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.

FTTN vs FTTC: my methods and decisions

Since it’s been criticized, here are some personal notes on the methodological choices I made in estimating the rate of BT’s FttC rollout for the ABC in an Australian context.

Why use exchange areas instead of population?

1.    Verifiability – While it would be possible to verify BT’s household-coverage claims, it would need someone willing to part with around $10k to buy a data license and carry out the analysis.

The number of cabinets installed by BT provides no base for comparison: Australia doesn’t have a design yet.

On the other hand, the number of exchanges serving VDSL2 is published in the UK, and ADSL2+ in Australia.

The only assumption I made here is that a hypothetical FTTN would need to replicate ADSL2+ coverage to satisfy the public.

2.    Geographic equalisation – Using exchange areas equalises the vexed question of the geo-demographic differences between Australia and the UK, an issue which I’ve worked on for six years in various projects.

Britain and Australia have nearly the same number exchanges – 5,000 or so – yet the UK’s exchanges serve 40 million households, Australia’s 7 million. The UK’s exchanges are bigger (in terms of lines served) but smaller (in terms of geography served).

Why did I select 2009 as the start date for the UK FttC, and 2010 for the NBN?

That’s much easier to answer: the deployment of commercial pilots provides an equivalent date for the two projects.

The NBN has proceeded very much in the public spotlight – the implementation study, the establishment of the company, the design decisions, the maps, the appearances in Estimates and so on. We knew a lot about the design process before the launch of commercial services in 2011.

BT’s process is a black box, by comparison. We do know that its first commercial pilots occurred in 2009, but between that date and the official launch of commercial services, we know very little about how much work went on. For example:

-    How many cabinets were ordered, delivered, and put through acceptance testing?
-    How many locations went through site preparation so as to enable rapid installation when cabinets were available?
-    What resources were devoted to network design, site selection, training, contractor selection, and ramp-up planing?

And so on.

Without an understanding of the pre-launch effort, I think it’s quite reasonable to use the commercial pilots as “Year Zero” of BT’s rollout since I can be certain that all that “underground” work was going on at least as early as 2009, prior to the commercial service launch in 2010.

Since everything else was based on public sources linked in the article, I don’t feel the need to explain the other sources further.

Google Glass: the next tech press cargo-cult

The tech press rarely, if ever, sees the downside of a gadget when they begin hyping it.

iTunes turned property (the CD) into a license without a whisper. E-readers did the same with books – complete with revocation of licenses, lending / gift restrictions and so on. Smartphones work hard to eliminate privacy. Games platforms are trying to do away with ownership of games, just as iTunes did with CDs.

The lesson repeated but never learned is simple: gadget-makers have a result in mind when they design things. They’re not acting at random. The licensing models are worked out by lawyers before the product is launched; strategies exist.

And we come to Google’s Project Glass: the gadget is getting lots of love before it even exists, and there are no downsides.

Google once wanted to “organise” the world’s information. Nothing wrong with that, as an ideal.

But there are dangers in encouraging Google to own every possible information-delivery channel right down to the eyeballs.

Sure, won’t it be cool? Someone wants to design an app that will estimate the weight of vegetables in the shop, just by looking at them. Wow! (Dude, there’s a set of scales just over there.) Someone wants to give you a heads-up map (because it’s so much trouble actually knowing where you’re headed).

There will be ads, the inevitable ads, and data collection: because you won’t get your cool “augmented reality” (by the way, one of the most odious expressions the tech sector has contrived) for free.

You can bet that such considerations would be in tech journalists’ minds, considering that they completely missed the downsides of iTunes etcetera years ago?

No. They’re worried about whether Google Glass will (a) arrive soon enough for them to write reviews of them and (b) whether they will brand the wearer as a “geek” and therefore never take off.

It has, as I hinted in the headline, a characteristic of the cargo cult. Google will drop its next wonder on the waiting tribe, who construct a religion around their own dependency.

About shooting in national parks

Last night I complained about the state governments “shooters in national parks” policy on Twitter, sparked a bunch of replies, and rudely went to bed during the discussion, so here’s my thoughts. I have a busy day, so this will be quick.

1.    Is it affecting tourism?

Yes. I own some holiday cottages in Wentworth Falls (Bunjaree Cottages, here). People are asking about it – “will there be shooters around?” – even though the Blue Mountains National Park isn’t on the list. They’re worried. It’s easy to dismiss them as uninformed, but that’s the way of the world.

