A Twitter-rant I'd like to preserve

Like Sarah Stokely, I'm sick of the emergence of the “cult of hard”. 

"HTFU" is yet another piece of plastic solidarity, invented only so that the arsehats at the top of corporations can justify their “we own you so do as we say!” Invented to ruin lives, steal weekends, cancel holidays, eliminate sick leave – and adopted out in the community by suckers, racists, toad-eaters, pole-climbers, place-seekers and all that drops from the arse of the corporate world onto the anchor-fluke of the ship of commerce.

“Harden the fuck up” leads to nets under Foxconn dormitory flats to catch the jumpers, to trolls that don't think “ape” is a racist insult to an Aborigine footballer, to miserable lives of desperation no longer quiet, to silent misery after yet-another-buggering by a priest.

In my father, enough “hard” to serve in WW2 meant a man who was never completely sane until his death from Alzheimer's Disease in 1989.

To hell with hard. And here's my Twitter-stream because I'm proud I found the words. With thanks to @stokely who started it.

@stokely The world doesn't need more hard. It needs more soft. I'm as hard as a lemonade sandwich. "Strong" != "Hard".

All that follows is me as @r_chirgwin. I have suspension points where thoughts spanned more than one Tweet.

In general, "HTFU" and variations on the theme are just evangelising passive conformity. Takes a lot more "hard" to speak than not.

Someone says "this is rotten", and a whole heap of vested interests say "harden up"...

…(And a chorus of eunuchs chimes in aligned with their meal tickets). Who's strong? The vested interest, or the ordinary person saying "no"?

I'd rather admire the "soft person" who trembled at the knees and spoke up, than the conformist saying "harden up" or any of its variants.

"Strong" is a virtue. "Hard" is not. Ask my wife: I'm soft. But you won't get a hammer through my skin...

…and in the face of hell and death and illness and all the rest, we're 26 years together and still hold each other every night.

The "harden up" crew in the world look a lot less potent if you imagine them in tunics with pom-poms...

…the cheerleaders of a toxic culture introduced to the world by people like Al Dunlap. It's not something to aspire to. It's to despise.

If you love your loves and love your happiness, love your ability to be moved to tears or appreciate beauty, NEVER "harden the fuck up".

People who say "yes" in fear of the horror of being disdained by the boss aren't "hard". They're followers hoping the arrows don't hit them.

And the jewels you win by being "hard as concrete" won't be more than glass when live turns to shit and desperation.

The only things worth holding are love and laughter, and those things you do because they strike at your heart. The rest is chaff.

…........

I ended the Twitter-rant because dinner was served. It was a home-made chicken pie, cooked by Ms T, with leek and mushroom in a cream sauce. Served with chat potatoes in butter and parsley. OK, she ran with frozen peas as well!

She is seriously ill and on chemotherapy for an immune system disorder, and her chronic pain is good enough for synthetic opiods. And she and I live on the knife-edge of expertise: what's enough chemo to keep her immune system down, but not so much that it causes cancer (she had two tumours removed last year)?

“Cooking for you guys [me and our sons] is the last thing I'll let go,” she said tonight.

I'll take your HTFU and raise it “love through the pain”. Even with a pair of twos in my hand, I'll win.

Yet more MSM NBN politicking

It's been a while since I had a chance to unpick egregious NBN commentary – not that the stories have gotten any better, but because I've been extremely busy!

But this piece at Fairfax is too much for me to let pass:

Don't look now, the white elephants are multiplying

Let's just pick off some hit points.

“The government's plan to roll out high-speed fibre-optic telephone cable to the home is now estimated by most experts to cost $90 billion to $110 billion, compared with the government's latest guesstimate of $45 billion.”

Fibre-optic telephone cable? That should set the tone.

And “most experts” don't estimate $90 to $110 billion – that, dear friends, is the Coalition's number. I don't know why the columnist, Kenneth Davidson, decided not to source the number correctly.

The government's $45 billion is the whole network, not just the fibre network – it includes the satellite services and fixed wireless services to the last 7% of the population. NBN Co's calculation for the fibre is currently in the order of $37 billion.

“There are about 11 million fixed lines in Australia. Fibre has a life of about 25 years. In order to fund the capital cost and depreciation of the network, every fixed-line user would have to pay $9400 a year to the NBN, based on a return of 10 per cent a year.”

“Fibre has a life of 25 years”? Oh dear. Mr Davidson has mistaken the depreciation life of the fibre for its operational life. The depreciation life – which gets revised upwards from time to time – is a mere financial fiction. The operational life of the cable could easily reach 60 years; as I've reported before, Corning has tested fibres which, after twenty years of exposure to mud, flood, heat and snow, showed no observable deterioration.

“By 2020, the US will probably have developed low earth orbiting satellites capable of picking up and sending wireless signals at a fraction of the cost of the Gillard government's scheme.”

Wow: let's party like it's 1998, when I was being instructed by boosters to get excited about Iridium, the planned constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites that would usher in a new world of communications, etcetera.

Iridium got launched – but not until after a bankruptcy, for a host of different reasons, and a subsequent restructure that meant some of the planned constellation was abandoned. As it happens, the late 1990s saw this happen more than once, with Teledesic, Orbcomm, ICO Global and Globalstar all suffering a similar fate.

Some of the constellations are there – but you might notice that we're not all using satellite communications in preference to our land-based services.

I would add that I'd just as soon have my services delivered by an Australian company, and pretend futilely that at least some of my communications aren't subject to the Patriot Act.

When so many errors are fashioned into a stick to beat the government, it's hard to believe that the opinion was nothing more than politicking. The problem is, few readers are in a position to pick up the errors.

Mr Davidson Responds 

Update: I'm told Mr Davidson has responded to criticisms, and his response is posted here at Dropbox.

Note that I can't vouch for the veracity of the response. If it's a hoax, I have no way of knowing.

