Laser vs Anko Economy Earbud Sets Quick Comparison.

I recently had the sad experience of my favourite "necklace" type earbuds, a no-name brand from the Reject Shop. 

If you enjoy podcasts and music while you work without disturbing co-workers (or one's wife, which is the more important motivation for me - we both have a right to our own soundscapes) then earbuds are the way to go. 

Background

I don't need hi-fi for podcasts, just endurance and comfort. And all we have in town are Big W and K-Mart. Oh yes - we also have a Harvey Norman electronics shop and a Jaycar agent but HN are invariably the same things rebadged but overpriced, while Jaycar is an agency and doesn't have a great range of budget earbuds. I'd bought a set of earbuds connected with a necklace style cable that had a small control pad inline, made with skinny flat cables that - after a few years, mind you - had finally broken the wires inside and stopped working.

The Reject Shop no longer had those necklace-connected sets of earbuds, which is a drawback of shopping at such budget outlets - their product lines appear and then disappear, and this brand ("Sound Republic" I think) had been replaced by something other range - that had no necklace earbuds. Big W has a house brand "Laser" and K-Mart has their "Anko" brand, which is a small step up from Reject Store, so I bought the cheapest necklace set at Big W, and then had to buy the equivalent at K-Mart. 

History

We both have normal individual earbud sets, hers is Anko; mine, whatever brand Reject Shop has been flogging recently. I hate the earbuds because due to carpal tunnel syndrome I have low sensation in my finger and I keep dropping them and having to go hunting for them. The worse issue is that my set lasts only between 120 and 180 minutes before needing to go back in the case for quite a while to recharge. Pah! For dilettantes! I listen for hours a day and want the audio to last for phone calls too. 

The Anko separate buds last significantly longer and sound better, according to both of our evaluations.

But I wanted to go back to the more familiar (and to me, more useable) necklace buds, and pretty much any would do. (Except not, as I found out...) Here's a picture I grafted together out of commercial images online. They're not the exact models I got but illustrative of the type.

These are for illustrative purposes only and not
the actual earbuds I purchased.

Help me with the cost of them, use the image below to make a donation. I rely on donations to keep things paid up. 

Laser

The Laser set took hours to charge, being supplied with 0% charge. That alone made me a bit wary of them because discharged - and supposedly new - lithium batteries means they've already been discharged beyond their lower limit and that makes the chemistry suspect to me. 

But I charged it and then tried to connect the set. For the first five attempts I tried their connection method, then tried a desperation measure I'd used once before, pressing the power/connect/select button four times in quick succession after the earbuds announced "Connecting..."

That worked. Sort of. The phone connected to the earbud set. And then a few seconds later, disconnected. After trying that two more times, I gave up on the set. The +/- buttons would seem to have worked as volume buttons first, and skip forward/back second, I'm used to the skip function being similar to older BT speakers because once the volume's set you hardly need to alter it.

The earbuds have magnets to click them together when not in use. The cost was ten dollars. 

Manifest: Included the necklace earbuds with the familiar little control pad inline in the necklace, a charging cable, and a (truly execrable) User Manual.

Pros: It cost ten dollars. That was five dollars cheaper than the Sound Republic set had cost me two years earlier. 

Cons: It had a suspect battery and didn't connect properly nor hold a connection. Therefore nothing else could be evaluated. 

Anko

The Anko earbud set had 90% charge right from the outset, it paired first time, and was fiddly to get into my ears because of the weird earhooks. The necklace cord was a trifle short for my liking. The sound isn't particularly crisp but adequate. 

All in all a trouble-free and reasonable experience. The only other odd experience was that it didn't have an inline control pad, the controls are on the right-hand earpiece. There is no power LED.

The buttons I'd have liked to use as skip + / - buttons work as volume buttons first and have to be held for a few seconds to work as skip buttons. Comes down to personal preference I guess.  They cost fifteen dollars.

Manifest: Included the necklace earbuds with the controls in the Rh earpiecece, the earpieces have an over-ear hook, and there's a charging cable, several more earbud earpiece inserts to suit your ears, and a reasonable User Manual.

Pros: Supplied with useable charge in the battery, the earhooks make wearing them a bit more secure for an old fart like myself and they connected flawlessly on the first attempt.

Cons: Earhooks aren't of the best design, necklace cord is a trifle shorter than I'd have liked, the skip function. And a power LED would definitely have been worth having.

---

That's it. If I'd had my druthers, I'd have bought another set of Sound Republic earbuds because they lasted so well and had decent battery life. But life isn't always perfect.

Sound Republic

Not a review. Sort of.

These cost about fifteen bucks a few years ago and have a flat thin ribbon cable connecting them and the control pad, sounded passably good for the price, and the battery lasted all day for me, right up until the thin cable finally flexed through. But that took two years of regular use. 

As I recall they came with the inevitable badly written manual, a charging cord, and not much else. They may have had a set of silicone ear inserts.