2.    Am I anti-gun?
In public places, most certainly.

3.    “Gun owner” isn’t the same thing as “gun nut”
When I use the phrase “gun nut” I am referring to a particular mindset: the ideology-from-the-NRA lobby groups.

I know people who go target shooting, and I know farmers who keep a weapon to deal with feral pigs, wild dogs, injured animals and the like. They aren’t pining to head out for a weekend swapping between gun and bow-and-arrow (and in the case of farmers, they greatly resent having wild pigs brought into their district just to provide targets for shooters).

4.    It’s worked fine in New Zealand
Actually, there have been deaths. Rosemary Ives in 2010, and Dougal Fyfe 2011, to identify two.

5.    The national park shootings will be properly supervised

If you travel down the Hume towards Goulburn at the right time on a Friday night, you’ll see the suburban 4WDs loaded up with weapons and beer.

I know country people who call in the family from the verandah at night if there are shots in the distance, because they’ve had bullets come over hilltops and whack the house.

And I’ve seen the roadside gatherings with the guns lined up against the cab of the ute while the roo-hunters stop for a beer.

Yes, I think fears of a future with guns in national parks are justified.

About that British Telecom Fibre-to-the-cabinet case study...

Since British Telecom’s fibre-to-the-cabinet rollout is the example Mr Turnbull favours, let’s take a look at it.

Question: Does the rollout deliver high speeds?

BT currently claims a maximum of 80 Mbps over copper. As always, with a copper-based technology, “your mileage may vary”.

Question: Can customers upgrade to fibre?

Answer: Yes, in some cases.

Question: What’s the fibre-to-the-cabinet reach?

Answer: Currently around 60 percent of the UK population.

Question: How many exchanges are required to deliver that reach?

Answer: Around 1,300, if this list is accurate: http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchanges/bt/fttc.

Question: How long did the rollout take to reach 1,376 exchange areas?

Answer: Around four years. Call it 340 exchanges per year – at which rate, Australia would have VDSL2 services replicating current ADSL2+ services in, oh, about 8 years. Give or take. Your mileage may vary…

The absolutely inescapable point of this little conceit is simple: Australia is not the UK. Pack 60 million people into Victoria; concentrate them tightly enough that you still have farmland and (in Scotlant) tundra; deliver broadband in a way that your rural users complain they can’t get it, and then use that as a model for Australia.

As I said, if Australia were to match the UK’s rollout rate, we might match its KPIs, but the actual Liberal Party target for fibre-to-the-whatever would take nearly as long as the NBN.

But I don’t blame Malcolm Turnbull. I blame the supine, spavined, sleepwalking slackness of journalists who by hell should be smart enough, Google-savvy enough and care enough to actually test the case study. The research took me a little bit of down-time, not enough to justify asking someone to pay me for – which is why this is a blog post instead of an article.

Off yo' asses, my colleagues. Research or retire.

You want cuts? Cut the Joint Strike Fighter

OK, I’ll give you the cuts. One cut. One cut to rule them all.

The massive boon-doggle, scam, sham, snake-oil shake-down called the Joint Strike Fighter.

For a $35 billion commitment, Australia has so far received nothing, nada, zero, zip, the cube root of sweet bugger-all, except.

Oh, yeah.

Except for a gap in our “air superiority” between the retirement of our current fleet of baby-killing flying machines and the touted-since-the-1980s next-generation of baby-killing flying machines.

All on the presumption that a quarter of the world is waiting, itching, champing-at-the-bit to wage war on Australia.

Just to remind you: the JSF talks started in the 1980s. The money Australia has so far handed over have achieved nothing more than development work on what looks, to all intents and purposes, like a complete failure that won’t be delivered in its current form, nor to its current timetable, nor to its current price.

The F-35 finally managed its first flight in 2006, two decades after it was conceived. Right now, its airworthiness is under question, not for the first time, because it can’t fly through thunderstorms for fear of lightning strike. Its delivery date remains as uncertain as its eventual capabilities. 

Its price is as excremental as the whole veil of bury-the-skeleton secrecy over who-scammed-who in twenty years pf vile alchemy turning the manure of bad public policy into the gold of shareholder value.

And Australia remains irrevocably committed to it.

To defend Australia.

Here are two snippets of fact for you.

1. Australia is a continent
2. In all of recorded history, no continent has been successfully invaded by a strike force, except in the presence of an overwhelming international coalition

Prove me wrong.

