Male Driving Hormone

An urge to drive is inherent in men with healthy levels of the male driving hormone. Increasingly as a boy reaches teenage years and then approaches 17, he will feel that compulsion to get behind the wheel of a car and put his foot down and go.

Lack of interest is not necessarily a sign of low hormone levels. Video gaming is increasingly realistic and can sometimes be an alternative outlet for this need. But if this isn't the case, medical intervention might be the only hope. An injection in the foot can boost levels immediately and is recommended in severe cases. Behavioural modification is another option - confiscation of bus passes and withdrawal of parental taxiing options can work wonders.

Upgrading Your Dog

Visiting the jam-packed dog beach at Ocean Reef, there were hundreds of cheerful four-legged creatures frolicking in the water and chasing balls. And my close dog friend who is now approaching retirement age of 12 years was among them, looking a little the worse for wear after a tough life working down the mines. And so when she was at one stage surrounded by a couple of identical but younger canines, a thought struck me. Why not substitute our worn and weary one for a more recent model? I quickly ripped the collar off a nearby pooch and swapped it with my dog friend's and the deed was done. We now have a miraculously rejuvenated dog whose age has halved, and who no longer responds to her original name.

The magic healing waters of Ocean Reef Dog Beach have done their trick.

Heatwave - Day 5 Report

Aaaagghhh.

The lounge room warmed from 30 degrees to 33 degrees. Toasty.

Crisis at the Ace Subiaco Cinema yesterday - choc bombs had run out by 4pm. A sure sign of extreme temperatures.

And visiting the Kings Park outdoor cinema this week, it was striking how cool it was in the forest, sitting on the lawn in front of the big screen. In the suburbs, the temperature was 38 degrees and sticky, but picnicking in the park you'd never know we were mid-heatwave. A chill wind came through at times, and people wrapped up to stay warm. Once the film finished and I drove back to the hot suburbs I was shocked to experience a wall of heat when I got out of my car and walked to my front door.

There is research showing forests are cooler than surrounding (natural) areas. In the dappled shade and amongst the trees, pockets of colder air are trapped. And in addition, cities are several degrees warmer than they would be due to the urban heat island effect - artificial surfaces (roads, houses) absorb heat during the day and release it at night.

So there you have it. The solution to staying cool is to live in a forest.

Heatwave - Day 4 Report

The lounge's morning temperature of 30 degrees rose to nearly 33 degrees by 5pm. This is the well-insulated part of the house and I suspect the roofspace is now full of air hotter than sun's corona. So even after the windows are opened up to let in the afternoon sea-breeze, a heat source above the ceiling is sabotaging my cooling efforts.

Note: spider plants can't swim. 

The first garden fatality is confirmed. A spider plant has drowned from over-watering. Although technically my fault, I still blame the heatwave for instilling a paranoia that has led to this regrettable incident in which my plant was left floating in a pot of water for four days.

Last night's rain cooled the air so rapidly it fell from 36 degrees to 29 degrees in one joyous minute.

Heatwave - Day 3 Report

The lounge room warmed from 28 in the morning to 32 in the evening.

The fish pond is simmering away in the intense heat. When I toss ice cubes in, goldfish gather round desperately for a few seconds of cooling comfort being they resume being cooked.

An hour of tennis from 4.45pm in 39 degree heat again failed to kill me, but I did reach a state of exhaustion forcing me to adopt a new style of Statue Tennis with my feet planted to the ground in a shady corner of the court. It was satisfying when a coach came over later and said that all tennis lessons had been cancelled due to their extreme heat policy.

A third column of ants has penetrated the building. Their searches for the iced tea supplies are relentless but they will not vanquish me.

Wembley's Death Valley Theme Park nears opening. A few more cacti in my backyard and we'll be ready for business, and the coach tours will start passing through to experience the furnace-like conditions.

Facebook Friend Rankings

Rank your friends. That's the revolutionary idea I've sold to Facebook for literally $25.60. Watching the Australian Open Tennis, the idea of player rankings is clearly useful not just in sport but in social networks. Imagine how inspired your Facebook friends would be to impress you if they knew a surprise gift or an unexpected hug could improve their ranking. You'd never neglect a distant acquaintance again if they ranked you in their top ten. How much more civil would our society become if all our relationships were classified in this way?

And not only are friends incentivised to be more obsequious, it makes it so much easier when planning party invitations. If you have space for 20, then merely select your top 20.

So simple and yet so stupid. All in one idea.

