There is a lot of talk about fracking, the process where engineers pump liquid into the ground to open up tiny pockets of natural gas in the rocks to capture it for commercial and domestic use. Its an understatement that environmentalists are concerned about the use of this process. As it involves pumping liquid into the ground, soil and ground water contamination is a obvious side effect, plus, as the pumped liquid is pressurized enough to break rocks, it could cause micro-earthquakes, which is bad news for moles, rabbits, wombles or anything else that lives underground.
One well publicized side effect to fracking is that people living near fracking operations who relay on groundwater as their water supply have experienced more than just water coming out their taps...
One of many videos under the search results "fracking water fire"
Of course almost everyone who has seen such clips are shocked that this is happening. But just recently I had a thought about this phenomenon. One way to have great ideas is to look at problems at a different angle, in this case turning a negative into a potential positive. To everyone who is experiencing gassy waterworks, hear these words...
Connect your taps to a tank and collect that gas. With some tinkering you could pipe this gas into your existing gas system. That's right, you now have a free supply of natural gas straight from the ground. If you can manage to live off this FREE GAS, you can successfully boycott the gas companies that are fracking your local sub-terrain. With the loss of profits due to people living off their free gas they have to cut down their expensive fracking operations.
It's just an idea. I'm not sure if there's any bureaucratic red tape that prevents such protesting plumbing from happening. But if there is nothing stopping you form doing so... well I can't be held responsible for giving people the idea. And if the gas companies complain about you doing this, you can just say "Well, you started it by fracking my ground."
Its such a simple idea, I'm surprised that I have not heard about it from someone else. I came up with it on my own. I'm sure someone else must have thought about it, but I don't want to contaminate my internet history by finding out.
A few days ago I did something I thought I would never resort to... I started to use Facebook.
An old friend of mine once e-mailed me back in 2009 asking me to join it. I set up the account and then after a thought about what exactly I was doing I abandoned it.
Why I abandoned it? Its because I find the idea of social network sites questionable. We all know the stories people hijacking other peoples accounts, stalkers, surprise guests at parties and many other stories of the like that usually have "Facebook" in the newspaper headline. We all know the privacy issues raised by use of such web services. We know that every image that is upload on Facebook automatically becomes the property of Mark Zuckerberg. Its all of this plus many other reasons why I don't like social network sites. Also, because I'm not naturally the social type, so I don;t see the point of me using Facebook
But last week I got an e-mail from Facebook (I do get them regularly to incise me back, like junk-mail vouchers and catalogs.) and one of the friends listed was one I really wanted to look up for years. That was how they got me. I have begun to use it and got around to load up images for the avatar.
I can hear my past self calling me a traitor.
But I'm not stupid. I'm not going to upload any of my great work on that site. I'm not giving them away to Mr Zuckerberg for free. I'm saving them for this blog. I'm just going to write the occasional comment and maybe the occasional image (nothing great, just so and so stuff).
But all the best stuff is going up here. Nowhere else. I may post links to it on Facebook as advertising, but I want most of my visitors to stumble upon it by chance. So there you have it.
What an angle to take. For years (as far as there been charity ad campaigns against cancer) all cancer awareness ads had only been (like all other diseases) about the victims. They had been mostly somber in tone, like this one...
Mirrors - Cancer Research UK ad (2000s)
But within the past decade (as survival rates for cancer have increased dramatically) that tone has become more positive...
Birthday - The American Cancer Society ad (late-2000s)
Even threatening (for sentient cancer cells)....
'Cancer, we're coming to get you' - Cancer Research UK Race for Life TV ad (2013)
In fact, if you look at the many ads covering the subject, cancer is quite an unique cause when it comes to how its advertised, Think about it. Can you think of any other medical condition who's awareness campaign includes reviving famous victims, such as the British comedian Bob Monkhouse.
Bob Monkhouse ProstateCancer ad (2007)
The reason for this tiny exploration in advertising is that (if you haven't heard what the most recent crop of cancer ads have been saying) is that by the time of writing the number of people surviving cancer and dying from cancer has now about equaled. This means that if you (hopefully not) discover a lump somewhere or have a doctor give you the bad news, the chances of you not been killed by it are (generally) about 50:50 (please note that this is a gross generalization and that the survival rates of various forms of cancer vary - with much with the odds in your (living) favor).
But there is room for improvement. A "one size fits all" treatment is still a bit far away. But this is a too negative point of view. More positive view is this....
The fact that cancer has become the big killer and (as a result) the big health concern as it is now is a sign of progress. A century earlier, infectious diseases (Such as TB, malaria and flu) were the biggest killers. Cancer was rarely heard of (except in freak shows, where the few who did and developed huge sightly growths due to lack of treatment could earn a living). This is mostly because of the increase in life expectancy due to advances in health and medicine in the past century. Without them, not many people would have lived long enough for the tiny mutations caused by lifestyle choices (such as smoking) or environmental factors (such as the presence of asbestos) to turn the subject cells into uncontrollably-multiplying units that contribute nothing to the body except take up space and choke it, like junk in a spare room. You know them better as "tumors."
