Into the Trees

For a middle-aged expat Tasmanian who learned to drive on a winding country road behind endless log trucks headed for Triabunna, “The Destruction of the Triabunna Mill and the Fall of Tasmania’s Woodchip Industry” was electrifying reading.

I’d missed the news about the mill being bought by wealthy environmentalists: a brilliant tactical stroke. And I’d missed the news that Eric Abetz and Tony Abbott were angling to open it again, but it didn’t surprise me. I expected the story to continue in depressing detail about how they’d pulled it off and got the log trucks rolling again, so the section on Alec Marr’s monkey-wrenching read like something out of a thriller. I’m averse to vandalism, but when the choice is between letting loggers loose again on Southern old-growth forests, or dismantling a disused mill to prevent that from happening, I know what I’d choose.

A lot of Tasmanians would gnash their teeth and talk about lost jobs, but industrial forestry hasn’t been a jobs bonanza for decades. A century ago teams of loggers used to go into those forests and haul out one giant tree at a time for sawmilling. By the 1980s, a few men with heavy machinery could knock over whole hillsides of ancient trees in one hit, and ninety percent of it, ninety percent of it, ended up as woodchips to be turned into newspaper. Or, as Abetz puts it in this article, “the woodchips are made from the leftovers”. What kind of person thinks of ninety percent of any living thing as “the leftovers”? Poachers killing rhinos and elephants for their horns and tusks? Poachers need jobs too, but where is it written that they have to be those jobs?

Read More · 30 July 2014 · Politics

Potato Beans

Taming overlooked wild plants to feed the world.

Five ways that Seinfeld changed television.

How classic Seinfeld episodes were written.

Krieg der Sterne am Flughafen.

Graham Linehan tweets the Running of the Bulls.

Richard Linklater reviews his films.

UK authors’ incomes collapse.

Maps of an alternate North America.

Photographs inspired by kids’ nightmares.

SF writer Greg Benford on terraforming the moon.

SF writers predicted the Ukraine conflict; now they’re fighting it.

Photographs of Chernobyl post-accident.

Ohio replaces lethal injection with humane new head-ripping-off machine.

30 July 2014 · Weblog

Sanity

Sanna Beach, Ardnamurchan Peninsula, 13 July 2014

I’ve been stuck in the office for a lot of Scotland’s recent warm weather, but have been taking some days off here and there to go camping with my family. After a trial night in the woods in June (to see how our three-year-old daughter liked it), a couple of weekends ago we went to the Ardnamurchan Campsite at Kilchoan, driving through mist and rain on single-track roads to get there. We had one afternoon of sunshine the next day, when we crossed the crater of an extinct volcano to reach one of the best beaches I’ve seen in Scotland yet, next to the crofting village of Sanna. Here’s one photo of the many I took that afternoon while the unexpected sun went to work on our unsuspecting skin (mouseover for another).

We’re heading back west before the end of the school holidays for a final summer camping trip, so there will be more sandy photos to come.

23 July 2014 · Journal

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the Floating World

My recent forays into 35mm scanning have been taking me back to one of the major trips of my youth, starting with eight days our family spent in Japan at the end of 1985. I’ve actually written about that trip here already, when I wrote at length about my second visit in 2006. While getting a collection of these older pictures together for yet another photo gallery, I thought about adding some extended passages from my diary of the trip to complement that later account. But the diary entries are a whole different animal, full of the wide-eyed innocence of an almost-adult in a very foreign land, interspersed with accounts of sibling squabbles and teenage concerns. So a few extracts will suffice.

Read More · 8 July 2014 · Memory

The Big Cask

Once in every lifetime.

Believe it or not, Pete isn’t at home...

People can’t really multitask, except for these people.

Why you’re (probably) not a great communicator.

How not to say the wrong thing.

You are the best thing in the world.

Another breakthrough in solar panel manufacture.

Goebbels handpicked the perfect Aryan baby, not knowing she was a Jew.

Cory Doctorow précises Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century.

XKCD précises the land mass of the solar system.

Drinkies.

4 July 2014 · Weblog

Was Blocked (Not Blocked)

The Open Rights Group Blocked project has found that one in five sites are blocked in Britain by web filters put in place by one or more ISPs in response to government hyperventilation. When I checked on Wednesday, MetaFilter, Freaky Trigger and this very site were all blocked by TalkTalk, which would have killed half of my web reading and writing if we’d switched to them as we’d been considering. It looked almost as if TalkTalk were blocking all blogs by default, which seemed insane. They’re showing as okay now, so maybe they’ve been scrambling to fix things behind the scenes.

Maybe they didn’t like this ancient page of mine about how filters are fundamentally broken.

4 July 2014 · Infotech

June 2014