Proving that sometimes a cheap no-name item can be pretty good. I'm going to try some microsurgery to get them going again. 

From Ye Olde Blogge Wednesday, October 29, 2003

Memory Lame

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.  

Pride in incompetence

Maybe it's just me. Maybe I was just too young when I was young, or maybe too gullible, or something...

Have you ever noticed though, that less and less people take pride in their work anymore? In fact, some people I deal with seem to revel in their incompetence at their job, a kind of "look, I'm so fuggen useless and I'm still making that asshole PAY me for my services!" kind of pride at yet another job fucked up...

Why I reckon it *could* be me, is that when I was growing up, it seemed to me that people actually gave a shit about their jobs. Maybe I just perceived them as 'grown-ups' and knew that grown-ups were practically perfect in every way, maybe it just seemed to my young mind that these grown-ups were doing things that I considered unimportant and thus it made me think that in order to perform such unimportant tasks, they had to take some strange pride in their work. But the fact remains that I still feel that work ethics have changed tremendously in the last thirty years.

When I was 11, I met my first incompetent. She was my friend's mum, and she worked checkout at our local grocery store. I used to amuse myself by racing the cash register, and one day I noticed a miscount of around a dollar in the store's favour. Being a polite little lad, I was very polite in pointing it out, and also noting that since the amount corresponded to a particular item's price, that it was most likely that this item had been rung up twice. No scanners back then, it was all manual punch in the price...

Thing is, she knew my mum. and she complained to mum about me, said I was a 'little smart-ass'... I ask you - what sort of internal reasoning led her to believe that her fuck-up was due to me being a smart-ass? How convinced of her own competence did she have to be?

I read somewhere that more incompetent people are most convinced of their own competence than more competent ones. Because they are so bad at what they do, they don't realise that there's a lot of improvement to be made in their performance, while a more competent person is more aware of what their duties entail and more critical of themselves because they *know* they could improve a lot.

I believe that, implicitiy and completely...

When I was 20, I went into a stereo store to buy myself a reasonable stereo system. I discussed what I wanted with the salesdroid, and then pointed out two turntables which I thought were to my specs. Salsedroid immediately ignored both of those and pointed to several other, more expensive, and actually *lower* spec, units. He was selling to me based on price and had no idea of specs whatsoever! 

After asking him once more to stick to my specs and not to the catalogue prices and getting nowhere, I'd had enough of him. Back then, you expected the salesperson to know at least *something* about the product they were selling...

I asked to see the store manager, explained that I had the then not inconsiderable sum of $5,000 in my pocket in cash to buy my stereo equipment, and that his store had just lost that sale because of the incompetence of that salesperson. I bid goodbye and only walked back in once more a few days later (after buying my gear at a store where the staff knew something about their products) to see what had happened. I was gratified that the salesperson had apparently been sent packing. Managers took $5,000 seriously in those days...

Thing is, for those days, that was still considered inexcusable, offensive, and unprofessional. 

Nowadays, it's the fashion...

On a similar vein, more recently I was shopping for a secondhand laptop and walked into one of those computer trader shops, and finally found a laptop in my price range, but... so little RAM, such a low-powered CPU... It wouldn't run Windows 98, which is what I wanted it for, so I asked the salesdroid if they would upgrade the RAM for me so it wouldn't swap out all the time, and mentioned that I needed it to run W98.

'Oh it'll run W98 fine' was his breezy reply, 'it just depends on how much of Windows you install."
Pardon? You mean I can install a cut-down version of the W98 kernel? Can you tell me how? You mean save hard drive space not RAM, don't you?

'Ah, you just uncheck some stuff when you install it..."

By that stage I'd had enough, and said, in a voice loud enough to carry all over the store, that I was going somewhere else to spend a few grand, somewhere where the staff knew anything at all about what they were selling. The manager came over not to apologise, but to try and convince me that his salesperson was right, that any dickhead knew that if you installed less of the 'fruit' as he called it, it would use less 'memory.' At that point I just shook my head, called the manager a name I'd rather not repeat here, and walked out.

More? My next door neighbout works as a delivery truck driver for a whitegoods outlet. He has a diesel 1.5 ton truck, and every morning I hear him crank and crank and crank that truck, because he doesn't know enough about that truck to know that you should hold the key on preheat for a minute before starting, so that it won't have to supply current to both the glowplug and the starter... If it was just a few weeks I'd believe that his preheat had burnt out and he was waiting on spare parts, but it's every workday morning for a year now, so it's obvious he's either just clueless, or else he doesn't give a shit.
I believe the latter actually, because a few times he's come home with deliveries still in the back of the truck, canvas-covered rear wide open to thieves and often to the rain, and I wonder why the store keeps him on...

