February 2005 Archives

Centrelink have quietly "re-organised" by firing and moving staff into specialised units, and away from local branches. This is a move that makes life more difficult for people subsisting on a Disability Support Pension. Instead of going to your local branch of Centrelink to show your rent receipts and bank statements, if you are disabled, then you must travel to a specialised unit in a distant suburb. If you're not disabled, the your local branch is just fine, no extra hurdles for you. In my case, when I was sick from the ciguatera fish poisoning, I was being threatened with breach of contract because I was unable to walk the four blocks to my local Centrelink branch. Due to the astonishing computer problems and uncaring policy within Centrelink, I was forced into many letters and phone calls to correct wrongly entered information and outrageously bad calculations. Centrelink imagined I owned a house, or had full-time work, or any sort of fantasy that could cut me off. Always, the only thing that would cut past the psychological problems that Centrelink staff have with talking to people over the phone, was to speak with them in person. In person, they couldn't cling hold to their belief that I was some kind of fake, and they could see my documentation, and were forced to accept the reality of my words. Over the phone, deniability and flippancy is the rule. On paper, fantasy is the rule. So now disabled people are being forced to travel for the convenience of an arbitrary "restructuring" that has been accomplished as an excuse to fire hundreds of Centrelink officers from each branch. If I visit my local branch in person, now that a four block walk is relatively easy again, I will just get their sole receptionist, who will then send my documents into the maze at the specialist unit, where it is guaranteed to be misread, wrongly entered into the computer system, and not be available to anybody I speak to or write to about problems of fact. The software Centrelink uses cannot get simple arithmetic correct. In my last encounter, I amazed them by using a spreadsheet to show all of my finacial information and what my payments had been and what they should have been. Spreadsheet technology is more than twenty years old. I've asked Centrelink staff at the call centre, the specialist unit, and at Centrelink Customer Relations about the change in the way disabled people are treated, and they are not allowed to comment, or don't know. Shortly the criteria for eligibility for the Disability Support Pension is going to be HALVED from being judged by a doctor to be able to work thirty hours a week without harm, to judgement by a clerk that you are cablable of working fifteen hours a week. They will want proof that there will be any harm, yet they have demonstrated that they don't accept any kind of proof, until you're dead. There are no more Commonwealth Medical Officers anymore, the Centrelink clerks get to make a medical judgement on how much work will hospitalize you. You don't get to say "no" to being damaged if it won't kill you outright. I have had medical certificates rejected by Centrelink clerks. The whole point of a medical certificate is that it is written by a certified medical doctor who has his phone number and address printed on the letter-head. This is so that anybody presented with the medical certificate can contact the doctor and question them about what the doctor has written. Its a simple system that lets people check the validity of a claim of illness or injury. Yet Centrelink staff have continuously made judgements, including rejecting medical certificates, without making any efforts to contact the doctor at all. A Rally to protest at the dysfunctional way that Centrelink is being run is being planned for 2005 at The Artful Dodger During my problems with incompetence at Centrelink, I have benefited from good advice and help from Welfare Rights Australia and The Commonwealth Ombudsman's Office. I highly recommend giving them a call or writing them a letter if you're having Centrelink problems. Trust me, you WILL have problems under the new "Work 'till you drop" scheme.

A University of Melbourne researcher, Dr Marie Pirotta conducted clinical trials on 235 women, using "active probiotic" yoghurt treatment for vaginal and oral thrush. Despite being the most popular prescription for thrush; yoghurt doesn't work. The yoghurt contained Lactobacillus acidophilus bacterium. Oral thrush is a common side-effect of taking powder based asthma inhaler drugs. As a scientist who uses an asthma inhaler, I had attacks of oral thrush, and also found that yoghurt doesn't work. However, in a lateral step, I looked at the reported anti-bacterial, anti-fungal properties of humble tea tree oil, and decided to test them out on myself. Tea tree oil is an extract of the Australian shrub Melaleuca alternifolia which has been in use by the Aboriginal peoples of Australia for centuries to treat many different conditions. I bought some tea tree oil based toothpaste from a health food shop, and discovered that it totally wiped out the oral thrush. So tea tree oil based toothpaste, in a sample of one, namely, me; works every time to keep away oral thrush after I use my asthma inhaler. Tea tree oil has been tested in the labs against vaginal thrush since the 1960's. The problem is to have it dilute enough form, because it can cause severe burning sensations if its too concentrated. Herbalists sell pessaries filled with a tea tree oil infusion, and tiny diluted amounts can be applied to tampons by hand. Just be warned that if you do it yourself rather than buy an over-the-counter product, you may be in danger of severe pain from the tea tree oil. References: Yoghurt no answer to thrush (press release) AIDSmap|Tea Tree Oil (many good paper references) Photo from the Australian National Botanical Gardens