Now, in the defence of a continent that probably doesn’t need defending, since it’s cheaper for (say) China to buy what it wants from us than to take it by force, we’re committed to pouring good money after bad, into a project of notorious non-delivery and malfeasance, because of a commitment to an ally that won’t turn up if China turns hostile (do you truly believe that America would spark a nuclear war over the arse end of the world?).

Just to emphasise: at this stage, Australia has a $35 billion commitment to a development project in the USA. Say it slowly to yourself. Savour the ironic stupidity, the medalled mendacity, the cynical theft that this entails – and the naïf cultural cringe and fearful “yellow peril” idiocy that keeps our budget nailed to a failure.

The JSF isn’t a bloody jet fighter. It’s a massive subsidy to American industry, disguised as a military program. Australia doesn’t need to sling $35 billion in, just for the privilege of knowing that some good ol’ boys still eat well. What about keeping the money here and doing some good with it?

“Retail suffers in election years”

Well, of course Eli Greenblat is sympathetic to what retailers say. He’s the Fairfax “retail reporter” after all (one of the great dangers in specialisation is that the reporter identifies with the speciality instead of the reader. I try to pay attention and avoid this myself).

Here’s the article: “Election call a disaster, says Specialty”

The ‘money quote’ is this: "Election periods always, always, affect us and the fact that it has been called so early is an absolute disaster, [Specialty Fashion Group CEO Gary] Perlstein said.

Oh really? Here’s a quick capture of retail trade since the 2001 elections. I’ve taken the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ seasonally-adjusted retail trade growth for:

-    The quarter preceding the election; and
-    The quarter in which the election was held.

One datum is missing – in 2008, December quarter seasonally adjusted retail growth was left out because of the government’s stimulus package.

Something odd happened in 2003 – there was killer retail growth. If you eliminate the outlier, what do you see?

2001 – growth above average for the preceding quarter and election quarter
2004 – growth on average for the preceding quarter, below average in the election quarter
2007 – growth above average for the preceding quarter and election quarter
2010 – growth on average for the preceding quarter, below average in the election

What about clothing retail alone, since that’s what Specialty does?

Nope. The clothing retail item, seasonally adjusted, in the ABS data set is just as likely to rise ahead of an election as it is to fall.

However, the ground is prepared: if Specialty doesn't perform in 2013, we know what excuse will be given.

A word to the wowsers: try Ms T’s life before you rule it

Here’s a genuine list of things to give up, mentioned in the space of a fortnight. 

1. You really need to get rid of the cigarettes
2. We need to get the opioid painkillers down
3. Drink less
4. Don’t overeat
5. Your potassium is a worry

Now, as to number (4), Ms T is not overeating. Only by dint of paying attention to cramming in extra calories has she stabilised her weight at a snip under 50 kg. Considering that in the last two years, her illness has taken her to 31 kg, at which point she could not walk unaided; or that in the last twelve months, her average has been around 40 kg, which is still weak, we are delighted at a 50 kg weight and gave the idiot nutritionist a fairly terse response.

But pay particular attention to the opioids.

She has no painkillers available to her except opioids. Paracetamol has an instant and devastating effect on her liver, for reasons nobody quite understands – two days of it will take her to emergency. Anything anti-inflammatory – say, asprin or ibuprofen – is anathema to her immune system disorder (the effects are nearly instant).

No paracetamol; no asprin; no ibuprofen. What’s left, to someone whose fourteen-inch surgical scar remains painful? Oh. Opioids. Wine. There is nothing else.

Because of the way that prescription rules are managed, there is a problem: someone at the far end of a telephone from a doctor, working to a call centre script, has to approve the GP’s request for opioids. Which means we can recite the high-speed script that the GP tells the telephone:

“Severe debilitating pain not responding to non-narcotic analgesic not due to cancer less than twelve months’ duration.”

(Pronounce it with no gaps between the words, like he does from long practice.)

Those last five words – “less than twelve months’ duration” – ended this month, but not the pain, and every other word of his script remains true. Which means, from now, that we are subject to a regime that doesn’t recognise her particular constraints, and she lacks a cancer support group. 

No other painkiller is permissible (and not once did she ever fit the profile demanded to reach a hospital “pain specialist”).

Try it yourself, the wowsers whose moral stance would get all opioids off the list for all but the dying (and dying she is: merely, may it please my fortune, not this year or decade). Try it: you have only one painkiller available to you; your pain is debilitating (which I will attest. I don’t even do painkillers for headaches, if I can avoid it; call it a psychosis of my own; Ms T's pain is cry-in-the-night stuff).