That's the high school biologist in me there speaking.
In conclusion, I do hope cancer becomes a history lesson one day. Its a condition that (on the looks of it) shouldn't happen to any organism. It is an effect caused by a spanner been thrown into the fundamental mechanism of life - DNA. The more we can do to stop that spanner from doing its damage (or deal with the carnage it causes) the better for us all.
But on a lighter note, I love the ad I started this post with. It is truly original in angle (form the cancer cell's point of view) and its execution (the cancer treatment is the cause of the end of (their) world).
It's saddened to hear that the great comedic genius that is Robin McLaurin Williams has died. He has gone the same way as David Carradine and Isadora Duncan and joined the choir invisible (though the reasons for their strangling were very different to his).
Before I continue this tribute, I know that some of you may not like the idea of jokes in a tribute of a dead person, but Robin is a comedian form the same school as Monty Python, and (using Graham Chapman's memorial service as a example) it is something Robin would have wanted.
They are a lot of anecdotes about Robin's talent, but the best one I can think of now was this one said back in July by Adam Savage (my doppelganger born 20 years earlier) on his "Still Untitled Project" on Tested.com
Favorite Adaptations - Still Untitled: The Adam Savage Project - 7/01/2014
(The anecdote in question begins on 22:00)
Before I continue (again) I like to say that the movie Bicentennial Man (despite been panned by critics at the time and been a flop in the box office due to (according to Robin) lackluster marketing and a cut in the film's budget by Disney (the owners ofTouchstone Pictures) that resulted in a lowering of quality) is a good film. I think it's better than the original novella (which I have read) as the film includes more emotion.
This is a truly sad loss for me as he has been a big part of my childhood and was responsible for a part of my sense of humour. I saw him as Mork in Mork & Mindy, the Genie in Aladdin, the Adult Peter Pan in Hook, Alan Parriah in Jumanji, the advance aging kid in Jack, and (of course) as Mrs Doubtfire. In my later years marveled his acting talent in films like Dead Poets Societyand Man of the Year.
I would have loved to have met him (alive, of course, but the zombie version of him might be an interesting sight (how it would compare to Bill Murray in Zombieland I don't know until I see it (Them becoming zombies, not the film.))). In fact, back in primary school, me and a friend thought about doing a comic strip adventure about us meeting him. I only drew the first frame of us in the airport introducing the story. Maybe because of that (and the fact my heart wasn't fully into that project (and also it was my final year in primary school)) the project didn't go further and I forgot about it until just now as I am writing this. I can assume that any physical evidence of this project is all gone. Probably put in some shredder years ago to clear out the cupboards in St Lucy's Primary. I wanted to do something involving anthropomorphic animals, but the teacher said we'll do that after the Robin Williams story. Sigh.
So anyway, here is my tribute post to Robin Williams.
Hot Cars Kill Dogs campaign video from Dogs Trust (2014)
I recently found out about this internet campaign from the UK animal welfare charity Dogs Trust (formerly known as the National Canine Defense League). It tackles a problem every person involved n or concerned about animal welfare gets angry about every summer - dogs trapped in cars on sunny days.
They are no actual statistics on how many dogs die in such a preventable way (I tried typing "how many dogs die in hot cars each year" into Google and I got nothing. Not a single number.). But the high school biologist in me knows why it happens. A human could withstand the heat inside a hot car (though some children have died in hot cars (38 a year in the US, according to this website.)). This is because humans sweat. Dogs can't sweat. That is why they stick their tongues out when their exhausted... or hot. The lack of sweat glands can limit their ability to withstand heat. But many humans don't know this fact and assume that a few minutes in a car will be fine because it was fine for them. It's only when they return to a car containing a dead dig that they realize how wrong their assumption was.
What got me seeing this video was how devilishly simple the idea is - a time lapse of a ice sculpture of a dog melting in a car. What struck me was how come no one had thought of this until 2014? Its so obvious. The charity has been around since 1891 (just when cars were beginning to scare horses and running over small animals on the road). Why now? But I guess the dog in hot car problem didn't exist until fully enclosed passenger compartments began to be the norm in the 1920s (before most cars were convertibles). Also, it would have been expensive to set up a time lapse camera (something a charity can't afford to do (until now)).
It is a brilliant idea that illustrates a common problem in the world and I applaud it. But the cinematographer in me sees need for improvement, such as engraving a name on the collar (something in the theme of ice, such as "Frozo") and ending the video with a close-up on the collar showing the dog's name. But please ignore it and not take it as an insult, because they have made something great. It deserves an award of some sort for its simplest and execution. Dogs Trust, I salute to you.
National Council on Problem Gambling ad from Singapore (2014)
On the 13th July the final of the FIFA World Cup in Rio, Brazil took place with an astounding victory for Germany against Argentina. Now, usually I don't take notice of things in the world of sports (I didn't know Andy Murray won Wimbledon until a day after his win). But Germany's victory in the World Cup has had an unexpected effect in Singapore.
