The Collapsing Narrative
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, Commentary, Environment, General, Gripes, Humour, The Destruction of History
A sign of our times is the constant harping on by the legacy media about things which are not really happening, and these are simply distractions.
The bizarre public conversation regarding apparently rising levels of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere is a Will o’the Wisp, a phantasm. Common sense would suggest the opposite over geological time scales – that the combination of weathering and biological processes, which (as far as we know) are absent on other rocky planets, will eventually sequester all of the atmospheric carbon, at which point, plant growth will cease, and we will all starve to death.
If you pushed me, I would have to admit that there is so much Clown World activity these days that I often just sit back and laugh. This “climate science” farce, in which it is claimed that Armageddon is only years away, primarily due to the combination of burning fossil fuels and cow farts, clearly not only doesn’t coincide with observable facts, but is also hiding something that nobody ever seems to talk about. Now, it does seem strange to me that prestigious researchers don’t mention this, but it also shows that maybe well-educated and experienced people who should know better also don’t see it, even though it is right under their noses, and we might describe it as being part of “Chemistry 101”. Or maybe people are afraid to state the glaringly obvious?
What I am talking about here is the tendency of chemical reactions to proceed until they are no longer thermodynamically possible. Admittedly, this is somewhat difficult to illustrate and may seem somewhat obscure to many onlookers, but bear with me; this is real science, not journalistic gobbledegook. Remember: this is an experienced and world-published chemist and biochemistry graduate talking here, not the kind of “scientist” bemoaned by Thomas S. Kuhn back in 1962 (the year that I was born!) who spends his or her whole damned career trying to “verify” the theories of others rather than challenging them. Question everything.
Back to the chemistry…
Another thing we have to remember is that, for precisely this reason, Earth’s current conditions are nowhere near resembling what they were like when this planet was first formed. As we are talking primarily about the atmosphere and climate here, we should remember that, according to data from geological sciences, the atmosphere of this planet was originally unbreathable; it was toxic and contained components such as methane, ammonia and hydrogen sulphide, and it remained this way for millions of years because the dominant early lifeforms of the time – bacteria and their allies – produced these as the wastes from their respiratory processes.
All of that started to change when photosynthesis arrived, and a new waste – oxygen – started to be produced in vast quantities. The result of this was that the former kings of this domain – anaerobic bacteria – could not survive with oxygen diffusing into the waters, and they were forced to survive in places occupying the lowest positions in the oxygen gradient. Think of the dark, anoxic substrata of estuarine mud flats (and I know, because I went there sampling anaerobes when I was a biology student), and you will get the idea.
A big part of our current situation, then, is apparently due to an accident of nature – a transition from purely anaerobic chemical life processes to aerobic ones in geologically ancient and remote times, and resulting from the appearance of photosynthesis and the subsequent change of major atmospheric constituents from gaseous wastes such as methane, ammonia and hydrogen sulphide to gaseous oxygen, which is factually toxic to the surviving anaerobes.
We could illustrate this by referring to other rocky bodies in the Solar System to see how it might have been otherwise. On the one hand, we have Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, a frigid world with a thick, orange atmosphere composed largely of nitrogen and methane; on the other, we have a place like Mars, where the atmosphere is composed mainly of carbon dioxide, plus a few odd little components (such as methane). We are sometimes told in the popular scientific press that the former represents a primordial Earth, and from our discussion above, this seems to be true; from it we could conclude that the big difference is that the emergence of life made it more chemically dynamic. The same could be said of Mars: perhaps, if there were photosynthetic life there, the atmosphere would be strikingly different – much more like that of Earth is nowadays. It would still be quite thin, however, because of the relatively low gravity of Mars (compared with that of Earth, for example) – a factor overcome to some extent, in the case of Titan, by the frigid temperatures.
What I would suggest here is that the presence of life on Earth, and the dynamism it contributes to geological and atmospheric processes, has an additional effect: it slowly leads to the depletion of carbon dioxide by sequestering into other forms. For example, as carbon dioxide is soluble in water (a polar liquid in which it forms soluble carbonate anions, which can form solids with e.g. dissolved metal ions such as calcium, magnesium and copper), which is perhaps its most important characteristic from a purely chemical point of view, it is more immediately able to undergo reactions which can convert it into inaccessible forms; think of corals, for example. We won’t go into a discussion of the enzymes involved here, but simply remind ourselves that stony corals are “stony” because their polyps take carbon dioxide from the air (dissolved in seawater) and convert it into an insoluble carbonate. Some of this may return to the atmosphere when the polyps die and their calcareous skeletons begin to degrade, but if these are subsequently buried, the degradation would be prevented and eventually, the skeletons would become fossils in a rocky matrix, at least if the conventional process of fossilisation is correct. Since the primary source of carbonate for corals comes in the form of carbon dioxide dissolved in sea water, the long-term result of this would be the depletion of atmospheric CO2.
