The People's Democratic Republic of Birmingham

Yup: you read that right: bottled water is more expensive than petrol!!

So – not only due you drink water that in most cases is not even more pure than tap water, but you are also paying stupidly insane prices for the privilege. AND you are using plastic for the bottles that has to be processed from crude oil and transported to the water bottling plant, and from there to the supermarket and from there to your home. And this is plastic that takes over 1000 years to bio-degrade: yup – that is correct – over a thousand years!

Also in most regions in the world, tap water is subject to more stringent health and hygeine regulations than bottled water!

So for crying out loud, get real! Instal a water filter in your home if you really HAVE to have water that is purer than what comes out of your tap – and here is the revolutionary part – RE-USE THE SAME BOTTLE EVERY DAY!

Check out the full article.

Any item that is considered to be “disposable” has the costs of disposing of it transferred from the manufacturer to society as a whole. Think about it: we all pay for the costs of disposing of such items through our taxes that pay for waste disposal and removal, and the company benefits by making the item so cheap that more people buy it.

In effect the company is transferring costs onto the whole of the rest of society. There is nothing wrong with this from the point of view of a company: they always act in the short term financial interestes of their shareholders, which is not in the long term interest of the rest of the planet.

This is yet another instance where the rest of society needs to stand up and tell these people “no!” – and tax them an amount that makes THEM pay for the cost of disposing of their items. A fair tax would be 100% of the cost of the item – and if this makes it too expensive for the average consumer then that’s just great!

We are all paying the environmental costs of this short term profiteering: these taxes either stop these items being manufactured and distributed or they charge a tax level sufficient to dispose of them safely. Either way the companies stop taking the piss out of the entirety of the rest of society and pay for the damage they cause.

It also emerges that putting electrical appliances into standby mode eats up the power from threee or four entire power stations per annum in the UK in 2006.

Let’s just run that past again: three to four power stations need to be run and belch their carbon into the atmosphere because people are too lazy to turn off their freakin’ TV’s?!

I’m sorry – but this is one instance where the State should just come over and go “Oi! Standby setting? NO!” – and just ban the sucker! It will have no material affect whatsoever on anybody! No one will even notice that the off button now just switches something off all the way with no fiddly intermediate setting of “standby”.

And absolutely no company anywhere will in any way be affected! – in fact you could set up a profitable from-home business removing standby settings from older appliances after the law has been changed!

All you do is introduce it with a bit of warning: you say that in three years time you cannot buy any appliance with standby and that three years after that no older device can be on standby – and every manufacturer must offer a cheap retrofitting option to remove standby for any device under 5 years old.

This is one of those rare instances where the State needs to say “I am banning standby.” – and when they get asked “Why?” the response is “Because I damn well said so!! – and because we just do not need three power stations running flat out every year just to power stuff left on standby! Get out of your seat and switch the bloody thing off or on, lard arse!”

How much of a no-brainer is this?! – Lightbulbs are a very energy inefficient method of lighting: they cost 3 to 4 times as much as a flourescent tube and wear out much quicker. The only reason we still use them is that they have been around for longer and are at the point of purchase cheaper than low energy flourescent tube style lights.

Now – it’s been estimated that simply banning these things would save 5 to 10% of all electricity! Why then is there any delay or doubt about this?! Just ban the bloody things NOW!

OK – so you give a warning of say a year away, and any companies that employ people to make lightbulbs in this country you give a grant to so that they can switch production to the flourescent tubes – but seriously: who could possibly have a problem with an overnight saving of 5 to 10%?!

All we need is 4 or 5 such savings and we could vut power usage by 50%! – and watch this space for more ideas soon….

In my day job I am the webmaster for a large global company. We have a site that I inherited that needs to be updated, and some web design agencies have found out about this and are starting to send me emails enticing me to check them out.

So far, so normal.

Interestingly most of these agencies mention usability in their spiels, correctly stating that if a site is not easy to use then it will result in less sales. Now this starts to interest me; usually I have to scream until I am blue in the face to get designers to lower themselves to the point where they will condescend to consider usability.

So – off I surf to check out these design agency sites to see if they should be included on the list of people I send the revamp / redesign tender out to….

… and every single one of them – and I do mean every one – breaks all of the top ten mistakes of web design. Especially the basics: using non-standard link colours and opening new windows on links that leave the site.

At this point rational self-restraint falls away and I flame these idiots, along the lines of “how the hell can you sell usability when you don’t understand it well enough to implement it on your own site?!” – and then I will list their Crimes Against Usability and quote the address of the pages they occur on.

And the most bizarre thing? – not one of these people then contacts me to say anything – ever… and not one of them ever goes away to fix the problems on their site. I suppose paying lip service to usability and using it as a sales tool and conning people who do not know what real usability is, is far easier than actually implementing a real world usable site.

I don’t know if you are aware, but I once undertook a massive labour of love: over 18 months of evenings and weekend I created the Heart of Empire CD-Rom with my personal hero, Bryan Talbot.

Bryan created the art and words and I was just the webmonkey that put them all together. Trouble is, I took a ruthlessly usability focused point of view – in that if I thought that as a user I would personally find it useful to have a link there – then damn it! – there would be a link there!

In fact when I analysed the project there are over 180,000 links on the CD!

Bryan and I always intended the CD-Rom to be a guide to creating a comic, and I find that a lot of people have thought it to be so. Anyway: whilst surfing today I found a really nice citation of the CD-Rom: “rarely more than an arm’s length away from the PC“

Cheers Spinneyhead!