Heatwave - Day 2 Report

My lounge room is now at 29 degrees, up from 26 degrees this morning.

All plants are still alive, although the third snapdragon flower is looking wilty and scorchy.

Cats are still mobile and lively.

Laughing in the face of the inferno, I played an hour of tennis at 4.30pm. A serious case of beetroot-head meant an early stop and a race to the beach for a cooling swim.

Too long spent staring into the setting sun led to temporary blindness, so the drive home was more exciting than usual, with buses and trucks disappearing into my blind spot on occasion. Reading the speedometer was impossible so I judged my speed based on engine frequency - a technique possible after countless hours on racing video games. The cops will understand if I happen to have passed through any speed cameras.

The backyard ice sculptures still survive proudly on the back lawn, but they are starting to perspire.

Revolutionary Weather Reporting

Weather-nerds take note. I've created a new measurement of heat discomfort called the Luigi-hour. Take a reasonably comfortable temperature of 25 degrees Celsius as a baseline and for each hour during the day, sum the number of degrees above this base. This gives you a cumulative measure of the heat energy hitting you over the day and is more representative than the simplistic measure of a daily maximum and a daily minimum.

The rationale is obvious from today's 24 hour chart above. Although the maximum of 35 degrees was unpleasantly high, it only stayed there momentarily before the sea-breeze saved the day and blew away the heat. This gives today a discomfort rating of 54 Luigi-hours.

Compare that with a sultry day with a low maximum of 30 degrees but with low clouds holding the heat high late into the night. With eleven hours around 30 degrees, that could give you 55 Luigi-hours.

Take note, Bureau of Meteorology.

Approaching Apocalypse

Someone has flicked the switch and Perth's overdue summer hits us tomorrow. The nightmarish forecast goes:

  Mon - 36

  Tues - 37

  Wed - 39

  Thur - 40

  Fri - 40

  Sat - 39

This is how it will affect me, comparing today's scene with next weekend.

This Weekend

*The back lawn's verdant pastures are flourishing with spring flowers still lingering in shady corners and butterflies flitting around lazily. Plants are greener than ever at this time of year after our wettest ever start to summer.

*A fridge fully-laden with fizzy apple juice, iced tea, white wine and mini-cokes.

*I'm feeling relaxed, bursting with energy and keen to tidy up the garden, do odd-jobs around the house.

Next Weekend

*I'll be imprisoned either under a shower or in front of our one and only fan, too hot to move anywhere else
*Mass extinctions will devastate the garden with frazzled survivors barely holding on after being watered twice a day. Blackened, scorched remnants of flowers and insects will litter the ground and a furnace wind will breath fiery death on anything in its reach.

*A barren fridge will contain nothing of interest except my beetroot-red head as I stick it in to cool down. And once it's completely empty I'll live inside it in frigid comfort, sipping hot chocolates to keep my core temperature up.

Writer's Block

It's a sure sign of an uninspired blog or newspaper column when the topic is writer's block. But please forgive me today because I'll be telling you how to overcome it, rather than listing humorously the distractions that hit when you should be sitting at a keyboard. Here is how to get going with creative writing.

1. Write daily. My top tip is to try to commit to write something at least daily. Should you choose to put your thoughts into words less regularly then what'll happen is that you'll forever be waiting for inspiration, looking for a strong idea, waiting for the right mood for writing and waiting for a time when nothing is on tv, nothing is on the radio and you're not in need of a kitchen snack. And it's so easy to defer that writing session till tomorrow and then another day. And a week and a month go past. So with the expectation of daily writing, you'll just get on with it as part of your routine.

2. Observe. What if you don't have anything to say? You should be looking for inspiration every waking minute. A funny incident at work, or an incident at the park when you're walking the dog. Anything out of the ordinary can be noted and used. It helps to write down the idea because it can go and soon as it comes. Once your mind is attuned to this, you can quickly accumulate enough topics.

3. Work it. You're sitting at a keyboard and you still have nothing - don't despair. Half of the time I start to blog without a completely blank mind. I take the first thought that hits me and then expand upon it. I might see a paperclip on the desk and then do some research and see if there's an interesting story behind it. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't but if you approach the topic with gusto and enthusiasm, there's a better chance.

Now go away and write an essay for me.

Completing a Jigsaw Puzzle

Why waste your time using your brain to complete a jigsaw puzzle? I propose a speedier automated approach. The only requirements are electronic scales and a jigsaw database. Then do this:

1. Weigh to the microgram every single piece in your puzzle, and write the weight on the back. 
2. Go to an online jigsaw database* that stores for each puzzle a list of pieces and their weights and their position (e.g. weight = 1.5423g, position = row 16, column 84).
3. Use the weights of your pieces to match pieces in the database, and  place them one by one starting from the top left corner working through the rows till it's complete.