Went to a restaurant with three friends, checked in at the counter, and then sat there for about 15 minutes without anyone bringing us a menu or asking us if we wanted drinks to begin with. Quite a ritzy restaurant, it charged a premium price and was supposedly one of the best new venues in the locality. After 15 minutes I used the mobile phone to ring the manager and ask if there was a chance of being served, the reply? 'We're not busy, you would be served as soon as you arrived. When were you thinking of coming?'

I informed him that we'd been sitting at table 16 for almost 20 minutes now without any contact, and there was a profuse rush of apologies, but still no waiter.

About five more minutes elapsed before one did arrive, so we placed our orders and waited some more. By this stage some 30 - 35 minutes had elapsed since we first came in and were asked to take a seat. None of us were badly dressed, nor were we rowdy or otherwise objectionable, after all, we wanted our dinner. About seven of around thirty tables were filled by that stage, absolutely not a busy evening.

No excuse for it, really. But that's not the end of it...

About halfway through dinner, my friend's coffee ran out and they flagged a passing waiter and asked for another cup. We finished the meal and were still waiting for that coffee. Two more of us felt the need for a post-prandial coffee so we flagged down another waiter, asked again for the first coffee, and asked that another two also be brought out. Waiters were walking by at the rate of one every few minutes, and we waited for about ten minutes before flagging down another waiter. Yes, he'd check into it, yes, he'd make sure our coffees arrived as soon as possible.

Another ten minutes and we got up to leave. At the register we noticed that we'd been charged for those three extra coffees, and asked to see the manager. Explained to him why we had decided to go to a coffee shop instead of waiting for almost 30 minutes for a coffee after the poor evening's service we'd already had. And he went and asked his waiters who said they'd never received any orders for extra coffee! (Yeap those same extra coffees which were on the tab, that's the ones...)

When we pointed this out, he said he had to back his staff and the extra coffees must have been entered 'in error...' At that point we'd all had enough, and I'm glad to say that this particular restaurant, which was a new venture, went broke and was taken over by new management in its first year. Reviews were shocking and mostly singled out the lackadaisical service. (ted, added in 2023 from memory. Sorry, still not divulging the name of the place or the manager, the place had an African country as the theme is all I'll say.) 

That points out something to me. The manager had the chance to smooth things over and keep four regular customers, because the food was indeed excellent. Instead, he chose to support his staff, staff which cost him more and more clientele, more and more bad word of mouth, and less and less income.

And yes, we did tell everyone we knew about how the place had been, and probably cost him another 100 clients among our circles of friends, and I daresay that every other dinner party that his incompetent staff drove away from the restaurant also badmouthed the restaurant to *their* friends...

Here's someone who not only was incompetent, he also seemingly looked for and fully supported incompetence in his staff because he himself knew so little about how a competent restaurant was run...

So is it me, or is ignorance winning the race?

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These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one. I am shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world. 

From Ye Olde Blogge Sunday, January 18, 2004

Memory Lark

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.

Leave The Car At Home Day

... which was today, has come and gone. I noticed only marginally less traffic than normal (if at all) and decided that someone needs a reality check. The idea is to promote health by asking people to walk. It wasn't pre-promoted all that well, first I heard about it was on the radio in the car on the way to work...
And it's definitely ditzy and impractical...

Example: I live 12km as the crow flies, or 15km by road, from where I work. Yeah sure I'll leave the car at home, start out for work at 2AM and get home by 9PM... I'm sure everyone else in Perth would also do this, yeah sure...

I've also tried using what laughably passes for "public transport" in this fair city. The bus route must be 16km at the very least with all the zigging and zagging to cover as much territory per route, and they stop about seven times as often as I do when driving to work. It takes me 15 minutes on a good day, 25 on a really bad, slow traffic day. I tried the bus the other day. 35 minutes later I arrived at the busport, waited another 10 minutes for a connecting bus, then another almost 10 minutes to get from there to my workplace. And that was the fastest route...

Train? Don't make me laugh. My nearest train station is 12 minutes away by car, then takes 20 minutes to get to the city, then I have another two or three kilomtere hike (depending on which station I stop at) to walk to work. Connecting buses? Oh yes, walk 5 minutes to the stop, wait 10 for a bus, then sit in it 5 - 10 minutes while it meanders all over the place and finally deposits me about 2/3 of the way towards work, leaving me almost a kilometre to walk anyway. Or get on one of the "CAT" intracity buses, then it goes the LONG way round its route and finally drops me about 200 metres from work. But takes 15 minutes to get there...

And our government wonders why we stick so doggedly to cars.

Oh - and using eco-friendly transport? I can't cycle - emphysema tends to do that to you - and I've looked at electric and hybrid vehicles. Who can afford them? Hell I am one of those people who buy a $2000 old smokey banger because I can't afford to hock my life for a new emission-controlled vehicle, give me a break okay? So until there are incentives to lose the smokers and go with the sparkies, I would very much like to drive a new Prius or some such greener vehicle but can't. I'd love to get on a bus or better yet a train every morning and go to work in a reasonable amount of time, but it's not possible yet.

