04-01-2004_04-30-2004

Monday, April 26, 2004

low power community radio
low power community radio - why it ain't paying its bills...
Dunno - I worked for a communtiy FM station, hosted a request music show one evening a week, and that station was supported by the mining company which pretty much owned the town. It was in their interest to have a good music station that their plant operators and haultruck drivers could tune into, so they paid a lot of the bills.
Sponsorship drives paid the rest, but that was barely enough to buy the (already heavily discounted in return for a plug or two) albums we kept the library updated with. Most of our albums were sent to us by the record companies as samples and publicity.
When I left there I discovered bulletin boards and suddenly a new world opened up. I opened TEdLIVISION - Don't Touch That Dial!!! BBS while working for Channel Nine, and then started an ISP when the Internet came along.
Community radio lost a lot of its importance in that timespan, and when I heard that you USAians were opening up low power radio licenses I figured that the community and commercial models were never going to work. I mean, look at the ultimate in pervasive low power radio, otherwise known as the Internet - how long has it taken for websites (which are the equivalent of LPRS) to make money? How many actually do?
And they are paying nothing compared to LPRS licensing fees and running costs - no wonder they have trouble making ends meet....
Categories - ::/:: Edited on: Tuesday, May 04, 2004 8:48 PMposted at 9:19 PM Ted
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Thursday, April 22, 2004

Please Observe Data Speed Limit - Or Not...
Us geeks are often just happy when things work. Then once we get them working, we aren't happy until we get them working faster... And when we hit the limit of our gear, we spend more hard-earned getting faster gear and then spend time getting the new kit working...
So we're sick puppies, we always knew that. But what happens when things can't get any faster? Well, if you're like me, you start thinking how to do it anyway...
So the Stanford U test found that in a few more generations the rate at which we can write and read data will top out. So they say. (A few generations because most generations in computer technology seem to involve a doubling, and it only takes a few doublings to reach that rubicon...)
And I say? I say bollocks! Because this is another one of those skewed reportages, these spindoctored stories, the kind that seems to be based on someone's need to make a spalsh even if it means overlooking facts. And what facts are being spun and overlooked?
The tests were carried out on present-day magnetic media, which showed disrupted magnetic patterns when extremely highpowered pulses were fired into it. The reason why that limits data transfer speeds is that as with everything else, if you want it to go faster you need to throw more power at it. Magnetic heads in hard drives are already running at quite high power levels to get the transfer rates.
Assume that the technology to make heads able to handle higher power levels will be reachable - are you assuming that there won't be any advances in the technology of the medium the heads record onto? "They're not going to package linear accelerators in hard drives" in the foreseeable future. Well, as I said, no-one expected to see data densities in the ranges of gigabytes per square inch either, nor revolutions speeds above a few thousand RPM.
Because if there's one thing we've proven over and over is that we exploit every incremental smidgen of advantage, use every trick in the book, and continually surpass expectations. And if we develop the technology to make heads handle such high power, whether we build in a linear accelerator or use a pulse driver circuit, then we will no doubt develop recording media that can cope with the increased power levels.
As an example, rather small laptop HDDs are now running 100Gb - see, a year ago 20Gb was a laptop drive and 40Gb was creme de excellence..
But long before we miniaturise nuclear power plants to fit into the hard drive casing, something else will have happened. Because - as we've also proven time after time, when something stops being useful, we drop it like a hot potato in favour of something that is.
And in this case, there's no end to the pretenders to the storage throne. Flash memory based devices are getting bigger and bigger and operating at memory I/O speeds, optical storage media is getting faster and more useable and will get around the "magnetic disturbance" effects, and technologies such as holographic storage are being prepared in the wings and in secret.
For example, if memory becomes nonvolatile and more dense, it can become the storage medium as well as being the medium in which the program is run. That makes a new school of programming possible, faster programs, and much more rugged devices. (Think: What would I rather drop, a 300Gb hard drive or a USB flash drive?)
And if you are going to spread memory and storage interchangeably among the computing elements, then why not spread some of the computing power among the memory, and make the storage medium smart? Parts of programs could then truly run "in memory"...
By the time it's needed, faster denser and smarter storage will be there to fill the need. Long before hard drives need you to carry a generator to power your laptop, long before the platters in your disk are made of titanium/NiTiNoL metal, they will be dinosaurs. The problem of only being able to go 1,000 times faster will no longer be a problem, and articles like the one I referrred to will have been relegated to the null device. Nothing to see here folks, just normal progress and someone with a camera, please move along...
Added 24 Apr 04 - now there's a coincidence for you...
Categories - ::/:: Edited on: Sunday, April 25, 2004 4:57 PMposted at 10:55 PM Ted
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Tuesday, April 20, 2004