We might also remember that the shells of molluscs and many marine algae, both geologically ancient and modern, are likewise composed of calcium carbonate (aragonite), sequestered biologically and presumably only slowly weathered away when their owner dies. Again, there are plenty of fossils of these creatures and again, once encased in a rocky matrix, the material is sequestered and chemically inaccessible. Think of the huge deposits of ancient microscopic marine algae such as we find on the south coast of England – and how many such deposits are not exposed to weathering due to still being buried deep under subsequent rock strata. They might not even go this far – if buried in mud, perhaps no further reactions are possible with these materials (concrete, anyone?).
An additional material for sequestering could be wood. Non-woody plants fix carbon into sugars via glycolate (mainly), and the plants may then transform it into sugars or oils. The sugars are partly stored and partly used for structural purposes – polymerised into amylose (starch) for future energy usage, or further polymerised into cellulose to create wood fibres. There would be an annual carbon dioxide flux according to how many non-woody plants die and decay, but less so in the case of woody plants, especially in the case of large trees in (for example) Earth’s extensive boreal and antiboreal forests. The boreal forests might be interesting here on account of their evergreen content – resinous pine needles again sequester carbon and rot away very slowly, unlike the leaves of deciduous trees. You do not see processes like these on Titan or Mars (or even on Venus).
Venus is interesting because it has an atmosphere composed mainly of carbon dioxide [1] plus a lesser amount of nitrogen and sulphuric acid; it is also much denser than the atmospheres of the other rocky bodies. Is Venus so hot because of the carbon dioxide? Perhaps the truth is that Venus is a relatively recently-formed planet (according to thousands of stories in global folklore; check out the works of Immanuel Velikovsky for more information), and what we are seeing is the remanent heat of its formation, which probably is being lost only slowly because of its closer proximity to the sun.
Our main point, however, even in the case of Venus, is that the one thing not present is life; the atmospheres of these other rocky bodies, according to conventional wisdom, represent possible primordial states from which our current atmosphere could have developed – if life were present. Left alone, the existing geological and atmospheric processes there would presumably stay the same, forever. On Earth, however, the geological/geochemical record, as it is currently understood, seems to indicate three basic phases: the initial, lifeless and anoxic, primitive post-formation atmosphere; a second phase, resulting from chemical life processes, and still anoxic and too toxic for modern-day life; and finally the almost-end stage which we have today, caused by plant photosynthesis and the global availability of oxygen, which is itself toxic for surviving anaerobes. However, if our hypothesis here of time-dependent CO2 depletion is correct (and it should be because it is thermodynamic at its heart), we are living in the end stages of survivability on this planet not because of pollution, but simply because the chemistry of carbon dioxide allows it to dissolve easily in water, which is where it becomes available to biological processes, either within the watery photosynthetic tissues of plants, or by being absorbable into animal tissues, where enzymes can transform it into a solid.
Our eventual fate, then, is starvation, as the levels of available carbon dioxide in the atmosphere decline past the point at which plant life can convert it into sugars and oils. If it falls to half its current level, plant life will start to die, and as animals depend upon plants to maintain the food chains, they also will become extinct – including ourselves. The end-point of Earth’s development is starvation of its inhabitants due to the irreversible mass sequestration of the original atmospheric carbon dioxide. We should note that during periods when the CO2 levels rise, plant life flourishes; we should also remember that when growers of crops, using greenhouses, want to enhance growth, they add CO2 to the closed atmosphere in which they grow the plants. You can visualise current CO2 levels compared to those of the geological past in the graphic, “We are in a CO2 famine”, in a previous entry here.
What stimulated me into writing all of this (and it took a few days of cogitation for it to all crystallise in my mind) was an article at ZeroHedge by our friend, “Tyler Durden” [2]. According to an article in The Washington Post (inaccessible to we plebs due to their paywall, but reported on X as well), the corrected geological record for the past 500 million years shows unequivocally that mean global temperatures are in steep decline and have been for the last 50 million years. Essentially, temperature measurements have been compromised for a long time by the change of local temperatures resulting from increasing urbanisation, so that formerly isolated measurement stations (which used to be in the countryside) show incorrect temperatures resulting from being caught up in the heat bubbles surrounding cities:
“WaPo journalists cited a new study about Earth’s global surface temperatures over the last 485 million years. In 2023, Earth’s average temperature reached 58.96 F (14.98 C), well below the average 96.8 degrees F (36 degrees Celsius) the study showed around 100 million years ago. The trend shows Earth’s temperatures have been sliding for 50 million years. ” [2]
The interesting thing about this is that, if CO2 is an effective “greenhouse gas” (and it is often said that water vapour is more effective, not least because the cloud cover on Earth represents a self-correcting system; ditto for methane), it would actually make sense that mean global temperatures should decline in tandem with declining CO2. However, we might then have to ask a question like: “… but the atmosphere of Mars is almost entirely made up of carbon dioxide, and it’s freezing there!”, and according to authorities such as NASA [3], a good day on Mars would be barely temperate; nights there would put Antarctica to shame. Clearly, the whole “Global Warming” hypothesis is unsupported by any available evidence.