Ask yourself why nothing gets done about this. "Hmm" says the government, "we could spend a few billion on better transport and providing incentives to make, import, and buy green vehicles - but the disasters that are happening now won't come home to roost for another 10 years. And not doing this now makes our figures look better..."

I REALLY don't want to be alive when those chickens come home to roost...

Something I really like?

http://atanks.sourceforge.net/

Something I really like is the old classic Scorched Earth, but for years, PCs had become too fast for the old unclocked DOS battler, and I'd given it away as a bad joke. (They recently released a version of Scorch that didn't need one to run SloMo but I can't find the URL.) So when I saw Atomic Tanks I just had to download it. Verdict? Cool!

e3 :: blogging the wireless freenet

http : // e3 . com . au /
e3 :: blogging the wireless freenet are a wireless freenet in Perth, Western Australia. I plan to provide some linkage to this network, by way of letting them piggyback on my wireless link to work. Always assuming the wifi to work becomes a reality. Man it's difficult to get spare time to do stuff!

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These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one. 

I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world. 

Technology's Pace Is Racing

Not technology's pulse - technology's pace. It proceeds, as it's sometimes said, "most apace." I don't think there's a BPM that'll measure the kind of heartrate tech's exhibiting now... 

And I know - I sound like an old guy yelling at - whatever. But bear with me. I've seen people on Youtube feeling frustrated because things they'd spent a few days recording editing and publishing a video about, had progressed so much that by the time the video went up it was already out of date. 

"Oh ha ha!" I thought. "That's a bit rich, Youtuber. How can you say something like that?"

But they were right. Reviewers would get a 3D printer to review, spend several weeks putting it through its paces, produce a thoughtful review and put it up on Youtube - and the company had updated software version and fixed two hardware issues by that time.

More recently I saw an explainer-type channel presenter complain that what they'd posted about AI yesterday was already superseded by today's new AI app online. "M'kay boomer" the youtubers said ... 

Anyway. They're right. I've recently written and scheduled a post, added to it twice before the publication date, and then right after it was published, had to schedule another post with even more new stuff relating to the original post. The post was about EV charging stations, and I mentioned the rapid pace that battery technology was taking from chemistry to chemistry to construction to manufacturing and two posts later I'll have to start another one and start with this new technology (which incidentally isn't the latest battery news any more either . . . )

This is the state of everything at the moment. Ray Kurzweil famously suggested The Singularity and many people wondered if Moore's Law would keep being more or less true, and I've been working on the basis that if you replace "the number of transistors per chips" in Moore's Law with "the amount of computing power per dollar of cost" then it still holds true. And The Singularity holds sort of true because the last decade in particular has seen prosthetics and "biohacks" start on a geometric rise to that point. 

This is one of my favourite banner images I ever made.

Fifteen years ago I read about someone building themselves a home-brewed prosthetic hand, now you can download the model files to print your own, build your own controller, and set it up. Or you can buy them ready-made customised to your needs. There were the parents that built portable filters so that their children didn't need to have dialysis as often, insulin pumps are now mainstream and the age of cyberpunk biohackers is here if you search for devices like implantable NFC chips to hold your bank card's functionality or open your doors or start your car or even just store some information for emergency services in case of accidents.

Two or three other companies are competing with NeuraLink and I've actually posted about Augments and neural nets and stuff, mostly though as fiction stories, but it's been a thing I've thought about for 20+ years so I'm sure hundreds of other people will have thought about the exact same things - and for all I know there are biotech and nanotech companies pursuing that very research right now. (I've found that I'm almost never the first to arrive at what I thought at the time was a unique and revolutionary idea, and literally hundreds of others were also thinking they had the same unique and revolutionary idea... And sometimes, I'd see the idea become a commercial reality as someone got more research and development done than I did. Because I never really went past the "Oh wow! A unique and revolutionary idea!" stage.)

No, there's no ulterior motive to this post

I'm just blown away by how fast things move. "Oh!" I think to myself, "Wouldn't it be great if we could put a direct connection into our nervous system?" and then a decade later "No Elon - not like that . . . Sheesh . . ." I mean, I'm still waiting for some nanotech company to develop the Nano-Augment products I predicted in my blog post sixteen years ago. (Yes, there is an ulterior motive - sixteen years ago. Me.)

What are they?

I thought to myself that we can't really expect to connect a person to the Internet via hard hardware (like panels of fine pointy metallic bits) attached to a small patch of brain for a very small number of inputs/outputs. There're a number of reasons I think that it'll never work, despite NeuraLink's little successes. And Elon you can try and change my mind but in this case you're just not enough of a visionary, sorry. 