But you aren’t permitted painkillers, because there are no alternatives to the 60 to 80 mg of oxycodone hydrochloride each day that makes Ms T able to function (and she does function on this dose, reduced from six months ago, all the way up to performing OCD-level refrigerator-cleaning for our business).

And – added to the hounding of drug-wowsers, we are enjoined to drink less than our shared nightly bottle of red; ordered to relinquish nicotine; instructed as to diet by nutritionists with less experience and education of food than Ms T has acquired by her professional interests …

…And all the time, the big-ticket toxin on her list is cousin to mustard gas. 

I mean this literally: the drug cyclophosphamide is one of the first-generation of treatments developed in the 1950s to try and replicate the effects of mustard gas (nitrogen mustards) on cancers while reducing their toxic effects (by a small amount).

Oh, yes. Cyclophosphamide as an injected infusion is metabolised by the liver. Which was, in Ms T’s case, an organ damaged by her immune system’s attack on her arteries (the others were one kidney, and a carotid that is now completely occluded. That means she’s dead, but for reasons nobody cares to discuss in detail she hasn’t stopped wriggling. Yet) (Honestly, you want to live this life? I’ll give you ten minutes and the high side of the odds, and still will take your money three falls out of five).

Cyclo, which oddly enough turns out to be the treatment she tolerates best, is doing serious damage. The liver likes it, mostly: the stomach goes into meltdown only one week in four; and her immune system is suppressed (not enough, right now: the dosage is going up this month).

The immune-suppression has already been made manifest in two tumours, one on her face, one more intimate. Because, you see, the damaged cells that most people never see, and some people may have to suffer the brief discomfort of the freezer-spray to remove – for Ms T, they run like horses, from “what’s that?” to “get a biopsy” to “remove the Vulval intraepithelial neoplasia Stage 3 RIGHT NOW”.

Now: give me a healthy and comfortable researcher, telling me and Ms T that one her few pathways to nearly-normal function through the pain, that the pathway to function is an evil conspiracy by Big Pharma, and for the greater good of others she must give up everything at once, merely to satisfy a moral argument against everything.

Even though we despise your research-smugness, your data-collection without experience, your anti-something jihad, neither of us can wish our lives upon you. We just want you to get out of the spreadsheet and leave us alone.

If you don’t know “severe debilitating pain” etcetera, you have no standing to pronounce judgement upon its relief. You are no more than a virgin screaming “natural childbirth” over the advice of the anaesthetist prescribing an epidural.

A Question for the Lunar Right: Why so serious?

If there’s one thing I don’t understand about the country’s right-wing complaining column-blog-whinge clique, it’s this:

What the hell soured their whiskey?

To pick a random example, look at Andrew Bolt. In spite of the entire net worth of his TV viewership being somewhat less than a house at Yerranderie with an asbestos ceiling fan, he seems to do okay: the suits, the profile, the income, the News Limited sinecure and so on.

For this, his journalistic output is roughly that of a hobbyist Reddit poster, except without the editorial control.

Bowling leggies on a damp wicket to batsmen with spiked-down feet, this guy is obsessively terrified that he’s being done out of the upgrade from Lexus to Real Mercedes by some academic activist because said activist isn’t black enough. His continual attitude to the world is the bile of entitlement denied, like he hasn't noticed he's rich.

Jesus, Andrew, get a grip. When the repo man comes for the Blu-Ray, come and complain to a world that will ignore you as cheerfully as it ignores anyone else fallen on hard times. We promise not to sympathise, because nobody does. Oh, we'll make noises at the pub, but we'll also bid on your stuff at Grey's.

Or Gerard Henderson. Here, I swear, is the pith and juice and seed and skin of disappointment. In a bottle. With someone pulling a face on the label.

In spite of his obvious privilege, his inside-track to people willing to pay him to write their columns, his long-standing position in the Australian media, and his dignified grey hair …

Gerard has the dog's-bum-lips expression of someone who just found a lemon in his Corona, again! They’ve played this prank since I was in first year at university and I HATE IT! – and nobody ever told him the lemon is the only thing that makes it drinkable, because it’s so much more fun watching him dig with a skewer for the next two hours.

Piers? I really can’t make fun of the preposterous old doughnut. My father died of Alzheimer’s.

Paul Sheehan? Oh, here is a victim worthy. Over the years, he’s worshipped at the alter of magic-water pseudo-science, praised the fake economy of the first dotcom bubble, predicted the collapse of Australian society based solely on the poor rugby teams fielded by GCS schools, encouraged Australia to follow the odious example of oppressive regimes like Singapore, and railed at any and every government that didn’t follow his own insane prescriptions for The Greater Good.

