The Derwent World Patents Index is a database compiled by editorial staff.

The database provides a short abstract detailing the nature and potential use of a patent and is indexed into alphanumeric technology categories to allow retrieval of relevant patent documents by users.

This curated database turns what would be a useless soup of metadata from various national patent offices into a globally useful and consistent database.

Noting that the tags on Internet porn are universally rubbish, methinks someone should do a ‘Derwent’ with Internet porn.

One would need a team of experts that create useful and consistent metatags for all available porn. There would be plenty of job applicants for this one.

Once this is achieved you could have Pandora for porn and even online psychotherapy based on a person’s porn choices. Like Derwent the porn metatag database would be a huge money spinner.

The possibilities are endless, especially considering that porn is probably one of the biggest sources of revenue on the web.

Just to be clear if all our atoms were made just after the big bang 10^10 years ago and their lifetime is limited by the lifetime of a proton which is 10^34 years, this means that in 10^24 years the universe will suddenly become a sub atomic soup.

This will make my chemistry degrees quite obsolete.

Having spent way too much time in the surf when I was younger, from the age of thirty or so I found myself managing skin cancers. Nothing drastic mind, just the odd actinic keratosis on the face.

In the past this affliction precipitated an annual trip to the skin quack where I was assaulted with a liquid nitrogen blow torch. Think of a creme brûlée (my head) and the pâtissier with his little handheld carameliser (the liquid nitrogen applicator).

This process invariably left me looking like an accident victim for a week or so and then the skin cancers would go away for a while. When they returned it was back to the quack’s. One can think of this as expensive ongoing management of a condition, as opposed to a cure. Nice for the medical practitioners, not so good for me.

The most annoying part of the whole process was the five minute duration of the appointment. First, a cursory glance by the quack and then bang, I was out of there; a few hundred dollars lighter and looking like I had a pox. The hastiness of the treatment did not provide any sense of assurance that due care and diligence had taken place.

A couple of years back I came across a paper on the use of radium weed, euphorbia peplus, to treat keratosis. To cut a long story short, this is a traditional folk remedy for skin cancers which has more efficacy than any other current treatment method, including liquid nitrogen or other chemical approaches.

The active ingredient in radium weed is ingenol mebutate and it kills cancerous skin cells very effectively. It probably kills all skin cells, so the trick is to just apply it to the keratoses. The weed has these tiny little stalks which contain a milky latex. When snapped off these are the perfect applicator – a tiny little drop forms on the end which can be carefully transferred directly to a keratosis.

Of course the pharma industry has decided to create a synthetic version of ingenol mebutate which is mixed in a gel at exactly the same concentration as in the plant, placed in a tube labelled Picato and sold for $150 a pop. I guess the synthetic version allows for patenting whereas natural plant materials cannot be readily patented.

The recently released Picato is now considered to be the most effective treatment for keratoses.

Since radium weed is almost ubiquitous in Sydney it is easier and very much cheaper to wander out to your backyard and pick a stem or two off the weed. Apply by touching the milky drop to the afflicted areas. Allow for a week of healing in general. I have found it is much more effective than liquid nitrogen since the keratoses seem to take longer to return.

I just skimmed through two editions of New Scientist in about 5 minutes and barely paused thrice.

Précis …

People trying to copy nature. Scientists pretending to be historians. Technology focused on fleecing, dressed up as enabling. Physicists deluded by the significance of sub sub thingys. Medical insights designed to suck up all that affluence. The moral conspiracies of the industrial side of science and technology. Random things that animals and plants do. And trivial pursuit candidates from Mars.

I once had a journalist write an article for New Scientist about a technology that one of my startups had been forced to license (a long story that; it has a lot to do with the stupidity of some tech investors).

What was in fact a dream with a most primitive proof of concept, no feasible application at any price, and a cohort of loopy academic inventors, became the next platform technology of the twenty first century. Another ‘laser’, so to speak.

Looking around at the time, I noted that many scientists and technologists that were senior to me seemed not to notice the charade.

I was already losing faith in the system that I lived in. This data point represented a definite fork in the road. A moment where I lost my religion.

Lola thinks we should incorporate a smart phone, maybe a flexible one, into businessmen’s ties. Upside down on the front and at the bottom, so when you pick your tie up to use the smartphone, it is the right way up. When not in use the screen would show the same pattern as the tie and thus be disguised.

You’d expect ties to get longer and smartphones to get lighter if this tend took off.