His "Mental Health Suffered" ?
One more atrocity to add to the world of insult to humaneness... I read this with interest but the shocker is just one line dropped into the article. The guy spent 12 years in solitary confinement!
Why do I read about the majority these most loathsome of iniquities in Israel? What is it about the Middle East that seems to attract so many zealous fanatics? (Except for Bush, of course. And he's supporting Israel at the moment so I can rest my case anyway...)
And under such names as "Shin Bet" and "Mossad" too - I don't know about you but I see Shin Bet and the first thing that springs to mind is Bethel - seemingly poles apart, though...
Why Bush is so chummy with Israel? No idea, maybe their WMD are better than Saddam's, who knows... At an estimated 150 nukes, maybe they need a bit of watching, and maybe they could be seriously nasty if provoked.
Israel has nukes and Bush loves them, North Korea has the capability to make them and Bush hates 'em. Go figger, he is a joke not a statesman. I'd rather support Bert and Ernie...
Categories - ::/:: posted at 11:57 PM Ted
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At The Old "Cat'N'Coincidence"
Ghostie (my little ginger buddy) plucked me out of the doldrums on Friday. He'd been a bit more miaowy than he normally is and seemed t be sleeping more. By evening he had a limp - and scored an immediate visit to the vet - and by 6:15 he'd had a dislocated knee joint put back in and been prescribed anti inflammatories even though he showed no immediate signs of bursting into flame. But it did reduce the inflammation around the knee joint, over the next four days.
And because he kept wanting to jump and climb stuff, he became a carpet cat for a week. Loved the special attention, the cuddles and earscratches, and has been very cute. His litter tray went in the bathroom, and he joined me in the bathroom once. This a a "biggified" bathroom wehere we tore out the pathetic shower nook zand the baby surprise size bath, and installed a large spa with shower.
No shower curtain you see - no cats - no SANE cats - would stay there when anyone was showering, Ghostie picked the spot on the mat that was driest, indicating that it rarely got wet, and then he studied me, really did the "watch every move" thing. Then he waited until I was looking at him, raised his paw, licked it, and washed his face.
The message was that he'd figured it out, I was grooming and washing and he was down with that, he watched a while longer and then started washing himself too.
Now coincidentally to the cat becoming so intelligent, my other system admin stayed home Monday, with a busted knee from football. And here's a coincidence, Diego Maradona is also in hospital with heart problems that I don't have and respiratory problems. Which I do have. Now if only I hadn't misread Maradona as Madonna, maybe things would have settled down. But obviously I didn't becaue McDonald's manager in Australia died of a heart attack... Big Mad anyone?
I think we make a habit of ignoring coincidences and odd similarities in our lives, and maybe we're missing a lot of the fun of life because of that. I'm making a conscious effort from now on to note and remember as many of them as I can, and blog them for your amusement...
Categories - ::/:: Edited on: Wednesday, April 21, 2004 3:30 PMposted at 11:52 PM Ted
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Sunday, April 18, 2004

Weird Search Behaviour
WTF? Type in projectgutenberg.org and get taken to http://iraqi-mission.org ??? How the hell can IE make such a connection? Is PG a subversive organisation, is Saddam considered a benevolent source of wisdom, WTF WTF WTF?
Categories - ::/:: posted at 12:02 AM Ted
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Saturday, April 17, 2004