Let me just check, behind that off-milk demeanour. How are you doing, Paul? Okay? Top ten percent? Not left behind with the jetsam of Fairfax’s chronic mismanagement? Haven't flown to London to scratch and whine at the Guardian offices like an ancient Labrador hoping to swap his fleas for food?

Able to command sufficient re-Tweets and complaints to justify your income? So why are you so miserably unhappy with the state of the world?

It’s an enduring mystery, to me. What was, for these and the rest of the vermin brood – whose only prescription, really, is that people below them on the greasy pole of life should sink lower for the Good of The Country – the thing that soured life for them? That made every dissenting opinion evil?

Let's not even start on the country universally acclaimed by these reincarnations of the Whinging Pom: America, life, liberty, and the pursuit of the last damn penny not already claimed by someone offended because they have mere millions while others have billions.

What put the worm in your apple, people?

I don’t earn your income, but life is fun. My wife will die, one day, either horribly or suddenly. But while her tests give us another year, our sons give us another argument, our business gives us another month’s mortgage, we smile and laugh and eat and drink.

Dudes, if I had your life, the biggest problem I’d face in the morning is how to stop laughing. Really. I’d be like a pig with my arse in butter and my face in treacle.

Why. So. Serious?

To John Birmingham: A ‘bottom feeder of the Web’ responds

“Rather than bitching and moaning about the bottom feeders on the web stealing all our best stuff we should seriously think about stealing theirs. Or, here’s a radical suggestion, even paying them for it”,  writes John Birmingham.

I might take exception to being included among his hyperbolic “bottom feeders” tag, since I have certain bits of expertise beyond being an efficient word-assembly machine, but I’m familiar with Birmo’s diction, so I'm not actually offended.

Instead, I’ll give him four reasons why his suggestion won’t go anywhere.

1.    Publishers don’t want to pay

Well, you might argue that there isn’t the money around for such things.

But a publisher torn between a decent analysis of a difficult technical subject and a three-day Canberra correspondent wet-dream over a poll that’s within the margin of error and, oh, a good analysis of technical data? The poll wins.

Actually, your editor probably can’t even put an accurate value on technical expertise, in an editorial sense. He or she lives in a world where photography is being outsourced to your readers – “join the community! Send us your pics for free!”

The editors can just about grasp that a high-profile economist or demographer is worth money, but why pay (say) $100 an hour for someone who understands the NBN when you can get forty-seven opinions for free? When it takes five minutes of a journalist's time to play the fake-balance game on topics they know little about?

2.    Media don’t want to listen

The best way to publicise a half-truth about technology is to give some kind of exclusive to a mainstream newspaper. I still have traumatic memories of trying to explain to one of Australia’s most respected business columnists that light and electricity do not interfere with each other – and failing entirely.

If anyone on the Sydney Morning Herald’s business or sports desks – and anyone at all over at the Australian Financial Review – had cared about facts at the appropriate time, the FirePower scandal would never have happened. It’s like that, really: once your colleagues are convinced they have the inside information, telling them they might be wrong is a waste of time.

Even easily discoverable facts - such as "no, cybercrime is not a bigger business than drugs" - is ignored in favour of a quote. "Is what he said true?" an outsider might ask. "Not my position to judge", the journalist responds, "It's true that he said it."

3.    Why would an expert want a public mauling?

Imagine, Birmo, that I’m an expert – I mean a deep, serious expert who has put years into a subject – on something like telecommunications technology or climate change. Now, ask me to drop myself into a contentious debate, for (frankly) low pay.

Do you remember a couple of Southern Cross University scientists that took measurements of fugitive emissions from coal seam gas facilities? Let me remind you. Dr Damien Maher and Dr Isaac Santos measured fugitive emissions around coal seam gas facilities in Queensland, and put that data in front of a government inquiry (the submission is here as a pdf: http://www.scu.edu.au/coastal-biogeochemistry/download.php?doc_id=12515&site_id=258&file_ext=.pdf).

They caught merry hell for it – from Martin Ferguson (who isn’t a scientist), from industry lobbies (whose objectivity has to be questioned), and even from the Australian Science Media Centre.

And that’s not to mention what happens to an expert if the foam-flecked screaming morons of the far right decide to form an attack pack to bring someone down. Some people seem resilient to this – Tim Flannery for example – but how many experts on any topic want threats and insults?