*Such a database does not yet exist, but given that Microsoft management read this blog, they'll soon be starting this project. (Compiling such a database is the type of ill-fated and idiotic project that they typically embark upon only to abandon it after a year or two). 


So your days of having to use your own brain's in-built pattern recognition algorithms will soon be over.

Poverty in Tennis

Become a touring tennis professional and experience a life of poverty and pain.

My goal of entering Junior Wimbledon is still on track, but researching the prize money on the ATP Tour has scared me into not quitting my office job just yet. The chart below shows Australian Open prizemoney, and how many players receive each payout. Although getting beyond the fourth round earns you over $100,000, most will receive a pittance. Bomb out in the qualifying and you'll be living off $2,860 until the next tournament. That's barely enough for an airfare and accommodation and equipment costs. Even reaching the second round is worth only $33,000. You're not going to be able to afford a full-time coach. Your only hope is to be super-hot or incredibly promising, and thus worthy of sponsorship from some company.

Touring the world hitting yellow bouncy things would seem a dream job, but for all save the top 100, it's a lousy decision. It doesn't seem fair when you compare tennis to equally popular sports like football or basketball, with tens of thousands of professionals around the world earning huge amounts, whereas only 100 tennis players can make a living playing full-time. Boo hoo.

Australian Open prize-money 2012. Numbers of recipients are along the bottom.

Summer Coolness

A colleague after a full day in the air con

Summer is so cold. It's not that the weather is unusually mild, the problem is that my office is under attack from powerful air conditioning, incessantly blasting chilled air at our lightly dressed bodies. A few minutes is refreshing, an hour chills our bones and a whole day renders us shivery and mildly hypothermic. Moving around would seem a logical way to warm up but paradoxically it worsens the feeling by increasing the volume of cool air hitting the skin. So staying dead still is recommended.

I refuse to dress warmly on principle, and I'm suffering for it. I can't wait for the autumn to hit.

Yukko

A selection of foodstuffs that are now inside me and my friends. They will be sadly missed.

Cricket Report - Australia v India

Such a thrill to view Australia's demolition of the Indians in the 2nd Test Match in Perth today. Here's how I saw the exciting conclusion from my vantage point in the city, atop St Martin's Tower. Admittedly I couldn't see every last detail of the action from 3 km away but then again I was very busy consuming several plates of canapes and petite fours so cricket wasn't my main concern at the time.

The WACA ground is found by looking for the light-towers in the centre of the shot.

Accidentally using ISO 2000 wasn't too smart. 

Off the Grid

This is the grid I'm not on.

Being intensively secretive, I spend my life avoiding being tracked by the government and corporations. Not only is my name spelt wrongly in this blog (it's unlikely anyone could ever crack the encryption), but one of my main weapons is to pay for everything with cash. It's so convenient to use a credit card to pay for petrol, groceries, everyday shopping. But guess what? Banks and retailers and others can see exactly what you're doing and when. Their databases contain enough information to track your movements around town from one hour to the next. They can look for patterns in your activities and use predictive analytics to assign probabilties to your future purchases.

Even paying with cash is not enough to escape their attention though. Store loyalty cards are a crafty method used to entrap you. You may think that accumulating a few reward points each shop is the supermarket's attempt to reward you for choosing them. Nope. They want to build a profile of your spending patters for their market research. So ditch that rewards card, put away your credit card and come back to the 1950s with me. You'll thank me later.

Multi-tasking at the Cinema

At a Perth Festival film at the Somerville Auditorium this week, I found myself madly multi-tasking and loving it.

Being so busy, I can't afford to devote my precious minutes and seconds to just one activity. Particularly because a scheduling disaster meant that I arrived at 7.48pm, a mere twelve minutes before the film started allowing barely enough time to lay out the picnic rug, pour a glass of bubbly and present various cheeses, grapes and figs on a platter before it was time to pack up and find a deckchair. So by 8pm the film started and I was still sipping on wine, and sampling delicious grapes from my lap. And what's more, I had my iPhone playing a tennis lesson podcast quietly into my ears so when the film was free of dialogue I could switch my focus to a description of forehand technique.

It's tough being busy.

/----------------------0

Note: the symbols above were typed by my cat just now. He's possibly depicting a lump of cheese in the middle of a road.