Travelling By Print, Travelling By Electron
"Of course you get more spam, you travel to more of the Internet than I do." That's Trish's explanation of the spam epidemic I'm experiencing.
So it seems that the Internet now looks like geography to people, and you need inocculations and precautions to avoid viruses and spam....
And yeap, we do travel - as a kid I liked to read, I could go through books at the rate of several a week when our Library had stock. In fact, I reckon books outfitted me for later life much better than school did. Books let me go to some interesting places without leaving the loungeroom rug.
Let me explain that. I'm no prodigy but I've always enjoyed knowing about things around me, to the point that one of my earliest memories is of my much older half-brother Michael giving me an electric motor and a battery when I was almost four. Michael made powered electric cars, which were THE toy for kids in the early 60's.
Unfortunately, he didn't leave me any wire to connect the two together.. And at age four, I remember thinking that wire must be very costly. But I asked my mother anyway, and then she earned my eternal disbelief with her answer.
"Use a bit of cotton" she suggested. And even at that age I remember wondering how someone could not know that cotton doesn't conduct electricity...
I'd looked at Michael's instructions for making his cars, you see. And while I couldn't read I could understand pictures. One of the pictures was of double-cotton-covered (dcc) wire... And even I knew that the cotton kept the electricity in...
Mum was hoping to baffle me with bullshit, because she too probably thought it would cost too much. My first ever snow job...
So from that time on I determined that I needed to not be like Mum, I needed to know what goes on in the world around me. In books, I could travel to other places in the world, learn about them. I could travel to laboratories, observatories, and conservatories. I could see Galvani wiring up his frog's-leg dinner, I could watch Boyle experiment with the properties of gases...
So when my primary school teacher four years later told us hot air rises I was ready. "Please Sir, it's actually cold air that sinks and pushes the hot air up, otherwise air would just keep rising and we wouldn't be here."
I was told off in front of the class, and lost all respect for so-called "teachers" who know less than their students. (Hey, this should actually be one of my "Pride In Incompetence" blogs!) He was baffling all of us kids with bullshit because he was not a specialised teacher, and his knowledge of general science was shaky.
With tourguides like that it's no wonder I found books to be much better, and now find the Internet to be the ultimate book, the ultimate guide... And as a traveller here who started out around the mid-90's, I guess I am a bit blase about it all.
And while some of us are using the library to find out about it, there are some who, just like my mother, miss the point and try to use their limited knowledge to divert and misdirect, who, like my teacher, don't know enough to make a contribution but will bluster and bully. And they are the people who create the social conditions in which spam, viruses, and overcommercialisation flourish.
Just like early "travellers" who had no idea about hygiene and no words for "freedom of religious expression" these people now wander around cyberspace and are even less equipped to handle it than their predecessors.
Categories - ::/:: Edited on: Saturday, April 17, 2004 10:49 PMposted at 10:34 PM Ted
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Thursday, April 15, 2004

Blog Virus!
They turned at the bottom of the great stairway, and his face went thoughtful. -->Lois McMaster Bujold, "A Civil Campaign"Blog virus instructions:1. Grab the nearest book. 2. Open the book to page 23. 3. Find the fifth sentence. 4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.5. Collect random blog virud memes and stack above one another6. Use as an input file for Babble.7. Upset George Hammond & Archimedes Plutonium, troll poot rootbeer a bit,and make baby jesus cry liek a schoolgirl
Categories - ::/:: posted at 3:06 AM Ted
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Wednesday, April 14, 2004

Christina's in the Park
My (damn monthly!) paycheck just got deposited, 8PM a day early. Trish and I did the only thing possible.
At 8:40 we were sitting at a table at Christina's waiting for bruschetta and salsiccia, a cup of tea, and a long black.
I've been home sick but it's clearing up and tomorrow I go to see my doctor to see what to do. I've been feeling bored because I can't go to work (yes, sad but true, I actually like my job) and just before my pay, I'm always a little bit broke. I was going stir crazy, basically.
Anyway - Christina's salsiccia plate? To die for folks, to die for! It was more than an antipasto dish, it was like a whole antipasto platter. Great fetta cheese, tasty black olives, a delicious salad, and heaps of salsiccia all crisp and dripping with oil - now THAT is food!
Trish had the bruschetta and I noticed no complaints there either, and I noticed with pleasure that the water is filtered without the nasty fluoride/chlorine taste - I hate spoiling a good meal with a mouthful of chlorine. Top marks Ms harding.
Rating for Christina's is a 8 out of 10 for their service, 8 for the food and presentation, and a 7.5 for their coffee. (I still enjoyed it but I'm spoilt, I only use Lavazza Espresso at home and enjoy Gino's and Rocco's - both barista Award winners.)
Having mentioned Gino's and Cafe di Rocco:
Christina's - Albany Highway in Vic ParkGino's - the terrace in FreoCafe di Rocco - Subiaco Village, past the Regal along Hay St
Categories - ::/:: posted at 11:46 PM Ted
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Explore The Issues Of Cybernetics At TEdADYNE Systems!
Big news! I've found that lately I've been carrying more and more stories here to do with nanotechnology, cybernetics, and interfaces between man and machine.
Since this is a general ramblings column and the issue of cyborging is likely to be a contentious one, I've taken the step of splitting the topic off to it's own blog, TEdADYNE Systems. There, I will be able to include a comments system and some related works of fiction I've been working on, and ensure the material of both blogs isn't diluted.
In any case, it's major news. Here I am, suddenly I have a direction to go in, a range of subject matter which I want to make a contribution in, and actually working on a blog which isn't just a vanity blog. Wow...
I hope you'll bookmark both blogs, but if you bookmark just one, then bookmark TEdADYNE Systems blog, because I promise you it will be an interesting ride...
I will still, of course, keep posting here but this is not the area for cybor-ethics, this is more my venting place for things that I just can't keep to myself. Thank you all who are reading this, for your patronage. Enjoy!
Categories - ::/:: posted at 9:27 AM Ted
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Friday, April 09, 2004

