from the feelings, hours will bring a blandness to the events.  Repetition is the bastard son of these time ticks, and I renounce the existence of this abomination.

No, I live with an image of the next and images cascading away from me to my birth.  I imagine the impossible and I extend my dreamy moments into the light of day.  If I can dream it, I can give birth to it.  My dreams are simple though.  I find the lips of my lover in a tender embrace, I am not older and I am not younger, and I smell the clear intent of closeness and I taste the urgency of life. 

It is now and as I imagine it.   I look at the footsteps of my God that walks before me.  The moment is an artifact of deliverance and I know no guilt as I walk the path I see unfolding before me.  The quick-snap lock of time is unsprung.

Trading in Carbon

Here in New Zealand motorists are reported to pay up to $25 per metric ton of carbon when they fill their cars with fuel.  Some sources report that the open market cost for carbon credits is just over $13 per ton.  The fuel supply companies are effectively making a 100% markup on carbon credits on the face of it.  This is similar to governments making money trading in carbon credits.  

As a simple man with a desire for simple explanations, I find it hard to understand why there is a trade in carbon credits.  Yes, I know all about global climate change and the smarty pants scientists putting evidence on the table that we are the cause of the impending doom.  But how does this trading scheme work, if it trades in the unseeable and unmeasurable based on sketchy science?  Why are we going along with it?  Is it because we have been kicked into submission and guilt?

Let’s just look at this quickly using round numbers:  one liter of automotive fuel (C₈H₁₈) weighs about 700g (equal to about 6.2 mole of fuel) and reacts with 2.4kg oxygen to form about 2.2kg of carbon dioxide (CO₂), which translates to about 600 gram of carbon.  This means that for an average tank of fuel used (50 liters), you produce about 30kg of carbon, and this translates to about 75 cents per refill.  Or you could pay about 38 cents, if the fuel companies did not rip you off.

I maintain that this is fruitless expenditure.  Where is the money going to?  You see, I see 1.5 cents per liter disappear from my wallet.  That is REAL.  I use about 800 liters of fuel per year in the one car we use.  Obviously I also consume fuel when I take the bus or the taxi cab.  I have no idea how much that is.  So let’s just work on 1000 liters to make the case here.  That is $15 per year.  Insignificant!  Maybe we are playing along because in the bigger scheme of things this is of no consequence....

But wait, there is more.  Wolfram Alpha reports that there were 3.1 million vehicles in use in New Zealand in 2006.  Assume there are about 4.3 million people living here.  Just for now, assume there is a steady growth in vehicles and that it came to about 3.5 million vehicles this year.  As a very conservative assumption, assume all these vehicles have similar patterns of use to mine, then we use about 3.5 billion liters of fuel per year. That comes to $52M of carbon tax.  $52,500,000!!!  Not shabby.

If I now ask where that money is going, I think I am asking an important question.  Let us take this further.  I can buy a large beech tree for about $15 (Fagus Sylvatica Purpurea).  This tree will conservatively sequestrate about 15kg of carbon per year in the climate of the South Island.  One tree will sequestrate the carbon delivered by using about a half a tank of fuel.  As I am generating 600kg of carbon per year, I need to have  40 healthy beech trees somewhere to sequestrate my carbon production from using typical transport.     That comes to an investment of $600.  These 40  trees will stand there and consume carbon for the rest of my natural life.  The 3.5 million vehicles need to have the same sequestration, so let’s make it easy and say that we need to invest $1000 per vehicle.  That comes to $35B once-off.  I hope my math is right, because it says that we can sequestrate the carbon we produce in New Zealand from using cars and trucks by investing about $35B in trees.  That is 670 times what we pay in tax per year.  

I assume a tree like this will need 10m² to flourish (I do not have a lot of information on this, so maybe someone can comment).  I need 400m² planted with these trees.  Nothing else, just the the 40 trees.  Make that 500m² for the sake of my argument.  The total perennial crop area of New Zealand is about 1.8 million hectares.  I have 36 million spots available for my trees to sequestrate my type of fuel consumption.  Sure, we also need to produce other crops, but they do their bit in cleaning up carbon too.  

Back to maths.  We need to clean up 3.5 billion liters of fuel derived carbon.   One tree does 15kg of carbon which is generated by 25l of fuel.  Therefore, we need 140 million trees, or about 140 000 hectares covered in trees.  That is less than 10% of the perennial crop area covered in trees or similar carbon sinks.  I hope my math sucks big time.  