Personally, as I suggested earlier, I tend to find all of this amusing, but it is for precisely this kind of reason that I also gave up on a career in science long ago; I even left the UK and changed careers because after graduating, it proved impossible to get a post in my chosen area of study, and you can’t live on air and promises. Essentially, however, there seems to be no evidence whatsoever that establishes a causative link between increasing CO2 levels in Earth’s air and rising atmospheric temperatures; what evidence there is indicates that it has been declining over geological time, and that on the same timescale, global atmospheric temperatures have likewise been falling, and that this decline continues despite widespread deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels which are alleged to have the opposite effect. Whole spurious areas of pseudoscience and lucrative careers have been built upon this foundation of sand.
Remember, folks: all of this is just gaslighting and it isn’t really happening. Nothing in the foregoing discussion needed any great leaps of logic or mathematical analysis; all of that has already been performed at various locations in academia. We have merely linked together a few salient points, most of which were apparently produced by that same collective academia long ago.
A final caveat is as follows: we only know what we can see right now. We can’t jump into a time machine, like Doctor Who’s TARDIS, and go on a jolly romp through time seeing exactly what happened in the remote past. Our experience of time is purely one-dimensional: we have no idea how this planet formed, how many planets there were originally in total, what happened to them or even how they were arranged around the sun; take the Electric Universe theory seriously (and indeed, I do), and the first thing you realise is that we don’t even know whether the planets that we see today even belong to this one sun, or whether they wandered or were snatched in from elsewhere; the surprising heterogeneity of the visible planets is very suggestive of this. If the EU adherents’ accounts (based upon legends and traditional stories handed down from those who were there) are anything to go by, both our primary (sun) and the arrangement of the original planets were probably very different. We have to tread carefully because we are at the end of a long set of processes, plus we have to be careful when we try to apply analogies from our observation, as the analogies may be incorrect.
Real science is a pursuit in which a hypothesis must be falsifiable in order to be supported, at least until it is either fully or partially disproven by new research or evidence; everything in science is therefore purely provisional. Only a nitwit politician can stand up and assert without evidence that “the science is settled”. Science is never settled; it’s a cat on a hot tin roof, and a healthy science is one in which different hypotheses compete to see which one(s) better represent(s) reality. When only one hypothesis is presented and, as so often in this particular case, others are deliberately excluded from public discussion or subjected to public ridicule, you know that somebody is up to no good. Two or more options are healthy competition; a single option is propaganda.
References:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Venus : “Venus’s atmosphere is composed of 96.5% carbon dioxide and 3.5% nitrogen, with other chemical compounds present only in trace amounts.[1] It is much denser and hotter than that of Earth; the temperature at the surface is 740 K (467 °C, 872 °F), and the pressure is 93 bar (1,350 psi), roughly the pressure found 900 m (3,000 ft) under water on Earth. The atmosphere of Venus supports decks of opaque clouds of sulfuric acid that cover the entire planet, preventing optical Earth-based and orbital observation of the surface.”
[3] https://science.nasa.gov/mars/facts/ : “The temperature on Mars can be as high as 70 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius) or as low as about -225 degrees Fahrenheit (-153 degrees Celsius). And because the atmosphere is so thin, heat from the Sun easily escapes this planet. If you were to stand on the surface of Mars on the equator at noon, it would feel like spring at your feet (75 degrees Fahrenheit or 24 degrees Celsius) and winter at your head (32 degrees Fahrenheit or 0 degrees Celsius).”
Tags: chemistry, farce, gaslighting, geochemistry, global warming
Postscript: Five Years Later: The Final Cut
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Cancer Diary, Commentary, General, Health, Humour, Living in Korea, Uncategorized
One of the involvements that I have been having recently, as part of a burgeoning interest in Stoicism as a philosophy of life, is of writing my reflections upon a question or proposition twice a day; the practice of Stoic (reflective) journalling. Twice a day, I record my responses to philosophical cues from Ryan Holiday’s “Daily Stoic Journal”, although not without gaps at present.
Philosophy, however, represents a reflective space, which can be highly personal, where the strands of one’s life can converge with new ideas, and in which new ideas can be introduced; and in this environment, the worth of those ideas can be compared. This is where the Journal comes in.
Here, finally, then, with something of a Stoic background, I am thinking about the post-experiential recollection and response to a health issue long after the event, essentially bringing my cancer narrative to a close. When they give you the Bad News, how should one respond? Is cancer cause for humour?