testable stuff
Cells choose their jobs, like cops. Sometimes there's a shortage and then the bad guys win. This is a biologically lawless time... %( Also, remember the 'anima' idea? That there's only so much 'thingness' in the world for any particular thing, and when too many of that thing appear, they have to share it between them, leading to a thing being less like the archetype... Then if it's human, you get 'losses' in the thing, like weakness for drugs, cancers, weird illnesses, and so forth. And in order to have enough 'thingness' that means that the thingness of extinct species has to be subsumed to your particular archetype. So how much 'virusness' is there and how much 'humanness'? Will they subsume our archetype or do we absorb the bugs?
Increase the electron shell - decrease friction.
they changed my blog? me? a la matrix?
png and tribes and generations
why some ppl dumb down
why is there no fluoride free toothpaste left?
Categories - ::/:: posted at 2:30 PM
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Monday, April 05, 2004

Ingvar Kamprad is the AntiGates
Farewell Bill Gates, from all your rich mates,Farewell the AntiGeek, dumped, no more great.Bad taste will always trump bugridden code,Done by a Swedish cheap furnishing bloke.
Okay so it's doggerel in the worst taste - but hey this is Ikea we're talking about, and Microsoft - taste doesn't enter into the equation...
So now that Ingvar K is the new world's richest bloke, does that make him the new enemy of the home handyman? Are thousands of socially withdrawn home carpenters sitting at turning lathes at home making copies of Ikea spindle back chairs?
Are they engraving anti-Kamprad slogans into the tops of pine bolt-together kitchen table with their routers?
Or - gasp! - are they breeding ever newer, faster, more voracious woodworms in their workshops and sheds to release onto our unsuspecting furniture? "If you von't buy Ikea orichinalls den p'raps won day you chuss sitting for breakfas an voom! - you lend on floor on you ass... Ve sell you new lacquer to put on, stop dose vorms..."
Why isn't this happening? What's the difference between Bill and Ingvar? They both buy other people's ideas really cheap, bash them into a form suitable for production, and then sell them for a lot more than they're worth. They both have design and look and feel and copyright and property patents on a variety of things.
Yet Bill is reviled and hated while Ingvar is applauded. What gives here? Why this difference?
Hmmm - there are a lot of people out there producing software, and crying out that Microsoft owning all those patents is making it impossible for anyone else to make a living at software - yet they're making a living...
On the other hand, Ikea owns and copyrights a lot of designs and a large range of products, and there are furniture makers out there making a living...
Software was, until recently, pumped out by expensive programmers, with expensive managers. Now, more and more, the programmers are becoming cheaper because more software is produced offshore where expertise is cheaper.
A long time ago, furniture was made by expensive craftsman artisans and sold by expensive sellers, then they discovered offshore mass production where labour is cheaper - and the furniture makers flourish to this day...
Microsoft should just go away and let us software houses make a living at softwarwe! Make Microsoft go away please!
Ikea makes a table? Hell, we'll make our own tables! They make chairs? We'll make cushions for them!
Seem to me that the difference is mostly attitude, no?
Categories - ::/:: Edited on: Monday, April 05, 2004 9:22 PMposted at 8:55 PM Ted
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About Buses
Watching the buses this morning on the way to work. You get plenty of time because there's a real bottleneck into Perth city coming over the causeway, right where six lanes of traffic from three different roads try to merge down into two lanes. Best bit of city planning you ever saw, yessirree...
Also merging there are two lanes of buses, merging down to one at the busport there. So I'm sitting in a car which is idling there for up to ten minutes every morning and moving about 50 metres in that time, watching half empty buses going to the busport and the city, and it occurs to me.
I'm sitting in a dinosaur stuck in a modern day LaBrea, watching lumbering behemoth dinosaurs. In another ten or twenty years either there won't be any people to remember, or else what they will remember is that these things once ruled the cities and the land...
I'm guessing that if people are still around they'll be using modules that chain together to form larger units as required, and that once some dickhead gets the use of solar energy right, these units will use electric power.
As for getting solar power right - I mean, at the moment another dinosaur, the modern manufacturer, is lamenting that it takes so much energy to make solar powered equipment that you never amortise the cost of the initial energy . Now suppose that they used their first batch of solar power generators to star powering the process of making further solar power generators...
ahaaaaaa, you're beginning to see the idea. Even if it takes five solar cells entire output for a year to make five more solar cells, at the end of that time you'd have ten solar cells... The tortoise wins again.
Stupid industrialists.
Categories - ::/:: posted at 4:01 PM Ted
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Sunday, April 04, 2004