My basic premises for rejecting hard implants are that A) it'll damage the brain tissue it's implanted in, for sure. Take a hard tumble and the contacts'll drag and destroy a few cells.
B) Even though the currents may be in the range of picoamps, that will still cause electrolysis effects over time.
C) Materials themselves won't be up to the flexing required. Yes we have bendable screens now but how many have been tested to last 30 - 90 years of constant use? Hmmm. 
D) Resolution: a thousand points of contact of which only between 100 and 400 could end up being unuseable only gives a small number of bits that can input/output commands. 

So what's the solution?

Well - nanotechnology. And BIG thinking. And a lot more time. You see, nanotechnology can be rigid machines, or it could be liquids and suspended molecules . . .  

And - a LOT of experimentation and trials before ever making the first treatment. 

The basic idea is that we can make nanomaterials that can have pretty specific properties right now. What we need is to get good enough to give them extremely specific properties. They have to be made to adhere to particular types of human tissue, and then join together along it to form a conductive circuit. 

So you make a mixture of these nanomachines and introduce them into a person, they form along all manner of nerve cells, in effect creating a parallel to the nervous system and connected to it. you now have "wiring" in the body that runs at a far faster speed than nerve cells, and which it's okay to connect to. And you have - in effect - the entire nervous system in analog that can be used for - whatever you want. 

There are downsides to this. I thought this through at the time. If you have a second nervous system in your body that runs at around ten times faster than your original nerves, you'll suffer from a terrible "double vision" effect where the signals arrive, and then arrive again a second later. Unless it's possible to train oneself to ignore one set of signals, it would be nauseating and disorienting. But I assumed it wouldn't be insurmountable.

Then there's a second issue. You might sense a mosquito landing on your arm in a tenth of the time that it took you before the Augmentation, but you still couldn't get your muscles to react fast enough. THAT would drive you crazy, maybe. Maybe crazy enough to have a similar treatment done to increase your muscle speed. 

Now when you sense that mozzie, you send the swat signal, your new muscles power on and - 

break the bones of the arm you're swatting with. Followed by the mosquito, and the bones of your other arm that it was sitting on. 

*sigh*

You need some titanium reinforcement for your bones, too. 

And before you worry about how much weight you'll gain with all that nanotech inside you - it's nano. You have ten times more bacterial cells in your gut than there are somatic (body) cells in your body, yet they weigh only about a kilo. Any nanotechnology is similarly going to consist of numerous molecules but weigh only a kilo or two. 

Okay okay - I took a bit of artistic license.

The thing is - I'm expecting to read about it anytime now. THAT'S how fast I think technology is going.

It's a system that would allow a person to send every aspect of a learned behaviour (aka an 'engram') to an AI to teach it a particular task. Imagine someone who's been a truck driver most of their life, providing their experience to an AI. And also a rally driver. And so forth. Eventually you have an AI that can be trusted to drive you everywhere. And because the Augment is in all your nervous system, the driverless car AI will even be able to have "gut feelings" about traffic situations and act on them...

One downside of course is that you could be infected with a digital virus. In that 16 year old blog post I actually thought about that too. I'm just going to re-state that. Sixteen years ago I'd already thought of a way to make a superhman, and a way to defeat them. I'm not - I'm nowhere near being - the sharpest tool in the biotech / cyborg / cybernetic shed, but I could imagine this back then. I had (and still have) no laboratory for any such ventures, no formal education, and no money to do any research like that.

Imagine what a bunch of smarter people with a decent set of laboratories and funding could do . . .

I would sooo like to be able to get my posts seen farther and wider. And I'd so like to chat. There's a link in then graphic above that you can use to chat with me. (There are also links to donate and subscribe t the once-a-week newsletter . . .)

Please share this article if you liked it.

From Ye Olde Blogge October 31, 2003

Memory Lane Friday, October 31, 2003

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.

Contemporary history through... - searches for drugs

Mesothelioma - Viagra - Phentermine - Zocor - Bontril - Prozac - -Tenuate - Zyban - Didrex - Meridia - Lipitor. As of this writing, these are the most popular terms searched on drugs.com, a site that mainly seems to shill for secondrate drug companies and cut-rate cure-alls... It reveals an interesting anthropological find and a not altogether unsuspected snapshot of people now - i.e. people are stupid. Mesothelioma is a disease of the lungs caused usually by inhalation of crocidolite (blue asbestos fibres) in a certain range of lengths. It isn't a drug at all.

The interesting fact here is that if mesothelioma manages to beat viagra as a search term, then there must be a lot of people with asbestosis out there... How did this happen? Dust from old asbestos fencing? Asbestos house cladding? Pipe lagging? Or car brake shoes?

Then we have the inevitable small-dick-syndrome people, and then the obese and the cholesterol-obsessed, the stressed, smokers wanting to get off, and more fat people whose inner thin person is screaming to get out.

If for any reason, this fact survives s few centuries and is finally dug up by an anthropologist / historian, what sort of a world will they imagine we lived in?