Tumour humour, much?
After some five years of completing the post-operative monitoring and being essentially cleared of cancer last December (with the obligatory you-know-what stuffed up my posterior), I recently found myself considering an odd question, late at night (well, I was lying in bed at the time, what a surprise!): after all, the cancer was not, and could not be, the only bad or stressful experience that I would face in my life. Also, I had recently passed the age of sixty, and despite the fact that since that time, I had been put on some half a dozen drugs for my blood pressure, biologically, at least, I seemed to be sound and stable – or, at least, as “sound and stable” as one might be, taking half a dozen drugs a day… it sounds worse than it really is. Really.
However, this led me to ask myself the question: years later, when a life-threatening condition would be in the increasingly remote past, how should I look back and react to it? An analogy might be with the kind of “gallows humour” one encounters among people who have dangerous occupations; some levity, however odd, relieves at least a little of the immediate stress.
Obviously, when I was first told that I had bowel cancer, considered to be a high risk, I was not exactly overjoyed: I had had a sudden, intense existential threat thrust into my face, and perhaps I need not suggest here how great the shock factor might be. The days immediately thereafter, when everyone around me was getting on with his or her own life basically as normal, seemed somewhat surreal. In much the same way that young people talk about death as a strange and remote thing, I had always thought of cancer as something that was unlikely to happen to me, yet here it was. Be warned, people: cancer strikes fifty per cent. of us before we finally kick the jolly old bucket. It could be you… actually, it probably will be.
Now… as I have become increasingly involved with considerations of Stoic philosophy recently, this suddenly came to the forefront of my thinking, as it seems to parallel the notion that emotional reactions to external stimuli are not necessarily appropriate, if only because most things in life are deemed by many mature people as not being worthy of comment. It is, to be honest, hard to not recall these things sometimes, as the human mind has a habit of recycling ideas and experiences, but there are definite benefits, as this helps to guard against forgetfulness. We should, however, remember this golden rule: not everything you see in life is worthy of comment. Learn, instead, to laugh inside with maybe a wry smile to yourself. Laughter will always take away some of your own stress. Don’t try to share it with or explain it to others, as they will probably take it in the wrong sense, and you may even find yourself ostracised as a result. People are funny like that; there are too many strange (or otherwise bizarrely self-indulgent and narcissistic) people in society.
Stress itself is a known cause (or contributory factor) of cancer, and we can hardly suggest that daily life is lacking in stressful elements – if you are foolish enough to have the TV on for any length of time, the news media (which you actually pay for, back in the UK), is non-stop stressful propaganda. I sometimes feel that people could get cancer just from too much time spent immobile watching the goggle box. No kidding! The bullshit is both constant and unbearable; the most sensible thing to do is turn it off. Hence, very often here in Korea, as I try to get new apartments of the unfurnished variety and do not have a television of my own, I will simply get the Internet hooked up and not worry about it. I will choose what pabulum my mind should receive, thank you very much. Some unfurnished apartments, like the current one, may come with a TV, but I basically ignore it.
TV needs to be avoided because it is populated by a strange caste of narcissists, and these are also a group who should be excluded from your life, as their presence is a great source of stress. Especially if one of these is someone you actually admire, ask yourself whether what they do presents a realistic or even acceptable example of social behaviour. Also, does their behaviour or attitude represent a benefit to wider society? Probably not. Sadly, our civilisation has begun on its downward slope and we are about to witness a huge decline and fall. The narcissists are a parasitic class who produce little of value (but typically value themselves and their opinions rather highly, so go figure), but slowly burden society down until it is unable to rise again, like ticks infesting an old pasture horse until it suddenly drops dead. Turn off the TV and keep them out of your living room. Their dubious doings are no concern of yours.
When it comes to philosophy, Stoicism is too often regarded as encouraging an attitude of detachment and possibly even emotionlessness in the face of what many would call suffering or misfortune, but in reality, the original Stoics were people who rejoiced in life; despite the bad experiences that they encountered, the Stoics asked themselves what they were (or should be) grateful for; was life completely bad, or did they still have things which were good, which they should remember even as the misfortune was perhaps upon them? The popular perception of Stoicism is incorrect, and is the result of ignorance.
When we remember the origins of Stoicism with the death of Socrates, the reactions of his admirers and followers and, indeed, the passage of Stoic philosophy through generations of thinkers such as Marcus Aurelius, we need to remember that the backdrop to their experience of daily life, of what it meant to be human, was in a world very different from the world we know today. There was undeniably a greater opportunity for suffering in a society with not only slavery and plebeian poverty but also a culture in which punishment was often almost synonymous with entertainment; also, reading Suetonius’ account of the lives of the Caesars makes it very clear that being in a position of privilege or wealth in ancient Rome was no real defence against either persecution or sudden death.