I am worried that we do not attempt the maths, that we do not ask the questions and that we do not take our governments to task on this.  A once-off payment of $35B will cover us for a few years (say 10).  That comes to $1 extra per liter, or $1000 for every vehicle.  This is what we need to pay to pay for the carbon pollution, if that argument holds.  I see no trees being planted.  Will I be exempt from tax if I plant 40 trees?

So why are we paying $52M per year?  It is not enough to make a difference.  Where is the money going?  Are we the generation that is guilt ridden and ripped off because we choose to be ignorant?  Please check my math.  I try to spend no more than an hour per blog entry, which means I my me mistaken here.  If I am right though, we should be asking a few questions.

(Image used under the Creative Commons License - see http://www.freefoto.com/preview/15-19-15/Tree)

About Sugar - InfoGraphic

Created by: Health Science

Mindless Rant

It is so bloody hot in Pretoria, South Africa, this week!   It is close to 40˚C (104˚F) every day and the night time temperatures never go below 20˚C.  We are all on edge and tired.  Beer is warm in a country where people consume a crappy brew called Castle by the tanker load.    I mean, who calls a beer Castle?  It must have been a hot summer when they came up with that name.  And it shows in the beer.  Have one and your whole system turns to toxic sludge.  Come on SAB Miller XXX fishpaste - sue me!  

Oh, and I woke up to discover that Steam had been hacked.  I was angry man!! What is this?  And I mean, STEAM hacked - the same idiots that ban people for a typo!!  HACKED!!  Karma is such a bitch.  Lucky I have a tech savvy son to help me secure my account.  He LOLs as he confirms that I have not left any important stuff in the account in any case.  I use 1Password to generate the mother of all passwords.  Take that!   Even without salt that is a killer.  I feel better - momentarily.  

The politics are just as hot.  The leader of the ANC Youth League was suspended for 5 years from his party.  He responds in defiance from an even hotter Limpopo that he’ll appeal the outcome.  Why?  Please claim that you have heat stroke Julius.  Just continue with your business my friend - it is good as it is.   Please do not have another march from nowhere to nowhere to test the resolve of your followers.  People might die.

In Cape Town the Aussies look like they are crushing the local flower boys in one of two REAL cricket games, just to be blown away by a great bowling attack on the mother of all of the weirdest pitches ever prepared at Newlands.  One has to ask how this happened, and in the light of the history of screwing with the game, one feels cheated.  I mean - WTF!!  This is worse than the Bryce (who remembers him) debacle a few weeks ago.  But who would notice?   It is about the money these days.  Screw the poor fools that thought they would be seeing great cricket on Saturday.  

Went to the local super supermarket, you know the posh one,  and bought imported (I cry in my warm bubbly) pomegranate.  Use by date is 3 days from now.  It has a distinct fizz to it and being a consumer of alcoholic beverages, I notice the smell of the by-products of fermentation.  I take it back and I ask if they would replace it.  Yes, sure, no worries.  So I open the next container, and point out that it too is evolving.  The manager sniffs it, and no, it is fine.  This is where the beast in me wakes up, I guess.  So I say, well, I’ve paid for it, and I am happy to walk away from this - you just eat it sir!  Nope, no can do!  Why not, well he does not like pomegranate.  You see where this is going?  It is warm, even in this posh air-conditioned shop.  Fade out and fade in as I walk out into the late afternoon with a bottle of warm bubbly.  

Meanwhile I pour over pics from Dunedin NZ where my family indulges in seafood and a bottle of the most divine Sauvignon Blanc bubbly from somewhere cool in New Zealand.  I listen to TuksFM and they insist on playing metal.  I mean, get a life, just play some Johnny Cash - we are all dead already, have mercy.  Metal!  Sweating teenagers with hormones dripping from hot guitars and drummers sweating blood.  There is no mercy in this world.  The TV offers nothing of value.  It is Noot vir Noot.  For those souls reading this  outside South Africa, this translates to Note by Note, but for those in the know, it equates to crap squared!   About two minutes into the show, the host does what is expected and he chooses the girl in the second row for a competition - NO SHIT SHERLOCK!!

I open doors and windows.  This allows the great multitude of insects in, even on the fifth floor.  It is clear to me now.  We are the dinos of our age.  It is time.  We refused to pay carbon tax, so GAIA is taking revenge and unleashing the exoskeleton brigade.  I smile and take a sip of iced bubbly while I spray the room with a phosphate and chlorine mix laced with nitrous elixirs.  What the hell - GAIA is pissed off already.  

A cool breeze clears the smell of death momentarily and my thoughts go back to late 2009.  The pool light is set to deep red and we are floating in the salty warm water.  The stars are bright lights in a black sky, even here in the city.  We are wrapping up here before moving to the next phase of our lives.  There is sadness and anticipation as we point out the familiar constellations and we talk about the winters in Bloemfontein when we first discovered the majesty of the Universe.

