THE DRAG OF JET LAG.

 THE DRAG OF JET LAG.

There are people who don't get jet lag.  I believe that they are not real people but aliens who have arrived on Earth after light years of travel so that twelve to twenty-four hours on a plane is nothing to them.  I mean, they might have been born on Earth, but they were probably smuggled into some unsuspecting woman's uterus after being well traveled embryos from a distant planet.

I traveled with one of them once.  We boarded the plane in Brisbane for a twenty-three-hour trip to Paris.  As soon as we took our seats in the cramped Economy section, he closed his eyes and went to sleep.  Just like that, he tuned out the aircraft noise, the lights, the announcements and the sardine-like conditions, and floated off into dreamland.  This is not normal.  He is Polish but I don't think this has anything to do with it.

I have to admit that I haven't traveled overseas for years (financial constraints) and would love to be able to again.  Nonethless I am well acquainted with jet lag.  It is just a shame that my alien co-traveler decided that there was no such thing, decided I was a lost cause and went on his merry way around Paris with his sister, who lived there, for two days while I tried to recuperate in our noisy hotel room.  She had booked this for us, even though she had promised us free use of a friend's apartment.  Trouble was that the friend wasn't out of it yet.  I won't go into the rest of the three-week story, save to say that their disregard for my fatigue in those first days upset my irritable bowel syndrome for the remaining trip.

All I required was one- or two-nights-sleep but friend harangued me about missing Paris nightlife.  I missed it and I don't think he ever found it.  When we drove out of Paris, the pharmacies on the route south to Monaco benefitted hugely from my purchases of medications to contain my trips to the toilet and ease the burning in my intestines.  One thing that really annoyed me about French pharmacies was that none of their analgesics contained codeine.  They put caffeine in its place.  Now why would I want caffeine in an analgesic when I could just have a cup of coffee?

Ten years before the Paris trip I had traveled alone to London from Perth, Western Australia.  I was heading for a pre-paid bus tour of France.  My, then, husband would not join me.  I was in good shape when I boarded the plane and not so good when I got off in London.  Jet lag had hit me hard and, having had panic attacks in the past, I had trouble keeping one at bay in my depleted condition.  Once at the hotel, I discovered that my room wasn't available for six hours and I was really quite sick.  My marriage was under stress at that time, and I think that my nerves just crashed.  I begged the hotel for any room they could give me, and they were kind enough to offer me one that I think was used for flight attendants.  A jackhammer started outside the window just as I arrived at around 7am but I managed to sleep through it.

Sadly, I decided that I was in no shape to go on the tour.  I spent four days in London coming back to my senses and cancelled the tour.  My husband managed to get me on the only available flight at short notice, traveling first class (God bless him.)  It's a real shame that I was in no condition to enjoy first class, but it did not impress me.  Now, this was forty years ago, but I remember it being full of businessmen glued to their newspapers and paying no attention to their first-class surroundings.  I was feeling pretty ill at this point, not from panic disorder, but because an old friend came and took me to lunch at her place in London before my flight.  I told her I was allergic to cream, but she gave me a light lunch with a hummus dip.  Oh, she only put a little cream in it.  I'm glad I was packing Loperamide (for diarrhea) but there went my enjoyment of first class.

One more thing about first class.  There was no tray containing your whole meal.  There was a trolley containing silver service with, first, the entree then, later, the main course and still later dessert.  Give me a good old tray and the whole shebang so that I can sit back, relax and fall asleep, or run to the bathroom.  You see, I have traveled business class.  It was lovely, a real Goldilocks moment.  I was bumped up on my way to London.  The seats reclined just so, the footrest came up, there was elbow space and it was, oh, so much quieter.  The tray also came with the full meal.  If I ever can travel again my choice would be business class hands down.

I can say this, genuinely, because yesterday I watched a video on Facebook of a man taking us with him in a first-class seat on a recent Qantas flight from Sydney to London, with a brief stop at Singapore, where he had an hour at Changi Airport.  I have, in the past, visited that airport often when I lived in Hong Kong and traveled via that route and it is fabulous.

The fellow first showed us through the Qantas First Class airport lounge in Sydney.  Actually, I've been in the one in Brisbane and it was great.  For our benefit he sampled meals in the airport lounge and on the flight, partook of free champagne in the airport lounge and showed us the seat in its partitioned privacy on the plane.  Honestly, it looked claustrophobic to me.  Yes, it was big enough and, yes, there was a window, but still I preferred the seat I'd had all those years ago when I traveled first class.  He could dim his lights, recline the seat to lying down, rotate his seat towards the window, but all in all, it looked like a comfy office cubicle.  It also looked lonely.  More importantly, when he woke up after nine hours sleep, he took off his eye mask.  Ah ha, I thought, it's not completely dark.  If he's wearing an eye mask, so there is residual cabin light.  Why would I pay $10,000 Australian dollars for a one-way ticket for an office cubicle? More room certainly, possible better but rather ostentatious food, and still not be able to rest in complete darkness?  The answer is that for that price, I wouldn't.  I'm not going to feel well anyway after a twenty-four-hour flight with background noise that cannot be dulled and light that cannot be shut away.

Amazingly there are partitioned seats in the centre of first-class between the window ones.  He advised us to go for the window ones, which is understandable at that price.  If you could pay a price to get rid of jet lag, it would be worth it and perhaps someone will come up with a medication for it someday, but nothing much is going to make a long flight in recycled air and white lights, background hum and announcements over the intercom pleasant.

When you arrive at your destination, if you're not on a business trip and expected to perform as if you haven't shifted many time zones, get a quiet, dark hotel, room service and sleep until you feel ready to face the world.  If I'm very lucky, I may be able to try to do just that again one day.

END

HEAR, HEAR FOR OUR FUNNY LOOKING HUMAN EARS.

 HEAR, HEAR FOR OUR FUNNY LOOKING HUMAN EARS.