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These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one. I am shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world. 

Two Poems, circa 1970-80ish:

Here's a thing. I was searching for another topic in my old blog posts and found what I'll repost here.

I was going through older posts, and found two poems, I thought at the time I'd written them in the mid-1980s but I recall writing Smokey's Lament just after my gap years which would make that one written in the late 1970s. And Sing A Song Of Chaos was written within a year. 

I was backtracking to see how far back I could verify my TEdALOG Lite / TEdALOG Lite II blog series. I found a text dump of a blog that I'd written on my PC (in HTML, no less, and using Notepad) and uploaded with some software that arranged and linked it and then wrote the whole shebang to a website of your choice, and thus includes the earliest blog post I still have records of. 

These were posts from late 2003 to late 2006. Everything earlier (and done completely manually before 2003) was lost when the web provider I'd been using before 2003 went belly-up. That would have been from 1997 - 2003 and the blog was called TEdLIVISION!!! as a nod to my BBS I ran before that.

But it establishes TEdALOG as being at least 20 years old, with a name change to TEdALOG Lite II in January 2007. And if I ever find my earlier blog on the 

Anyway - here, with no apologies and no expectations - are some poems that had to be written by a guy in his mid-20s and the blog post he wrote with them in his 40s:

Poems Across The Decades.

As we were selling up and moving house, I went through many many boxes of my father's possessions, airing out a lot of it and seeing what's there. Two sheets of paper fell out of one book, written on my old dot matrix printer, and turned out to be copies of poems I'd written in the mid 80's. I think I have second sight...

SMOKEY'S LAMENT

Smokey the bear went out one day,
Found a six lane carriageway,
Saw the cars belch fumes and soot,
People competing to pollute!

Something welled in Smokey's eye,
A bitter tear, he wiped it dry . . .

How long can we do it, this rape of the soil,
This searching and striving for land to despoil?
How long can we pillage the trees of this land,
Before we fall victim to our own wanton hand?

Silting the rivers with algae and spill,
How long before we must swallow this pill?

Smokey the bear turned aside for the city,
Sad there was the Earth, and the more was his pity,
Covered in concrete, entombed in highrise,
Cloud of pollution was hiding the skies,

Coughing and stumbling and hiding his tears,
Smokey resolved not to come back for years.

Kill the damn bugs, for the ruin our hay!
Curse them with sprays for they get in our way!
Coursing their ways through the Earth's veins they ran,
Now in us all, every child, woman, man!
Salt in the tillage, a new man-disease,
We've forsaken the land and raped her of trees!

Smokey the bear turned his steps to the West,
To places which once were with native life blest,

Found only farms, all sterile and bare,
Rusting machines - man must once have been there.
Bowed now and weeping and heavy of heart,
To the wide oceans did Smokey make start.

Full of our excrement, turgid and green,
The results of the Exxon Valdeez were here seen,
(yes I added these verses when reprinting it for Dad, in 1990.)
And great were the fishes that died in the net,
And great were the whales (what was left of them yet)
Lifeless, the reefs and the corals as one,
Nature again has by man been undone.

Smokey the bear thought he knew of a place,
Safe, and so far from our human deathrace,

Made for the east, for the rainforests there,
(Arrived just as we laid the last acre bare)
Heavy of heart now and laden with doubt,
Smokey the bear booked a fare to the South . . .

"Here in Antarctica, surely," thought he,
"I will no more of this man-folly see?"

Alas - that which greeted him, ugly and dusty,
Was campsites abandoned, boats, reefed and rusty,
And with horror he noticed his blistering skin,-
No-one had told him the ozone was thin . . .

Smokey the bear asked the Lord for one boon,
And so, in a thrice, had set sail for the Moon,

But space debris Got in his way,
Up there, where Killer Sputniks prey,
And on the Moon too We'd left our traces,
Pitted robots andRocket cases . . .

And so on he continued, he's gone off to see,
If somewhere there might be a sane galaxy,
We're left here to face this our pell-mell race,
To make amends to our birthing-place.

Such a beautiful world that we treated unfair,-
And now without Smokey, what hope is there?

SING A SONG OF CHAOS

Sing a song of Chaos, Entropy reversed,
New and strange attractors,
In the mind are nursed.

Mindful of another verse, I can but watch and frown -
It looks just like "Atishoo!
We all fall down..."

Ere I wake this morning, Before I end my sleep,
I pray to have a gentle dream,
A treasure I can keep.

No more nuclear nightmare, Frightening to my rest,
Please not another forest raped,
With axe and chainsaw "blest!"

Want to dream of pastures green, Not razed by 2-4-T,
Please - show me a verdant place,
Where in dreams I can be.

Let me look on fish and whales, At play in waters blue,
Don't show me an albatross,
Dying in black goo!

Let me roam a mountain range, Not opencut collier's pit,
I want to swim on beaches clean,
Not have dodge through shit!