So here's the nub of Mr Davidson's case:

The major difference is between my statement that the capital cost of ftth will be in the order of $90 billion (the Turnbull estimate) rather than the $46 billion (the official NBN estimate) 

The difference is explained by the fact that my NBN critics claim that the ‘least average cost’ of the underground tail connection from the NBN pit to the customer is $4,000 dollars. The highest average cost is $12,000. Based on 11 million connections the total cost of the tail connections ranges from $44 billion to $132 Billion dollars

I don't exactly know where Mr Davidson sources his data but I suspect it's a mangling of data presented on page 207 of the NBN Implementation study. Yes, the peak price does reach between $11,000 and $12,000 per premises.

The $11,000-$12,000 cost per premises is not the cost across the whole rollout – that's the bit of the graph that's been misunderstood here. The graph says that for the easy premises, in metro, near the exchange and so on, the connection cost is low, whereas for someone in a low density area, at the edge of the network, in a country town, the cost is high.

It's quite clearly described in the Implementation Study as a “marginal cost curve”. The $12,000 cost of connecting Joe Bloggs in Dubbo does not result in a $12,000 cost of connecting Jenny Basketweaver in Balmain.

Ten thousand kilograms of concentrated awesome: from me and Ms T

As always, I post this with Ms T's permission. So first, the update, which is good news.

We can't call “remission”, but there's a faint echo of one in the distance, if auto-immune disorders offer remissions. Ms T's intake of terrifyingly toxic drugs has been halved to a mere bi-monthly visit to the chemo suite. Her intake of steroids has been cut down towards the minimum, and may be stopped this year.

The replacement celiac artery is holding up perfectly, and there haven't been any new tumours (which can arise in the presence of a severely depressed immune system).

All of that's good – but some of the burdens remain; in particular, the side-effects of chemo. Although the dose has just been cut, there effects are cumulative and don't disappear instantly. So cyclo's effects on digestion and so on remain.

It doesn't stop us from feeling happy that things are headed in the right direction at last. Even if there are still times when the best thing to do is hug her while she cries.

The other point of the post

While away at a conference, I found myself being asked about the blog posts Ms T has allowed me to post about the chemo life – some of the time in public, at other times away from the crowd, sometimes in low voices, sometimes in groups.

The things they said touched me, and in particular, someone who discussed chemo in terms of psychological isolation.

I hadn't articulated to myself is that chemo is an isolating experience.

Yeah, I know. I'm an insensitive clod. I miss the emotional context routinely.

It's easy to see that chemo makes someone feel dreadfully, atrociously, physically ill. And it makes them feel like freaks if, for example, they lose their hair (Ms T is fortunate in that, her hair changed colour but is still there).

It's easy to realise how frightening it is: watch a nurse approach in a splash suit, or look at the gauntlets I'm supposed to wear if I have to clean something up.

But how could Ms T feel isolated by chemo? The family never went away, never stopped holding her, never stopped saying we love her.

“I didn't realise,” someone said – I forget who, perhaps because there is lots of wine around at conference dinners – “how isolating it must be, until I read about your wife.”

That was a double smackdown for me: first, because I hadn't thought about chemo in terms of psychological isolation; second, because I'd managed to communicate it without understanding it.

It was profoundly unsettling. Ms T must have felt like that – even while she was giving me permission to put the ghastly details in public – and not been able to articulate it to me. And I'd been everywhere with her disease, since her weight first collapsed to 31.7 kilos and it took nearly three months in RPA to get her under control and her immune system disorder diagnosed.

Thanks to that friend for opening my eyes, when you thought you were thanking me for opening yours!

There's also the person whose family member had gone through chemo for cancer and died, all the while hiding the worst side-effects from anyone who came visiting, including family. Yes, Ms T and I published those posts for you. And your appreciation touched me deeply.

And there are so many people in the same boat, from such a small sample of acquaintances. 

Their loved ones, family members, friends, feeling isolated while they talk about the public face of chemo, the things that go in movies and celebrity magazine profiles and TV talk shows, hiding the stuff nobody told them about, not even the doctors. 

“I got to say to him, it's okay, I understand, it's the chemo, there's someone I know...”

Finally: the acquaintance, now a friend if they ever need it, who told me “your wife is ten thousand kilograms of concentrated awesome”?

I agree.

Destroying freedom in order to save it

Only a little while ago, ASIC gave the keys of a backhoe to an institutional Baldrick, whose cunning plan cut the metaphorical cable of 1,200 Websites.

It was a denial-of-service attack that would probably earn a script kiddie some jail time, but meanwhile, the “cyberwar” doom-army would still have governments curtail the Internet.

What stirred me is this piece of drivel in The Australian.

Written by Centre for Independent Studies director, ex-banker, company director and thriller author John M Green, it purports to lay out the horrifying future of cyber-warfare.

From the headline on, it makes for a great episode of “spot the bollocks”.

“The cyber-enemy we're not seeing” – Bollocks. Define “cyber-enemy”. Define “we”. Define “seeing”.

“Today, a lone cyber-terrorist can launch global havoc from anywhere, a bedroom, a beach, even a carpark, provided they have phone signal.” – Bollocks.

To “launch global havoc” would at least require someone with access to vulnerability and malware markets, money to pay for botnets, other peoples' knowledge and skills, and so on. 

Also, it has nothing to do with Green's purported thesis about the insider threat.

“Spanish police arrested a Dutchman they claim launched the biggest cyber-attack in history. From where? His mobile-equipped campervan.” – Bollocks.

The “biggest ever” tag was PR from CloudFlare (“we defeated the biggest attack!” style claims), and that bit of spin is being repeated by the police because it improves their case.

Because Green's only qualification in this space is to write a thriller about it – which he's currently promoting, hardly a coincidence in the context of the article – he bolsters his position with this quote from ASIO boss David Irvine:

“A single malicious algorithm could switch off our lights, stop all planes flying, disrupt whole countries' financial networks, or shutdown their electricity grids”.

Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks. Mr Irvine is ring-fencing his budget – and it's odd to see a CIS director playing along with “protect my spending” while it's willing to slash and burn everything actually useful the government does.

I won't unpick everything that Mr Irvine said, but here's some points.

First, electricity – the grids that are nearly national, all connected not by the Internet, but by private fibre owned by every electricity authority in the country. There is no single, unwatched, unmanaged Internet off-switch for the electricity grid: even if an attacker found his way from (say) TransGrid's Web page to a control room, the control room is manned.

