The reason this sighting was particularly noteworthy, was that my colleague followed his observation with a prediction: that the PCSO would throw his cigarette butt to the ground. So we watched for a few seconds; each twitch of the arm studied with mounting intrigue. After about 20 seconds, an arm flick was followed by a deft hip-pivot, as the butt was crushed below the sole of his polished black shoe. What he didn’t do next, was bend down and pick it up, it thus became litter.

At a time when other councils are pushing the £75 fine for smoking litter (no matter how young), when some claim they’ve been incorrectly accused of dropping litter, and when people are being chased by all means because of zero tolerance policies, this just seemed wrong.

To be a fair system, there should be one rule for all citizens. Cigarette litter is a huge problem, and the police are not above the law. We could have run down to the car park, taken his number and reported him, but on this occasion we chose to chicken out and “let him off without a caution”. If it happens again we might be more bold and ask him to caution himself.

Tesco however, are being a bit awkward in their latest mission to cloak the facts about the welfare of animals that end up on their shelves and will only take Hugh’s resolution to their AGM if the cost of distributing the relevant papers to their shareholders is met.  They could waive this fee (after all, every little helps) but they have so far refused to do so.

The cost of the distribution is (apparently) £86,888, which sounds a lot, but for a company that made profits of £2.55billion last year, it’s not going to break the bank.  However, shareholders are shareholders and the profits belong to them, so the directors cannot be blamed for not wanting to stump up the cash… can they?

So how to raise £86888 in two days?  Ask nicely, auction your services, and hope.

Bid now, or donate, no matter how small, remember, every little helps.

Update: Wow! Target reached! Next stop the Tesco AGM!

Now, normally the idea of a fair, replete with wicker cutlery and forced vegetables is not my idea of heaven, but factor in the fact that there will also be a multiple spit roast featuring goat, lamb and pig and you may begin to see the attraction. This is not just food: this is organic, free range, spit roasted meat, cooked by one of the countries best chefs, on a summers day, washed down with local scrumpy, and probably some local strawbs for dessert. What could be better?

River Cottage gigs often sell out fast, so this is well worth an early look! [Update: SOLD OUT!]

The customer ahead of me approaches a free till carrying two items: milk, which is in a plastic bottle with an integral handle, and a box of chocolates, which are packaged in a small plastic wrapper. I watch both tills, wondering which will become free first and notice Shopkeeper 1 scan the milk and reach to place it in a plastic bag. The customer has just successfully carried the items to the till without using a basket and interjects cheerily:

Customer: No thanks!

As Shopkeeper 1 proceeds with the payment process the customer joins in the conversation about the plastic bags, obviously aware of the automatic “put everything in a bag” response that has just been avoided, and asks simply:

Customer: Why can’t they be made of paper?
Shopkeeper 1: ’cause they’d get wet with the milk, and besides, it probably costs too much.

The shopkeeper has a salient point, but not all sales are “wet” or cold (which promotes condensation), so a recycled paper product could possibly be used for all sales that are not attractors of moisture.

Customer: but what about the environmental cost?
Shopkeeper 1 (getting very defensive):Don’t ask me I just work here.
Customer: No, I’m not saying the policy of using plastic bags is your fault. I’m asking…
Shopkeeper 1: Look just leave me alone alright?!

Game over.

We’re bombarded with messages about our responsibility to society and the environment, and this reasonable series of questions was met with animosity. A discussion of the shop policy is now impossible because the shopkeeper obviously considers this an unjustified personal attack.

So where is the boundary is between “I just work here”, and “We just live here”? The shopkeeper has abdicated moral responsibility to their employer, but is failing to act as a channel for the concerns of the poor chap in front of me. The employer is driven by money, so if they’re not aware that their customers are concerned about plastic bag usage they’ll keep on using them and not offering an alternative: their staff will stay on autopilot, selling everything from newspapers to cigarettes with a complimentary piece of environmental vandalism.

There’s no such thing as moral abdication. The convenience store was wrong for not providing an ecological alternative, the shopkeeper was wrong for taking it personally and acting like a child, and everyone in the waiting line was wrong for not leaping to the customers defence.