Nanotechnology from the University of Toronto can be dissolved in paint and sprayed on surfaces to let them see in the dark. Tiny particles harvest the suns invisible rays and convert infrared light into electricity. The quantum dots are semiconductor crystals measuring nanometres across, so they can be dispersed in a solvent, just like paint. The crystals are just eight carbon atoms strung together in a chain. The solution could be used to make cheap digital cameras that can see in the dark, and heat sensors on every surface to warn against fire. Solar cells could be sprayed onto flexible surfaces such as clothing so you could recharge your phone by putting it in your pocket. Because the particles can be dissolved in solution, very cheap mass production techniques can be used. Its estimated that when the infrared sensitive solar cells are combined with visible light solar cells, they will be able to convert five times more sunlight into electricity. References: Press Release from Professor Edward H. Sargen, University of Toronto
Solution-processed PbS quantum dot infrared photodetectors and photovoltaics (Nature) A nanometer-level microscope image of quantum dots, similar to that used to make the infrared detectors. You are looking at individual columns of lead and sulfur atoms bonded together.

MP3

I went to an Australian Skeptics dinner night where Lynne Kelly performed a magic act where she challenged the audience to consider the emotional as well as the intellectual reasons for people’s supernatural beliefs. She published a book last year called "A Skeptics Guide to the Paranormal".

Lynne went on to explain about her experience of Night Terrors, a kind of vivid hallucination that some people experience just before falling asleep or just after waking. Its a very real experience, and not anything at all like a dream. In fact its almost more vivid than real life. When you dream normally, your body is paralysed so that you don't act out your dreams. If you wake up while your body is still paralysed, its a frightening experience called "sleep paralysis". People experiencing "sleep paralysis", often have a strong feeling that there somebody or something in the room that shouldn't be there. Researchers believe that a combination of Night Terrors and Sleep Paralysis may be the cause of people's experiences of alien abduction, and visits by night-time demons and ghosts. Lynne explained that she had experienced large spiders jumping onto the bed, and she has taken that frightening experience and embraced it; by studying spiders and using spider decorations and jewelery. She's now a "friend of the spider".

She explained that people who experience Night Terrors are labelled in psychology as a “fantasy prone personality” - FPP and make up about five percent of the population. She asked everyone who had ever experienced the Night Terror halluncinations to stand up, and I was one of them.

Apparently Lynne expected a number of us to stand up, but I’m the first person she has met who has also seen the big spider that she's been "visited" by, and knows exactly how real the experience feels.
The textbooks say that the ‘fantasy prone personality,’ represent a diverse group of naturally imaginative and visionary individuals.
Josephine Hilgard and other researchers have found that some people have particularly rich inner fantasy lives and cultivate a lifetime of vivid imagery experience corresponding to an openness to unusual experience, extraordinary memory in many cases, capacity for intense concentration, sharp sensory acuity, and unusually strong somatic or bodily responses to mental imagery -such as response to placebos.

Thats me. I discovered at an early age that I could hypnotise myself and others fairly easily.