So: someone issues a shut-down instruction for the grid, and nobody in any control room notices, or if they do, they yell “It's a cyber-attack! Forget the hospitals, run for your lives!”

Pfui.

Or the “planes will stop flying” argument (its orgin being Richard Clarke, who always has a book to sell).

Do you think Airservices Australia connects the Mount Boyce radar station to the Sydney control towers via the Internet? As in “Darn, we can't see QF 11 heavy any more, some kid in Toongabbie must be Torrenting Game of Thrones”?

“Though he wasn't, he could have been reading a thriller about this, one like mine, The Trusted. Fiction can be fluff, an entertainment, but it can also be an amber light, in this case flashing how woefully underprepared we are.”

The Australian is running this because mister Green has a book promo happening.

“Take Matthew Trevor Flannery, a support technician at a Sydney cybersecurity consulting firm, who police arrested last month for allegedly defacing a local council website, and who reportedly claimed he was leader of global hacker movement LulzSec.” – Bollocks.

Note that Flannery's “insider status” was separate from the crime he's accused of committing (the entirely global-hacker-worthy act of vandalising Narrabri Shire Council), and that his acclaimed status with LulzSec is already looking threadbare.

Note also that you need no special skills to copy secret files and carry them out of a building on a USB key, or e-mail them to yourself. That's not about “cyber attacks”, it's about trust and access to information.

Then there's this closing book promo:

“It's hardly mere fiction to imagine a handful of environmentalists out of all the millions, so disgusted by global inaction that they plan their own direct action: to save the planet by destroying its pillaging economic system using the best tools available, cyber terror. Positioning themselves carefully and quietly, as the Cambridge Five did so successfully. Working among us, looking like us, trying to be us. Until they're ready to strike and destroy our way of life, by turning technology against itself, and us.”

(Actually, it was "mere fiction" - another book promo for Green).

Note that he leaps gleefully back from his warnings about insiders to “global cyber terror” (terror? Bollocks) wrought by activists.

What I find frightening is this: that so many people are willing to encourage not security, safety or knowledge, but dependent ignorance.

That dependent ignorance includes, in no particular order: 

* Governments working to criminalise the way technology works (really – stepping through URLs instead of clicking on links routinely gets described as “hacking” even though it's how HTML works)

* Police exaggerating minor incidents into major attacks

* Companies exaggerating the scale and cost of Internet security breaches

* Arrests and convictions over trivial social media jokes

The end-game of this is less freedom of speech, more snooping, more censorship, license-to-blog, and an Internet presided over by a scowling inquisitor, scourge in hand, waiting to ask the extraordinary question.

Bollocks.

Update: I've been accused of ignoring Stuxnet, which damaged nuclear centrifuges in Iran in 2010, and therefore I'm wrong.

Stuxnet rather reinforces my point, I believe, for the following reasons:

1. It targeted a particular target (Siemens controllers in Iranian centrifuges)

2. It's believed to have been delivered to the centrifuges on USB memory keys rather than over the Internet

Taking down a country's entire electricity grid is a far more complex task than that attempted by Stuxnet.

Of 3D printing and electricity from walking

It amazes me how easily people can fall for ideas that don't stand the test of just a little mathematics: there are people who believe that a 3D printer in every garage is as good an idea as generating electrical energy from tiles that people walk on.

As a proposed replacement for mass-produced products, the 3D printer represents an environmental disaster.

Let's take a Lego block as the example. My calculation is that a 2 x 1 block has about 400 cubic millimetres of plastic in it, which a 3D printer like the Up Plus can run off in a best-case 14 seconds.

The Up Plus is specified at 200 Watts, and that gives us a nice, convenient calculation: 200 Watts for 14 seconds is 2,800 joules of energy (since one watt second is one joule).

How does that compare with an extrusion process?

I don't have a number for Lego bricks, so I'll have to use public data and treat it as an “average” plastic. According to this document, from Europe's plastics industry, the whole industry produced 52 megatonnes of plastic in 2007, at an energy consumption of 3.5 million gigajoules.

That works out to 67 joules per gram of plastic produced – and if a 2 x 1 block weighs 1.6 grams, its energy budget is nearly 108 joules.

The 3D printer, on that measure, is 1/26^th as efficient as the extrusion process.

Sure, printers will get better, more efficient, quicker – but a 26 times efficiency deficit is a hell of a handicap to start with. Some things aren't subject to Moore's law – like the basic physics that a lot of the energy is needed to move the print head around, and you can't create a massless print head, so it's always going to need energy to move. It heats the plastic input mass to melting point, and heating element efficiency is capped by physics. And so on.

3D printers are interesting and exciting and they'll make huge changes out in the real world. It's just that its place in the hype world is bugging me.

Now, over to the “generate electricity walking idea, which also boils down to joules. The idea is so exciting that Adam Spencer abandoned his maths on Friday (May 3) to give it a kick along.

Whatever else it's generating, Pavegen is generating buzz. And what for? Generating real electricity, about seven joules of it, every time someone steps on a Pavegen tile.

I'm going to make two assumptions: that it takes about a kilowatt-hour to actually fabricate the tile, transport it, install it, and extract electricity out of it; and that each step generates seven watts for one second. At seven joules per step, it will take that tile about half a million steps to pay back its energy budget: if it's in a high-traffic spot, with 1,000 people stepping on it each day, that's 500 days.

After that, it's generating free electricity. At a thousand steps per day, you're getting a whole 7,000 watt-seconds out of the tile – enough to run one 11 watt compact fluoro lamp for about ten minutes. Turn the lamp off for a while and you've got the same environmental benefit as from the Pavegen tile, without the capex.

Of course, if it takes more energy to create the Pavegen, it gets worse – if it takes 10 kW to make, deliver and install the Pavegen tile, then the payback is five million steps.

And once again, I strongly suspect, physics is going to constrain the whole idea. There's only so much energy you can extract out of a footfall. Most of the available energy has to be available for the person to walk with, after all!

Confirmation bias is not journalism

The more you put in a brain, the more it holds. But you can't run a deficit: you actually need stuff to put in.

Most of the time people complaining about “mainstream media” aren't actually helping. They want journalism to stop being journalism, and instead confirm their existing world-view.