My daughter managed to get strepp throat on these holidays. So she had to go on antibiotics and, of course, later she will have a course of probiotics to help ameliorate the negative impact of the antibiotics on her gut flora. She wonders why the antibiotics and the probiotics can’t be in the same pill.

The Cantabrian farmers of NZ have this great technology for making pine tree hedges.

They plant rows of pinus radiata or cupressus macrocarpa and then they hire these enormous hedge trimming tractors to shape them into 40 foot high hedges.

You’d have to think they have a wind problem. Or else they just don’t like their neighbors very much.

The final invention of the day is to use this technology to make a Pinehenge.

The first step is to plant pine trees in exactly the right places so they mimic the placement of the stones at Stonehenge.

Then, when they are big enough, simply trim them to the right shape.

Imagine the tourist dollars!

Like empathy, good advice requires two skills.

Firstly you must be right. And secondly the good advice must be delivered in a way that the recipient likes.

Being right in an argument, for example, has no point unless you can turn it into a discussion.

Yet another hitherto unthought of use for homeopathy … homeopathic gluten additives for all the gluten intolerant folk.

Magically that rice pasta would suddenly taste like the real thing.

And the gluten free beer would be indistinguishable from Tooheys New, after the first dozen schooners or so.

When I was a kid I had a whole range of people in the neighbourhood that I used to drop in on, from my mates to random older people that I had befriended.

I used to get milk and biscuits from a lovely old aboriginal woman around the corner. I suppose she got random yarns from me and a little company. I got a lot more.

She taught me a lot about aboriginal culture including the fact that eye contact can be offensive to Australian indigenous people.

You will know if eye contact is offensive by the amount of, or lack of eye contact you are getting back.

It’s best to find some bloody interesting stain on the wall at an angle that leaves your correspondent in your peripheral vision. About 50 degrees off American.

I suspect that chatting this way without direct visual eye contact activates a different part of the brain.

It makes one concentrate on exactly what’s being said. Or not, if you go into a trance, which is easier to do without eye contact.

Either way, you get something different out of such a conversation. Especially if it’s introductory small talk which is designed to elucidate the credentials of the participants.

A blunter is someone who goes to the doctors and just wants to be told what to do and is not interested in the details of their illness.

They prefer not be lumbered with the details of other people’s problems even if the other people are friends or family.

They very much gravitate towards people that keep their problems to themselves.

This does not necessarily mean that they don’t seek solice when they themselves have issues that need workshopping.

They generally hate conspiracies such as global warming, holes in the ozone layer, fracking pollution, and giardia in the drinking water.

They get all their general knowledge of current affairs off commercial television and listen to the radio stations with the most ads and jokesters.

They believe in Anzac Day and might even book a trip to Turkey to remember the fallen.

They often talk and think about money, quite independently of their degree of affluence.

They will state a preference for people that are blunt in their opinions, so long as they agree with these opinions.

They can make OK acquaintances but are of dubious value as close friends.

Fascinated with the predictability of the minds of Nissan’s software engineers, I just timed the Wingnut’s ‘you aren’t wearing your seatbelt’ chimes.

60 dings lasting exactly 60 seconds and then the patient is dead.

I almost ran off the road checking my watch.

Peculiarities of the Wingnut …

If one fails to engage the seatbelt because, for example, one can’t be arsed on a quick run down to the shops, then one hears a wonderful Japanese warning chime.

This particular chime sounds like the heart monitor one hears on Grey’s Anatomy and the like. Quite moorish to be honest and no real incentive to buckle up. Nothing like the screaming banshee that plagues my Subaru.

The oddest thing; while these chimes are chiming the indicators do not work. Again not a problem for that quick trip down to the shops. The locals can suck it up – they are used to bloody tourists.

The Japanese engineers at Nissan probably didn’t consider that foreign reprobates would do nothing upon hearing the chimes. Such disobedience simply did not enter their design constraints, so they happily doubled up on the use of the noise making electronic components.

The disadventurers amongst you might decry the amorality of such careless driving behavior, but I would point out that the trip to shops was for beer and smokes and may have included a quick phone call.

There is a certain completeness to the illogicity of this self-uncentredness. And, to be completely honest, I care not a fig for the marketing-driven concerns of good morning tv viewers.

And to the good burghers of Nissan I say thanks for your accidental provision of even more entertainment. The Wingnut just keeps giving.

A flying drone that tails a cyclist at about 5 meters up, with front and rear facing video cameras.

Included are (1) a couple of video-processing algorithms that calculate real-time motor vehicle trajectories, and (2) a warning buzzer for imminent cyclist death.

This would give cyclists time enough to pray, or to randomly duck left (or right if you are in the other Coriolis sphere of affluence).