Life in those days required a certain amount of fortitude simply to exist and survive in a world where death could come at any moment, whether at the hands of an interlocutor with ill intent or due to the relatively primitive state of medicine; as history shows, even the emperors of Rome were not immune, as even their own bodyguards could turn on them at a moment’s notice. Ancient societies necessarily persisted at the point of the sword, infant mortality was high and they did not have the advantage of such things as antibiotics in the event of diseases. Since life could be snatched away in an instant, people needed not only to live in the moment, but also to reflect upon whether they were actually making good use of their time and having good plans for an uncertain future. When a Stoic spoke about “gratitude”, you can be sure that at least part of what they were grateful for was the simple joy of being able to wake up the next morning to experience another additional day of being alive. Ironically, the main threat to the original Stoics was that they were misperceived as seditious malcontents, when in fact they were more concerned with how a good life could be lived.
As the ultimate origin of what we now call “Stoicism” was with Socrates, let’s not forget what was probably his most important assertion: that an unexamined life was not worth living. When we are confronted with the Bad News, perhaps, in a Socratic vein, we should be asking ourselves what kind of lessons we will have learned in its aftermath, when we have the opportunity of a post-experiential examination of what happened, and how it should inform our thinking in the future. Socrates would probably berate us as contemptible fools, destined to live our lives in suffering and ignorance, if we took little or no time to consider the lessons that the experience had brought us.
In a developed modern society, surrounded by the products of advanced technology and medicine, it is perhaps too easy to fall into the illusion of a kind of virtual immortality; indeed, so many of us seem to live as if we think death will never come. The ancient Romans knew this, and their watchword was “memento mori”: “remember that you must die”. We are all mortal and irrespective of our individual desires or intentions, death is something that we must all face in the end. In such circumstances, there is at the same time not only irony in laughing at past misfortunes, but also optimism in the realisation that we were strong enough to endure them. Paradoxically, perhaps, the experience also gives us strength and hope when other misfortunes strike – experience which we can share with others when they are likewise affected. It was hard when the crisis was upon us, but the outcome was that we discovered what strength we could summon up from deep within ourselves when we needed it most. What we discovered was, in fact, that we had more strength than we ever imagined; strength such as is difficult to explain to others. The medicine and science are great and all, but without an appropriate Socratic self-examination after the fact, perhaps, nothing would have been learned.
It is not without reason that we speak of “cancer survivors”, even with the benefits of modern medical technology, but unfortunately, we cannot avoid the inevitable. In the twenty-one years since I left the UK, the older members of my extended family have also been passing to the great beyond, something that I could not fail to notice; medicine can only take us so far before biology strikes. They did not all die of cancer, but due to a range of the afflictions of old age. We must learn to see these things as signals from the future; yes, the passing of our friends and family is always deeply saddening, but in the face of that which cannot be avoided, perhaps we should be celebrating the achievements by which they will be remembered. The mourning itself passes eventually, and they live on in the memories of those who survive them. However, we all go the same way, in the end. Memento mori.
At the time, when my own cancer was diagnosed, I had no idea what would happen in the period of days leading up to the operation, or indeed whether the actual end was looming. I shared a very small ward space with six other male patients who were at different stages of progression. As smoking is still very prevalent in Korea, there was no doubt in my mind that this was responsible for the condition in at least some of my temporary cohabitees, and with some of them, the progression was clearly advanced and it was affecting their minds. Outside, the weather was cold, as it was now early January, and as I was waiting to have my operation, I would watch the snow falling past the ward window, which was a strange contrast with the surprisingly high temperature that was maintained indoors, and which kept me constantly sweaty. [1] Of course, a single room was possible, but I was told that the cost was some KRW450,000 a night, so that decision was kind of already made for me… the others would simply have to put up with my snoring…
One might also comment that there is an element of fatalism in abandoning oneself to whatever is to come, yet assenting to an operation is not a guarantee of survival. We place our trust in the surgeon, but there is no absolute certainty of returning alive from anaesthesia; some abandonment and casting oneself upon the seas of fate is a requirement in such circumstances, not a choice. As it happens, the operation proceeded as planned and I was transported back to my bed with a load of catheters and cannulae inserted at various points (not to mention the Fecal Diversion Device itself), which rather hampered both easy movement and routine hygiene; but I persisted. It seemed the right thing to do at the time…
Over five years after the event, I find myself often reflecting upon that brief encounter with mortality with varying amounts of humour, sometimes rather dark, maybe still maintaining the typical human delusion in my mind of immortality, even as the reality creeps ever closer, considering that I have now reached the age of sixty. However, it is because I made a choice that I am able to sit here, typing this on my tablet; and because I made that choice, and did not succumb to a kind of paralytic indecision at a moment when mortality beckoned, I am free to continue my life as I wish, at least, for as long as it lasts. Perhaps this is, in fact, the most important take-away from the experience: it’s not the odd humour itself but the surviving and being able to indulge in the humour, because without the former, the latter is impossible. Socrates was right; you learned something there.