For a few weeks Singapore's National Council on Problem Gambling ran an anti-gambling advertising campaign featuring a boy (named Andy) whose dad bet his live savings on whoever wins the World Cup.
So, which team did he bet on?
NCPG ad web banner (2014)
Germany. The team that actually won the World Cup. Andy's dad must have been over the moon by the sudden windfall. Not surprisingly, as soon as people learnt about this ad campaign (with the miracle of hindsight of knowing of Germany's victory) some had altered it to show Andy's Dad minting it and to tell Andy to "stop whining."
For a bit more see this Reuters article and look at a few others as well (I'm not doing all the work for you!).
But what happened to this ad campaign made me ponder. They say that they choose Germany for the ad to add realism to the message. It wouldn't have worked if they made up a team. And it would have worked if Germany had lost, but the NCPG couldn't have had foreseen Germany's luck that year.
So I thought about this idea. Instead of just one ad, the NCPG could have ran two or multiple ads featuring different dads betting on different teams. This will have sorted the unlikely outcome of the dad in the one single ad winning the bet. But then I realized a problem. With multiple dads betting on different teams, viewers will wonder which one would win. Instead of discouraging gambling, this idea will encourage the very thing it was trying to stop. It's like an anti-smoking campaign giving out free cigarettes. Or a drink-driving campaign where people are asked to sample various alcoholic drinks and then asked to drive a car (to a test track, of course).
Hang on. That drink-driving idea could actually be doable. But by using the same technology that makes Testing Britains Worst Drivers: Crash Course possible. If you haven't have seen it, some pretty bad drivers are placed in a telepresence set up that allows them to control a life-size remote-controlled car on a test track like they are actually in it. But after getting use to it they are confronted with their bad driving by another remote controlled car that crashes into them. Its a shocking experience for the driver, so I can imagine my drink-drive campaign working equally well. I could go on about this idea, but I should finish this post with something about gambling.
So here are my thoughts about gambling in general. Looking at human nature and human history, gambling is a natural thing for humans to do. Its a result of our pre-farming/supermarket years of hunting our food. There is no 100% guarantee that you'll eat today, so you had to gamble if that antelope is catchable, as if you didn't, you'll starve. We still have that brain wiring today (though what some of us we hunt now is different, like that Charizard card). So what has hunting got to do with gambling? Think about it. If faced with a African plain for a few hours and you'll see only one small antelope (and your hungry), would you try to get that antelope, or wait a while in the hope of encountering a more fatter antelope with a broken leg? Play safe or take the risk? That's gambling. Taking risks. We take risks all the time, from crossing roads to temporary ignoring speed limits when in a hurry. Although some people will frown upon speed limit breakers and pedestrians who don't use zebra crossings, when gambling involves money and/or doing humiliating things that is when the moral panic lot go mental. They are a lot of stories about people who have become ruined wrecks (financially) as a result of gambling. Most middle class people who read such stories wonder "why do people do this?" Why do people become addicted to gambling? But I'll add this observation. Most of the people you hear about in such stories are neither unemployed or in remedial jobs. Also, if you remember your history, many aristocrats dabbled with a few games of poker. So why mostly them? It's our risk-taking hunter past that is responsible. Gambling has filled a daily need of risk taking that was once satisfied by the daily hunt. Most middle class people are immune to gambling because they have a job that involves risk taking and problem solving, such as stock trading or computer programming (I know that a few of them do gamble, but I'm just rounding off observations.). But if you are in a routine that is unchanging everyday, such as working on an assembly line or (in the case of many aristocrats and unemployed people) doing nothing, you face almost no risk at all. And for the hunter programs in the brain it's boring. The brain craves the frill of taking risks, and that results in those people taking up gambling and, as a result, get addicted. Don't believe me? Ask Desmond Morris. He said this very observation in The Naked Ape.
But here's an additional note of my own. In the past (I'm speculating here.) the problem of gambling addiction was more manageable, as it was a social activity involving friends or rivals. This had the advantage that if you wanted your money back you could beg for it back or (I'll let your imagination fill in this blank). Today, on the other hand, most gambling addicts have their fix using machines. Their honesty and security (for the sake of their owners) makes them more trustworthy, making gamblers more willing to use them. But you can't beg a machine for your money back (and the owners won't like you taking a sledge hammer to their machines).
What I'm saying is that gambling is a human activity and it should involve humans. It should be a social activity, not an isolated one. And it shouldn't be done through machines. A human must be in the mechanism to allow the possibility of begging/cheating, making the game more interesting.
But a more constructive idea would be to find alternative means for the risk craving brain to channel its cravings, such as competing in sports or writing a novel or sitcom in the hope a publisher or producer would like it (we need more writers to end the epidemic of reality TV shows).
If you can think of other suggestions, I'll be welcome to them in comments. And now a final sketch...
This idea was too tempting to do, so here it is to add to the endless pile of anti-smoking ads.
I will be AFKed for a while so don't expect anything new in the next month or so. And don't worry, Cat is still alive and well.
