Lazy HRM employees try to kill citizens, but fail to do so

Gust & sign that hit Mrs May

HRM's special event signs, made of thin sharp aluminum metal, have holes at top and bottom for a purpose - to secure them safely against gusts of wind turning them into weapons.

But those lazy, idle, useless employees who were supposed to securely tied these signs to trees on Ahern Ave, for "SWITCH DAY", were too damn brain-dead to tie the signs properly top and bottom, despite highly public warnings of possible hurricane winds drifting up to HRM on the weekend,  from a disturbance off Bermuda.

Lazy HRM workers almost cost woman an eye

Result ? Lindsay May, former school board member and wife of former Dartmouth councillor Colin May was hit in the ear by the sharp edge of one sign suddenly swinging up violently in a gust of wind.

I have video-taped the gusts catching these signs to show the speed they achieve.

I unilaterally swung one sign up and out of the way, when I could find no policeman about to set them right.

Lindsay told me,  "I feel okay now - but an inch closer and it would have been my eye that got the force instead of the very tip of my top ear lobe....."

South Mountain BATHOLITH debated by skygods and earthlings

hunka,hunka burnin' lava

One reason why Nova Scotia has such an unique lobster like shape is that its backbone is one immense chunk of highly-erosion-resistant granite, by far the largest chunk on the entire east coast of North America : the famous South Mountain batholith.

A batholith is an giant upwelling of granite-like magma, from deep down below melting its way through the surface rocks.

The South Mountain batholith, which is hundreds of kilometres long is indeed big, but not the biggest in the world - ones on the west coast of North America can be thousands of kilometres long.

Batholiths and thermodynamic laws

Basically batholiths are one enormous rock that erodes about as slow as anything does on earth ; this one in Nova Scotia is about 350 million years old and hardly changed since its birth.

Skygods are People of the First Law (of thermodynamics) and in their understanding of the South Mountain, its surface impression of solidity is in fact just that, an impression.

In fact, they are argue, its solidity is all an illusion. Matter and energy can't be created or destroyed only changed from one form to another ----- and change is easy, even for granite.

Granite can be easily reduced to its constitute atoms and then reduced no further : atoms are the simple, small, easily controllable, harmless "solid" fundamentals of reality : mix and match them and turn granite's atoms into the atoms of silicon oven gloves or concrete or whatever.

Earthlings , as People of the Second Law (of thermodynamics)see the South Mountain totally differently.

They think that its granite is surpassingly solid - one of the most solid objects in the Universe in fact.

But once they divide it into its atoms, they find they are not solid but rather dividable and in fact,  "a waste of space" : tiny busy electrons swirling around the vast distance between them and a tiny heavy nucleus.

But that nucleus isn't solid either : it breaks down into ever smaller sets of Russian dolls and ends up feeling like nothing more than whirling bits of energy.

So mass, it turns out, isn't just convertible into energy : it IS energy , bits of energy whirling about so fast that it gives us mega-sized humans the illusion of weight and solidity.

Energy popping in and out of existence constantly, but always moving slowly,ever slowly, to a totally dispersed state where they will slow down into the Universe's death at near absolute zero temperatures.

(Aka : Entropy).

Skygods: big is dynamic and complex and small is solid, stable and knowable-controllable. Optimism as high as the blue skies themselves.

Earthlings: big is solid and while dynamic is at least a bit knowable-controllable. The small ? mercurial, unknowable, non-solid. Cautious (grounded in what we do know, not what we might know) and skeptical we will ever begin to 'control' reality.

Which side are you on ? Is granite more solid-seeming than atoms or vice versa ........

If RON JOYCE still ran it, rural NS Tim Hortons would have WIFI

Not for RURAL Cdns

It seems, as of this date, that the closest TIM HORTONS to my family home in Seaforth Nova Scotia (the outlet in nearby Porters Lake) isn't going to get WIFI.This is a rural location and I suppose the attitude was "it doesn't really face much fast food 'n' coffee competition, so why offer WIFI to gain and hold customers, if you don't have to ?"

Pity, because while I do think that desktop computers' contribution to national work-related productivity gains has been vastly over-stated, there is no doubt that mobile computing has been a great help  in a country this vast size, in raising the nation's overall productivity.

(Dad texting Mom to say he's gotten the ham and the milk and has he forgotten anything --- and she says "Crikey, I sent you out to a store ten miles away for  baby nappies - don't dare come home without them !")

A  case of a rising tide lifting all boats - in and out of the workplace.

Forget Jesus : what would RON JOYCE do ?

I can't help feeling if rural Nova Scotia-born ( and indeed rural Nova Scotia-retired) Ron Joyce was still running Tim's,  he wouldn't dare let rural Atlantic Canadians gather the impression that Tim's regards them as second-class citizens.

Mobile computing is an extra big help to rural people who must travel much further to get services and who can't afford to waste gas (and warm the planet), by making lots of unnecessary trips.

I might have to start up a petition to Tim's, asking them to treat rural Canadians right, when it comes to delivering WIFI....

'Nasty' Abbott and Howard Florey : told they'd be important from day they were born

the new Howard Florey ?