What, then, can I offer by way of advice to anyone who has such a circumstance thrust upon them?
Firstly, let me express due gratitude to Professor Kim Jae-hwang, the surgeon, his team, and the ladies and gentlemen on the ward, who all put up with an odd foreigner with grace and dignity. Secondly, let me express my gratitude to my ex-manager at Times Media, Jamie, who did not hesitate to get me to an initial specialist’s examination when the symptoms became severe. Let me, thirdly, express my gratitude to another lady who stepped in to countersign the necessary forms when another had promised to do so, but did not turn up as agreed. I need not mention her name here, but her signature was probably the most vital component in all of this.
My final advice might be something like this: survival is manifested as a consequence of many things, many factors, perhaps many choices, but when mortality calls, you must make the decision, and don’t be afraid. If the price of your indecision is death, it is still a choice that you must make; as we saw above, greater minds than yours have been taxed by similar situations in times past, and did not waste time on it. They were no more welcoming of the inevitable than you, but understood that they were free to choose; and what followed from their choices became history. Moral (perhaps): make the right choice, and maybe you won’t be history…
… you want to be able to look back, many years later, and laugh; recalling that time when death came to call, and was denied…
… and be grateful.
References:
[1] In fact, I had to collect my urine each time I went to relive myself, as they were monitoring this output. The trouble, of course, was that I was sweating so much that this would distort any figures that they were calculating.
The Disaster of November 5th
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Breakfast in the Ruins, General, Gripes, Humour, Lost Geographies, Odds and Ends..., The Destruction of History, Uncategorized
Ah, November 5th… the day some of us recall the failure of G. Fawkes et al. to blow up the old Houses of Parliament with the King inside – discovered, according to legend, as he was literally about to light the taper on the charge.
The irony, of course, being that a couple of centuries later, they burned down almost of their own accord (having been built from wood)… the Office Keeper and Yeoman Usher of the Receipt of the Exchequer, who had held that position for some time, was one William Godwin, dissenter and anarchist. His responsibilities* included the sweeping of the chimneys at the Palace of Westminster, and this little disaster came one night during his tenure.
After the flames had died down, a contest was held for the design of the new buildings, the ones we see today. I read elsewhere (many years ago) that it happened because he was asleep on the job (as he was granted rooms on site).
Alas, poor Guy… but the bonfires and fireworks were good. 
* See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Godwin, “Later years and death”: “Literary critic Marilyn Butler concluded her review of a 1980 biography of Godwin by comparing him favourably to Guy Fawkes: Godwin was more successful in his opposition to the status quo.”
The Dubious End of Windows 7
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Computing, General, Gripes, Humour, Uncategorized
So… at a stupid hour of the morning (meaning: it’s now Sunday!) I am almost forced to give up trying to resurrect an existing Win7 partition. The reason seems to be not that there is any real problem with the system, but that there is either a memory decay issue or something to do with the NVIDIA video driver. Trouble is… it’s difficult to tell which one it is. It looks like CCleaner (alias Crap Cleaner, I used to use it regularly on XP) can cure the issue, but first I have to pay for the privilege. [1]
Contrast this with the situation on Mageia 8 Linux. Many programs can be substituted for those available in the Windows ecosystem because the focus is really on the filetype; also, of course, a lot of work performed nowadays on Win10/11 is actually on the Internet and really depends upon the capabilities of the browser. As it happens, over the years a number of programs have been ported across OSes so that there is no difficulty manipulating the same files on concurrent ports of the same program – think of Audacity (sound editor), VLC media player, and various Internet browsers, a category which now includes Microsoft’s own Edge! [2] This means that their online services, such as Office, would be performed in a browser rather than a dedicated program… but isn’t this killing their own markets? Why would anyone want to buy a system with their OS when everything can be done online through a browser?
Corollary: I am handling the same files with programs ported to Windows, Android and Linux.
I could see the way things were going already, way back under XP: programs that used to be free (albeit with limited functionality) are now “Pro” and you have to pay more money for the dubious benefit of maintaining the “security” of an OS that is obviously more open to attack than others. In this particular case, the trouble is not that I cannot find out where the problem is, oh no, the trouble is that its nature is such that I cannot complete scanning and register for the “Pro” version that allegedly would cure this. I keep getting the dreaded “Blue Screen of Death” (BSOD) before any “solution” can be applied, which, from my long and painful years of experience, is absolutely typical of Windows. It repeatedly BSODs during scanning… plus, even if I could prevent this problem, this particular machine was made in 2008, is running a now-defunct version of Windows, and its final fate will be to end its days running Linux.