To understand why this is a problem imagine a simple scenario where a customer’s preferred brand of tinned spaghetti is out of stock, it’s no big deal, there are similar products, so the customer can buy a competing brand and may broaden their culinary tastes. In contrast, if the one available eco-brand of detergent sells out, then the shopper must either compromise their morals and use a product that is damaging to the environment, or, have a contingency plan.

The eco-shopper’s contingency plan often works as follows:

1. If you see product X on the shelf, buy two or three times as much of it as you need so you never run out, or,
2. Go to another supermarket (typically using a polluting vehicle) in the hope that they’ll have the product

The second option is not favourable, so the eco-shopper buys in bulk. The problem with this is that it exacerbates the likelihood of the product being out of stock for other eco-shoppers, some of whom then buy other brands because they don’t have the time to be moral guardians (because they just need to clean the house before Aunt Mabel comes to stay).

So the eco-shopper has to balance their own desire to not use “bad products” without causing the supermarket to sell out and thus force others into using them anyway, and thus increasing the apparent demand for non-eco-friendly products. Hopefully this is a problem that will slowly disappear as more environmentally friendly products are released to compete with the established (and legally compliant but less responsible) brand names.

Fingers crossed eh?

Grinding up food before it goes in the compost has two key benefits:

1. It helps the worms to eat the scraps more quickly, because there’s more surface area they can attack it from, this means the composting time is drastically reduced, so there is less compost being made at any one time.
2. The waste can be more easily mixed-in with the existing worm tailings (soil), so flies can’t get at it so easily. If they do lay eggs near it, they’re less likely to become viable maggots if the food source is buried.

The Kitch’n'Komposter therefore seems like a great idea, so:

1. Has anybody seen one?
2. Does anybody own one?
3. Does it work as we might imagine and is it effective?
4. Why can I not buy it anywhere?

Due to a seemingly random series of events, the wiser and more benevolent side of Andy’s internal self has acquiesced with the over inquisitive and but danger-to-itself “curious child” part of his brain and managed to sign the whole of Andy up for the Xtreme Everest expedition; a medical study aiming to see how the human body reacts at altitude.

Expedition

The expedition are hoping to help understand the effect of hypoxia (low blood oxygen) on supposedly healthy adults. This is relevant in the field of intensive care as patients almost universally suffer from hypoxia so understanding how to get more oxygen into people’s bloodstream is how you keep them alive. Or so the doctors on the project say anyway.

The upshot is 3 weeks trekking at altitude, interspersed with tests involving needles, physical jerks, general prodding, putting different shaped blocks in holes (apparently you get stupid at altitude) and whatever other weird things the doctors can dream up.

Carbon Gilt

For some reason, Andy decided that just a single act of (uncharacteristic) philanthropy wasn’t enough and figured that he might as well raise some money for a good cause while he was up there; and decided to offset the guilt of flying long haul to Nepal by choosing a charity dedicated to the environment – namely Friends of the Earth.

He then asked me to “use my colossal internet presence to spread the word and put forth the metaphorical cap of pleading for donations to this cause“. How could I refuse? Donate, donate, donate! Now, now now!

Turn the screw

If anyone thinks of any tests that might inspire the doctors to find inventive, painful or (preferably) embarrassing ways to prod Andy in the name of medical science, do speak up!

I’m wondering if hypoxia affects the time taken for a tongue to become stuck to a frozen metal pole.

What do the petitioners think they are supporting?

The petition subtext highlights that there is already an effective travel tax administered through the cost of fuel: “The more you travel – the more tax you pay” it explains helpfully.

Next it goes for the heart strings, calling the proposed monitoring system “an unfair tax on those who live apart from families” and it pours pity on the “poorer people who will not be able to afford the high monthly costs“.

It rounds off with a stirring and simple plea: “Please Mr Blair – forget about road pricing and concentrate on improving our roads to reduce congestion.”

So that’s:

1. Standing up for poorer people,
2. Reuniting estranged families,
3. Caring for the commuter who’s stuck in congestion.

This is a petition (and therefore a million petitioners) with heart and compassion: it’s very warm and fuzzy, but it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

An Existing and Necessary Tax

The petition calls for road improvement but roads are not created or improved without investment. Funds don’t magically appear at the Dept. for Transport without tax, so the petition is implicit in it’s agreement that a travel tax is necessary, it’s just misguided about the most fair means of delivering it.