They're not actually complaining about “factual reporting”. They want a political position that agrees with theirs, and if they don't get it, they won't buy.

You idiots: all you're doing is forcing a polarisation that makes the actual newspapers worse, not better. You – both sides, left and right – are forcing an exclusion of the middle where most people actually live.

Look, you idiots: sometimes, facts can't be massaged into a political slant. Insisting that they do so is just as stupid as editors that try to do so – editors who are as easily led by the nose as asses are (but the nose-ring of the modern editor is some focus group of poor schmucks answering questionnaires in exchange for a cheese platter).

So. You're going to endorse a story because it was written in a style you enjoyed, took a position you enjoyed, slagged the right political victims, took the right position?

Really, you're an idiot. A solipsistic brain donor. Instead of wanting to know more about your world, you want to know less; you don't want information, but confirmation.

You are undermining not only the media – by encouraging their own solipsistic lock-up into arsehole-gazing, but by encouraging them to confirm your own – you're undermining democracy, by elevating Vaudeville over substance, sizzle over steak.

Sparkle is fun, but it isn't illumination.

And the stupid folly of it all is that you think that Social Media is replacing MSM when most of what it's doing is re-Tweeting MSM with the gimcrack endorsements of the worst crap MSM has to offer.

Frankly, you dills, the reason MSM has become a parody is because you endorse the parody – but only from the intellectually-crippled frame that interprets the journalist's job as endorsing your own shorthand politics.

If “bitchy to the other side” is a reason to endorse untruths, you aren't thinking. You're just knee-jerking to the idea that either Julia Gillard is Juliar or that Tony Abbot is PhoneyTony. That's slogan, you fools, and it doesn't help you.

If you endorse the offhand, one-handed ejaculations of a post-lunch editor as gold, and dismiss factual reporting as politicised, you're worse than a fool: you are engaging in the destruction not just of media, but of debate and democracy. And I have no truck with you, left or right.

Nutlessness as a service

Any tech journalist who discusses Malcolm Turnbull's "policy launch" tomorrow without quizzing him on it acting in the service of politics without the chance to examine the policy-maker, and is a fool.

Whatever else we know about Malcolm Turnbull's broadband plans, they represent brains without balls.

Brains tells us that everything you say about broadband in Australia is an attack launched on a government that can't take a trick, even with fourteen trumps in its hand.

Balls?

There once was a man from Devizes

Whose testes were two different sizes

The one was so small

It was no ball at all

The other won several prizes.

When it comes to a broadband policy launch, is Malcolm Turnbull winning prizes?

Don't make me laugh: he's keeping the gig to the morons, partisans, gourmands, time-servers, place-seekers, and dyspeptic dipsomaniac brain-donors of the press gallery.

Having handed a gift of a policy that's already risible – virtue of its red-handkerchief $90 billion – to a witless goon at the Daily Telegraph, Mr Turnbull is now ignoring every approach to journalists with, you know, experience in the telecommunications market.

He's quite free with his advice, criticism and public denigration of journalists that don't agree with him. I've had “why won't you call British Telecom?” (answer: I did) and is happy to tell me what I've misunderstood, forgotten or added up wrong, should I dare to run a spreadsheet over the NBN or any similar project, anywhere else in the world.

I've offered to quiz him at any public press forum he chooses, and never once received a reply.

With 25 years experience in writing about the telecommunications industry, and – if I include my original training at the Overseas Telecommunications Commission – close to 30 years all up around telecommunications, I'm not on the invite list for Malcolm's Great Broadband Policy Launch.

Because, unlike the lazy shit-for-brains that infest the gallery, for whom all politics is reduced to “the government said / the opposition hit back” or “the opposition said / the government hit back”, I am both numerate and familiar with all of the technologies that are proposed for modern broadband.

In other words, people like me – and I have – need to suffer his lame lectures about journalistic technique if we don't agree with him. He'll sit at the door, scratching and whining like last decade's hound that we're not going to the original source (that is, sources that agree with him). But we're not permitted to quiz him in a public forum.

In his broadband launch, Malcolm is going to be an original source – but only if he can share his fleas with other superannuated hounds.

What a lame joke: and this is the best brain in the alternative party of government.

What a joke.

Work that “$90 billion” figure, printed without question, query or even the simplest mathematics by the Daily Telegraph, the utter suckhole of journalistic suckholes in Australia, a place even facts won't use as their hospice because it's better to die in the gutter than have your brains sucked out by News Limited lizard-people with skull-drills and straws.

On today's number of households in Australia, that's well past $10,000 per household.

That number is so stupid – strike that, so utterly stupid – that any journalist worth the price of the headline and a Starbuck's coffee should have asked even one question:

“Since British Telecom is only asking a couple of thousand per kilometre for individual node-to-home connections, on the most inefficient model that human ingenuity can devise, what idiot gave you a convincing estimate of $10k per household for FTTH?”

Or even better: “Why did you believe an estimate that is many times every available international benchmark for FTTH rollouts, based on what's already been spent?”

Or even better: “This is a naked political lie. Put up or shut up.”

News Limited doesn't work that way. Its game is this: we will only run with the naked, unadorned press release, if we get it first. Go off to its IT pages and tell me I'm wrong: but only if you first poll the PR companies who know how the game is played. Give News a 24-hour break; that's all you need.

And it can even be utter drivel as ran in the Telegraph today.

Which is why experts aren't going to be welcome at Malcolm's little piece of theatre. It only took a few seconds with a spreadsheet – but the brain donors don't do numbers, they do “he said / he hit back”. Which is exactly the wank-and-dribble level of intellect Malcolm Turnbull wants covering his policy launch.

The one was so small, it was no ball at all

Poor of Australia: Stand Behind Broggers!

Thanks, John Brogden, for defining the problem.

There you were on the ABC show 730, valiantly toiling in your paid occupation as apologist for Porsche Cayenne buyers the nation over, the negative-gearing doctors'-wives of Double Bay, and so on …

Doing quite well until you had to try and convince people, whose superannuation won't buy a second-hand Honda Postie and whose entire wardrobe is worth less than your damn pinstripes, should grab pitchforks and torches to defend the interests of your clients.