Oh Progress, you are wonderful, You fill me with such dread,
You've stuffed a lovely planet
Now you're starting on my head . . .

Titanic Oceangate Submersible

It's well past the time when the five submariners aboard the submersible "Titan" should have run out of oxygen. We have questions but not really many answers.

UPDATE: Some questions answered - it seems the Titan imploded, it seems that the knock signals were spurious - but still leaves open if they were deliberately faked.

My first question is: Why were there so many stories? I don't mean journalitic coverage, I mean the things the experts surfaced. Today I broke my embargo on slavishly following the press and looked to see what's happening now that the official time limit's passed. 

I found two stories - you'll be able to find literally hundreds if not thousands - here and here. 

The Stuff That We Can Know.

Titan had 90hrs of oxygen on board.

Let's take this as a fact, that OceanGate thought the oxygen aboard would last five people a total of 90 hours. That figure has to perforce be a best guess. Panic - and you could halve the amount of time the oxygen would last you. Meditate and force yourself into slowed-down respiratory state and you could get to 100-120 hours. 

How Did They Scrub the CO2?

It doesn't matter if you have oxygen for 200 hours - you have to get rid of the CO2 (as Apollo 13 demonstrated in frightening detail) or you still suffocate. It seems that the lithium hydroxide filters might be a baseline to compare this to, the A13 had canisters of lithium hydroxide that could keep the expired CO2 of three astronauts scrubbed out of the air so I'm going to presume that Titan had at least that sort of a scrubber. 

The A13 had multiple spares so I'll presume that they had at least three, one to start on, one to replace halfway through the original mission, and a spare. Basically I think an A13 sized cartridge would scrub COS of 3 people for several days. The OceanGate missions were expected to only ever last eight hours and since the submersible had oxygen for three and three quarters days I'll presume they had the foresight to ensure redundancy.

The Implosion Sound?

In the investigation, it turns out that there was a sound similar to an implosion, right around the time that contact with the submersible was lost. Since that was at the 90 minute mark, the submersible would have been close to three quarters of the way down to the wreck of the Titanic. 

However, would it surprise us if we theorise that since one of the principals of OceanGate was on board and probably piloting, that the descent was maybe sped up  a bit? That may have put strain on the hull that it normally didn't experience and it imploded. Or perhaps they weren't really watching their descent and pancaked into the seafloor.

The Debris?

Whether the Titan imploded at 3/4 of final depth, at close to final depth, or on impact, can perhaps be established because the rescue ROV has apparently spotted a "debris field" that would be consistent with any of those senarios, and by analysing the pattern and spread of the remnants it would be fairly easy to work out at what altitude above the seafloor the incident had occurred.

The analysts also thought the debris found could well be materials similar to the composition of the Titan.

The Knocking?

Given that they found that debris and say that it looks to be similar to material that you'd expect to find if Titan had imploded, that makes it likely that the crew has perished and the Titan is destroyed. So where did the knock signals come from? The choices here are 1) implosion of the submersible at the 90 minute mark of the mission and loss of all aboard, or 2) the submersible is intact on the surface or the seafloor and someone is alive inside and signalling. 

The Stuff We Don't Know.

There are two scenarios and each has a few subvariants. 

The knocking signified that the submersible is on the surface or the seafloor and running out of time. I don't believe it could be floating at some intermediate depth just because that would mean it still has manoeuvring capability and should have surfaced once whatever incident they encountered was seen.

Given the loss of contact and a sound that could have been an implosion, my favoured guess is that the submersible did implode at or near target depth and is no more.

That means that the signal knocking was either the imagination of someone listening to the hydrophones, or some spurious noise that appeared to be intelligent signalling, or else an outright fraud committed by someone making such sounds to throw confusion into the search & rescue mission. 

Now A Crazy Thought.

• Paul-Henry Nargeolet was one of the people that first explored the Titanic and a French Navy diver.
• Stockton Rush was one of the principals and his wife was related to two people who died on that fateful Titanic voyage.
• Hamish Harding was a business jet trader and significant for his explorations and the records he's set.
• Shahzada Dawood is/was a friend of King Charles. 
  His son Suleman would be the traditional successor to that line.
• Given that the whole history of royalty is more labyrinthine and Byzantine than Machiavelli's deepest plots.
• And given that people close to the throne turn up dead from time to time.
• And also given that - had the most likely scenario occurred - then someone had to have been making the spurious signals in the vicinity, possibly to sow confusion.

So what are the chances that the Titan was deliberately scuttled for some ancient vendetta?

I'm aware of how crazy that sounds. But it's remotely possible so I mention it. 

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This Is What Climate Change Looks Like

... on the coalface. I said just a week ago that people who don't want to have children are okay to stay endlings. 

Now a bit more has come to my attention, and it says it right in the article that more than half of people who are active in climate change in any way (research, papers, activism, reporting, etc) believe that humanity is doomed by it. 