I walk out on the balcony.  Some idiot grills his motorcycle in a moment of madness, a dog barks at a shadow and I look towards the east where Saturday is dawning.  I imagine my love welcoming the day...

This afternoon a tree was dropping red flowers and leaves like tears.  The vastness of loss of so many lives and so many loves hangs over this day,  Turning away, I sip the bubbly and I realise it is a pretty good day to be alive today. 11/11/11

Social Media

I was blown away when I first read about hypertext and the concept of rich documents in Byte Magazine (1988 - Volume 13 number 10 to be precise).  What a pity that one cannot access these articles easily anymore, and just another reason to support the move away from publishers owning content. 

Back to the story...  I remember that I was asked to talk in a small forum about technologies that I thought would change the way we deliver information content. This volume of Byte came as a revelation and shaped much of my thinking about situation awareness, of all things!  The article by J. Fiderio  “A Grand Vision--Hypertext mimics the brain's ability to access information quickly and intuitively by reference”  was so well written and made so much sense.  How would we thread these links in electronic documents to access the content in this natural manner?  Remember, this was before the days when Marc Andreessen’s Netscape hit our screens, and years before Internet Explorer!  Most people were using the internet to send e-mails around.  At best you could search for stuff in a static ‘online’ database like dBase III.

I remember telling the forum that having these hot links in documents that could even reside on the internet, we would be able to jump from one piece of information to the next relevant one without skipping a beat in our unfolding understanding of subject matter.  We would ‘flick the pages’ almost at random looking for the information we needed, weaving new information as we went, all based on current documents on other topics.  For me as a generalist, this was exactly what I needed to really do what I do well, and that is to integrate across boundaries.  I had no idea how this would be done in terms of the underlying technology, but I knew that once we had thought about it, and with the exciting emergence of the internet, it would only be a matter of time.

In 1992 I saw the first application of this technology in a simple product for the masses: The New Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia was part of a bundle of software I got with a CD ROM drive.   Over time the hypertext links in documents just became part of the every-day experience.  These days I am constantly trying to convince people to accept the work I deliver in PDF or HTML formats, so that I can add links to other material in the document.  Why do we still want to print things on paper and have static documents?  I guess there may be reasons, but think about it.  You can get so much more, and I can even keep those links updated with new information at a small cost.  We can have real live documents.

How do social media applications fit into this discussion?  Well, FaceBook is just one big ‘hypertext’ mess.  Almost everything on the page is a link to something else, and then on to the next thing, and so on.  In Twitter we see the use of link shorteners in almost every post.  The post is almost just there to grab attention - the real stuff (or the fluff) is somewhere else.  Links appear everywhere, even ones to show where you are when you are posting something.  This truly represents how we interact with content, it helps us answer the what, why, where, how and when type questions on the fly.  Our search engines thrive on these links.  Our social media applications use this to sell us stuff, to find people, to share ideas.

My current social media favourite lives on my iPhone.  Instagram allows me to capture the emotions I feel with a picture in the instant I experience it.  I have to write very little.  I add the place where the picture was taken, some text to describe the moment and then the picture becomes the story.  This works for me as a visual thinker.  Chrissie asked the other day: “Who would want to see your snap shots?”.  I think Jan-Dawid answered appropriately by saying that it not just the picture, it is about the moment, the place, the hidden story.  He gets it.  The picture is the start.  Instagram allows people to 'Like' and add comments.  But often a 'Like' is enough - you know what was going down, you acknowledge that you grasped it, the moment became a common experience.  The art is to compose the message in the picture.  This is a long way from a static link in one document to some other content in another document.  However, it started with that Grand Vision that Fiderio talked about.  

Where are we going next?  I am not sure, but I do know that retakes on FaceBook will not do it, and Google+ is just not intuitive enough for me.  Twitter is good to broadcast with, but it seems to be a bit one-way.  Instagram may be the first of a new breed.  Live links in the pictures may be an obvious next step.  Links to where pics were taken, immersive experiences and ways to have tracks of pics, rather than just a singular timeline, may follow.  The closer we get to telling stories around the fire and learning from the discussion, the closer it comes to being natural.  I think that is the key.

My Instagram images can be seen at: http://instagrid.me/drhenkroodt/  It lacks the descriptions, etc.  You can also link to my stream if you have the Instagram app by looking for @drhenkroodt

Now, if only I can get that Byte magazine from 1988 in electronic format.....