Against what?

Against the old, poor, sick, the cancer patients with no private cover, the desperates trying to work four jobs to pay both the mortgage and the chemist bills, the staggering Alzheimer patients who can manage to get a prescription filled if there's a friend to help them, the single parents who somehow manage to get a couple of hours cash-in-hand at a cafe without either super or leave.

John, I won't even try to make this nice: your egregious, patronising, insulting and offensive plea to egalitarianism, that superannuation policy should be about “all Australians” – like hearing a Tsarist serf-owner of the 19^th century say “it's about all of Russia!” – is beyond crapulous.

Your threat to take up arms of advertising against the government is just odious, and completely out of touch. So here's a quick sample of the life of people who you're happy to have take the kicks on your behalf.

1. Can they skip the trip to the chemist? Before the safety net level, even familiar prescriptions can cost a bomb. Does the asthma feel okay, or do they head for the discount butcher to buy the preventer?
2. Darn. Need to register the car. That means the insurance, four tyres, and plastic that's already maxed. Wonder if the parents can lend a grand to tide things over?
3. Can't call mum to ask, because the phone got cut off and there's not the spare cash to buy a $20 prepaid voucher. Bugger.
4. “Hang on, why the final demand? I paid that bill” “No dear, that was the previous one.”
5. “I hate porridge!” “I know dear, but until Dad's working again, we really can't lay out $7 a box for Nutri-Grain. It won't be long.”

In among all this, I can just imagine the unsuperannuated rising in outrage at the unfair treatment that you and your peers might suffer – not will suffer, because we don't actually know what's in the budget until it arrives – not because the government will raid your superannuation accounts, but merely because they'll remove a tax break.

And there they will be: risking the sack for sneaking away from work early, losing benefits because Stand Behind Broggers is more important than turning up at Centrelink for ritual humiliation, laying out three nights' dinner-money on burgers to join the rally.

You can be sure that Jones will deliver a foam-flecked rant; instead of naff hand-drawn signs, someone from an ad agency has kindly thrown in a couple of hours for a nifty new Witch logo, and there's always a mate who runs a printing company so that things can be done properly.

And there they will be: the poor, the starving, the broke and the huddling, holding your signs and chanting your slogans to make sure that no Australian has to start retirement living without at least a Princess Crusies trip of some kind or other.

I can just see it. Can't you?

Greg Sheridan: stop it

Yeah, I know. He's A Serious Foreign Correspondent.

He's also a shameless fear-monger.

You see, Mister Sheridan, I'm of A Certain Age – when I was young, your predecessors in fear-spreading would find an excuse about once a year to draw maps of “nuclear devastation”. You know the kind: Vaporised at X kilometres, killed by the blast at Y kilometres, dead in the firestorm at Z kilometres, everyone in the last circle to die horribly from radiation sickness, and so on.

I have no way to assess how many kids got how depressed at this constant You-Will-Die theme.

The prophets of doom have been utterly miserable since the end of the Cold War. Oh, they try to stir up a good head of steam about Islam's Ultimate Plans for A Worldwide Caliphate, but their heart isn't in it. What satisfaction is there in frightening people who are already nuts enough to believe that Al Qaeda can take over the world?

North Korea is a gift from Rupert: nuclear-armed, belligerent and insane, and the belligerent howlers want us to all return to the appropriate state of atavistic fear that we abandoned when the Berlin Wall fell.

Take it from an old hand: don't fall for it.

I have no idea what motivates the Greg Sheridans of the world. Whatever makes someone want to see other people fearful, miserable and blighted is a disorder too deep for me to even discuss. The same bleak, hellfire Calvanist heart beats underneath the chest of the cyber-war fear-monger, the “here comes the Great Depression of three months from now”, the End-is-Nigh sandwich-board wearers, and on and miserably on.

So I'm calling this out. Greg, people are not “right” to be afraid of North Korea, no more than they're “right” to fear that they're going to get MRSA tomorrow and lose limbs, die in a crashing Qantas airliner, or be hit by a meteor.

What if North Korea launches a nuclear strike against the USA?

That ends North Korea as a problem. Is China going to go to international thermonuclear war over Pyong Yang? One that involves bombing, say, Sydney – just because there are a few spare missiles hanging around?

Don't be ridiculous.

If it did happen, what on Earth can you or I do about it? Worry? Oh, well, there's the cure for Dear Leader's mental malady right there?

Teach my children to worry, like I did when the odious, unprincipled bastards of another era scored sales by spreading misery?

I refuse.

What's the point of worrying about whether Pyong Yang is insane?

Save your worries, your concerns, your sleepless nights – save them for things that matter. The people around you, since you can't guarantee that your lives and loves will last the next 24 hours, with or without North Korea or Cassandra Sheridan. Worry about the mortgage or the business, the boss or the kids' HSC, not missing the next episode of Game of Thrones, what to have for dinner – the small, the close, the personal, the things you can hold and trust and love.

Don't listen to Sheridan: if you do, it won't improve either your life or your epitaph.

And anyhow, North Korea isn't about to bomb Sydney.

Payback for a 2,000 litre water tank: about four years

Update: I have a crow to eat. Playing citation hide-and-seek I find that the original benchmark included purchase, a pump, plumbing and installation. It's here: http://www.marsdenjacob.com.au/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=53&Itemid=63 Thanks to Stilgherrian for getting the ball rolling (below). I have added other thoughts at the end of the post. 

Why do I let myself get sucked in like this? I could ignore this stuff on a Sunday, then someone points me at a dodgy statistic swallowed without chewing by an uncritical journalist, and away I go.

The dodgy statistic in question is this:

“Restrictions could also encourage ''inefficient'' measures such as rainwater tanks, which cost up to $2000 but held only $4 worth of water at 2011 prices, the report said.”

It's in this story about water pricing, and because the Sydney Morning Herald doesn't practice source-linking, you have to do a bit of Googling to find out that the report in question is this one, from the Productivity Commission (the quote is on page 184):

“For instance, a common 2000 litre household rainwater tank costing about $1500 to $2000 holds about $4 worth of water at current mains water prices.”