I use mental imagery to provoke bodily responses all the time, to deal with all the symptoms my illnesses have thrown up at me. I have a limited ability to affect pain and itching and other unpleasant symptoms in my body, using mental imagery as a kind of “graphic user interface” of the autonomic nervous system. I’ve been able to help other people’s pains to improve, by sharing my imagery and a form of strong hypnotic suggestion when pain-relieving drugs weren’t to hand.
I also use mental imagery to help me remember things by imagining a glow around something hot, or dangerous, or dirty in the building. I don’t hallucinate and see things as real as a Night Terror, but I can see enough of my imaginary “tag”, to constantly be reminded.
On the “Big Brother” reality TV show last year, one of the men in the house chopped up some chilli peppers, and then later touched his genitals without remembering to wash his hands first. He was punished with an intensely painful burning sensation from the remains of the chilli juice on his hands. I was really surprized that he would forget and make that mistake. As Fantasy Prone Person, I would have visualized a “tag” of a red glow to remind me, and even if I suffered his absent-minded moment and forgot, when I next went to use my hands, the pretend “red glow” would still be there to remind me.
This kind of deliberate mental imagery gives you the gift of easy rehearsal. This gives Fantasy Prone People an uncanny “beginner’s luck” because they have already rehearsed and internalised a new skill before they try it.

I caught the end of a documentary once that suggested that shamans and story-tellers from the earliest times of human pre-history were “fantasy-prone personalities” who were able to hypnotise themselves to induce a trance. With the skill of entrancing oneself comes the ability to entrance others. The documentary showed a shaman in Africa who the anthropologist speculated was performing in a close way to the shamans of our ancestors. They pointed out that ancient cave painting from around the world accord with the dot and grid pattern of “tiny sparks in everything” that the shamans describe. This pattern also matches the physical structure, they suggest, of the visual cortex itself. Therefore the shamans were experiencing the visual cortex of their brains more directly than most humans.
Fran Stalling is part of the Healing Story alliance, a group dedicated to the therapeutic use of storytelling. She says: “Both hypnosis and storytelling require a setting which fosters good concentration. People must be comfortable enough to relax, and there should be a minimum of distractions. However, even when the audience sits on creaky bleachers in the hot sun and jackhammers pound across the street, as happened at one unlucky outdoor festival, certain powerful stories can still conjure a wall of silence within which the magic happens.”

"Neuro-linguistic programming” is a story telling and visualisation method of hypnosis. The idea is that you can apply light suggestions in a light trance by capturing and leading the imagination, as you tell a story rich in metaphor.

Ten percent of people are resistant to the trance state and are not able to learn to be hypnotised easily.

I've experienced full-on blood-running-down-the-walls ghost haunting, but I was secure in my knowledge that because I was in bed, and I'd turned out the light to sleep, that I was probably just having a Night Terror. I decided I felt lucky, and sat back and enjoyed the special effects.

My way of coping with Night Terrors when they do produce anxiety, is to immediately switch on a bedside light. This breaks the trance, and restores you to normal waking consciousness. The hallucinations usually vanish. From EEG sleep research, Night Terrors seem to be a combination of waking and dreaming brainwaves, overlapping. Light entering your eyes immediately changes your brainwaves. This is the basis of the UTS Mindswitch, which allows you to switch electronic equipment on and off by opening and closing your eyes, and then just by thinking. With Night Terror hallucinations, pointing your finger at them and making a shooting gesture, can also dispell the illusory demons, in my experience. And, because I've suggested it, this should also now work, for you!

I spent Monday with Carl and Lillian visiting Taronga Zoo and Balmoral beach. These pictures were taken with my snazzy new Aiptek Pocket DV5300 digital camera.

A big thanks to Steve and Mary-Ellen and Emma! Steve can be found at Dry Valley Nurseries in Kelowna, where he grows drought-resistant plants.

I have some little ASF videos from the zoo to post as well, but I'm planning to edit them a little first, when I get the software happening.

The Sydney Opera House, 16 seconds of the Opera House from the ferry (1.2Meg video)	The view from the ferry. 16 seconds of Sydney by Ferry (1.2Meg video)
Lillian	Lillian and Carl, with his giant 11 megapixel camera.
Wallaby	The Koalas were being put to work in several locations around the zoo.
Night Skink Staring Contest

Balmoral beach

I've been playing with CafePress Perversion for Profit, what else would be suitable to put on a thong? If only there were an Australian based site that would provide the same easy interface for printing designs onto a web based shop, it would be much cheaper to do your own. The problem is the cost of shipping from the USA to Australia is just too much. I don't expect lots of people to buy stuff, but its a lot of fun designing things.