"My, what beautiful ears you have," said no one ever.  It's just as well ears are positioned on the side of our head, not in the middle of our face like our nose.  I mean, noses aren't exactly something to get excited about either, but at least they don't look like a raised spiral maze or labrynth.  There are no beautiful noses.  A good nose is one that draws the least attention to itself.  The worst noses have their owners scurrying to a plastic surgeon as soon as maturity and money allow but not many resort to surgery for their ears.  For the ones who do, it is usually because their ears stick out from the sides of their head like vertical wing flaps or angry elephants.

Speaking of angry elephants, nature has cruelly denied humans the ability to express emotions with their auditory appendages.  When an elephant is upset, you know it.  It spreads its formidably large ears to make itself look bigger (as if that were necessary, given their size).  If that doesn't send you running, they'll charge you.  Horses, also, have ways of letting you know their displeasure - ears back.  Given that they are also large animals, it's wise to know what their ears are telling you as a means of life preservation.

Dogs, after centuries of breeding interference by humans, now come with an assortment of ear shapes from pointy to floppy.  Of course, their ancestor, the wolf has pointy ears, making them look alert and intelligent.  No one knows for sure why breeding and the domestication of dogs caused floppy ears.  Theories abound and some are that animals bred for herding and listening for prey kept their pointy ears, which one can assume means that these ears hear better than floppy ones.  Floppy ears apparently help stir up the ground so that pooch can be a better tracker, able to pick up smells from the ground. That seems to be a stretch of the imagination as theories go and I don't know how this works for the shorter floppy eared breeds like Golden Retrievers except that they look cute with them.  Floppy ears, however, are harder to clean and prone to fungal infections and the like.

But back to humans.

According to an AI article:

"Humans developed ear pinnae—the external, cartilaginous flaps of the ear—primarily as a survival mechanism to amplify sound and locate its source. Inherited from our ancient mammalian ancestors..."

Also:

"While many mammals have large, mobile pinnae that they can swivel to track predators or prey, humans and other primates evolved to rely more on turning our heads."

Then on reading an academic article, or a tiny portion thereof, titled: "Evolution of the Mammalian Ear: An Evolvability Hypothesis" (various authors), I came upon this nto very enlightening sentence:

"The transformation of the primary jaw joint into the mammalian ear ossicles is one of the most iconic transitions in vertebrate evolution, but the drivers of this complex evolutionary trajectory are not fully understood. " 

This gave me the cue that I should go no further in trying to understand the anatomy of the ear and would instead concentrate on its appearance.  Nor was I going to drag you, dear reader, down that rabbit hole as it seems that no one can really explain to anyone's satisfaction why we are adorned with our particular variety of hearing appendage.

Birds avoid all this trouble by having holes for ears.  That is, the outside of their ears are simply holes and their hearing is excellent.  Apparently, who or whatever our evolutionary engineers are, they decided to take highly divergent paths when designing mammals and birds.

If humans merely had holes, not cartilaginous flaps, external to their ear canals, we would never have been able to adorn ourselves with earrings.  Even worse, whatever would our spectacles have been able to rest upon?  Probably they would have required elastic bands like swim goggles or, perhaps, we could have had a hole drilled through the bridge of the nose through which a bar could be passed and then lens positioned either side in front of the eyes.

I doubt, though, that if we were given the task of designing our own ears, we would have come up with two rather odd looking, fleshy knobs that would protrude from the sides of our heads.

Whenever you watch a science fiction movie in which humanoid looking aliens are portrayed, the special effects people will always have fun with the ears.  Either they will be larger, pointy perhaps, or not there at all.  I think that is because our ears are probably the most alien things about us.  At best they look like Ammonites, the shells of Cephalopods.

Ammonite

How would we have felt if we had lovely pointy ears atop our heads like an Alsatian, with a fine covering of short hair on the back?  

I had AI create the picture above, but it wouldn't get rid of the human ears.  I'm still learning.  However, I think the pointy ears on the girl look rather fetching compared to our human ones.  Ours are, nonetheless, a bit more compact and handier for hanging things on and, now that I think of it, it would be a lot harder to hold a smartphone up to those pointy ears.

 Perhaps our mammalian designers were thinking ahead after all.

END

HUMAN PLASTICINE: molded for life - from birth to the grave.

 

HUMAN PLASTICINE: molded for life - from birth to the grave.

A funny thing happens to you when you retire: you feel like a third wheel and, with that, comes a sense of disorientation and none of direction.  Of course, that's not everybody.  Some people have definite plans for retirement and the money to carry those out.  Others anticipate days they can call their own; no plans, just the freedom to do exactly as they please.  It's the latter who have the problem.  Who, in life, has had the experience to do exactly what they please?

I'm one of the latter and I keep wondering why I'm not relishing all this free time.  I try to tell myself not to feel guilty and to go with the flow.  The problem is that there is no flow.  You're now in a becalmed canoe and must row.  This, however, defeats the purpose of 'going with the flow'.  The 'flow' is a gentle current that, like a good television show, carries you along while you relax in your armchair, not a canoe you have to row to move forward.

I think we move into retirement somewhat unprepared and I think that is because of how we are brought up.  With the best intentions in the world our parents take one look at that helpless blob of fleshy plasticine that they have produced in an energetic bout of sexual activity and wonder how to make it self-reliant.  Heck, they don't want it weeing and demanding food at all hours forever.  They must school it, and that's only after they have taught it the rudiments of holding their bowels, walking upright and communicating intelligibly.  Added to this, they are sleep deprived and rarely able to engage in sex, can never go out to dinner again without getting a babysitter or have a conversation that doesn't involve bodily functions.