It's a very misleading statistic in two ways. First, I can't find any 2,000 litre water tank that costs that much – even an expensive under-deck tank can be had for about $1,300. Second, it assumes that the water in the tank is a static resource – hence the snitty crack about it containing $4 worth of water.

Sydney's price of water in 2011 was $2.103 per kilolitre (hence “about $4 worth”). If I run a fairly simple model, and use a $640 purchase price for the tank (from here), it's not a bad deal.

Here are my unrealistic assumptions:

1. The turnover of the tank is sufficient that each “fill” gets used.
2. The catchment is 8 meters x 8 meters (the roof area above my head right now).
3. 1mm of rain on 1sqm is 1 litre (this is assumed by every online calculator I see).
4. I used the Bureau of Meteorology Observatory Hill average rainfall here.

Under those conditions, that tank would deliver about $163 worth of water each year – paying for itself in around four years. And it's this that the Productivity Commission dismisses (with unsourced data and zero analysis) as “inefficient”.

Let's reverse the calculation. What do you have to get out of a $640, 2kl tank for it to achieve payback in five years? About 5 Kl per month – which means filling and emptying the tank 2½ times each month, or the equivalent of six days with better than 10mm rainfall per month.

Sure, there are other on-costs. Sure, this isn't a complete study. But even if I'm out by fifty percent, we get six-to-eight years of payback time for a water tank.

Addendum: As noted, the cost includes installation. However:

1. It's still silly for the PC to treat a water tank as $4 worth of static water.
2. Payback doesn't happen overnight, but it does happen.

I'd be interested to see what a better model would show!

Different privacies

The thing Google Glass enthusiasts don't get is this: it's quite possible for privacy to be specific to the medium.

There are things, for example, that someone is prepared to discuss in words, or even publish in text, that they would never, ever wish to reveal in images or live video.

If you read this and know me already, you know that my wife, Ms T, has an immune system disorder that requires heavy chemotherapy. And that chemotherapy has unpleasant side-effects.

Now, she's brave: she gave me permission to blog about the real world of chemotherapy, to try and counteract the images of smiling people with no hair that sell charity gim-gams, and the glamorous world of movie-chemotherapy of Noble Suffering. Chemotherapy, among other things, leads to copious vomiting and bowel incontinence, and it's a living hell when the planets align against you.

But that's text, Sergie. The worst of it – the real-world cleanups, the unscheduled showers, the extra loads of washing, the reassurance that someone isn't repulsive just because they've been injected with a drug that's two steps removed from mustard gas – remains private.

And then there's the Google obsession with its new cargo-cult, the not-yet-released Google Glass, a way to capture everything that happens to everyone if one psychotic company can just sell enough product.

Now imagine yourself in a situation: That someone you loved with nothing more than a disease is caught short during a shopping trip; that she makes a desperate dash to the public toilet, while you head in a different direction to buy underwear; and that some creep decides that this is going to get them a handful of YouTube hits.

Yeah, I can easily imagine that such creeps exist. I've had to deal with creeps with smartphones who thought that “this is the junkie getting to the doctor ahead of me” was a legitimate Tweet (Ms T isn't a junkie; the marks on her arms are symptoms of her disease, and she was at the time 35 kg because she was near death).

I can easily imagine men using video-glasses to upskirt women on stairs or escalators or any other chance that presents itself. Hell, I'm a man: Ms T, discussing this subject said “If you stop looking at women, I'll bury you. If you video them, I'll kill you, then bury you.”

But there are too many people, too vulnerable, who have to be in public. They all have to work, shop, visit the doctor, the dentist, the library, the butcher. They don't need some smug, solipsistic smart-arse with camera-glasses to publish their misery worldwide.

The humiliation of the helpless is the endless preoccupation of the nutless: and with Google Glass, all those guys with no balls will have their perfect humiliation to practise on everyone with more misery than they have.

So I will make this pronouncement: not on my patch. At least on those parts of the world that are my property, I will never permit anything that looks like Google Glass. Go elsewhere, you sad losers, and leave people to their unaugmented reality, with its imperfections and loves and privacy.

Pre-review publication is not outside the scientific method

I've been thinking about this post for a while, and the departure of Martin Ferguson provides opportune moment to actually write it.

Back in November, some scientists conducted research (which is their right), and included some of their research in a submission to a government inquiry (which is their right), even though the research hadn't completed the peer-review process (more on that in a minute).

The research appears to find high concentrations of methane at ground level around CSG fields – and the submission included sufficient information that anyone else with appropriate equipment and expertise could try to replicate it. Ferguson, an apologist for industry, was http://www.smh.com.au/environment/minister-slams-unscientific-report-on-gas-leak-20121120-29nj5.html angry.

From the story: “Mr Ferguson said he believed the study … abandoned usual scientific practice”.

Bollocks.

He criticised the study's public release, before it had been peer-reviewed, saying that in "the scientific community that is not regarded favourably".

Bollocks.

“Conduct yourself in a professional way and focus on the outcome, not short-lived media opportunities”, he is quoted as saying.

Bollocks.

1. Did publication “abandon usual scientific practice”?

No. Scientists are free to do what they will with their data. Peer-review and publication aren't “science” per se. Peer review exists to provide a quality control mechanism before dissemination. The usual scientific practice – the boring stuff of making observations, conducting experiments, constructing hypotheses, and providing enough information about the work to permit replication – remains intact.

2. Releasing results is “not regarded favourably”?

That's a political response, not a scientific one. There even exists an entire scientific archive – Arxiv.org – that allows scientists to publish “pre-press” versions of their papers. Anyone can download those papers. A great many scientific releases I receive, including from the Australian Science Media Centre, which joined in criticizing the scientists, end with "this research has been submitted to journal X".

When the Higgs-Boson results started to emerge last year, Arxiv (among other places) received all the pre-press stuff. Did the Large Hadron Collider researchers do something “not regarded favourably”? What utter nonsense.

3. Short-lived media outcomes

The data was given to the government inquiry, not to the press. There never was any reason to accuse the scientists of being media whores.

Publication is publication, science is science

Somehow, in the public's mind, a piece of science that isn't science has been incorporated into “scientific method”. It's not part of “the method” - it's a publication process. The scientific method – observation, hypothesis, prediction, experiment – works even if you don't publish.