This is the real issue with closed-source software: running the operating system which runs it already costs money, and then you have to pay more money each year because (a) it is not secure enough by design, (b) this means that there is a whole host of malware, spyware, Trojans and stuff designed specifically to infect it, and (c) different security/system apps seem to target different malware so that in the end, if you want something approaching real security (because the different apps overlap in detection capabilities to some extent, and therefore coverage is dodgy), you need to waste a whole lot of time and power regularly scanning with a number of them, which also slows the machine down. Many of the programs I used to run under XP and 98SE, such as BearShare (a file-sharing program) and others (mainly security scanners) that I used to think were so good, were apparently bearers of malware and needed to be avoided; this was one of the reasons that I gave up on M$ in the first place and also didn’t go for the Fruity One – there were a whole load of free OSes out there, I had already had experience with one (trashing at least one hard drive in the process) and the experience of forever having to reinstall Win3.x (sometimes several times a week, it literally reduced me to tears at times, I kid you not, I have witnesses!) turned out to be a strange blessing, giving me strength in the early days when my unfamiliarity with Mandrake proved to be rather similar to my experience with the different incarnations of “Win”… I developed the art of patience, the Zen of OS installation.
However… there’s the thing. Normally, even if something goes wrong with the boot process on Mageia (and on my main system, it has, right now), the thing still works; it doesn’t go “Bork” when booting and if it does, well, the kind of system hygiene that you could apply means that reinstallation is easy and can happen while you are sleeping. We might add that there are applications (programs) which are third-party (i.e., proprietary; you have to pay for them) even under a free OS and yes, I do actually pay for them – precisely because I can use them under a free OS and the money that I pay doesn’t go to an account in Redmond. Programs like this include SoftMaker Office (which I used, among other things, to help a certain South African gentleman get his second novel typeset) [3] and WPS Office, perpetrated by KingSoft, who have been at this for a long time and guess what? The Linux version of their (very good) M$-compatible office suite is actually free to install under Linux! [4]
Anyway, I just paid for “Pro” and Win7 is still dying, I may have to let it expire on this particular machine soon. I bought this reconditioned laptop exactly because (a) I have been so sick of the constant e-waste that this kind of thing generates and (b) Windoze is sh*t and needs to be replaced by something that is useful and not prone to the type of “planned obsolescence” so prevalent in the Windoze ecology.
That’s my two penn’orth of opinion. A penny for your thoughts, lazangen’lemen???
[1] Yes, I did pay. Alas!
[2] Imagine: a Chrome-based browser on Linux. Who would’a thunk?
[3] Did I mention that SoftMaker have a FreeOffice that you can download on Windoze? No? Well, I’ve mentioned it now… https://www.freeoffice.com/en/
[4] See: https://www.wps.com/office/linux/
When the Haemo-Globbin Comes Throb-Throb-Throbbin’ Along…
Posted by Andrew | Filed under A Farewell to Authority, Cancer Diary, Commentary, General, Gripes, Humour, Living in Korea, Uncategorized
With immaculate timing the current Coronavirus panic set in just as I was due to have another colonoscopy. Predictably, things did not proceed as planned…
It had been expected to just happen as normal: first the purge, then the laying prone on the gurney, unconscious, while the medics did the dirty work; usually a short and painless procedure, but alas, it was not to be! First I screwed up with the purgative, and then, on the day, my blood pressure was too high. Again. And again. The nurse in charge decided that the colonoscopy could not proceed because of the danger of accidental bleeding resulting from any internal injury during the procedure and decided that it had to be postponed (!) until my blood pressure had been stabilised at a more “normal” reading, and I ended up discussing it with a cardiologist, who put me on Norvasc (calcium channel inhibitor) for fourteen days and gave me a little book to write my daily readings in. Readings that I would take with my little Panasonic BP meter that I bought back in 2008 and appears to still be going strong. Alas!
Now, when it comes to the reading of blood pressure, I personally have a few gripes. When I went back into education in 1985 (because the job situation in the UK was so atrocious), one of the first things we studied was physiology, and we were trained in how to use an actual sphygmomanometer in combination with an actual stethoscope to listen for the Korot’koff Sounds and measure blood pressure, so I already have a very good idea about how to do this with the most basic equipment… but when the new regulations about annual health checks for foreign employees in South Korea kicked in at the end of 2007 (immediately after Lee Myung-bak was elected – remember?), I decided to get my own dumb-bell set plus my own BP meter (as the local Hi-Mart in the centre of Changwon had a range of different models available at the time). I also paid close attention to the technique required in order to avoid systematic errors when taking my BP each day. What I discovered was:
Posture was very important: Whereas the use of the sphygmomanometer/stethoscope pair allowed a range of body positions so that an optimum body posture could be employed (and most specifically, avoiding abdominal compression which would render misleading pressures), not only my own wrist BP meter but also a lot of the ones commonly available in public places involved a position in which the user has to sit down and lean forward. When the patient is overweight, this results in the abdominal fat deposits being compressed, increasing abdominal pressure and giving an elevated reading, so care is needed to find a posture which avoids this error. At home, I now take care to sit with my back straight and no pressure on the abdomen, and abdominal muscles relaxed, measuring elbow on the desk and supported by the other arm, as recommended in the device’s operating instructions.