Babies, therefore, are brought into this world and are then expected to move forward in a culturally appropriate way and then to fend for themselves.  We are primates and yet other primates do not have expectations of their offspring other than to live, procreate and then die.  Humans, on the other hand, must attain relevancy in some way.  At first the child finds the whole life thing a surprise so that for the first formative years their only direction about what they're doing in this world comes from the people who brought them into it and who, themselves, have no idea what they're doing because they've never brought a child into being before.

As young children, we do not question why our parents insist on us doing what we are told.  We are put in clothes, told not to run on the road, forced to eat food we'd rather spit out and then kicked out of the house to attend day care, kindergarten, school etc. with a whole lot of other equally dumbfounded and unformed humans.  What we make of all this activity is unquestioned, at least until we are about five to seven years of age.  If our parents are kind people, we just feel safe and go with the flow.

I think that the sense of repetition and questioning only kicks in at about the age of seven.  The sheer tedium of having to get up, get into a uniform then spend six hours sitting at desks learning stuff before we are released to play and the gloss of being new in the world starts to wear off.  I know that by age seventeen, my only life plan was to leave school and never look back.  Oh, I figured that more was expected of me, I just didn't know or care what.  I hadn't yet seen a light of passion for some career.  I hadn't grown up poor, even though I had no actual money.  I was an adolescent after all.  However, my lifestyle didn't see anyone around me scraping to make do, which might have provided the motivation to earn a living no matter what I did to achieve it.

My mother's mantra was "get a degree."  She had wanted one, but her parents could only afford to send her brother to university.  I felt that a degree was the least that was expected of me, but in what?  Due to being unhappy at high school, my sole aim was to leave it, not gain high marks because I got high marks naturally, without studying much.  It therefore became a shock that I fell behind in the last two years of school.  Word of advice: when you're too quick, you don't learn to study.  My mistake.  I still did well, but not enough to do anything I would have accepted as a career.  There you go - from squirming baby to choosing a career by age seventeen.  You see, we're set on a path we don't chose, with no real knowledge of the world, and meant to know our passion.  Bravo to anyone who manages that.  There was only one girl in school who had a passion and that was to be an actress.  She worked at it through school and went on to become a well-known Australian actress.  I admire her for her early sense of direction.  Few of us have it so young.

I won't bore you with the details of my university days, dropping out initially and later getting a minor degree at forty years old.  I finally saw what I should have done when I was fifty, but it was too late then.  Nonetheless, it's all a journey.  Lucky are those who find a path that suits them.  I watched my son with complete admiration.  He was a real student, happy at school and he would study hard.  He earned great marks, chose a career and followed it.  The only credit I take for this is that I listened to him and made sure he was happy with his school.

In the end I could not get work at forty after getting a degree that could have provided me with some kind of work.  It was hard getting office work at that age too.  I ended up driving a taxi for fifteen years, felt humbled, but absolutely loved it.  The thing I looked down on gave me the greatest pleasure.

People get a great deal of relevance from their work but then, one day, it stops.  Age will stop them; the company will stop them, or their health will stop them.  That train track carved into our brains from kindergarten will run out.  Given that we've been directed to move forward one way or another from childhood, the end of that track is overwhelming.  When you think about it, something has taken the place of our parents all those years, directing us, channeling us, giving us structure.  My oldest grandson loves the idea of not having to get up and go to school.  He says that I'm lucky.  In a way I am but nor can I start a new life or career.  I could study, but for what purpose?  I can learn on the internet.  Years ago, I filled my days applying for jobs and getting rejected but, at least, I had expectations.  There is absolutely no point in applying for a job at seventy-three years of age, no matter how fit and compos mentis I am.  I still have a future, but there is no structure to it and no expectation.

I now live in the land leisure that younger people dream of and I'm not really enjoying it.  I would love to travel more but I'm not rich and I wonder how long incessant travel would please me anyway.  This is when people with hobbies excel.  The passion has to come from within.  I do love to write, but I don't do it incessantly.  I have to have something to say, and I can wait months to say it.  I'm amazed how many people have podcasts now.  There's an awful lot out there, but I don't listen.  I can't even stand the radio.  I prefer my information quiet.

Perhaps parents and teachers are doing the right thing by directing their children.  Certainly, they must teach them and give them the necessary tools to survive.  We're all just muddling around here on this planet since we emerged from the primal soup.  We've still got a long way to evolve.  My next fear is that we'll hand over the reins of life to AI and our direction will be taken over by a pre-programmed, non-human entity.

END

THE IMPACT OF THE COMMUNICATIONS REVOLUTION - 1990 TO THE PRESENT.

 

To say that the world has undergone a revolution since the 1990's is an understatement and yet for some reason this revolution hasn't yet been given a label, such as in the case of the Industrial Revolution.  Perhaps it is because this revolution has quietly insinuated itself into our lives, been embraced with gusto and left us all slightly dumbstruck, addicted and so engrossed that no one has thought to give it either credit or a name.

Differing from those other two types of revolution, political and orbital revolutions, a cultural revolution can be defined as a dramatic and wide-reaching change and, since 1990, that is exactly what has happened and it has affected every person on the planet.  Back in the eighties a lecturer at the university I was attending told us that the coming era was the Communication Age.  I was studying Media and Communications at the time and yet his statement didn't really hit home as it should have, but then no one could really anticipate the massive changes that were about to take place.

I finished my degree in 1990, just before the internet hit the ground running.  We had computers of course, but, at that stage, no one had access to the internet because it wasn't available in the public domain until 1993, except perhaps to scientists and the military.  My lecturer was obviously up to speed, however, and could see where things were heading.

From the 1960's, evolutions in computers and technology gradually led to computer networks and, progressively, to the internet.  A universal communication standard (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol TCP/IP) was developed to allow networks to communicate with one another.   In 1989-90 Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, a system of linked hypertext documents and pages that could be accessed by a browser, making the internet user-friendly and accessible to the public.  In 1993 CERN put the World Wide Web software into the global domain and the world hasn't been the same since.