I think I know what a Ninja is.
Just went to this rather amusing website and the thought has occurred to me:
There really is a difference between the majority and the select few... %) Heck, there are even people out there who would take that site as gospel truth. (Are they the "deselect few," in some twisted Darwinian sense?)
Well, take my workplace. There are around 60 people here, all of them programmers, developers, or tech sales and tech support type people. None of them should be unintelligent should they? Hmmm... Let's see...
I sent out a link to this timewaster and fully expected to get a lot of laughter around the office - but I also got one email complaining that his computer didn't have enough space. A tech support person no less...
We got an email with the subject line "air-con men will be in the office" and sent it back out as "air con-men will be in the office" and got about ten "what do you mean?" responses...
Or how about this - I (and about half the people here) walk about in our normal fashion (i.e. quietly) and we manage to freak people out by "just appearing out of nowhere" as some of the clodhoppers put it. Clodhoppers? Yeap, you know them - they're the people who throw themselves at the ground with every step, you can hear them walking clear across the other side of the building, who can't be bothered to develop a decent gait because their Nikes will cushion the shock for them.
There are thus people to whom using their brains is a revolutionary idea, to be avoided at any cost, and another group of people who don't understand why everyone else can hear them coming for miles and then take advantage of them, and another group who believe that things "just happen" to them and they can't help that or defend themselves.
The groups sometimes overlap, but between them they seem to form the majority of the population.
And that shows why Ninjas are so rare and so legend-worthy. They've learnt to walk softly and carry a big stick - and they can think...
Categories - ::/:: Edited on: Tuesday, April 06, 2004 11:31 AMposted at 1:24 PM Ted
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Saturday, April 03, 2004

Small victory to me, small loss to advertisers
A jokes site of a certain age sends out a newsletter every few days, with links back to jokes on web pages. The pages I get sent to have banners and ads all over them, and to a degree, I'm down with that. They have to keep the site going after all.
But those pages also launch poo pounder ads. You know the ones, they pop up, put themselves behind the page that called them, and bring that page back to the focus.
And no matter what justification a site tries to give for using them, I can't quite agree with any rationalisation of these stupid wastes of time space and bandwidth.
One. I multisurf, that is, I have about ten to twenty pages open at a time. Adding another five or ten popunder buttons to my taskbar is just plain clutter. Two, I'm reading an interesting article on a famous geek news site and wham! - up pops this stupid joke page, meaning I now have to minimise it and the popunder to resume my reading. I begin to associate the nasty website with pain, in a Pavlovian sort of way, and stop surfing there. No kidding, I've stopped reading some major science and news websites because of their policy. I'm not even tempted to click a link with their URLs in it.
Why? Well, that's the third and fourth reasons. Three, I'm on a very noisy modem dialup, and each page I open is a marathon already. Now add 5K of useless javascript in the web page to open the popunder, 20K for the popunder itself, and another 5k of useless javascript in the popunder and you can see how that sort of behaviour gets really really wearing after your first hour spent trying to load and read fifteen pages...
And four, there's a technique for dealing with popunders, which ensures I never even need to catch a glimpse of it - so the advertiser has wasted my time, my bandwidth, their money, and some web coder's work - all just for me to close their window without even glimpsing it...
Yes there are popup stoppers but why should I have to install one of those when the simpler alternative is just not to bother to go to the offending website? And yes the site can justify itself by saying that they need the revenue but why don't they just do the honest thing and tell the would-be advertiser that popunders stink on ice, people hate them, it costs the website a lot of traffic, and no-one retains much memory of them anyway?
People who sagely point to the number of popunders and say "well they must work otherwise Acme and BrandX wouldn't be using them" are missing the point, which is that they aren't working. Just as people point to the volume of spam and say "it must work," they're dreaming.
Spam works for about a hundred extremely hardworking spammers in the whole world. Out of some ten million people, less than a hundred are able to make spam work for them... And for the thousands of other would-be spammers, it's fines and prison terms and a lot of buying beans instead of beef... Popunders are in the same category, a lot of advertisers are paying a lot of website owners a lot of money for a negative return...
Isn't it time they stopped being so stupid? I can think of one roaring winning concept right now. "Catalogs.com" would be a site where companies could put popunders popovers popups and exit traps and entry traps and - somewhere among all the smart-arse technowhizzery, nestled in amongst the stupid banners and vertical banners and expanding divisions - they could actually put the same content, but on a flat website, where people could search and find what they wanted. Call it "we_are_GOOD_advertisers.com" if you prefer, whatever.
Put banner ads on other websites pointing to your product range, by all means. You do need to target a particular demographic after all, you just don't need to stalk them, hunt them down, and beat them to death with heavy handed advertising.
Until advertisers learn, I'll settle for the minor victory of closing their products and boycotting sites which deal with them...
Categories - ::/:: Edited on: Saturday, April 03, 2004 10:01 AMposted at 9:50 AM Ted
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Thursday, April 01, 2004