Wow – I still cannot believe it! The fanpage that I run for the legendary English comic artist and author Bryan Talbot at http://www.bryan-talbot.com/ is now ten years old!

I honestly do not know of any other fanpages out there that are both this old and have also been continuously updated for the whole time!

And I cannot believe how much other good stuff has flowed as a result of creating this fanpage:
-first and foremost of course meeting my hero Bryan – and then being honoured to call him a friend!
– then working with Bryan on the Heart of Empire CD-Rom
– using the experience of creating a compelling website to forge a career for myself in a field I love

It’s been an amazing journey! – and it’s going to carry on: my next goal is bring out a second edition of the CD-Rom with some massively improved scans of the Adventures of Luther Arkwright and to also publish a webcomic of the Adventures of Luther Arkwright.

In the meantime, check out the fanpage, but more importantly check out some of Bryan’s comics next time you are in a comics shop: to me that’s the most important thing – spreading the word about Bryan’s amazing comics.

The environment is the only thing on the problem horizon that has the capacity to affect every single person on the planet.

Think about it: as bad as AIDS is we can implement strategies to deal with it. (and especially if certain religious bigots stopped preaching against using condoms – YES – I AM talking about the Pope)

Also AIDS is a disease: current drugs mitigate against the worst effects; we might eventually get a vaccine; education stops the worst effects.

But rising sea levels won’t pay any attention to your efforts to educate against it! (on any timescale less than 50 years and on any physical scale less than the entire planet)

If there is a rise in sea levels, of if the Gulf Stream stops, or if there is more global warming then we will ALL suffer. Everybody needs to act NOW against this threat.

And other bigots – like George Bush – should stop consciously planning for Armageddon and placing blind faith in technology and do something NOW. If we all consumed like the Americans then we would need four planets to support us.

And guess what? – we ain’t GOT four planets.

Recycle NOW. Lobby your politicians NOW. Buy energy efficient goods NOW. Insulate your home NOW. Walk or cycle to work one day in five NOW. Buy a hybrid car NOW.

If we all fail to do this we ain’t gonna have much of a planet left to live on soon.

In the republic we are unashamedly humanist; we value human life FAR more than any animal….

What this means is that if there is some research that needs to be done to save human lives that requires some animal testing – then we will do it.

But what this does not mean is that we will allow animals to be routinely killed in pointless research; by no means. Students and school kids will NOT be allowed to disect animals: this is why we have interactive virtual reality programs with tactile feedback: all that needs to be learnt can be done through software. Nor will we allow cosmetics to be tested on animals in any way.

In fact, people have to come up with a damn good reason for needing to perform any tests on any animal: BUT – if such tests are required to create a drug or a procedure that will save a human’s life then we will allow them.

Because after all is said and done, human’s are conscious and sentient; and animals (whilst they might be able to feel pain) are NOT – and thus by the only criteria that can be considered valid, a human’s life is worth more than an animals.

Of course, one corollory of this is that any idiots that place an animals life above that of a human’s will have their actioned returned to them. There is no concrete object in the universe that can be pointed to, picked up, touched and called “justice” – it is an abstract human concept. Therefore we wimply return all actions that hurt someone else back onto the perpetrator and also require them to pay for all of the costs to the victim and to society that ther actions have caused. Animal rights activists that hurt another human will therefore have their exact actions performed back on them.

Human lives are infinitely more precious than that of an animal: we dance on this stage but once: let’s make it as long a performance as possible.

Consider these facts:

The Earth is the only planet in the solar system where from the surface a satellite appears to be exactly the same size as the Sun. The planets that are closer to the Sun than us – Mercury and Venus do not have satellites at all or they are too small to cover the sun in the sky; further out from us – starting with Mars – and the Sun is not really a disk in the sky, more of a bright point.

The Moon is 400 times smaller than the Sun – but the Sun is exactly 400 times further away.

The Sun and the Moon will appear to be the same size in the sky for an amazingly short space of time (in geological terms): in the four billion year life span of the Earth, the Moon and the Sun will only appear to be the same size for the current hundred thousand years or so – before that and after that their different orbits will make them appear to be different sizes.

Now – the current one hundred thousand years as a percentage of the total lifespan of the Earth is 0.25% – and it just so happens to coincide with one species – us – achieving civilization, science and sentience…..

So: we are left with the fact that on the ONLY planet in our solar system where life can evolve, and on the ONLY planet in our solar system where the satellite can appear as the exact same size of the Sun, at the ONLY time the satellite will appear to be the same size as the sun, and at the EXACT time that conscious, sentient beings arose we have eclipses of the sun!

Now this is a fantastically bizarre and unlikely series of events: each one is on the order of one in 10 billion chance – so you have a series of four one in ten billion chances happening one after the other: and that is WITHOUT factoring in the original chance that life would evolve here and then stay around long enough to evolve into sentient life. All of this has happened in the only sequence possible to make eclipses visible from the surface of the Earth.

Now the question becomes this: is it possible to design a process MORE likely to make a sentient species aware of the fact that they live on a planet, and that their satellite and sun are both also spheres?

What is more likely to make the curious monkeys look up in wonder and awe than the utter majesty of a solar eclipse? What is more likely to make a sentient being think about what those things in the sky are, apart from having one pass in front of the other and exactly blot it out?

What mechanism could you possibly engineer that is more likely to create the curiosity that goes on to create a star-faring civilization?

All that remains to be answered is who did this and why?

The only two possible contenders that the Chairman can see are – an alien civilization or a supreme being….