By the time I finished my studies, I had heard of the internet and first came across it when visiting an office where my, then, husband worked.  One of his co-workers could access it on his computer as a business tool and I asked to see it.  I don't remember particularly what I saw and Windows wasn't available at the time, so it would probably just have been a lot of uninteresting text and figures.  This was in the early nineties when mobile phones were the size of bricks and certainly weren't smart.  They also didn't have cameras; text messaging was probably the first big advance as they evolved and internet connection a mere dream.

The internet brought a huge change to the way business was done, while creating business opportunities and destroying others as well.  Later on, when social media allowed people to flood the internet with images and opinions, some people became famous simply for promoting themselves online.  They didn't actually have to do anything other than be in your face and have an opinion then ask people to 'follow' them.  What the internet has given us is a much clearer picture of the ratio of intelligent compared to not very intelligent people that exist among the eight billion or so souls inhabiting our planet.

Those eight billion people can now communicate with each other easily and en masse, put forward their opinions and read everyone else's.  In a way it's almost as good as having telepathy and an insight into everyone else's minds.  Apart from the dross and the sheer joy of communicating at will with so many people, the benefits have been huge.  Knowledge previously only accessible through searches in libraries and contained in books is now available instantly simply by using a search engine.  So many fields, including research and medicine, have benefitted from the amount of shared knowledge and speed of access.

The old way to carry out research.

Thinking of how businesses have been affected, consider the publishers of the Encyclopedia Britannica.  Such resources as this have accumulated vast quantities of knowledge on every conceivable subject over decades and set it down in indexed volumes.  The final printed version of the Encyclopedia Britannica was a 32-volume set published in 2010 and cost AU$1,395.  Following that it focused entirely on its online version.  Then along came search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo, to name a few.  Well, I'm sure those very search engines use the Encyclopedia Britannica online version now, and, probably, have to pay a subscription to do so, along with the other sources they access.  There is a free online version of Encyclopedia Britannica that is supported by advertising, but it is limited in scope.  If you want the full version, you need to subscribe.

No matter how many types of businesses suffered incredible upheaval with the arrival of the internet, an enormous number benefitted from it but, even more importantly, people used the internet to create businesses that would flourish on an online, global platform.  The internet created billionaires and is still creating billionaires.

It would be impossible to fully discuss everything that the internet has brought about and all its repercussions.  I'll probably only give a few examples in this post because it is a huge subject.  The internet also shows us that whatever is good in life can, equally, have a bad side but that is true about all things.  Everyone with children worries about screen time and the effect it will have on them, from small children to teenagers.  Having three grandchildren, I've watched firsthand how incredibly well they have taken to technology.  It's really no wonder as their brains are fresh and uncluttered.  It's why they learn language so quickly.  My two eldest grandchildren have i-pads and now laptops for school.  The youngest has an i-pad on which he sits wearing his headphones, playing suitable-for-age and often educational, games.  Their screen time is rationed by their parents.

My granddaughter expertly searches the internet for video art tutorials to learn how to draw.  She's not just glued to the screen; she's using the internet as a resource and educational tool.  She recently showed me a site about what type of marine creatures live at what depths of the ocean, from the surface to where there is no light.  She is nine and she finds lots of things of interest that are designed for people her age.  They're at an age of curiosity and want to learn, not just play computer games.  She also plays interactive games with friends online.  I've very impressed with what's available online for kids to use as resources and to discover the world.

When he was in primary school, my eldest grandchild who is now twelve, used a program on which his school set him math's homework called Mathletics.  Students can access it and do it on their devices without the paper and the mess, then the teacher logs in and marks it there.  Honestly, if I was a seven-year-old again and a fairy godmother came along and told me she would wave her magic wand and create a box that would let me play games, talk to my friends, show me how to do things like draw or build things, teach me, show me movies and places and take pictures, that I could then print, I would think that I had landed the best fairy godmother in the world.  Either that or that a time-traveler had popped into my bedroom from the future.  As I don't believe in fairy godmothers and I'm a logical person, it would have to be a time-traveler.

The internet allied with GPS, Global Positioning System, allows us to navigate in our cars, planes etc.  The GPS can ascertain our position, but will just give points of latitude and longitude, which wouldn't make much sense without a map.  Using an app like Google Maps, map data is downloaded over the internet so that your position can be viewed along with roads, points of interest and directions.  The first GPS apps that were made available for purchase over a decade ago were very expensive.  Now we can just upload them to our phones with little or no cost.

Life is being made easier and easier for us in many ways, thanks to the internet but harder for some in so many other ways.  Cyber security is now a thing.  Hacking is a thing.  Money scams are a thing.  Governments have dedicated cyber security departments because hackers can access military intelligence.  Once, if you were a spy, you needed to be able to access a computer physically or break in somewhere with a mini camera and photograph files.  Now the secrets come in a stream of zeroes and ones on optic fibre.  It's not just the military that has to protect itself online.  Identities can be stolen as well as your money but online banking and paying your bills is wonderful and time saving.  Queuing in banks is something we can all still remember and is one of life's drudges.  The internet has truly been like magic in allowing us to move our money around at light speed without having to walk into a bank.

Because of email, post offices have suffered massive losses as paper mail has decreased, however, online shopping has put life back into these institutions that now have massively increased parcel deliveries thanks to online shopping.  Large department stores have suffered thanks to so many online retailers but are fighting back by offering their goods online as well.  Many have reduced their number of actual stores as a consequence.

IMPLICATIONS:

Children raised past the year 2000 will feel as lost without the internet just as those of us raised with electricity in our homes are at a loss as what to do in a blackout.  We no longer have wood fired stoves and, at night, are used to television and radio to entertain us.  The youth of today have grown up with the internet are used to having information, entertainment and social interaction on demand.  It is stimulating and addictive.  If the internet suddenly ceased to exist in their lives, I believe most would feel thrown into a void, and it is understandable.

