The first train service disrupted by leaves reminds us that autumn is on the way.

Eddying drain pools tell us the leaves are now successfully clogging the sewers, and winter is near.

These temporary blockages are swiftly removed, making a terrific compost that nurtures the first daffodils of spring, giving us hope that good weather and good times are ahead once more, and then, as the winsome joy of sunshine-halo afternoons begins to fill our hearts, the harbinger of summer floats into our unsuspecting homes.

The summertime harbinger is of course not hayfever, but the first noisy muppet with a stereo in their back garden, banging out a loop of brainless dance tracks.

If humans can’t be considerate towards their next-door neighbours, and indeed, the neighbours a long way down the road, what hope do they have of peacefully sharing the planet?

So when I saw bored and apparently unwashed people sheltering under insalubrious doorways on wet weekends, shouting for trade as they damply failed to shift copies of Socialist Worker magazine, my impressionable mind somehow associated them with my fear of punk. Maybe it was their utilitarian clothes, maybe some of them were socialist punks, it’s too long ago for me to remember accurately, but the punk manifesto was to shock, and it altered the perception of a small boy in Wales. Subsequently he learned, I learned, that the scary punks were mostly exceptionally nice people, but socialism somehow remained stuck with all kinds of negative baggage. Perhaps it was reinforced by the general public repeatedly voting for Conservative governments; I don’t know. It wasn’t until I’d left secondary school that we saw Margaret Thatcher leave 10 Downing Street (and I vividly remember Chris walking into the computer lab, arms aloft, beaming from ear to ear, proclaiming “Maggie’s out!”), yet even then it was another Conservative, John Major, who became PM and then won the 1992 election. 1992 was the first year in which I was eligible to vote in a general election and I didn’t bother, it seemed of no relevance to me.

In 1996, by happy chance, I stumbled onto a TV programme called The Mark Thomas Comedy Product. The blend of self-deprecating humour and sharp social observation (of how we all seem to fail despite our good intentions, and how our elected representatives and corporate leaders fail with far greater regularity and impact) had me enthralled. This was comedy at it’s best – Thomas acting as court jester for the British populace, speaking unsightly and apparently uninteresting truths; using comedy to bring them to virgin ears.

Back then I was still young enough that I really didn’t care about stuffy old politics, but this bloke was talking sense.

I’ve enjoyed many of his programmes since then, and in advance of his current tour he’s released a series of interviews as podcasts. So engaging and engrossing are they, that there’s been nothing else on my iPod for the last week. The topic at hand is the economy, including banking, tax, the credit crunch, the sub prime market, RBS, Northern Rock, corporate tax avoidance, international money movement and many other related things that are, when presented with a pinch of mirth, both interesting and entertaining.

The interviewees are a diverse group of unrelated socio-political campaigners who all share a common vision of “something better than the status quo”, including: Sargon Nissan & Josh Ryan-Collins of the New Economics Foundation, Austin Mitchell MP (Lab), Dr Paulo Dos Santos (lecturer in Economics), Paul Kenny, John Christensen, Prof. Prem Sikka (Essex), Faisal Rahman of the Fair Finance Campaign, Vince Cable MP (LibDem), Nick Dearden of Jubilee Debt Campaign, Richard Brooks, Paul Mason of Newsnight, Nick Hildyard of The Corner House, Prof. Richard Wilkinson (Em. Nott & Hon. UCL) and Gerry Gold of A World To Win.

The podcasts can be downloaded from Mark’s website, or for those with an iPod, free from the iTunes store.

And for a generally interesting read, try http://markthomasinfo.com/. It’s reassuring to know there are people like Mark, and his interviewees out in the world. Socialists really are a heartwarming and idealistic bunch (they’d have to be to survive a right wing Conservative government, followed by a right-of-centre Labour one) and they’re not in the least bit scary.

The shop is on the corner of a T-junction of between two residential streets. Painted around each corner are double yellow lines, a signal to vehicle users that it’s illegal to park there.