In my article I said "I couldn't imagine raising a small human . . . in the climate of uncertainty that was already evident when I was a parenting age . . ." and my choice of words was deliberate. Back in the 80s it wasn't yet a media phenomenon like it is today, but we had BBS systems and we were swapping the usual chat - weather reports: "yep, it stayed warmer, longer, before this winter. Beginning to believe that weird report hey?" - odd plant growth: "my tomatoes died off earlier this year, and my parsley shot away early too - must be something in the water?" 

In the 90s it was more obvious - my tomatoes cropped for longer, and they didn't even die off that year or the year after, and I had early crops off them. I had the Internet now and also ICQ. And I was chatting to people who were definitely reporting signs of weird weather. Not just one or two, either. It was a wake-up call. 

And by then it was getting a bit late to have young'uns, anyway. People stopped asking. I breathed a sigh of relief. But not about the climate, because by then it was starting to become A Topic Of Discussion everywhere. Not enough for people to actually do anything about it, but talking, at least. The rest is history. 

But look at it - the amount of distress that climate science - and the news it brings - has been creating. That last article BTW is from 2021. The Crikey reader comments roundup is from this year. The first two articles are also from this year. Here's another one.

I'm sure the climate is warming. I'm not sure the human species will survive the coming climate changes. I'm not sure most of plant and animal life on the planet will survive it. But I want to do everything I can to slow or avert it.

End Of Line? It's Terminal.

Are you the last of your lineage? After you, no more <insert family name here> running around the yard? No more <insert family tree name here> DNA in the world? 

Don't be too discouraged and don't feel too guilty. We share more DNA with other humans than we do with molluscs or mushrooms, but the variation in our genotype is only about 0.1%. While that means that our particular genome will end with us, the rest of our unique DNA is spread out among billions of other humans. 

So we're not really denying the gene pool of too much mixing. We think there have been only around 108bn home sapiens born on the planet since the species diverged from the hominid branch. There will soon be 9bn of us on the planet at a time, so maybe around 7-8% of all the h. sapiens that ever lived are here on the planet right now. Even if that figure was closer to 4% that's still a pretty large gene pool. It can do without contributions from some of us.

Don't Worry, Others Have Worried For You.

Starre Vartan had this same question in mind. (For podcast listeners - the link will be in the article when it's published.) 

And I had this question in mind when I decided I'd be an endling. (An "endling" is technically the last of a distinct species but the same concept applies to DNA of a family tree I think.) And actually - technically - I'd only be an endling of this branch of the <insert family tree name here> family tree. But I have female siblings and now quite a few nieces and nephews so their DNA contribution will outlive me.

There are also so many other things tied up in this. For one, why do we have this implacable drive to have our DNA be propagated into the future? Are we really the fittest h. sapiens that ever lived? Some people in history thought so - the eugenicists. "Terminate all inferior bloodlines, only the One True Race!" but that's just so much hokum. 

Because when you press any eugenicist to imagine the point where only their race exists on the planet with numbers approaching 9 billion, and ask them what this Superior Race will look like, it turns out they all look like that eugenicist. "Only Skwarkians with straight spines, brown eyes, three nipples, fine (but not too fine) musculature, a height of 180cm, and thick protective hair on their head!" they exclaim, and they're describing only themselves. 

When it comes down to a point where you've subdivided Skwarkians into 27 sub-races, only one will do. When you divide that last 1/27th into your family and the other 80,000 families, only YOUR family meets the standard. And then, do you know what you get? Have you got there yet? You get in-breeding, that's what you get. 

Imagine a time in the unimaginably far distant future when humans can instantaneously move wherever in the Universe they want and can form breeding unions with whomever they want, and the number of humans alive at any one time has so many zeroes after it that it's staggeringly close to the number of all planets. And the matter of "whomever they want" becomes inconsequential because there aren't any more variations possible of that 0.1% of the DNA... 

Slight Hiccup:

There may be a genetic predisposition component to not wanting to have kids. (The old joke "If your parents never had sex, chances are you won't either" comes to mind.) But truly - if there's a slight genetic variation that predisposes a person to not procreating, then that's a trait that will obviously breed itself out. 

But that's okay too. It means that the eager breeders will breed, meaning that again, your action (in not adding to the gene pool) won't affect the viability of the species. We family endlings have the best of both worlds. The hiccup turns out to not be an issue either. 

On A Personal Note

I decided, as I said, to not have kids. A lot of things. I could never imagine me with a young'un, I mean, a pup was already a huge commitment... I couldn't imagine raising a small human and teaching them al about life - if I wanted that I'd have become a teacher I suppose - in the climate of uncertainty that was already evident when I was a parenting age. 

And if you've decided you'd prefer to make our population growth figures a bit less frenetic, don't worry. Everything will work out just fine.