What they must learn through parents, older people and educators is how to be self-reliant without the internet in terms of both communication, research and find other interests not allied to being reliant their devices.  How to access information the old way - a physical search through books in libraries.  Books and hard copy of information must always be available.  If all knowledge was only available on the Cloud in the future and we lost access to the internet, humanity would be thrown back into the dark ages.

I have always thought it would be a good idea if children from the age of, say, ten and onwards through their teens were given the chance to attend camps for two weeks every year where they could learn basic and fundamental survival skills.  This would include making fire, growing food and hunting (including preparing raw meat), making shelters, orienteering, finding and purifying water and basic first aid.  These are just a few things that most of us raised in modern times would find difficult to do.  The more children are raised as technology progresses, the less able to fend for themselves our descendants will become should disasters or war destroy our technology.

People born from the late 1940's onwards grew up with television and we have all felt very privileged to have entertainment and information so readily available to us.  Fifty years prior to that there was no phone, no radio or television and later on cars and flight took a few decades to become available to the masses.  Electricity also took decades before it was available in most areas.  Vaccinations and antibiotics were a huge benefit to mankind.  As someone born in 1952, I felt I had really been lucky to be born with access to all these things.

We sailed along quite nicely with these inventions for some decades, not really feeling the need for much else and all the while companies like IBM, Intel and Arpanet were working at progressing computers.  By the 1960's we'd heard about them but didn't imagine that they'd be used by anyone but businesses, universities or researchers.  We couldn't have imagined that they'd become as integral to our homes as our refrigerators.

MINICOMPUTERS AS THEY WERE.

An L5000, an earlier model of a Burroughs minicomputer than the L6000 that I probably worked on.

By the time I dropped out of studying for a Bachelor of Science at University in 1972, computers had moved into the business world.  Some took up an entire room that required constant cooling, but minicomputers were becoming available as I would soon discover.  Post university my parents couldn't stand having me sit around not knowing what to do with myself and they encouraged me to take a course in something that interested me (i.e. that paid).  Nothing did interest me but, due to pressure, I decided to take a Computer Programming Course with the Control Data Company.  This cost money that I was expected to pay off.

I got through this in six months and was employed by Burroughs Ltd., a company that made minicomputers.  I coded accounting packages in Cobol on grid paper in an office (when people were still allowed to smoke at work) before the coding was compiled on another computer somewhere else and returned in holes punched on paper tape in ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange - a computer code that assigns a numerical value to basic English letters, characters, and symbols - that could be fed into the minicomputer to program it.  The computer had no screen or VDU (Visual Display Unit).  Screens have made computers user friendly.  It's like giving them a face, eyes, ears and a mouth.  Interacting with a minicomputer back then was just programming it and then testing if the program worked.  You fed it data then checked the printed output to see if it did what you wanted it to do.

I lasted nine months in this tedium that I decided wasn't living.  I doubted that I ever paid my parents back.  Today's personal computers are compact, have screens and, if you're clever, you can even write programs them.  I can't because I lost interest long ago.  Windows made computers far more user friendly and fun.  I almost wish I'd stuck with programming.  There was money there if I'd become proficient.  I even went back to university and studied Computer Science for one year.  I transferred and did an Arts degree instead.  Honestly, I never did make real money.

People don't really write programs anymore, I'm told.  They make them using Sub-Routines, which are basically pre-existing programs.  When people tell me they work in I.T., I assume they are technical.  In fact, they can be in sales, network administration or installing software or hardware.  No one, anymore, says that they're a programmer, in fact, I don't think most people know what it means.

WHERE IT REALLY COMES FROM.

Undersea cables are the backbone of the global internet.

I have, until recently, laboured under the impression that the internet is mostly brought to us through satellites.  How wrong I was.  It turns out that undersea fibre-optic cables carry approximately 99% of all international internet traffic.  Satellites are used for hard-to-access and remote areas where laying cables is not feasible.  I had previously thought that one of the few useful benefits of the space race was that the internet relied on satellites.  It is interesting to note that undersea cables have been being laid for 170 years.  The first were copper and transmitted telegraph signals.  In the mid-twentieth century coaxial cables carried telephone service, and the first fiber optic cable was laid in 1988.  You live and learn.

A lot of hard work, such as laying all that cable over thousands of miles of ocean, has gone into bringing the internet to people all over the globe.  The foundations were laid years ago and layer upon layer of emerging technologies progressed and combined to give us instant communication and access to more information and knowledge than we could ever possibly absorb.  Billions of people have created their own web pages: everyday people, learned institutions, research entities, governments, media empires, utility providers, banks, your local kindergarten, influencers (a word I simply cannot stand), small and large businesses and lots of people who want to sell you things.  The list is endless.  You name it, it's probably there as well as the so named 'dark web'.

Whatever you think of it and however you use it, the internet has brought something akin to magic into our lives and is a positive addition to our lives.  It definitely has its negatives, but those arise from the use made of it by human beings. 

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TRUTH, LIES, EVIDENCE AND REASONABLE DOUBT: the Mushroom Lunch Murders.

 

Death Cap Mushrooms

Like a lot of people lately, I've been intrigued by the Death Cap Mushroom murders in which three people died and another almost died after they ate a lunch laced with Death Cap Mushrooms in a rural town in Victoria, Australia.  Did a divorced mother of two teenage children deliberately poison four guests as an act of spite towards her ex-husband?  Being a stickler for the facts, I was worried that the jurors would convict a potentially innocent woman.  Perhaps it was just a dreadful accident.  I believe there should be irrefutable evidence in order to justify a conviction.  I remember well the Lindy Chamberlain, ("A dingo took my baby"), case where the zeal of the Northern Territory Police to have her convicted based on their dislike of her religion, her lack of apparent emotion and their just-plain-bloody-mindedness to blame someone, put an innocent woman away for three years before she was exonerated.