Generally it’s dangerous to park on corners because it forces an emerging vehicle into the flow of traffic without visibility of what’s oncoming. In this case the lines are particularly sensible because the shop sells sweets to kids, and essentials to elderly locals, so there are often small or slow pedestrians crossing the road on the corner. People who can’t see over or around cars, and who need space to be able to cross safely.

Many of the shop’s customers however, don’t arrive on foot: they arrive by car. After parking on the yellow lines they nip in and out, taking a few minutes (or longer when there’s a queue), and they’re gone long before any traffic warden wanders by. Even if there is a warden lurking (a rarity), they’re only going to ticket one or two of the hundreds of cars each day that use the convenience of bending the highway code in order to make their day easier (rather than finding a parking space in the already impossibly congested street). So the dangerous practice continues.

The shop knows it happens, but does nothing to stop it. Possibly because they’ve never considered the ethics of their place in the community, or because doing something would put a huge dent in their profits. Perhaps they should refuse to serve customers who park illegally, but there are so many of them that the commercial impact might compromise the shop’s viability (and ironically this would force their local pedestrian customers further away, so they’d have to cross more roads, and would thus be more likely to be in an accident).

But what if a local kid were to get really badly hurt, or worse, as a direct result of convenience shoppers bending the law in this way? It’s unlikely that the shop could be tried for corporate manslaughter. It’s unlikely that the hundreds of dangerously parked convenience shoppers who park there every day would think twice about their involvement in the chain of events. Would the unfortunate driver, who’d been unsighted by all the parked cars bear the brunt of media and social criticism? Would we then stand up and declare that something should have been done, and someone should have said something?

Is there point where companies should be required to carry the social irresponsibilities that their customers shrug off?

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.

President Bush now warns his citizens that they are “in an urgent situation and the consequences will grow worse each day if we do not act.” Bearing in mind the scale of the problem, and the urgency which President Bush describes, I started to wonder if there is a point of no return where he would be advised to declare a state of emergency. When martial law would enforce a period of reflection and allow the economy to steady itself (or allow any shape of rescue bill might to be pushed through, or around the House).

President Bush has previously joked that things would be a lot easier if the USA was a dictatorship, providing he was the dictator. So, just how bad would it have to get, for democracy to be suspended at the core of the capitalist free world?

(Lets not find out, eh?)

The comment comes from Jane, who writes (verbatim):

Can I help you with your spelling, any site which mis-spells as much as you is truly doomed, even foreignors know the difference between your, you’re and what you have written, this country has gone to the dogs, good luck losers

Looking over the server logs, I can see that Jane has visited only this page, before leaving her comment (she arrived via a google search for “phone numbers direct”). Curiously the page Jane read has no incorrect use of “your” (possessive) or “you’re” (accusative) in either the article or the comments… bizarre.

So; flame or intentional irony? If your English skills are up to it, see if you’re able to spot the spelling, grammar and punctuation mistakes cleverly woven into Jane’s missive. If it’s a flame I may have to create a new tag (FOTW) so I can keep track of any similar comments that share its brilliance.

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!]

I watched as the machine-juggling-lady turned to one customer (a large, bearded and eminently recognizable rugby player who regularly commutes) and asked if he’d like milk in his coffee; at which point she stopped herself and commented that of course he didn’t: she knew his order. This got the brain cogs moving (I’m always wondering about how processes work and how they might be improved, disrupted or streamlined). Initially I wondered if face recognition software could help the staff – I discounted that idea because of potential unreliability and cost. I then recalled that Barclaycard have just introduced an RFID based debit card that works when the holder places it near a card reader; I already use the similar Oyster system when in London to pay for my tube journeys, so why not take that one step further and use it for ordering the perfect tasty beverage by placing a reader at the door of the café?

Give the RFID machine a small screen which presents the user with their 3 most common orders and just one machine can automate the process of giving the order, paying for it, receiving change and providing the information necessary to tailor the order to perfection, enabling the members of staff to focus on preparing the drinks during the busiest periods.