Publication permits replication; and peer review is simply an evolution of the editorial process, because no one person has enough knowledge to distinguish between good science and bad.

A decision to publish information ahead of peer-review is neither uncommon nor beyond the pale. It's just that in this case, it was something the minister – a tireless advocate for rich industries that are big enough and ugly enough to take care of themselves – didn't want to hear.

Escape from ICU

If you haven't ever been in hospital for a long time, there are things might seem hard to understand, like why Ms T once staged an escape from ICU.

By now, she's a little bit of an ICU veteran, with three visits. But I'm talking about life when she wasn't accustomed to that world.

She had already spent nearly three months in Royal Prince Alfred – on level 9, the gastro ward, because that's where she first landed with a hard-to-diagnose illness that disabled her liver and gave her a stomach of ulcers (it turned out to be that her immune system had shut down important blood vessels).

Our home in Lilyfield is almost visible from RPA, if you have the right view. You can't see the house, but if you have enough time, and the right angle, you can see the trees and work out where the house is. As soon as Ms T was mobile, with “Skinny Marie”, her name for the IV-stand-on-wheels, she would spend time in the sun-lounge on Level 9, trying to work out where “home” lay.

Her chief landmark in those days was the Anzac Bridge: large, unmistakable, and a pointer to the cluster of trees, with a few insane palm trees poking through, that told her where we were.

We were lucky, in those days. With my mother alive and living with us, I could spend a lot of time at the hospital, by her side, letting grandma watch over our teen sons, working with mobile broadband. But I always had to go home in the end.

As she reiterated to me tonight: “I always took 'skinny Marie' to the sun-lounge before I went to sleep, to look at you and say goodnight.”

Then there was one of the ICU visits. 

We were away in the Blue Mountains when she fell ill, with sudden and terrible pain. Katoomba Hospital was mystified by her blood tests; I told them to call RPA's Gastro-Enterology unit, and RPA demanded that she be dispatched by ambulance – ignoring a couple of other teaching hospitals on the way. (Things to love about Australia's health system.)

Ms T had a liver infection; her condition was assessed as critical; she was put in ICU immediately.

The next night, hallucinating on painkillers, she managed to escape ICU.

Knowing what ICU is like – and how many machines connected her – I have no idea how she managed it. Because she was spaced and pie-eyed she's never been able to explain it properly, and ICU was apologetic but completely without an explanation. No matter; it ended well.

Because she phoned me, from Missenden Road. The conversation wasn't one that I care to relate, but I talked her back down to ICU reception, at which point I heard another voice on her phone utter a swear word and call for help.

And after many conversations about the incident, we realised what drove her so much that she could take herself out of the secure part of the hospital and find herself on a road, in a hospital gown, trying to hail a taxi.

She couldn't see home. ICU wasn't like “Level 9”. There was no “goodnight my love” that she could utter while looking towards our home: only the lights, curtains and machines. So she sought some place to tell us she loved us all, and wanted to be home. Just as she'd done every other night she was in hospital.

I talked to her on the phone, somehow sorted the things she could see from the hallucinations, and guided her back to ICU reception, when someone swore, took over the phone and told me to visit in the morning, and apologised. And all was well.

It's hard to explain how it feels, to be loved like that. I can only hope I can deserve it.

WiFi NBN not fibre: PLEASE MAKE IT STOP!

Since we're talking about the NBN OH GOD PLEASE MAKE IT STOP the next time you decide to make a serious business decision based on a Business Spectator story, take a look at this story first.

Don't want to? OK, here are the high points: instead of the NBN, build fibre to the street, and do the rest with WiFi.

“WiFi is getting to the point where it could be used for the last bit of the network that connects households and businesses to the fibre. This is what should be the focus of an "open and transparent debate”.

Did I already yell “please make it stop”? Yeah, no need to repeat that bit.

The short version.

1. WiFi hotspots are shared: securing an individual's traffic is not trivial.
2. WiFi hotspots are shared: one user can swamp the network.
3. WiFi hotspots suffer interference from other WiFi hotspots – they use shared, unmanaged spectrum.

Read on:

“The NBN fibre could be brought to smaller neighbourhoods and then connected to each home and business using new powerful WiFi options, specifically little things called "picocells”.”

A picocell isn't a WiFi hotspot (PLEASE MAKE IT STOP!), it's a little mobile phone base station designed to connect to the fixed network and eliminate in-building cellular blackspots. That is: if there's a blackspot inside (say) a shopping centre, Telstra or Optus or Vodafone might decide it's worth bringing in a picocell so people can still use their smartphones.

It's got nothing to do with providing last mile wireless access.

Now, if you have the IQ of a fence-post and spare cash, go out and spend a couple of billion on a WiFi last-mile network, on the advice of Business Spectator, and go broke. I'll be laughing in the wind-up proceedings.

About vectoring: Malcolm is almost right but not quite

“The fact of the matter is that the shorter the copper loop, the higher the speed you will get. There is a new technology, a noise cancellation technology called vectoring, which is now being deployed, which will literally double the speed. So if you had a line which was delivering 50 megabits per second now, with vectoring, which is just a software solution, it's not, you know, it's not expensive to deploy, you can then double that to 100 megabits per second” – Malcolm Turnbull to ABC Radio National (http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/malcolm-turnbull-on-changes-to-the-nbn/4557604 here).

“This is the folly of stipulating one particular technology at the outset. FTTN is a much more powerful, much cheaper, much better prospect now than it was four years ago.”

Damn: I have to try to look at vectoring in a bit more detail, because if you don't understand it, you won't see the pea under the thimble.

First, the line-by-line, then the technology.

“The shorter the copper loop, the higher the speed you will get” – Correct.

“There is a new technology, a noise cancellation technology called vectoring, which is now being deployed, which will literally double the speed. So if you had a line which was delivering 50 megabits per second now, with vectoring, which is just a software solution, it's not, you know, it's not expensive to deploy, you can then double that to 100 megabits per second” – here, Mr Turnbull gets things a little bit scrambled.

It's probably not his fault. The industry PR has done a neat job of wrapping vectoring in a superhero's cape.