Reading David Marr's fascinating walkabout through the early years of the next Aussie PM, A. 'Nasty' Abbott, an astute student of that other hard-driving Aussie, Howard Florey, can't help but see similarities in how both men's families deliberately distorted their only son's personality to suit their parental dreams.

Both men were the only spoiled child - the only male child - in a family of girls. From birth they were told constantly they, not the girls, would be somebody--- that they had to be somebody.

Spoil a child and raise up a sociopath....

"At all costs , get there !"

Energy, sharp elbows and "take no prisoners" attitudes got them to the top but left very few, except fellow sociopaths, really liking them.

The lazy but studiously modest Alexander Fleming charmed his way into getting a Nobel Prize and most of the glory for merely discovering penicillin ("to be basically useless as a life-saver") .

Fleming left it to others to work hard (onto death in the case of Martin Henry Dawson) to prove the reverse : that penicillin is in fact the most useful life-saving medicine yet invented (my italics).

One who worked hard to prove up penicillin was Florey - but widespread dislike of Florey led the media (and Fleming and his hospital) to make Alec Fleming the star of this saga.

History isn't done with wannabe DLP leader Nasty Abbott : but I doubt it will be kind.

Both Florey and Abbott had much in their characters to admire but because they were warped from birth by their parents, the bad always seemed to outweigh the good in them, as they obeyed their parents' dictates to succeed at all costs, unceasingly issued to them since before they could even speak.

Spoil a child and ruin a nation.....

Crick's DNA Central Dogma is 80% JUNK, new 'Encode' project intimates

Crick's central Dogma is dead

Crick's simple-minded Central Dogma of DNA : that there is a single physical spot on your chromosome that encodes for bed wetting and for why some men prefer Arsenal instead of Manchester United, has been revealed to be 80% junk by the new ENCODE project.

Yes, a few rare diseases are actually caused by mutations of small physical stretches of your DNA ---- just as the newspapers claim of all diseases and all behaviors.

Poor Crick, after been loved for some many years, is now being kicked to death by his turncoat fans

But most diseases and most behaviors are the result of a complex mix cum muddle of the effects of dozens of genes and hundreds of controller DNA switches all interacting dynamically with the rest of your unique phenotype and with your unique interaction with the external environment --- things like stress, germs, chemicals, childhood falls and dietary deficiencies.

A few people have always argued for the complexity of genetic -phenotype interactions, but most geneticists and about 95% of the general public (with cliche-minded newspaper sub editors leading the charge) have always preferred simple-minded simplicity.

Now overnight, with ENCODE, all these people are now bellowing 'we always knew it wasn't that simple.'

This is largely why I am a Christian - it is so appealing to think that all these lying BSers will have to spend at least a few million years in Limbo for this bold-faced lie, that does cheer my heart so.....

Seaforth Nova Scotia : Surf, Hope for Wildlife, Skunk, and my pen

"our" beach in Seaforth NS

I wrote the first drafts of today's SVE posts out in Seaforth Nova Scotia, my family's home.


(We live in the old parish rectory, next to the church, right across from the community hall cum old school house , on land that was once the oldest farm in the settlement: basically in the centre of the tiny village.)

Growing up, the place was totally obscure, even to Nova Scotians.

But one day in the late 1906, some guys in a beat-up VW with Colorado plates came up to me and my brother Bruce and asked the way to the surf.

Surfing Seaforth

Surf ?

We tried to point the way - back  past Colorado - towards California and Hawaii.

But no, the boys pointed to the big waves in front of our house - how to get down to them.

Our omnipresent big waves - a perennial aspect of our Seaforth we could never stop hearing and seeing - turned out to be what others called "surf".

So for the last 40 years we are a place of pilgrimage for surfers from all over. And an nearby newspeg for lazy reporters seeking an easy sidebar on an upcoming hurricane threat : 'but won't the waves be totally, totally awesome ?!'

Then , more recently, Hope Swinimer came to our village and opened a volunteer-run place to save the lives of injured wildlife.

Cue even more reporters to report on cute (wild) animal alerts.

2000 people came out to Seaforth , to enjoy the Hope for Wildlife open house last week. (Star-of-the-show was a 3 legged skunk called Maxwell.)

We never had skunks in Seaforth till recently: credit global warming...

We got lots of surfers at "our" beach, right in front of the bench where I wrote this paragraph yesterday - thanks to a cover story in the day's local newspaper.

As for skunks -well a family of them lives in my field about 20 metres away from where I write.....

The triumph of natural penicillin : Uncle Tom's Cabin, Mark II

MkII : WWII moral battle over penicillin

Unabashedly I intend my first book, on the unexpected WWII success of the humble little natural penicillin team against the massed forces of artificial penicillin, to be a sentimental work in the full Victorian sense of the word.

110 years before "The Locomotion" , Little Eva Mk I, caused a commotion

Think of it as a new version of Uncle Tom's Cabin, updated 100 years, with Henry Dawson's dying efforts (like that of  Little Eva) moving the unregenerate heart* of Topsy ("John L" Smith) to finally do the world-saving good that only he could do , against the pressures of the Simon Legree-like evil figure of Howard Florey.....

* Hat tip to Jane Tompkins (in her book Sensational Designs) for indirectly suggesting the role of Little Eva for Doctor Dawson.