neonascent

Hayden recently gave me his old bike*, and I attempted to cycle it around Sydney. It’s was an old racing bike, with a very light frame, but also suicidally-placed gear levers and brakes. Combined with the foot-cages this bike made it impossible to cycle safely (IMHO).

Last Monday I visited the Nunnery free bike workshop (at the Redfern end of Newtown) and managed to carve off the old handlebars, replace them with straight maintain-bike ones, and move the brakes and gears. All for free: Fantastic! I’ve now got a very light bike, but with sensible controls. I’ve dubbed the bike “Mr Richard Ashcroft from the Verve”, as it’s all black, is very skinny, but has wide shoulders thanks to the straight bars. The bike now marches through the streets of Sydney a la Bittersweat Symphony, knocking old ladies and children over… maybe.

Needless to say, I was well chuffed.

Today, I managed to enthusiastically buy a bunch of cheap and heavy electronics from Reverse Garbage, with no transport other than Mr. Ashcroft. Necessity being the mother of invention; I managed to hook up the sweet trailer arrangement I’ve been wanting to make for years, all for less than $10!

* reports indicate it was a karma-swap for my old bike going missing while I was away.

From the comments of a Slashdot post on Japan’s proposed space elevator comes this nice scenario:

Actually, it would take a guy in the spacecraft a minimum of 4.3 years to arrive at Alpha Centauri. In Earth’s reference frame it might take thousands of years.

How disappointing would that be? You get yourself all packed up and ready to go to Alpha Centauri. You’re excited, the kids are excited, you’re going to be the first humans to ever step foot outside the solar system. It’s groundbreaking stuff, you are lauded as heroes as you step into your state-of-the art ship that travels at 60% of the speed of light.

After almost ten difficult years in a cramped interstellar ship, you and the other colonists can finally see your destination. You will forever own a place in the chronicles of human history. And then, you discover than the place was already colonized by humans centuries ago … the ones who waited until FTL travel was invented back on Earth. They made the trip in a couple weeks. They’ve been waiting for you ever since.

I’ve made screen prints on a few postcards, and want to share them with friends. This is just the first few attempts at printing, so I imagine that if I keep at it there will be quite an improvement. I’d love to have people to send them to, as motivation to keep printing new things, as a nice touch-base, and to using romantic, nostalgic old snail-mail - I always like receiving something packagey or handmade in the mail!

If you want to be on the mailing list, add a comment to this post with your name and postal address. I’ll keep the comments hidden, so you won’t have to announce it to the world.

If you are feeling dandy and helpful, you can contribute the cost of your stamp. This is $1.30 for international, or 55c for local. I don’t mind sending them out for free though, so don’t worry if it’s a hassle.

Thanks, and don’t forget to add your details!

I’ve sent them out. Too late for this design, but I’ll do another one soon enough!

A couple of years ago I went to see an allergist, who delighted in sticking needles in my arms and injecting things just under the skin. When he was done, he told me I was allergic to dairy, and grass. I’d had terrible hayfever for a few years previous, and he gave me a little bottle of “sublingual” (under the tongue) drops of pollen protein to desensitize me to grass. It worked fantastically, but I went overseas and didn’t finish the course.

It’s Spring here, and my hayfever was back with a vengeance. I suffered through Spring in England just a few months ago, and was taking multiple 24-hour antihistamines with little effect, so wasn’t looking forward to another one. Here’s my novel solution: grass tea. Just pluck some grass from the offending nearby park, wash, then add hot water. I’ve been drinking it every morning and night for the last few days, and it seems to have already started working! Harrah!

Melody sends me a link to an article in the fantastic Architecture Blog; WebUrbanist.

Rotating Architecture: 16 Spinning Builldings. Much of it is gimmicky, but it gives a great feel for what is possible with modern materials and engineering.

Remember that UK canoeist who faked his own death? Only his wife knew, and apparently the rest of the family were quite upset about the whole thing. Now it turns out he was living next-door to his wife, with a secret passageway into her bedroom. How exciting!

THE CANOEIST who faked his own death was actually hiding out in a bedsit with a secret door to his wife’s bedroom.

For at least four years, John Darwin would scuttle from “widow” Anne’s room through a passage disguised as a cupboard into the house next door.

From Science: The Politics of Fear

Out of a group of strongly political people tested, automatic fear responses were strongly correlated to political leaning. I wonder whether this follows through to high correlation to religion/atheist-agnostic; Republicans tending to be recognised as sharing Christian convictions regarding abortion, homosexuality, etc.

From BBC: Study into near-death experiences:

Doctors at 25 UK and US hospitals will study 1,500 survivors to see if people with no heartbeat or brain activity can have “out of body” experiences.

Which is great that they are keeping an open mind. “Study” is probably an overstatement though; from the article it sounds like it will just involve building high shelves into resuscitation rooms, and putting pictures on them that can only be seen from above. The doctors “study” of the patient will probably go something like “So… Seen any interesting photos lately?”.

From Slashdot (technology/nerd news):
Automated News Crawling Evaporates $1.14B

“The Wall Street Journal reports that Google News crawled an obscure reprint of an article from 2002 when United Airlines was on the brink of bankruptcy. United Airlines has since recovered but due to a missing dateline, Google News ran the story as today’s news. The story was then picked up by other news aggregators and eventually headlined as a news flash on Bloomberg. This triggered automated trading programs to dump UAL, cratering the stock from $12 to $3 and evaporating 1.14 billion dollars (nearly United’s total market cap today) in shareholder wealth. The stock recovered within the day to $10 and is now trading at $9.62, a market cap of $300M less than before Google ran the story.”

Concrete-jet ‘printers’ to build houses, Moonbases in hours

My initial thoughts:

Positives

• Very cool
• Very quick
• cheap
• can build interesting things on a whim

Negatives

• Removes a stage where intelligent, skilful, and experienced people examine and interpret the design
• Looks like it will lead to buildings that are not easily modified/renovated.
• No chance to recycle materials