Of course… if the ordering and paying can be automated, so can the drinks preparation, and there’s many a machine these days that can make a very good cup of tea, so taking the concept to it’s unavoidable conclusion we must consider that the role of the humans in the shop will become more focused on food preparation, cleaning and general stewardship of the customer space…. after all, the whole point of the shop is that it’s not just a lonely machine on a platform, and the convenience of never again having to scrabble for change in the morning cannot be overlooked.

Some commuters always catch the same train, at the same time, so a time based alarm might do the job, but for anyone with more flexible train usage, and for the times when the train is running late, or cancelled, a simple alarm clock doesn’t cut the mustard. So how about an alarm system that you could configure to go off every time you come within a set distance of a specific point? I’m sure it’s something my GPS phone could no doubt do quite successfully, and it would solve the problem of arriving at the same train station at different times.

A proximity alarm is not the kind of application you could leave running on the phone and just forget, because it would fire every time you got near the station. If you happen to live near the station the alarm would be going off at all times. This could be solved if the alarm were based on a series of way-points. i.e. If you pass near points a, b and c in sequence then the alarm should trigger. This solves the problem of the alarm going off when it’s not necessary. The main problem is that the application still cannot be left running and forgotten because of the battery usage – the Nokia N95 for example, has a good battery and during normal phone usage it lasts well, but the circuitry that does the GPS appears to have a far more significant draw on power than the rest of the device, killing the phone in a matter of hours.

There is, however, a suitable alternative to GPS. Rather than base the alarm on GPS locations, it can be based on cellphone mast IDs. As the commuter moves through the country, the phone detects, and negotiates with different telephone masts. If the alarm system were to be configured to work with masts, then it could work quite successfully without the need for any GPS circuitry to be used.

It’s certainly a less accurate positioning solution than GPS, so the multi-stage trigger for the alarm would be a necessity, but this could be a fairly low-power service because the application would merely have to be woken up whenever a new cell is discovered by the phone, checked for relevance (i.e. does this new cell match an alarm? are any alarms satisfied for triggering?). It’s still not perfect though. What’s needed is a minimal battery solution for that we need to remove the application altogether.

The perfect solution, would remove the need for the phone based application altogether. If the phone company could monitor the phone as it travels between cells, and send an SMS to the phone when the the trigger criteria are met. This solution would work for all phones, even old ones which can’t have applications added to them. No commuter need ever miss their stop again.

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?

Kareem used the web to write about his opinions on secularism and his concerns about what he perceived as religious extremism, political repression and discrimination against women by his law school.

For this “crime” Kareem has been jailed for four years.

Amnesty International have quickly issued a condemnation of the judgment, though Egypt appears disinterested in the opinion of the international community.

Human Rights Watch described the ruling as setting “a chilling precedent in a country where blogs have opened a window for free speech”.

I can only suppose that this will have a negative impact on Egyptian Tourism.

Incidentally, the site freekareem.org is run by people who are religious, and who do not agree with Kareem’s beliefs, but who are committed to upholding his civil liberties and his right to disagree with them.

(via BoingBoing. photo Br0m, remixed under CC license).

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?

High costs result in only the smallest error margins being afforded, so in mitigation, any part of a space mission that can be automated, is automated, and the use of commodity items helps. Whenever possible, human tasks are removed from the equation, but sometimes they’re a necessary part of the machine. There are times when a problem cannot be analysed without having a dynamic flexible and adaptable tool (the human) on board.

The Human within The Machine

The first astronauts (Gagarin, Shepard, Grissom, Titov, etc.) were all military pilots (often test-pilots) shortlisted because of their proven abilities in extreme flight conditions. The Apollo & Soyuz missions that those pilots undertook were real journeys into the unknown, not just testing unknown machinery, but journeys into an unknown environment where their vehicle would behave in uncertain ways.