UFO Area have my Time Travel article! Its also quoted in its entirety by CyberMax in Romania, and Fiction & Future
I wrote this in 1996 for the Sydney Futurian Science Fiction Society.

Time Travel: or the Possibility of Global Causality Violation
by Ian Woolf

"God cannot effect that anything which is past should not have been, it is more impossible than raising the dead" - Thomas Aquinas.

The biggest problem facing time travel is paradoxes. One way of avoiding them is to travel only on a one-way trip to the future.

Relativistic time dilation has been a standard item in physics since Einstein demonstrated in 1905 that as an object approached the speed of light, the time in its frame of reference would slow down or dilate. This demonstrates that space travel is time travel. Time dilation was verified in 1971 with speeding clock by Hafele and Keating using a jet.

Calling on general relativity, it has been demonstrated that time moves at a slower rate near gravity sources. This was demonstrated with clocks synchronized on Earth and then flown in satellites and aircraft. Even the difference between tall buildings and tunnels can be detected, tiny though it is.

Thus travelling near a black hole will slow down your local time rate, allowing you to travel one-way to the far future. Both these techniques have been widely used in science fiction.

Another method is suspended animation of the cold sleep, or stasis variety. Which have been used for one-way trips since Rip Van Winkle and HG Wells "The Sleeper Wakes", to Vernor Vinge's "Across Realtime", where stasis bubbles are global weapons and devices for travelling to the future.

Real time travel means going back in time. Most people won't settle for less than going to the future and coming back to the present again. Which means travelling to the past.

However an object appearing in the past violates the physical law of Conservation of Matter and Energy, regardless of the balance evening out some time in the future.

This means that time travel into the past is impossible by current physics, but that doesn't necessarily stop us altogether. No conservation laws are broken if we can only observe the past with our time machine.

In 1905 a story has a telescope that focuses light from Earth reflected by distant planets in "The time reflector".

In 1904 Jean Delaire wrote "Around a distant star" where he has a spaceship travelling Faster Than Light across 2000 light years. They turn their telescopes to Earth to watch Jesus in Galilee. John Wyndham wroter "Pawley's Peepholes", where people in the future put in a ghostly tourist presence in a town and annoy the townspeople into retaliation.

Asimov's "The Dead Past" shows that viewing the past means the end of privacy, for if you can view 1000 years ago, you can just as easily view 5 minutes ago. Michael Moorcocks "Dancers at the End of Time" has time travellors caught because they cannot travel back, so they live in "menageries" as pets of the all-powerful Dancers.

The "Morphail effect" allowing jumps forward in time only. Einstein's relativity of simultaneity states that once you travel faster than light, you are travelling into the past according to some observers, and that therefore an FTL traveller can return before he leaves.

As recorded in the limerick: There was a young lady called Bright Who travelled much faster than light she travelled one day, in a relative way, -- and returned home the previous night! This prediction is what worried many physicists about the announcement in April 1996 and more recently in June 2000 of photons travelling faster than light in a laboratory experiment.

However, its is now thought that the observers who see you travelling into the past are seeing an illusion, and that there are other observers who will see you also travelling into the future.

Science marches on, and it is possible that at some time a new physics may get around the Law of conservation of energy violation, but travel backwards is still fraught with difficulties.

Changing the past is dangerous. "The main purpose of time travel is to change the past; and the prime danger is that the Traveler might change the past." -- Larry Niven Hopefully your time machine will deposit you at a different place to where you started, so that you don't try to occupy the same space and explode.

Ray Bradbury's "Sound of Thunder" is a warning of the consequences of changing the past, and the earliest use of the butterfly effect.

A time traveller accidentally steps on a Triassic butterfly and changes the results of an election in his own time. This view is where the travellers are the only people aware of any change, protected by being outside of time when history changes. In "The Brooklyn Project" by William Tenn (1948), nobody notices the changes, because their memories are altered as the past is changed.

