Cheap Therapy

Fans of Philip Pullman might like to take a look at the documentary “Inside his Dark Materials” on ABC2, 8:30pm tonight (Sunday), put together by a friend of his.

Just awesome, check out the NASA photo archive (via Slashdot).

would be to not let your red LED sign on a busy intersection stay crashed for 3 days. At least it’s not displaying any spelling errors this time.

I’ve just finished reading Andrew Smith’s book “Moondust”, in which he attempts to interview the 9 remaining Apollo landing astronauts. (In one way it was strange because it kept referencing various popular artists I’d just been reading about in the previous book I’d started reading (“Culture Club” by Craig Shuftan )).
I guess the interesting bits I found were:

• Astronaut Edgar Mitchell shared a house with Arthur C. Clarke for a week
• Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Norman Mailer watched the Apollo 14 launch together
• The entire Apollo programme cost $24 billion dollars. At the time Vietnam was costing $30 billion per year.
• Armstrong took Dvorak’s “New World” symphony on the trip, along with a theremin piece. (The author was constantly haunted by Also Sprach Zarathrustra throughout researching the book!)
• Real programmers patch the Apollo LEM computer inside a 30 minute hard deadline
• How the Apollo toilets actually worked!
• Landing on the moon effectively ended the astronaut careers of Armstrong and Aldrin, after that they were too valuable to risk on any future space missions
• The alternative for most Apollo astronauts (many ex-Korea pilots) would have been flying missions in Vietnam
• Most of the astronauts were younger than I am now. The average age of staff in Mission Command was 26.

With only 9 remaining people alive who have walked on another world, it is amazing to read about how their lives were changed forever, being able to look at Luna and say to themselves “Hey, I was up there”. Mingling in the crowd at SF cons are people who have actually been into deep space, or walked on the Moon. Pretty much all of them agree they were the best moments of their lives, and everything since then has been learning to cope with the fact that the rest of their existence will be hard to compare to those moments.
Moondust is definitely worth a read if you’re a space fan or, perhaps more importantly, if you wonder what the effect of standing on another world and looking back at ours would be like and how that would affect rest of your life.

It would seem that there’s Mary MacKillop, the musical.

Visit nocleanfeed.com to get informed as to what you can do to stop Stephen Conroy from crippling Australia’s internet access.

A moment of insignificance to the greater universe, but not to me. Today Puggle put together a 48 piece jigsaw puzzle unaided! And I think Bilby said “star” and pointed to it in the book.

For those who don’t read boingboing.net, a blogger’s article on raising Free Range Kids (letting her 9 year old navigate their way home on the subway themselves), now has spawned a Free Range Kids blog.

I was somewhat amused by the press release about the Bentley Technology Precinct (”It will be Australia’s Silicon Valley - but with soul” - Minister Fran Logan, which wouldn’t be hard, most people in Silicon Valley probably leave the deserted landscaped wasteland or their corporate campus enclaves go to San Francisco for soul :). Given that I’ve previously worked in Bentley Technology Park, I thought I had some observations to make.

“Cafes, bars and restaurants will become boardrooms and central, shared facilities will provide mentoring and support for companies at all stages of commercialisation. Sustainable transport options will be explored and pathways expanded for a pedestrian friendly location.”

Well, when I was there there was one cafe, which served any sort of quiche (or egg-and-bacon pie), and pretty poor coffee (although unsurprisingly faster than UniClub). Pretty much everyone took their internal combustion engine vehicles to Karawara shops or Vic Park for lunch. Sustainable transport options (ie buses) didn’t run when you had to still go to work but Curtin University was on student break. Anyway , we don’t really need to ‘explore’ sustainable transport options, we already know which ones aren’t sustainable (cars with one person in them!).

As far as shared facilities go, when I was working in Tech Park the State Government stopped providing internet access to everyone, so most people wound up getting their own fibre laid (thankyou Amcom).

Mr Logan said numerous ICT companies from around the world were looking to move into the precinct.

The US-based company Interzone, which develops online entertainment products, has already established its game development studio within the precinct.

Cos games companies are cool at the moment and other states have them too so we’d better mention ours

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Edit - I realised the other thing I forgot to mention was the power! For a tech park you’d think they’d have a decent power supply, but it seemed like there were constant interruptions to the mains. Whilst it’s bad for a computer company it’s not insurmountable, but the biotech companies and the pathology labs can’t afford to lose power at all. It wasn’t long before they started installing their own diesel generators.

With power prices set to be hiked next year to better reflect their true environmental cost it seems a lot of people are putting grid connected solar power systems on their roof (noticed one on a new house just today as I walked home) and selling it back to Synergy as part of the Renewable Energy Buyback Scheme (REBS). I’ve discussed it with various people who have looked into it and discovered:

• Power is not sold into the grid at the rate Synergy charges consumers for NaturalPower (being 4.4c per unit above normal)
• Power sold into the grid gets you credit off your power bill. The credit cannot be exchanged for actual money (write your MP and complain). So there’s no incentive to try to generate more than you use, even though it saves the company on power generation and distribution costs, let alone the environment. You also only get 10/11ths of the agreed tariff to account for GST

Renewable energy buyback scheme PDF here. Info on the Photovoltaic Rebate Program is here. There’s also AU$500 subsidy for moving to a gas boosted solar hot water system.