As the petition points out there is already an effective tax on travel, through fuel, but it neglects to mention that:

1. Poorer people are already affected by a high travel tax.
2. Families that live apart are already taxed when they travel to see each other.

So the warm and fuzzy words about “poorer people” and “families” obscure the real issue, that the petition is merely opposing is an alternative mechanism for taxation; not an additional tax.

Our Electric Future and the Green Tipping Point

Electric vehicles create less atmospheric pollution and less noise pollution than their combustion engined counterparts. At present, there are large tax incentives for people who switch to electric or hybrid vehicles in the combined form of a reduced road fund license fee, and a reduced need to purchase heavily taxed fuel.

There will hopefully come a time when a green tipping point is reached, where the number of alternatively powered vehicles is large enough that the fuel tax is no longer a viable mechanism for funding road maintenance.

This green tipping point cannot come soon enough, in my opinion, and it’s the reason why an alternative mechanism for travel tax is a necessity. Electric vehicles cannot travel without roads, so a travel tax will still be necessary, however, in urging the Prime Minister to abandon this line of investigation, the petitioners are supporting a taxation system that is becoming obsolete.

Diminishing Returns and Fairer Taxes

In recognizing that revenue from the existing fuel tax will diminish, we must also accept that a government that did not investigate alternative sources of funding should be accused of negligence and short-sighted governance. The government is only a representative of the people, so demanding the cessation of research into those alternatives is short sighted by the people who signed the petition.

An important aspect of a journey-based tax was overlooked in the simple text of the petition and it is this: once travel-tax is decoupled from fuel, it can be applied to the journey and the traveler directly, so if somebody who’s “poorer” is traveling, they may be able to travel at a lower tax rate.

Journeys to and from job interviews could be subject to tax incentives. Journeys during peak times could be charged at a higher rate, meaning those with good jobs who choose to commute in busy times every day would pay more. Family gatherings would end up costing less because they tend not to require peak period travel. In fact, all kinds of journeys could become subject to either incentives or penalties which overall would make travel taxation more fair.

The people who signed the petition didn’t see that – what they saw was an emotive plea that was not backed up by any real consideration for the facts.

Improved Planning

Todays monitoring systems can tell us that n-hundred-thousand vehicles pass a particular point on a particular motorway each day, which is quite useful for road planning. Knowing the entire journey of each of those vehicles will give a far greater insight into where and how specific roads should be improved (through the application of techniques such as Ant Colony Optimisation).

Conclusion: There is No Alternative to Journey-Based Tax

Road usage, and thus, congestion, will continue to increase. Without an improved mechanism of taxation on travel, the gradual switch to electric vehicles will result in reduced funds being available to the DfT for road maintenance. Poorer people will still be taxed as they are today, and families that live far apart will continue to be taxed at the same rate on journeys that take longer as peak time congestion increases because of an overburdened road infrastructure.

Road congestion will not just affect private citizens, the goods vehicles get stuck in jams too, which increases the delivery cost of whatever they’re carrying, which in turn is passed on to the consumer, a few pence added to an expensive item like a TV makes very little difference, but for companies that are hauling basics such as grain, fruit & veg, this puts a significant extra markup on everyday items that “poorer people” cannot afford not to buy.

An alternative journey-based taxation system, could encourage more flexible travel practices by all and enable travel by “poorer people” through targeted tax incentives and journey-based insurance policies. The empirical knowledge of the road network and it’s use would lead to more effective improvements that are targeted at the problems of congestion (rather than the symptoms, which are all that can be monitored by measuring traffic flow and choke points).

So looking at the subtext of the petition again and see how it stacks up:

1. Standing up for poorer people – failed – with high fuel-based taxes they’re no better off when traveling, and with increased freight costs, the basic cost of living will increase.
2. Reuniting estranged families – failed – with high fuel based charges and increasing congestion they’re worse off: it will take longer and thus cost more in fuel to get home.
3. Caring for the commuter who’s stuck in congestion – failed – with increased congestion and high fuel charges they’ll switch to an electric vehicle, but still be stuck in traffic, on a road system that is not properly maintained, so they’re worse off too!

One million people can be wrong. One million people put their name to a solution which only exacerbates the problems that they are hoping to solve.