As such my mind was open to the possibility of Erin Patterson (the accused mushroom killer's) innocence right up until the verdict, after which I read and heard more about the detective work that led to her conviction and began to believe the law had got it right after all.  There was too much lying by Patterson.  Yes, that could be explained by fear, but other things couldn't.  She had stated she bought the mushrooms she used in the dish from Woolworths and some more from an Asian grocer whom she couldn't remember.  Leongatha, her hometown, has a population of around 5,800 people.  How many Asian grocers do you think it has in order for her to forget which of them it was?

Her mobile 'pinged' off two mobile phone towers in areas where the toxic mushrooms had been listed as having been found by two online sites.  A week later she bought a food dehydrator, which she denies having done even though there were photos on her phone of mushrooms drying in a dehydrator.  She was caught on video at the local dump, dumping the food dehydrator that she didn't have.  The dehydrator was recovered and forensically tested.  Lo and behold, it showed traces of Death Cap Mushroom toxin.  She also had three mobile phones and only gave one to the police.

After learning of all this, the possibility of 'it was a terrible accident', as she had claimed, just didn't add up.  She has been described as intelligent and had also taken and passed an Air Traffic Controller course.  That is a notoriously difficult course, and she completed it.  She has brains and nerve so why, in this age of forensics and the ability for technology to track our movements, did she think she could get away with murder?  And why take the chance of killing four people at once and think you can pass it off as a tragic mistake?  I honestly think Patterson must be extraordinarily arrogant to have underestimated the intelligence of the police and medical professionals in her local community.

How could you actually plan a meal with the intention to kill, prepare it, eat across the table from your victims, who were not even your ex-husband - (the person with whom you had the issue) - making small talk and then praying together?  She had asked them to lunch to discuss her 'cancer diagnosis', which didn't exist, so they must have felt obliged to attend and, like lambs to the slaughter, they did.

The presiding judge in the case gave the jury about five days of instructions to explain what things they should consider, what they should not, and about finding a motive, but my feelings are that Patterson was convicted as much by the pertinent facts as by her character.  She had been correctly portrayed as a liar both during the lead up to the case and in earlier instances in her life.  Her behaviour when her victims fell sick was also incongruous.  She had turned up at the hospital for tests after she was informed that her guests had poisoning and was advised she should also be checked as she had eaten the same meal.  She arrived at the hospital unfazed and, five minutes later signed a document to allow her to leave against hospital staff wishes.  She also showed no concern for two of her ill lunch guests who were just metres away from her in the hospital.  She was setting off red flags that brought her under suspicion and led to the hospital doctor calling the police.

For a clever woman, she wasn't being clever at all.  If she had gone to all the trouble to plan these murders, why try to take out four people at once?  Why didn't she ditch her mobile phone on her travels?  Why didn't she buy a dehydrator months ahead and use it regularly so it didn't arouse suspicion and why ditch it at the local dump where there are security cameras?

She is going to appeal, but the case has been covered by media all over the world.  Getting an unbiased jury at this stage will be difficult if not impossible.  One thing is for sure though, I bet Patterson is never given kitchen duties in prison.

END

THE 'F' WORD - The Pros and Cons of Obscenities.

 THE 'F' WORD.

Image credit: Calvin and Hobbes

It's probably the most used word starting with 'F' in the English language: the 'F' word.  You know the one I mean.  It's so well known that you don't even have to add the next three letters.  It is, by definition, a four-letter word: short words that describe sexual or excretory actions.  I, of course, have no statistics to back up my guess, but if you imagine, in the daily lives of people, the number of stubbed toes, whacked elbows, spilled or dropped anything, missed appointments, phone calls, buses, opportunities et al, and the things someone shouldn't have said but can't take back that cost them their job, promotion or spouse - well, you will no doubt expect that a large percentage of the people who have suffered one of those misfortunes, will have expleted.  (I don't care that 'expleted' is not a verb, I'm making it one.)  They may not have meant to, but it slips out.

I think an expletive is very helpful in the right situation or, rather, the wrong situation, when something bad has happened.  Uttering an expletive when you have done something stupid to yourself, or have had something bad done to you, is probably better than slamming your fist into a wall with frustration or into the face of someone else.  Expletives are a viable means of venting; of letting out intense emotion.  Swearing may well save someone who is upset from suffering a stroke, who knows?

When I decided on the subject for this post, it was because I had become annoyed with the prevalence, and apparent acceptance, by the entertainment media of, in particular, the 'F' word.  It has been tabu on live television since its inception.  Historically, It wasn't heard in the American movies until the 1970's, and on a very few rare occasions in British films earlier.  Little by little, over the years, its use has crept increasingly into films but, lately, it's not just creeping, it's marching boldly into television and streaming productions.

In both movies and television shows, with the exception of live and free to air, it is as if the media are trying to force that word, and similar obscenities, down our throats, and it makes me wonder why.  Are they trying to make it so commonplace as to make it acceptable, to lose its effect, or are they trying to lower our standards, to slacken our moral fibre?  Is it possible that the people who make entertainment in Hollywood and elsewhere overseas, spend their lives spewing profanities instead of other, purpose built and fit for purpose adjectives?  Does someone need to send such producers copies of the Oxford English Dictionary and a Thesaurus?

I am also going to be sexist here.  I know that men don't particularly like women to swear.  It's not about equality, it's about femininity.  Swearing isn't sexy.  I repeat that.  Swearing isn't sexy in conversation.  If you stub your toe, that's okay but if you use a swear word as an adjective, noun or verb in place of something more articulate, you're just trying to fit in, and it shows.  I'm old enough to be really sure about this.  It holds true for all ages of men down to the Millennials.   In groups born later than the latter, the 'F' word will have no more effect than 'bugger' or 'blast'.  Men want to respect women, and they won't respect a woman who doesn't respect herself.  They really don't like them competing with them in the profanity stakes.  Oddly enough, that's for the boys.  They want to be able to impress a woman occasionally by leaving the swear words out of their conversation, and that won't work if she swears like wharfie too.