Muscular exercise (for example, with weight training or more aerobic forms of exercise) causes the muscles to absorb fluid from the rest of the body, lowering the overall blood pressure. This can be seen by monitoring your BP some time after exercise.
Blood pressure taken in the early morning after awakening is usually the lowest (except actually during sleeping) because all body muscles have been relaxed during the night and have yet to tighten up due to normal diurnal body movement. BP peaks during the afternoon and evening and then begins to decline again. At one point (about eleven or twelve years ago) I would get up in the morning and measure my BP and get results like 50/30 (!). A normal (or more accurately, nominal) reading should be approximately 120/80 and even moderate daily exercise should maintain this. Again, measuring your BP some time after a long walk (for example, but allowing time for your body to relax first) should give a reading very close to normal.
My gripe with the typical automatic BP monitor seen in many public places in Korea is precisely this: that they encourage a bad body posture by forcing patients to be slumped forward, increasing abdominal pressure. To this I would add that in Korea, one is not allowed time to rest before taking a seat and being expected to take a measurement. The result is that (again) readings are too high and in the wrong posture to isolate the readings that you are trying to take. I have lost count now of how often – going back at least ten years – I have had to move rapidly between hospital departments for things like routine medical exams. Ridiculous!
Now obviously, with training in biomedical science and having twenty-four-hour Internet access, I do a lot of research online. Norvasc (which was prescribed in the first instance) is supposed to reduce ambient BP by up to 12/6 (systolic/diastolic), but so also is beetroot juice because it contains a lot of nitrate, which the body reduces first to nitrite and then to nitrogen (II) oxide, a potent agent for several processes including the relaxation of the artery wall muscles. I bought a liquidiser but unfortunately it wasn’t powerful enough to cope with raw beetroot, so whilst shopping at Lotte the other day I noticed that they sold at least two beetroot/apple juice combinations (one more expensive than the other). As it happened, after only nine days the Norvasc took my BP down to normal levels, but laboratory blood tests on sample taken concurrently with the initial consultation indicated that I was hyperlipidaemic (i.e. had a level of blood lipids deemed above normal range) and the consultant has now put me on Atacand and Lipitor. The actual blood pressure medication was therefore changed, although I was instructed to finish the last of the Norvasc pills (one per day) before changing to the new prescription.
Although this might seem a rather negative outcome, we have to remember that a lot of what has been observed is the result of an enforcedly static lifestyle. The walking distance between either work and home or home and wherever I would buy food and drink is very short and not likely to result in sufficient exercise; likewise, there is a great shortage of entertainment around here, so the result is an oversupply of food, boredom and a sedentary lifestyle. The human body did not evolve for the urban environment. Also – of course – people are being asked to stay at home while the Coronavirus issue is current, further compounding the problem. The consultant said that I should get at least thirty minutes of walking exercise per day, something which used to be normal until about two years ago because there could often be a long distance between home and work (or, at least, the nearest bus stop). If it had been possible to return to the area here where I used to live – in the north of the city, thirty to forty minutes’ commuting time – this would have been less of a problem, but last year, my manager was very insistent that she wanted me to be living as close as possible to the office in case of the need for a sudden interview. We have had no “sudden interviews” since I returned here, so that seems to have been a waste of time; now we discover that it has been deleterious to my health too.
Happily, at least according to the cardiologist yesterday, this is not an irreversible situation but it does involve a number of lifestyle changes which – to some extent – had already been in place. My alcohol consumption has generally been low recently as I have tended to want to hit the sack rather than stay up; the only trouble being that what I have been drinking has tended to be two or three cans of foreign cider on special offer, the issue here being not just the minimal alcohol input but also the deleterious effects of the sugar – fructose – which is a natural component of cider. My online research seems to suggest that this should also be avoided, but the trouble here is that it is a sweetener added on a truly industrial scale to a whole range of foods and beverages; very difficult to avoid. However, the cardiologist said that for a person my age, this should perhaps be expected, but could be mitigated eventually by diet and sufficient exercise. Now, if it would just stop raining…
Great Stuff!
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Art, Commentary, General, Gripes, Humour, Uncategorized
Had to add this once I saw it. A whole load of stuff at Ill Will Press.
Handle your shit:
More great Quotes . . . from Tommy Cooper!!!
Posted by Andrew | Filed under Humour
Tags: education, elementary, humour, Korea, nuts, South Korea, teaching, tommy cooper