4.    Who's the expert anyhow?

See, there are plenty of people who pick over this stuff out there on the Web. There is also a near-infinite number of fools, fruits, quacks and crackpots.

The Sydney Morning Herald is currently promoting a "documentary" from 9-11 "truthers". If I took an expert in turd-dropping to the editor who picked that one, and my expert dropped a turd in the editor's coffee-cup, the editor would probably still have trouble recognising the expert's credentials. There would at least be a demand that someone call Ian Plimer to get a dissenting point of view.

I love the idea of introducing facts to the debate, John. Really, I do. You go and convince your editors that they need facts, and I'll happily point you to people who understand them. Sadly, I don't think it's going to happen.

“Sorry son, don’t like the haircut”

DAMN I was going to sleep.

This from Malcolm Turnbull:

“NYTimes: Prison Population Can Shrink When Police Crowd Streets http://t.co/1a6vHnuL”

Oh thank you Malcolm. Another pass-on from America, where someone can get shot for entering the wrong driveway, can get mass-beaten by police, but where the relentless propaganda is that the best way to protect freedom is to curtail the individual and empower the instutution. Let someone carry a gun, but put RFIDs on students; let the gun makers thrive, and use drones to spy on citizens.

Back here in Australia, I am old enough to remember a darker era of policing, exemplified by what was a catch-phrase in the 1970s and 1980s:

“Sorry, son, don’t like your haircut.”

So here’s a story I’ve related before: that I knew someone who was arrested – not gently – on a charge of “resist arrest”. That’s sufficiently recursive to boggle the mind, but the most salient detail – the one that got a 1980s magistrate laughing out loud at an uncomfortable police prosecutor, is this.

At the time of the arrest, and at the court appearance, the individual in question was immobilised by a leg cast (plaster, not one of those plastic scaffolds we use now) that started at the pelvis and ended at the ankle.

The entire thing was a joke: merely a probationary constable getting a dose of the red mist at a cricket match, grabbing someone from behind at random, and taking exception when they tried to brush off the hand. The individual in question is and always was one of the most harmless people imaginable. Not harmless as in “wouldn’t harm a fly”, more “harmless as in Bernie Fraser would need four pounds of dope, a fifth of scotch and a hammer-blow to the head to be so laid back.”

To be more personal. I’ve been spread-eagled by a country cop for the crime of being the first to arrive at a car accident. I wasn’t in the accident, I was just the next car down the road, and someone else called the ambulance, and the ambos called the cops, and my teenage nemesis saw red when he saw me. The ambos talked him down.

Or there’s the friend of mine who didn’t even have to break the speed limit to get hassled: merely driving a 1970s V8 Ford Falcon Cobra (in imitation of the Moffat car that won Bathurst) was enough.

And personally? I’ve never even managed an arrest – which is probably an admission of failure as a journalist – let alone a conviction. I’m boring and somewhat conventional.

No, I won’t feel safer with an infestation of street police to take offence at my haircut or face.

And if I had one wish, it would be for the Liberals to stop telling Australia is should copy America in all things. I vowed long ago never to return to the USA, and I don’t wish it to be imported to Australia.

No, cybercrime isn’t bigger than the drug trade – not even by inflated industry estimates

One of my decisions for 2013 was to moderate how I express myself on Twitter. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy other people slinging it around…

Twitter was host to a row between @Asher_Wolf and News’ Claire Porter, @ClaireRPorter about this article: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/day-of-reckoning-is-coming-for-the-web-says-amit-yoran-former-director-of-us-department-of-homeland-security/story-e6frg6n6-1226565364997

Ms Wolf complained that the story was a little too fan-like (euphemism). It’s hard to disagree when the third par says “Amit Yoran is kind of a big deal.”

But it’s this line that I’m going to take issue with:

“Cyber security threats are in fact so common that more money is being made from cyber crime than from drug trafficking, Yoran said.”

Ahem. Here’s a UN source about drug trafficking (http://www.un.org/en/ga/president/66/Issues/drugs/drugs-crime.shtml):

“In 2009, the value of illicit trade around the globe was estimated at US$1.3 trillion and is increasing.”

And here’s a story (http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/cybercrime-costs-338bn-to-global-economy-more-lucrative-than-drugs-trade/57503) about the value of cybercrime:

“Norton reports that cybercrime is costing the global economy $338 billion a year, overtaking a still a lucrative trade in the underground drugs market.”

Norton is wrong, and ZDNet was unspeakably lazy to report it – since it took me just one Google search to find the UN data (search terms: global drug trade billions – it’s currently the number two result).