I know some of you reading this will be guffawing at these sentiments.  You will, I assure you, eventually find out that I am right.  Times do change of course and that's why I take into consideration that Millennials onwards will take no umbrage at the use of the profanities we use these days.  Media producers today, however, do use them to shock and to add an edge to their shows.  I wonder, however, when the dialogue has the actress being as profane as the actor, if the screenwriter has the voice right for the character.  Sometimes it just doesn't work for me.  I sometimes think that when the dialogue doesn't seem right for a character, a male writer is writing female dialogue or, perhaps, it's a Millennial writing the dialogue for a middle-aged actress.

Is it a good, or a bad, thing that the media is force feeding us profanities in fictional shows?  Does it lower the standards of the audience and a younger generation?  Do we want impressionable youth spewing words many of us find offensive thinking it's the norm?  Will it demystify and take the power from these words?  I have personally watched over the decades, as the standard of humanity has deteriorated, and so I would like to see us maintaining a set of standards in relation to certain things in the hope of maintaining certain aspects of civilization.

Words have power.  It's no use pretending that they don't.  "The pen is mightier than the sword", first came to us from English author Edward Lytton in 1839, and has resonated ever since.  We all know words can hurt, especially when coming from people we love, like or admire.  Another old adage is, "Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me".  In truth, they shouldn't be able hurt us as they are but vapour on the wind.  But they can and do hurt.  They can even wound fatally, because of the affect they can have on the mind and emotions of their recipients.

I could go on and on about the power of words, but I don't have to.  Anyone who speaks and negotiates their way in this world using a language, knows how many ways their words can be taken the wrong way, misinterpreted or twisted by other people.  Words, as such, can even be dangerous.  I'm not going so far as to saying swearing is dangerous, but I think you're getting my drift.  It is the way people receive what they hear that must be considered when making an utterance.

At a personal level, I don't appreciate when the media, a very powerful instrument in our society, takes it upon themselves to be the arbiter of our morals.  In my daily dealing with people over the decades, I haven't heard the 'F' word used in conversation even a quarter as much as I hear it in television and movies.  I'm not talking about as an expletive; I'm talking about as an adjective.  I'm prone to letting out the 'F' word more often these days when I suffer a sudden misfortune, but then I chide myself.  That's because it used to not come so quickly to my tongue.  I still find it offensive, and I can't help wondering if I have started using it because the entertainment I ingest is so replete with the word, in even the blandest of entertainment, such as comedies, that it has caused the censors built into my own internal dictionary to accept it as a 'word safe for utterance around children and the general public'.

Basically, my internal dictionary is being subliminally rewired to accept the 'F' word, but the moral code area of my brain does not and will not, accept it.  I will remain true to my set of standards, even if my mouth chooses to let the 'F' word fly occasionally, but I will never, ever use it as an adjective.

END

LET'S HEAR IT FOR DONKEYS and their 7,000 years of service to humans.

Happy Donkeys (DreamCafeArt)

DONKEYS came to my attention recently because they kept popping up on television news reports.  They were neither the reason for the bulletins in which they appeared, nor were they even mentioned, but they were there.  The televised coverage was about people fleeing their homes, their countries and their livelihoods to safety.  Among the mechanized transports carrying people and goods were donkeys, either heavily laden or pulling carts top heavy with goods and people.

Now, I feel terribly for people in such a situation, but my heart really goes out to the donkeys, mules, hinnies or whatever hybrids they are.  They haven't messed up the world, we have, and then we make these poor, innocent beasts carry the weight of our mistakes.

Donkeys are rather overlooked because of the horse, their showier distant relative, whom they branched off from over 7 million years ago.  Horses are to donkeys what supermodels are to the average woman, at least appearance wise.  Horses can be raced, groomed, ridden and sometimes change hands for huge amounts of money.  There are work horses of course, and even horses eaten for meat, but then there are racing thoroughbreds, special breeds of horses, Spanish Riding School horses and so forth.  Nobody gets a donkey to do dressage or spends a fortune breeding them.  They are the unsung darlings of the equine family, uncomplaining and mostly unnoticed in work and in war.  Yes, horses have suffered dreadfully in war, I know that, but you don't see Napoleon sitting on a donkey to have his portrait painted, do you?  No one thinks of a donkey as a majestic beast and yet, they have been of use to us for much longer than horses.  The truth is, however, that Napoleon rode on a mule, not a horse, to cross the Alps.

Paintings of Napoleon crossing the Alps: the idealized version and the actuality.

We've recently seen donkeys carrying people and their goods to safety (or wherever they've been told it's safe - and usually isn't) in the war between Israel and the Hamas/Palestinians.  I include Palestinians in that last statement (although this post isn't about politics) but in the interest of accuracy.  The Palestinians, innocent and complicit alike, are bearing the brunt of this war but I'm sure it's the Palestinians using the donkeys because the Hamas have so many weapons, they can surely afford mechanical transport.  They can also hide in the numerous tunnels they have dug under Gaza and so, don't have to abandon their homes on a laden donkey.

Elsewhere, in other news reports from Sudan, Ethiopia, Syria and Afghanistan, where people are fleeing from war, famine or persecution, you'll see the humble donkey, or its cousins, bearing burdens for humans.  According to my research, which, I've distilled from various sources, the donkey originated in Africa from the African Wild Ass and was domesticated in North-East Africa around 7,000 years ago, 3,000 years before humans domesticated horses.  Donkeys were first used to carry people and goods in Egypt before their reach extended South to Sudan, West to the Sahara, and East to Ethiopia and onwards.