Spent the night listening and chatting to Monty. The guy is seriously good at the songster caper. But of dubious sanity, cycling around NZ with a trailer containing his guitar, amp and a dodgy tail light. There are seriously demented drivers here and not a hint of a verge.

Not even a hint of photo editing.

Its being bugging me. How on earth did I get through two chemistry degrees without anyone ever telling me that stable atoms have a lifetime limited by the lifetime of a proton? Which just happens to be 10^34 years. This is the important stuff, you fools!

One of these …

That incorporates a hidden one of these …

Pink clouds.

Finally, an activity that can’t be Instagrammed.

I read somewhere that stable atoms (as opposed to radioactive elements) have a maximum lifetime imposed by the lifetime of a proton which is greater than 10³⁴ years.

The present age of the universe is 10¹⁰ years so you could argue that we have only just over 10²⁴ years left before we all get sub atomized.

Time enough for love.

If a human can labour then was does a computer do? Operate?

The reason I ask is that if artificial intelligence is developed then we might end up with the Operate Party.

A new candidate for the worst piece of music ever imagined – David Hamilton’s Elysian Fields.

I don’t much like orchestral music except for a few pieces that soaked into my brain courtesy of my father’s terrible habit of playing his ten records over and over, and over.

On the other hand, chamber music I often like. Stay with me, I am going somewhere with this.

Back before electricity I guess the only way to fill a large hall with music was to pump up the chamber group to 10x or even 20x the number of players.

It was pure economics.

But they forgot to shrink the things when electricity, mikes and speakers were invented.

You don’t see rock bands with 50 people in them do you?

Today, a group of die hards insist on continuing to write music for these orchestras.

Unfortunately all the nice melodies were poached by the early composers so of late there has been a concerted effort to see how much pain the avid followers can take.

And it turns out they can take quite a lot.

Not in this life. And not in the next thanks.

A telescopic back scratcher that doubles as a selfie stick.

Last night I had the pleasure of listening to a beer conversation on the subject of childhood vaccination.

To summarize; there are middle class-ish folk that in a former era would have had their kids vaccinated but now do not.

The ‘why’ is interesting. I went on a forensic investigative effort and found that:

1. There is not the general trust of science as there once might have been. People listed all sorts of evil outcomes resulting the efforts of scientists including companies like Monsanto and their evil ways.

2. Interestingly this mistrust does not extend to the very useful and widely admired modern internet technology which is deemed (correctly) as disparate from science.

3. The distrust of science is in part due to an intensely negative stories of outrage as witnessed on morning TV, facebook, and the like.

4. The general population seems to have a poor appreciation of life’s hardships before the enlightenment and the advances that science has afforded us. And a weak understanding that the odd negative, resulting from the practices of science, are probably greatly outweighed by the benefits. This would indicate a failing of high school education to place the basics of history and statistics indelibly into the heads of the great unwashed.

5. Fear of loss of a child. Fear of a child not fulfilling it’s complete potential. Fear of failure as a parent. Fear of not having full social status. Fear, driven by marketing and media. Fear is the primary tool that is used to drive consumption in our society. It is no surprise that it has finally turned in on us.

6. A distrust of government agencies and their motives. The incrementally extending intrusion of technology and law into our daily lives seems to have left a lasting legacy of defeated distrust, even among those that thrive in the maze. In some this tips over into fully blown conspiracy theories but resistance to the agency of government does not require this.

7. And finally, the anti-vaccine types seem to have a complete disability to participate in a discussion of points 1-6 above with any semblance of logical thought processes.

Because I have been having a close and unexpected association with the wingnut, temporary as it may be, the technology of cars is closer to my thoughts than is warranted.

Being a grey import the wingnut has all sorts of features that only the Japanese would consider valuable, such as a reversing beeper inside the car and an audio-visual system which has a perplexingly unusable interface system. My subsequent ponderings on the technology of the wingnut can be thus explained.

The wingnut is a pretty beast. However on its first refill under my temporary tutelage it occurred to me that the petrol cap somewhat ruined the lines of the rear quarter.

Indeed, my mind continued, possibly under the influence of the fumes, the intrusion of the petrol refilling port must create all sorts of engineering constraints for car designers.

Therefore the next instalment for the invention of the day is a petrol cap hidden behind a rear hinged taillight. When the little lever or button is pulled or pressed the taillight will pop out from the one hinged side, just like a petrol cap does today.