It’s also lazy for anyone to cite ZDNet’s report to support their own – not because of any systemic problem specific to ZDNet, simply because it’s not a primary source. Just because a journalist printed it doesn’t make it true.

The long and the short of it is this: the drug trade is worth around three times the cybercrime trade. But the computer industry has a long, long history of making itself bigger. A mature industry now, it still behaves like Chester the dog from Loony Tunes, trying to ingratiate itself with Spike, trying to prove it’s important, stealing gravy to add to its own steak.

Cybercrime is important. But it’s not bigger than the drug trade. It’s self-aggrandising for the industry to claim it; it’s lazy for journalists to report it.

Smithsonian feeds the quacks

“Over thousands of years, gold has been used to treat rheumatoid arthritis, inner ear infections, facial nerve paralysis, fevers and syphilis. Now, preliminary findings suggest a new application for tiny grains of gold – destroying cancer cells.”

With that line, the Smithsonian Magazine demonstrates a journalistic habit that undermines science reporting, while at the same time giving comfort to promoters of pseudo-science. A journalist with a story, going in search of a Grand Narrative for the lead.

The rest of the story is fine: a straightforward discussion of research. But the “wisdom of the ancients” is not, I’d suggest, the right “grand narrative” for a serious health story.

“Over thousands of years gold has been used to treat” is linked by the Smithsonian piece to this journal paper. It’s just a throwaway line at the start of the paper, which examines gold-based therapy for arthritis and tuberculosis. Interestingly, that paper notes that “Eventually, gold therapy was extended to arthritis and lupus erythematosus, because of the belief that these diseases were forms of tuberculosis.”

That belief has long been proven wrong … but what of the rest of the list? “Inner ear infections, facial nerve paralysis, fevers and syphilis”. The Smithsonian doesn’t provide a citation, let alone discuss whether any of these treatments were effective.

Ancient Egypt used dung in treatments. That doesn’t somehow suggest they knew something about feces that we since lost; it means they were ignorant and superstitious, and based their treatments on not on science, but on magic.

They’d have used unicorn penis to treat cancer if they could get it: that doesn’t make it an effective treatment, it just sweeps unicorn penis up in the “try everything” pharmacopeia of ancient society.

Spurious credibility is exactly what pseuds, frauds, snake-oilers, ripoff merchants, gull-deceivers, anti-vaxers, crystal-sellers, homeo-sue-anyone-who-disagrees-pathy, chiro-save-a-laywer-for-us-practic and every other quack relies on to draw new, desperate suckers into their net.

Well done, Smithsonian.

Wireless spectrum scare-story: $400 per year per user?

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If Ord Minnet’s data are to be believed, the federal government’s spectrum reserve price is going to add $400 per year to “broadband consumers”.

If, of course, the Daily Telegraph got its understanding of the Ord Minnet numbers right.

Let’s take the number as read, and since I can’t see why a mobile investment would be recovered from fixed broadband users, let’s confine the calculation to the country’s 5.8 million wireless subscribers. Finally, let’s take one other number Ord Minnet’s Brad Dunn gave to the Tele:

“The bill to purchase enough spectrum to cover the 22.6 million population will be approximately $1.5 billion.”

With 5.8 million subscribers, $400 per subscriber would yield $2.3 billion in the first year alone. Or to put it another way: to recover $1.5 billion in a year, the additional cost to users would only need to be $258, not $400.

So that didn’t work.

Not only that, but spectrum is a multi-year investment. Telstra doesn’t have to recover $1.5 billion in the first year; $150 million over ten years would pay it back (yes, I am ignoring the cost of capital).

If you ignore any kind of ramp-up, then Telstra’s current 4G customers – around 375,000 last August according to ComputerWorld – would have to repay $150 million in the first year.

Would you be surprised to find out that $150 million divided by 375,000 is $400?

But that’s only the first year (and from the laziest calculation possible). If you presume that Telstra wants to have 10 million 4G customers after ten years, and use a simple linear ramp-up, the per-year spectrum cost recovery by the tenth year falls to $15 per user.

A more complex calculation is to assume that Telstra would spread the $1.5 billion over ten years so that each user pays the same amount towards spectrum costs. Then, ignoring the cost of capital, the extra burden on subscribers is a paltry $29 per year (or less than $2.50 per month).

Even with a 10% cost of capital – if my spreadsheet is correct, which I don’t guarantee, but it's good enough for this case – the annual per-user recovery with a ten-year ramp up is $132 – or a little over $10 per user per month.