Science retrodate
Just been reading the New Scientist, 29 Mar 2003. It's the anniversary of that issue, after all.
As I was reading it, I had a few jogs of memory. For example, I recall a (very tiny) outcry over nanoscale particles causing lung damage, and realised that the idea's again recently surfaced on some science blogs, after only a year of waffling and avoiding issues and ignoring. I have a vested interest in nanotech and lungs, as my emphysema may one day be cured by nanotech, and the finding last year was a bit of a letdown... Still no light on the horizon for me, I guess.
SARS was a big thing. GM crops were being debated and found to be a mixed bag. Binge eating was rediscovered. And email FOAF harvesting tools were just being developed and used. Today, I am looking for FOAF (Friend Of A Friend, or social network and relationship discovery) software for our Sales and Tech Support people. Some technology gets a head start for being so universally useful. One other thing that NS didn't mention in that article was the rise and rise of blogging...
One article in there gave me a jolt. You see, years ago, when the world only had BBS systems and electronic mail (netmail and echomail for all us old farts) was a very avant garde technology, I was discussing with a bunch of people in the States, about the possibility of using Blackbird reconnaisance aircraft as cheap light shuttles. I had the idea that if you bought a Blackbird and modified it for a few million bucks, you could go up, mend or remove faulty satellites and space junk, and amortise the cost of the spacecraft in a couple of missions.
That wasn't it though. One of my correspondents mentioned that the heat of re-entry was a problem. And I had the answer right there - if you inject a layer of steam (steam is easy to create at the nose of a re-entering craft, after all - just add water to all that heat...) from leading edges of the craft, the steam should form a Leidenfrost layer and thus insulate the spacecraft from the heat. And there, on page 29, is my idea... Now I can only hope that those early discussions have served to kick this idea off finally, but I'd love to be mentioned as a "he thought of this first" annotation to the article at least. Damn I wish I had the archives of those old echomail days...
Cold fusion gets an ambivalent look, as do a heap of other things which are again coming up in the news this year, but the cold fusion article in particular caught my eye - do journalists just fish out year-old articles, flesh them over a bit, and release them again? Because everything that was in that NS article has also been in the more recent coverages online, and not much new has been added...
Also interesting - that "bat caves" placed around lakes reduced the number of mosquitoes and also produced around 2 tons a year of guano as fertiliser as well. That the bats were actually affecting the numbers of mosquitoes was and still is in doubt - maybe that needs to be investigated? Why not? I know of dozens of lakes and waterways around housing estates that would benefit from such natural protection. In fact, elimination of mosquitoes around inhabited areas costs millions a year, and leaves chemical residues, and causes other illnesses - so this would potentially be a tremendously beneficial piece of research.
So it's steam baths and bat poo time for me, perhaps I can design a shuttle that runs on batshit and bullshit and eats mosquitoes during descent, and find fame and riches as I go. hehehe later people!
Categories - ::/:: posted at 12:45 PM Ted
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