Update: The Email Campaign & The Anti-Petition

Apparently the one-million mark was passed thanks to an email campaign that (for want of a better description) scare-mongered about the hardware costs for such a system, yet none of the figures suggested were verifiable, or very realistic. Then scare-mongered about the loss of civil liberties that the system might represent.

Looking around the web several people are commenting on the story, some highlight the hardware cost issue. Roo from The Book Garden pondered the foolishness of the whole petition. Conversely Gavin Ayling described it as “proof of a backlash against government misuse of power“, though I think a more realistic description is:

a worrying example of how people can be persuaded to do anything if you push the right emotional buttons and provide them with imbalanced information.

Derren Brown eat your heart out.

Sanity: An anti-petition!

Thankfully, there is some sanity and balance in the world.

Thank you Tim Lewis for starting an anti-petition to the above nonsense. Tim petitions the prime minister; “don’t scrap the planned vehicle tracking and road pricing policy.” His supporting text is rather eloquent, and makes for a far more convincing petition:

Having recently received an email asking me to sign the a petition to scrap the vehicle tracking policy, I’d like to propose the opposite. I strongly feel that driving is a privilege and not a right. There are simply too many cars on the road and too many people making journeys by car when they could simply walk or cycle. Thousands die every year in road accidents and many, like myself, are forced to risk our lives in trying to get to work in a sustainable manner. We are dependent of foreign oil and the wars to secure such resources will only get worse if we don’t curb our driving habits. Driving started off as a freedom but as we’ve redesigned our land around the auto mobile, rather than the pedestrian, it’s become nearly a necessity. It is, however, perfectly possible to live a successful, car-free life. I would like to advocate that this become the norm and if this law helps driving to become even less attractive than it already is, I’m all for it.

I am delighted to sign such a sensible petition.

Other voices…

People are starting to speak up about the road pricing scheme.

1. Paul Kingsnorth takes a more direct route than myself, lambasting the “petrol heads” supposing that “the next thing we know they’ll be campaigning to ban zebra crossings, ambulances and traffic lights on the grounds that they slow them down unacceptably.”
2. Clive Bates has some interesting thoughts on the numbers involved, and discusses why the many counter petitions are at a disadvantage.
3. Richard Dows wonders if the proposed system could help build “a truly worthwhile, cheap, eco-friendly, and on-time national transport grid?“
4. Brendan of the excellent PetrolPrices.org asks If the proposed system is a bad idea then how do you think motoring should be taxed in the future?

The typical geek has carefully selected and purchased their gadgets of choice, has a computer that’s tuned to perfection and needs no software purchased (because their entire suite is open-source) – so aside from comedy tee shirts with clever slogans that can only be understood by other geeks, buying for geeks is difficult, especially if you’re not a geek, because you can’t even understand if the tee is funny or not.

Novelty Gifts

Giving up and buying a novelty-gift is not a good solution, it has negative connotations. Novelty gifts are often made of plastics and are immediately discarded because they tend to look twee and lame next to the 30inch LCD monitor, so if you didn’t have environmental guilt about naff presents before, you will have in future.

Novelties get made, bought, wrapped, presented and then discarded by January 1st. A whole lot of carbons belched into the atmosphere and gallons of oil used for no reason, and they’re often not recyclable because they’re made in a sweatshop backwater that uses chemicals that are banned by most governments. There, guilt, it must be Christmas.

So don’t do it, don’t go naff.

The geek in your life has bigger fish to fry and your gift can help.

Good Gifts

Donating to a geek charity will show that you care, and that, even though you can’t comprehend the strange words they use, you do at least appreciate that what they do is changing the world.

Several worthwhile charitable causes with a technological skew immediately spring to mind…

1. The Wikimedia Foundation – the people who run Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikinews, Wikiquote, Wikibooks (etc!) as a global services (free to use and free of advertising). The Wikimedia foundation have rejected lucrative corporate partnerships in order to preserve their independence and need the financial help of the community to continue to grow.
2. The Electronic Frontier Foundation – who protect the the individual when large firms threaten to trample their rights with with legal bravado, and protect everyone by challenging companies and governments that enforce new laws that restrict rights previously granted to the individual.
3. The Free Software Foundation have a worldwide mission to preserve, protect and promote the freedom to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer software, and to defend the rights of all free software users. If you’ve not heard of the FSF, you might have heard of GNU/Linux, which is part of the free software stable.