The reader watches the experimenters cycle through major and amusing changes, completely oblivious that their experiment has had a result. In "The Man from When" by Dannie Plachta a time traveller from the future reveals that the energy reuired to send him back destroyed the earth of his day, and he has travelled back a total of eighteen minutes. Saul-Paul Sirag suggests that the first time machines will have bugs that will create, unintentially, a series of wrinkles or weirdnesses in the time-flow, which rolling backwards will create the "occult" events that attracted many intelligent people in the late 60's and early 70's. "General relativity suggests that if we construct a sufficiently large rotating cylinder, we create a time machine", says Frank Tipler.

By spinning a body of ultra-dense matter until the space-time continuum gives way in disgust..This requires vast amounts of energy, and lots of superdense matter travelling at near-light speeds.

In the late 1980's Kip Thorne of Caltech conceived of a "wormhole" consisting of a pair of connected black holes, creating a tunnel held open by exotic matter. The tunnel's "mouth's" could, in theory be open to different times. Stephen Hawking ruled this out as a time machine because radiation would loop around and around the wormhole doubling its strength each time until it was destroyed by "boiling away". However, the Febuary 1995 issue of New Scientist reports that Li-Xin of the Chinese Centre of Advanced Science and Technology in Beijing has calculated a work-around to avoid the energy build up, using mirrors and relativity. Li's working time machine requires two wormhole mouths each about 10 kilometres in diameter. Li adds a perfectly reflecting sphere, about the same size as each mouth, between the two and exactly on a line joining their centres.

The wormhole mouths would then be moved close to, but not touching the mirror(Physical Review D, vl 50, p R6037). Any radiation leaking from one wormhole mouth into the tunnel itself will be reflected away into the Universe at large, harmlesly. The mirror would have to be a perfect reflector of every type of radiation, but any civilsation able to build wormholes should find this easy.

Whatever the practicalities, it appears that there are situtations described by Einstein's equations, under which stable time machines can exist. To me this suggests that General relativity is due for replacement. Very strange possibilities are opened up, as closed causal loops become possible. Imagine the following: One morning I come into my lab. At 11:59 a small two-minute time machine appears on the bench. To test it, I set it to jump back two minutes at 12:01. At 12:01 it disappears.

Nothing is actually moving, there is simply a circular loop.

According to quantum mechanics empty space seethes with liitle matter-antimatter loops. Energy, carried by a photon can be briefly conveted to mass, then reconverted back to energy. At any one point, one might have an electron and a positron emerging out of nothing, only to bump into each other and disappear. Positrons are sometimes thought of as electrons that travel backwards in time. Positrons have the same mass, spin, size, etc as an electron.

The only difference is that electrons have negative charge, and positrons a positive charge.

Whenever they meet up they disappear in a flash of light, this is called mutual annihilation.

The other side of the coin is that when you create an electron out of nothing, you also create a positron at the same time. This process is called pair production. Robert Heinlein wrote the two definitive closed causal loop stories "All you Zombies" and "By his bootstraps".

In the first, a man is able via time time travel and a sex change to be his own mother, his own father, and his own daughter. In the second, a man meets interacts with many future and past selves going over the same experiences from a different perspective each time.

Backwards living is best expressed in Phillip K. Dick's "A little something for us Tempunauts" and "Counter Clock World". People are disinterred from the cemetary and live their lives backwards to the womb. This was also the subject of an award-winning episode of the TV series "Red Dwarf". Unfortunately anyone attempting this in a universe with foward time-flow like ours, will become antimatter and explode.

The biggest problem with time travel is that it leads to physical paradoxes, to contradictions in the fabric of reality. The major example being the Grandfather Paradox, which is about travelling into the past and smothering your grandfather in his cradle.

This results in you never being born and so never travelling back to kill him. Therefore you are born and do kill him. If you kill him then you don't.

Thus he is both dead and alive. Changing the past is full of Grandfather paradoxes. Seeing the future and then changing the present is just as bad. If one travels to the future, or sees in the future that a big war is coming, so you return to the present to prevent it.

Thus the war never happens, so there was no evidence of war for your earlier self to find. When he appears, he finds nothing and gives no warning, so the war does happen.

Another Grandfather paradox. One way of resolving the paradoxes is the proposal that travel sideways in time to alternative universes is what happens when you attempt time travel.