Throughout history they have been of immeasurable assistance to humans in trade that must be carried out by land routes because of their endurance and ability to carry heavy burdens long distances.  They can also be used for milking, raising water, milling, as pets and even rides for tourists.  Sadly, they can also be used for meat.  Approximately 3.5 million donkeys and mules are slaughtered each year for meat worldwide. (Source: Wikipedia)

The first donkeys to arrive in the Americas came on the ships of the second voyage of Christopher Columbus and landed at Hispaniola in 1495. (Source: Wikipedia).  They reached Mexico by 1528 and only reached the United States in 1598.  In 2006 it was estimated that there were approximately 41 million donkeys in the world.  Since then, donkey populations in China, which had the largest population of them, have decreased as well as some other countries, and it would be very difficult to make an accurate assessment of the number presently in the world.

Donkeys have also found their place in fiction, probably the most famous being a toy, Eeyore, in the Winnie the Pooh books.  Poor Eeyore was always depressed and, considering how donkeys are used as beast of burden, I wouldn't be surprised if they were, but I think depression is only experienced by human beings.  Donkeys are generally gentle, tolerant and forbearing.  They are, however, considered stubborn, but that is probably because they tend to 'freeze' in the face of danger, unlike horses that are likely to bolt and flee.  They just have a strong survival instinct. 

Eeyore (Courtesy of Disney)

Like many animals, donkeys have been used in war.  At least they are mostly used as pack animals, not to be ridden into battle, although they have often been in the thick of it.  Probably the best-known instances of donkeys used in war arose from the Gallipoli campaign in Turkey in WWI.  An Australian and a New Zealand soldier, (ANZACS - Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) both became well known for using donkeys to transport wounded soldiers from the front to first-aid stations.  I found it interesting, in my research, to discover the story of the New Zealand soldier, Dick Henderson, a stretcher bearer.  I had heard of the Australian soldier, John Simpson, also a stretcher bearer, and his donkey, 'Simpson's donkey', as it's part of Australian ANZAC folklore.  I am Australian, after all.  Surprisingly, however, I had not heard of our New Zealand counterpart and his donkey.

Dick Henderson, New Zealand stretcher bearer and his donkey and the photo that inspired the painting.

The painting of Dick Henderson and his donkey transporting a wounded soldier, hangs in both Australian and New Zealand museums.  In John Simpson's case, the donkeys were bought ashore to carry water, but Simpson decided to use his to carry less seriously wounded soldiers to safety.  Those with life-threatening head, chest and stomach wounds could not be transported this way.  Simpson is credited with being the first to do this in the campaign.  The poor man died only three weeks after having landed at Gallipoli but had become a familiar sight in that short time transporting the wounded on his donkey and made his mark in history.

Obviously, donkeys and mules were used well before this war and for the same reason, but by the time WWI came around, photo coverage and in the field reporting, brought the animals to the public's attention.

A happier and somewhat less cumbersome task for donkeys and mules is to carry tourists.  Until I researched the animals, I didn't realize how capable they are of withstanding heavy loads.  I don't tolerate animal abuse, but once I knew this, I wasn't so anti their use for taking tourists for rides.  It's a hell of a lot better than being used in the firing lines or eaten once the food runs out.

Recently I found my late parents' photo album of their round-the-world journey and, 'lo and behold, there they were riding donkeys in Greece.  Mules tend to be larger and so I think that they are riding donkeys.

My parents riding donkeys in Greece 1974.

Donkeys, throughout history have been viewed as an inferior beast, possibly because they are servile and tolerant.  Their stubbornness has also made them appear stupid, when really, all they are is hesitant and careful.  A stubborn creature is not stupid, in fact, it knows exactly what it doesn't want to do.  They were, however, typecast early in written history and people's opinion of them hasn't changed much since.

"Donkeys were found in the works of Homer, Aesop and Apuleius, where they were generally portrayed as stupid and stubborn, or servile at best, and generally represented the lower class. They were often contrasted with horses, which were seen as powerful and beautiful." (Source: Wikipedia, Cultural references to donkeys.)

The Jewish religion even adds to this demeaning attitude to the creatures by considering them impure:

"In the Jewish religion, the donkey is not a kosher animal. In the Zohar, it is considered avi avot hatuma i.e. an ultimate impure animal, and doubly "impure", as it is both non-ruminant and non-cloven hoofed." (Source: Wikipedia, Cultural references to donkeys.)

I can't help feeling sorry for the dear creatures for being held in such low regard historically and, at the same time, used ceaselessly for our benefit.  At least by not being considered kosher, they are less in danger of being eaten in some societies.

Donkeys and their kin, asses and mules, have given us colourful analogies based on their perceived characteristics.  Examples of these include 'stubborn as a mule', 'make an ass of yourself' and 'donkey vote' (in which you simply mark your voting preferences 1,2, 3 without giving any thought to the candidates).  These sayings imply that donkeys and their kin are both stubborn and stupid, but that hasn't stop humans using them for all manner of things, and that's because these animals are reliable, capable and strong.  They don't bolt or flee in the face of danger either.  Surprisingly, they don't eat at much as horses either, making them more economical.

 "(Donkeys) need less food than a horse or pony of comparable height and weight, approximately 1.5 percent of body weight per day in dry matter, compared to the 2–2.5 percent consumption rate possible for a horse."  (Source: Wikipedia - Donkey)

Most of the world's donkey population is found in undeveloped countries and used as working and pack animals.  In developed countries where there are fewer of them, they are mostly used as pets and for breeding.  This is the case in the area in which I now live, which is at the edge of suburbia where farms and large acreages begin.  Near to me are a number of hobby farms with various unusual animals from llamas and alpacas to camels and donkeys.  Some of them have open days where children and adults alike can pet and interact with the animals.  Animals such as these are well cared for and a long way from poverty and war zones and it's wonderful to think that there are some creatures in the world being cared for by humans and living their best lives.

END