I’m sure the geek in your life would appreciate a personalized donation far more than a novelty mouse warmer. If you can think of worthy causes to add to the list (or if you represent a worthy cause that’s not mentioned and happen to have dropped by), respond below.

Kudos must go to the big brains in Essex County Council; their recent decision to switch off street lights between midnight and 5am makes clear economic and ecological sense.

They’ve stated that in some places the lights will have to remain on, but hopefully the continuing commoditization of infrared movement sensors can enable Essex and (more impotantly) other councils to adopt more aggressive energy saving measures in the not too distant future, allowing us to have dark (or at least much dimmer streets) in places where animals aren’t moving.

So, that’s lower council tax, and the ability to see the starry night. Essex house prices just inflated again.

Vermicomposting is remarkably effective, and because we recycle everything else, our weekly rubbish mass for the household usually amounts to a single half-full refuse sack. The added bonus is that the refuse sack is rarely slimey or smelley, because it never has food remains mixed in with it, so if you do throw something away by mistake, it doesn’t come out covered in the remains of what you ate yesterday.

The worm bin we use is an Australian design called a [goog]Can-o-worms[/goog]. We find it particularly effective because it’s designed as a stack of trays. When you first add waste to the can you start just one tray, and when that tray fills up, you can place a second tray onto the top – the worms can then move up to tray two tray when they fancy a change of scene, and over time, as more worms breed, both trays become well populated.

After a while, the second tray also fills up, so the third and final tray is added. The theory is that by the time the third tray reaches capacity, the first tray should be ready for rotation. The tray in the picture above is a perfect example of a tray that’s finished composting. The rotation process typically involves a little sieving in order to separate the rich vermicompost from the worms. Then, once emptied, the tray, and the worms from it, move to the top of the stack and the process continues.

That’s how it’s supposed to happen anyway.

When the worm bin first arrived, it came complete with several hundred worms, but we very quickly realised that there weren’t enough worms and they weren’t eating fast enough. We could have waited for the worms to breed, but impatience can be a virtue too, and we were surprised to find that there are plenty of places on the internet where you can [goog]buy composting worms[/goog] and have them delivered by the regular postman! We immediately added another few hundred nemetodes to the bin and the composting rate increased to a level that balanced with our output.

Recently, we’ve installed a new kitchen, and ramped up the amount of real cooking we’ve been doing. Traditional foods made with fresh locally produced ingredients are healthier, and cheaper than ready meals and take-aways, but they also have a side effect that we should have planned for.

We’re now generating more compostable waste than ever before. Every meal that’s not from a plastic sachet; everything that doesn’t come in a box; everything we now eat, is made of real ingreditents that have to be extracted from natures bio-degradable packaging, and that packaging has to be composted.

The result is the worm bin is full to brimming, and we’re going to have to start throwing compostable food into the waste bin, which we dont’ want to do. We need to somehow turbocharge our vermicomposting efforts, or introduce a longer pipeline so that the worm population can grow and thus, increase it’s throughput.

The most obvious solution that I can see is that we could buy a couple of extra trays for the can-o-worms, but I’ve not seen anywhere that sells individual trays in the UK.

My search will continue, but in the mean time there may be alternative solutions to this minor glitch, so if you’re in posession of any nuggets of turbo-vermicomposting wizdom, please leave them in the little box below and receive the our eternal gratitude (and when I say “our eternal gratitude”, that’s the gratitude of me, Em, and about ten thousand overworked worms).

Whilst posing for photographs afterwards he was attacked by an environmental protestor, brandishing a rather tasty looking gateaux.

It’s common for people who are the victim of such attacks to show horror and indignation. Not so with Dr. Clarkson, who (in addition to surprise) appeared impressed by the audacity of the strike, and immediately commended the quality of the shot, affirming his praise with a cheery thumbs up gesture.

So well done Jeremy for being a good sport, and furthermore well done to the protesters too; an excellent publicity move that will help keep environmental issues at the fore of people’s minds.

Before I continue I should assuage any opinion you may be about to form that I don’t like Clarkson or Top Gear. Top Gear is about the best program on telly on a Sunday night and Clarkson writes and presents good and interesting pieces; which he should do, because he’s very well paid for it.