“Will literally double the speed” – Vectoring will improve the performance to individual subscribers, but the results they see in the real world are subject to a lot of dependencies. "Can" double the speed would be more accurate.

“Just a software solution, not expensive to deploy” – Only if the equipment in place supports it. If you've rolled out a VDSL2 network, and it's new enough, then that might be true. You'll note in the example I refer to below, Austria's A1 Telekom, the upgrade involved hardware as well as software, which is much more espensive than a software upgrade.

Tl;dr starts here

I realise that there are people queued up ready to fire their “ALP stooge” guns at me. So here is a much more detailed explanation of my position.

Here is an excellent – and not too hard-to-understand – presentation from Ericsson. For the Tl;dr crowd, the main point is that vectoring exists to take care of a particular kind of noise, far-end crosstalk or FEXT.

If Bob and Alice are both DSL customers – any kind of DSL will do – and they're served through the same cable bundle, then each of them appears as “noise” to the other. That is, Bob's signal will couple to Alice's twisted pair, and since it's not Alice's signal, it's noise, and reduces the capacity available to Alice for communication.

The same thing, of course, happens to Bob: Alice's crosstalk cuts into his capacity.

However, the noise Alice generates is different to random electrical noise: it has some predictable characteristics, because you know it's a DSL signal that's generating the noise. That means you know (for example) which frequency bands will suffer noise, and that patterns that it will exhibit.

And that means – with good mathematics (if you want employment in mathematics, network physical layer work is a good place to start) – you can get rid of Bob's noise on Alice's line, and vice-versa. This is vectoring.

Bob, Alice, and World+Dog

If there were only Bob and Alice to worry about, vectoring wouldn't be a “new thing”. But every house connected through a twisted pair is connected in a bundle of cables. 

In a bundle of 48 cables, this would be unmanageable even with vectoring, if every cable coupled its crosstalk to every other cable. Fortunately, that doesn't happen. Lines will couple more strongly if they're close together. More importantly, some lines – for example, where copper degradation or damage spoils the line's impedance – will leak more noise than others.

Ideally, all crosstalk should be cancelled, but Ericsson's white paper notes that “close to optimal” performance can be achieved by concentrating on eliminating the noise from “dominant disturbers”.

And in the case of vectoring, “optimal performance” means the speed VDSL2 can achieve on a single line. “Vectoring” doesn't change the maximum speed available on VDSL2 – it lets more users get closer to that maximum speed in a crowded cable bundle. 

Vectoring in practise

In a presentation to the 2013 Broadband World Forum, Gerald Clerckz of A1 Telekom Austria gave a presentation outlining that carrier's experience with vectoring in its field trial in Korneuburg.

The implementation involved: 

• upgrading DSLAM line cards 
• upgrading the DSLAM software 
• upgrading modem firmware to support vectoring
• replacing modems that could not support vectoring.

A1 Telekom is pleased with vectoring, saying in the presentation that vectoring is “fulfilling the expectations” while also noting that “it cannot be seen as a replacement for FTTH”, but rather as a bridging technology on the way.

With that noted, there is a very wide spread of real-world outcomes achieved in the field trial. At between 250 and 300 meters loop length, customers on the trial experienced download speeds from around 120 Mbps down to around 35 Mbps; customers at above 400 meters experienced speeds between about 22 Mbps up to 75 Mbps. The poor customer at 600 meters was only able to get around 30 Mbps. 

I don't have permission to reproduce the original chart, but here are the extremes at different distances:

This, remember, is a real-world deployment, not a vendor's claim - and it's a set of data from a carrier that's happy with vectoring. It's a statistically valid sample, as well, since the test covered 500 homes, more than ten percent of the service area of the test.

What's clear, here, is that while vectoring can double speeds, there isn't much difference in the top-to-bottom envelope - and that diference evaporated at 600 meters (however, that may represent fewer data points). At 300 meters, the difference in best-case performance was 33 percent.

Seth: you are wrong

Why do more?

Because, if you're the kind of smug, solipsistic, self-obsessed prick that writes a post like that, you have no world except work.

I have a world apart from work. For a start, the great love of my life will die before I do, and if I'm not careful, before we get to live together any significant time in the great joint love of our life, a patch of bush that hasn't been torn down by the concreters and improvers.

Because I'd rather worry about money than devote myself to some fleeting passion that doesn't count for anything after love.

Because I don't care about the things you care about, Seth. I don't want to be famous. I don't want to develop some insane, pointless passion for an abstract that doesn't give back. Because the greatest ambition of my life is to spend it within arm's-reach of a woman who pursued me, seduced me, captivated me, slept with me, loved me, married me, and is still here 25 years later in spite of my shortcomings.

Because your passions are dry as last year's leaves, as dead as my father, as pointless as the entire app-driven, consumerist, toy-obsessed, must-have-the-next-thing-sooner, pathetic, loveless, lifeless, reductionist, evangelised, American world you inhabit.

Because I don't fucking care about the loves of your life. A byte doesn't love you back, doesn't kiss you goodnight, doesn't cook a simple beef stew that I and my sons consider ambrosia, in spite of illness and injury. A byte, a development project, or a fucking app doesn't deliver life, love, whispers in the night, promises that tomorrow will be better.

And you know what, Seth? I'd rather gouge my own cheeks off with my fingernails than to pretend that your artificial passion was worth more money.

Because actually, dude, it's the same artificial shit that you've told me matters for twenty years and the only thing it's good for is making money.

So don't give me that rich-man “oh, it's not about the money” pretentious crap, because only the same kind of suckers that believe TED talks agree with you. And they're never short of money.

In the mean time, you patronising fuckwit, dickhead, you rich-man-pretending-to-have-homespun-philosophy – don't waste your time telling people who only have money to get them past tomorrow that it doesn't matter.

Because if they, and I, don't get tomorrow's money, bad things happen. Fuckwit. Someone fails to eat. Someone dies. Someone can't get the car registration or insurance paid, and has to give up some other opportunity because there wasn't enough money.

Because the sterile cocoon that you inhabit bears no relationship to a life of terror, illness, love and death. 

Don't try to motivate me. I have sufficient motivation all on my own.