My Top Six Novels of 2012

We're only a few days into the new year, but I've been totally absorbed by a number of captivating novels since Christmas. I'm in the midst of a reading spree and every spare moment is spent racing through the stories. Here are my top six. I'd highly recommend the top two.

1. The Ill-Made Mute by Cecilia Dart-Thornton - the most poetic, cryptic, imaginative fantasy written since 1843. It's barely intelligible but it doesn't matter because the dense prose is such a joy, each sentence is worth reading on its own.

2.  Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock - a lyrical, deep and moving story of ancient haunted forests inhabited by otherworldly beings

3. Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens. I've not quite finished this one (because it's on someone else's Kindle e-reader), but it's a classic. No need to say more.

4. The Book of Dave by Will Self - a racist London taxi-driver's diary is discovered in coming centuries and revered as a new bible. A cult grows up based on his rants and ravings and mundane life.

5. Hal Spacejock by Simon Haynes - sometime hilarious space opera

6. Dream Park by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes - a virtual reality theme park featuring a murder mystery. Written in the early 1980s it was way ahead of its time, yet scientifically 100% plausible.

Beetroot and Asparagus Salad

Have you ever had a beetroot and asparagus salad. We're running a survey at the moment, investigating individual differences in ability to process these two vegetables. Without being too indelicate, one of them can produce a red colour and one produces a pungent odour in you depending on whether you have the genetic ability to process them or not.

Ant Crushing for Beginners

Do you recognise that distinctive crushed ant smell? Did you know that it acts as a panic signal for other ants? My story begins with an attempt to straighten some driveway paving yesterday. An easy task were it not for the ant colony living underneath those same pavers. Initially a few ants would be leisurely going about their anty business. But once a few climbed onto my feet or hands and I brushed them away, they'd all go crazy. Thousands more would emerge from below and they'd be running madly in all directions. And instead of treating me as a large obstacle they'd have to climb over or go around, they'd actively start biting, latching onto me with their mouth pincers and not letting go despite several flicks. All because of the smell released by one crushed ant which told them they were under attack and needed to repel any nearby threats. This beserker activity would last for several minutes before gradually they'd calm down and I could start work on the pavers again. Next time I shall  find some way to distract them rather than face attack from a thousand tiny suicidal creatures.

Evening Traffic

This isn't mine. It's stolen from http://youhavetostartsomewhere.tumblr.com/

Watch for ten minutes to see Mothra emerge and knock over the middle pylon.

The Staying Chilly Diet

Increased warmth in our lives is increasing our weight. Over the last three decades, houses have got warmer with improved insulation and better heating. And as temperatures increase, the body burns less energy to stay warm. Any increase in environmental temperature from 15 degrees to 28 degrees progressively reduces calories expended. And the replacement of sheets and blankets with the smothering warmth of a doona doesn't help. So there you go. Before you forget go and turn off your heaters, open the windows and put on skimpy clothing. 

Further info

Astrophotography

..as in astronomically bad photography. I didn't have a tripod so this is slightly blurry but you can definitely see Orion's Belt on the left.

Beating the Buffet

New Scientist

A Chinese software engineer has managed to beat the "one bowl, one visit" rule at many buffets, by using architectural principles to stack enormous amounts of food into a tower. He uses carrot sticks to build a framework and then solid walls of cucumber around the outside. This leaves the inside of the tower free to be filled with anything that takes your fancy.

This technique can reach up to 1 metre into the air.

Canine Confrontation

A furry stand-off between the farmer's vicious creature on the left, and our little doggy.

Horned Cow

Staying in Nannup last week, this was my neighbour.

My Top Ten Films of 2011

Having seen 105 films in cinemas last year, I have a long list of contenders for my favourite ten. Whittling them down to the finalists is tricky, but here we go.

10. Hanna - Siaorse Ronan is a young assassin on the run

9. X-Men First Class - the best superhero story of the year

8. No Strings Attached - romantic comedy with Natalie Portman and Ashton Kucher

7. Sucker Punch - amazing visuals

6. Source Code - mind-twisting science fiction storyline

5. True Grit - Coen Brothers western

4. Melancholia - the opening slow-mo sequence is the most memorable four minutes of my entire year

3. Sarah's Key - such a poignant story of the second world war

2. Midnight in Paris - I love both Paris and midnight.

1. Black Swan - saw this twice.

Note that none of the above are 3-D. Although several blockbusters in the extra dimension were moderately enjoyable at the time, they didn't make a lasting impression on me.