Dr. Celebrity

Whilst the environmental protestors have valid concerns with the reasons for the award, their action also illustrates a fundamental problem with honourary degrees: the new universities (such as Oxford Brookes) are now fighting with each other in an annual tussle to assimilate famous alumni; but there are not enough worthy people to go around.

Clarkson for example, was proposed because of his “support for excellence in engineering”, yet fundamentally he just presents a show where they drive cars and say whether they like them or not, which is quite often based on whether the car massages the ego’s of the all-male presenting team. Compare this to the Honourary Degree that was awarded during my first graduation ceremony, which went to Helen Sharman OBE, the first British person in space, and you’ll see what I’m hinting at. My bachelors degree was 10 years ago, and the universities are now running out of folk that have really achieved something remarkable, so they’re turning to the fickle world of celebrity.

If the process continues then I have to wonder who our Universities will look to next. Perhaps we’ll soon be applauding Dr. Jade Goody for her services to education, or maybe Victoria Beckham in recognition of her selfless failure to release another record.

Forgive me, but I’d rather no honourary degrees at my next graduation.

On Friday night thirteen people, selected from tens of thousands of applicants, gave up their freedom and entered the Big Brother house, submitting to 24 hour surveillance and a variety of pointless weekly and daily tasks that they must complete in order to earn food credits.

Big Brother shows just how awful people really are: how self-centred and inconsiderate it’s possible to be. It’s not just the contestants on screen that are found wanting; the production company and the voting public come off badly too.

On a one-to-one basis the housemates all manage to function, but as members of society they all seem poorly educated. For example, This morning we were treated to watching a housemate attempt to wash up, he’d awoken before everybody else and proceeded to lament upon their poor sanitation as he “nobly” cleaned up after them. This supposedly well educated man who’s written speeches for senior Conservative Party members, struggled for several minutes, unable to make the sink plug work. This in itself is no bad thing, however, the fact that he left the taps on full bore whilst puzzling with the sink for five minutes, is reprehensible, given the current (almost critically low) reservoir levels following what has been the second driest winter in the last 100 years. Several bonus marks for cleanliness but minus several million for ecological ignorance.

The production company don’t seem to realize any social responsibility, and why should they? They’re making a lot of money out of the current format so without external pressure they have no cause to inject a collective conscience. Big Brother is a potential channel for worthwhile educational content in the weekly tasks, but historically these have had no social merit and have enlightened neither the housemates nor the observing public, they’re merely designed to titillate & embarrass, usually through physical & mental ineptitude. The result is that the conversations largely stagnate after a few weeks and the program becomes a shallow popularity contest.

So the housemates are largely left to their own devices, and their eventual success or vilification is decided by the same people that have made a success of the Crazy Frog ringtone, and music single; people with fickle taste, and just enough expendable cash to waste on text voting.

The saving grace of Big Brother is the Psychology Show, where psychologists, psychiatrists, criminologists, anthropologists, counsellors and medical doctors offer insight into the housemates behaviour and tactics, explaining how and why their actions and reactions are as much predicted by their unconscious animal responses as their own free will.

Personally I’d love to see the psychologists publicly analyse the producers and the voters in as much detail, it might give a fascinating alternative view on the program, and provoke a rethink of it’s content and direction.

The Psychology Show is broadcast Sundays at 9pm, catch it if you can. Big Brother is broadcast most other times, catch it if you must.

This is one such thing, the Eglu, by Omlet. Some call it the iMac for chickens.

Some call it really rather expensive (at a shade under £400 for the whole thing, including 2 live animals, but without hard disk). Some, however, factor in the cost of 6 free range eggs and quickly realize that it’s not such a bad deal after all. With the added bonus that chickens aren’t chicken, and will stand up to the local cat population, they make a rather interesting guardian of the garden.

Granted the more practically minded among us could build a chicken coop, but could we build one that looked like an iMac? (At this point I’ve seriously started to consider looking on [goog]ebay for a second hand iMac[/goog] that I could strip the innards out of, but anything I could make wouldn’t have the handy litter tray.)

I want one. I’m not going to get one until I’ve had a good read about chickens to see if I’d actually be a suitable owner; but these seem way more sensible than a puppy because they don’t need walking and their waste makes good compost, oh, and they lay eggs.