Many authors have explored the theme of alternative histories, however this isn't really time travel. The other solution is that the Universe has a law of Conservation of Reality that prevents global causality violation on any but a small scale.

In Isaac Asimov's classic "The endochronic properties of resublimated thiotimoline" a new chemical powder dissolves BEFORE the water is added, acting on future knowledge. After lots of clever ideas are explored, then scientists try to fool the powder by not adding water after it dissolves.

A Conservation of Events is invoked, and a tidal wave ensures that the dissolved powder gets wet on schedule. Many authors have invoked a law of Conservation of Events to heal breaks in time, for instance in Fritz Leiber's "Change War" stories. A soldier tries to prevent a man's death by gunshot, and when he finally succeeds, a small meteorite speeds through the window and kills him with a bullet-sized hole in the head.

Thus paradoxes get resolved. Kill your grandfather and you will likely take his place, after all you're already carrying his genes, and you're now an extra on the stage of history. In Michael Moorcock's "Behold the man" a time traveller visiting Jesus Christ becomes forced to impersonate him. Larry Niven pointed out that the end result of such smoothings by every Tom, Dick and Harry time travelling meddler, would be a universe in which no time machine was ever invented. Thus he propounds Niven's Law of Time Travel which states that in any Universe where time travel is possible, it will never be invented.

References:
Great mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition by Ed Regis
"Time Travel: its all done with smoke and mirrors" by John Gribbin, New Scientist 4 February 1995
Profiles of the Future by Arthur C. Clarke
The Theory and practice of Time travel by Larry Niven, All the Myriad Ways 1971
Cosmic Trigger by Robert Anton Wilson
The fourth dimension and how to get there by Rudy Rucker
The Visual Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction edited by Brian Ash.

I've found DirCaster will work on the UTS blog host, so I have an XML feed for my MP3 content at last. I'm slowly transcoding my ASF sound files to MP3. I will eventually hack the code so that I can create an ASF XML feed as well, for those people who can listen to that faster downloading codec. My MP3 XML feed

Chicken Computer Chips Recycle some waste chicken feathers and some soy oil, and you can make a circuit board that is better than industry standard.

The other night I thought I'd settle for sure if I could remove the loudly whining fan on my PII cpu, and thus remove a source of pain. I found that the fan is integral to the CPU housing, so no luck. When I put everything back together and switched on, I found that there was no mouse pointer in Windows 2000. My keyboard wasn't working, either, although the lights had flashed appropriately when the PC booted up, and hitting a key helped Windows start up. In fact Windows was registering every single piece of hardware from the floppy disc controller on through the serial ports, as if they were all new. Then it would just sit there. I tried a Knoppix boot disc, and it couldn't see the keyboard. In fact the BIOS didn't respond to the DEL key for setup. The mouse is serial, and the keyboard PS/2. Not connected, so the failure of one shouldn't affect the other, I thought. However, a day later, I unplugged everything and re-plugged, and found that the keyboard was plugged into the second PS/2 port. I moved it back to the one next to it, and suddenly everything works as well as usual, including the mouse. Windows can now remember all the hardware. Lesson: must replace this PC SOON.

This is the list from the Community Broadcast Association of Australia's (CBAA) Digital Delivery Network (DDN) of regional radio stations that put the Discovery Science show to air: 2BLU BLU FM 89.1 Katoomba, NSW 2BOB Taree, NSW 2HOT Cobar, NSW 2KRR Kandos, NSW 2MIA Griffith, NSW 2MCE Bathurst, NSW 2TLC Yamba, NSW 2WAR-2 Coonamble, NSW 3MBR Murrayville, Victoria 3MGB Mallacoota, Victoria 3OCR OtwayFM Colac, Victoria 4NAG Yeppoon, Queensland 4RRR Roma, Queensland 4ROK Moranbah, Queensland 5KIX Kingscote, Kangaroo Island, South Australia 5RRR Woomera, South Australia 6YCR York, Western Australia That's 17 stations in addition to 2SER in Sydney! We have to re-apply this week to 2SER to be judged whether our show will fit into the new programming the station is planning.