Such was the success of those missions that journeys into Earth orbit appear to have become fairly routine. The first few Shuttle missions were televised live, but after that, they were relegated to an “and finally…” item on the news, and often not covered at all. The loss of Challenger and it’s seven crew refocused press attention on space travel and the fact that one-shot right-first-time problems can fail catastrophically.

If things do go wrong, the crew needs to be informed and focused, taking in a lot of information, filtering out the irrelevant and acting instinctively. When warnings and malfunctions are day-to-day events, intensive training aids the cognition process, helping complex tasks to become routine; keeping the human a part of the machine focused on the mission, to the exclusion of all else.

Mission Focus, No Deviation

In 2005, we had the opportunity to meet the Commander of Apollo 15, Col. David Scott, when he presented a lecture at the University of Portsmouth. Something occurred during his presentation that was, unintentionally, quite revealing about the astronaut mindset.

Speaking for an hour can be quite hard on the voice, so the university had provided a glass of water.

Midway through explaining something quite complex (he covered things like trans-lunar injection) Col. Scott caught the glass with the back of his hand and it fell from the podium, smashing on the carpeted floor, quietly but audibly.

There was no pause, not even a glance at the debris, not even the slightest break in sentence or paragraph.

Afterwards several of us commented about the glass, one person remarked “it was like it didn’t happen; he knew the it was lost before it hit the ground, so continued without falter”.

Col. Scott was not diverted from his task of delivering the lecture, and as a result, the audience were not diverted in their reception of it, nobody felt embarrassed for him, nobody rushed to clear it up, everything continued at full pace. There was absolutely no deviation.

The Human without The Machine

Singular focus on a goal is beneficial in an otherwise automated one-shot project, but what about afterwards, back on earth? When it’s combined with personal & emotional issues it can result in extreme and startling actions.

Yesterday, an astronaut was arrested at Orlando International Airport and charged with attempting to kidnap a love rival. The suspect had driven 900 miles non-stop from Texas to Florida wearing disposable nappies (to avoid having to stop for a wee). She then donned a wig and trench coat and followed her target to the car park, carrying the following: pepper spray, a BB gun, a steel mallet, a 4-inch folding knife, rubber tubing, rubbish bags and $600 in cash. She’s a married mother of three, and could face a life sentence if convicted.

So it seems nobody’s perfect, not even astronauts. Astronauts do things that would make the rest of us feel clumsy. Astronauts fall in love with the wrong people and go to extreme lengths in order to “just talk to” their love rival. Perhaps the unseen problem of being an astronaut is that you have to keep getting it right even after your last mission. An astronaut is put on a pedestal and expected not to screw up, ever. Right first time, right every time, no deviation.

Wikipedia has some interesting quotes from NASA spokespeople who are stunned and perplexed by the incident.

It’s funny, and although it’s based on the Christian dogma of the holy trinity for its main characters (so far), the humour is delivered with enough brickbat simplicity that anyone can appreciate the gags.

At a time when FOX is taking legal action against YouTube (owned by Google) for distributing it’s copyright content without license (after a user uploaded it) it nice to see the opposite side of the coin – YouTube being used to generate a fan base for a show that may one day get snapped up by the likes of FOX.

[Update: When Em watched the intro to the second episode she had a flash of inspiration. "Oh I want that ringtone!" said she. I've asked Mr. Deity who (obviously speaking through Metatron) said "Yeah, I'm gonna do that soon". Cooool. I've been in places all over the UK where I've heard the CTU ringtone, but having a Mr. Deity alert would slightly up the exclusivity ante.]

[Ringtone Update: Mr. Deity Ringtone now available. ]

Mr. Deity Episode 1: Mr. Deity and the Evil

Mr. Deity Episode 2: Mr. Deity and the Really Big Favor

Mr. Deity Episode 3: Mr. Deity and The Light

Mr. Deity Episode 4: Mr. Deity and the Messages

Episode 5: Mr. Deity and Lucifer

More?

More Mr.Deity at the website: MrDeity.com