There’s plenty of room in a 4G premium alone to cover that.

If any of my numbers are close to reality - closer, say, than $400 per user per year - then perhaps the government's spectrum floor price isn't as stupid as people are saying.

A post for a friend I haven't met

You might say I’m writing this for a friend.

Call it an awareness thing. I’m not competent to diagnose my friend’s condition, but I know how difficult it can be if your body decides to lay out a puzzler for the experts. So here’s the early history of Ms T’s condition, as always related with her permission.

Disclaimer: yes, I have told some of this in a disjointed way, before. This is more linear timeline, with a specific purpose. I won’t be offended if you skip over it.

The reason we want to set this on the record is to illustrate how, with a rare condition, the symptoms can deceive.

Ms T’s condition is the immune system disorder known as vasculitis. The immune system – I guess it’s the T-cells because they’re on the list of “things we look for in blood tests” – has decided to nuke her blood vessels.

That’s not particularly common, but there’s more. In my limited understanding, vasculitis typically starts with things like capillaries – there are some typical symptoms, purpling near the skin and so on. Ms T’s started with major arteries: one carotid, the celiac artery, one renal artery.

The celiac artery was the one that delivered the symptoms that got us a diagnosis. The rest ran under the radar at the time. And the symptoms didn’t actually point to the cause.

What happened – nearly three years ago now – was that her stomach shut down. Between January and March, she went from steak-after-bushwalks (15 km was a good day) to not eating (because every attempt ended in pain), and only able to walk with assistance. We tried a walk in February to see if her appetite would recover; I carried her he 200 meters back.

Yes, we were seeing the doctor. After several visits and nothing working, he referred us for imaging. The clinic had a six-week waiting list.

So we waited.

Things got moving once the specialist took a look. Ms T couldn’t eat because there wasn’t stomach there, just ulcer. So with the specialist speaking kind of urgently down the phone, the imagers waived the waiting list and opened early the next day for an CRT (or was it an MRI? Anyhow, a big machine that takes pictures).

The next day we were in hospital – and still running with the wrong diagnosis (a rare liver cancer).

So: most of Ms T’s condition was (externally) asymptomatic – the extent of damage was only revealed by imaging. Here only symptoms where symptoms not of vasculitis, but of the collateral damage.

Now, I could make a political point of this, something about the state of the health system, public versus private, blah blah blah. Once in the hands of the public specialists of RPA, I’ve got nothing but good things to say. Others have a different experience; I’m not responsible for that, nor am I going to change my report.

What I’m relating is how difficult a diagnosis can be if you have a rare disease. The GP got it wrong; the first specialist got it wrong. RPA – with six specialists taking their shot over nine weeks – ended up with a coin toss, vasculitis or endocarditis.

There simply isn’t an easy test. We tossed the coin the right way. She lived. Rough, but alive. We have the chemo, but right now it’s going in through a vein, which is roughly that we’re killing the T-cells from a safe distance and the side-effects are manageable.

The point of this story?

Right now, someone I know only on Twitter is threading through the labyrinth of mysteries. It won’t be the same thing as Ms T, unless the universe is throwing up the kind of thundering coincidence that makes you throw aside a whodunit in disgust.

But if something is taking months to work out, I’ll place a small side bet on “rare”. And if it’s not racing ahead, I’ll place a much smaller bet on “not cancer” and hope I’m right. But this difficult, I’ll guess that my Twitter followee is on the long road down rare chronic illness.

I hope not. I hope it turns out to be easy and innocuous and temporary.

If not, there’s good news and bad.

The bad is that it’s a very, very rough road.

The good is that many, many of us will stand alongside you. One last story in this overly long post.

In the darkest days – when Ms T was about 35 kg, we were still waiting for the first round of imaging, and I was watching her die – the previous owner of Bunjaree Cottages (which we now operate as our labour of love) gave us a free weekend in a cottage. We’d missed a regular booking, she phone, I told the story, and bingo.

That wasn’t all.

She also gave some life-saving advice – she’s a trained nurse – that kept Ms T going long enough. Just. She suggested something that was revolting, but extremely nutritious in small amounts. Ms T’s weight bottomed out at 31 kg, but she lived. Mrs A – the nurse – had experienced catastrophic weight loss before.

Right now, I can only pass on support and advice. But any of us in the same world are here to help, whether it’s moral, practical, whatever. Because governments aren’t helping: we only have each other.

Go well, Ms C. Our thoughts go with you.