Yeah I know electrics and petrol fumes might not mix, but this is the 21st century after all and bigger problems have been solved. And I am pretty sure that the Mythbusters busted the myth of mobile phones and petrol filling anyway. Indeed as we move to electric cars (which still need a plug point) this issue will go away entirely.

Apart from fixing the aesthetics issues that plague so many of our cars, this taillight petrol cap invention solves at least two other common problems:

1. The new petrol cap behind the rear light could be placed on both sides of the car so you could drive into a servo without asymmetrical service considerations.

2. On small compact hatches the removal of the petrol cap from the rear quarter would allow for a largish rear suicide door hinged from the far rear back corner of the vehicle, thus allowing maximum door size without any impact on aesthetics.

Now that I have got that off my chest I feel much better.

Holy cow! The power of suggestion.

In high school one of my most infamous incidents, and there were a few, was when I was sent from a classroom by a teacher for a stupid act (that hardly warrants describing).

Rather than sending me to the special master for the usual caning I was asked to ponder my crime and then return to announce my own punishment.

Now this was nasty treatment because I had the power to let myself off.

But then of course I would have never lived it down amongst my peers for being so weak.

After much agonising I re-entered the classroom and announced that I should get a ‘stern warning’.

It accidentally worked; everyone was laughing so hard, including the teacher, that the whole incident was lost in the hilarity.

The tag ‘stern warning’ followed me around for years and even to this day an old school mate will occasionally retell the story over a beer.

I always thought that I had come up with this accidental pearler of my own accord.

But today whilst watching the first series of Get Smart (S01E16) with Lola I discovered that I had in fact sponged it off Maxwell Smart, probably years before the incident itself, and totally forgotten about the source.

Life does have a habit of throwing up the odd surprise.

Sinpatico (sĭn-pä′tĭ-kō′)

adj.

Of like minded amoral temperament; compatible deviants

It is a little known fact that Charles Darwin had a body hair fetish.

Which, in a roundabout way, might explain our glowing opinion of the genetic bard.

Scientific history works just like science itself, by cherry picking the facts that work and quiet suppression of those that don’t.

On the subject of body hair, for Darwin the fetish came first and then he went an ill-advised step further and attempted to merge this fetish with his then novel hypothesis for evolution.

In a nut shell, Darwin proposed that hairless apes (humans) resulted from a single genetic mutation and that this mutation was selectively expressed to the point of domination because the apes found nude more attractive.

This dodgy hypothesis has hardly survived history and it shows how we manage to suppress the facts that don’t fit the image that we want to project for our idols.

It does however beg the question, why are we nude?

Having pondered this for a while my best guess is that the mutation for something genuinely useful like speech also rendered us accidentally hairless, which must have actually been somewhat of a drawback before clothes were invented.

Eve may very well have been the first attractive, hairless and verbally expressive woman on the planet. She would also have likely been either very sunburnt or very cold, depending on where she lived at the time.

The question is, in the era before computers how in the world did the artist come up with a complex repeating pattern that has no obvious joins on all four sides?

The only thing I can think of is that the original canvas was first painted in a cylindrical format to make sure the tops and bottoms matched.

And then the canvas was unrolled and formed into cylinder by joining the two sides followed by a re-working the edges so they matched as well.

Then the thing was then laid flat and used to make screen prints which were then printed onto the fabric with perfect edge matching on all four sides.

When Agent 99 tells Maxwell Smart that he has all the control in a situation it’s highly likely that Max is facing a double bluff and should either double down or give up wondering.

Me and the wingnut.

Lola tells me that a zig goes right and a zag goes left.

Not exactly Augusta but it was a hole in one. On a par 2.

Sinbiosis – The condition that results when the natural flora of the gut are thrown out of balance due to excessive sugar ingestion and immoral thoughts.

A feijoa that doesn’t taste or smell like a feijoa.

What sort of morning is it when you spend an hour trying to find out where the artist joined the repeating patterns in the 1980s motel room curtains?

Lola’s idea of the day … a finger print scanner image file that can be used with a 3-D printer to make a facsimile of my finger so she can get into my laptop and watch Get Smart.

A smart watch that counts your beers and has the power of attorney over your accounts so it can freeze your cards when further consumption might lead to a life threatening fall for the watch.

It’d be pretty handy if the thing could also serve up the odd Berroca. Watch’s got legs.

Better still, and here’s another new invention, a Berocca in coconut water with Panadol and Quickeze added.

Looking back on it I was fooled by two things.

Firstly, the beverage was called Tui, which lulled me into thinking I was drinking a singular Tooheys. I was not – the stuff has all that lethal craft beer rubbish in it.

I should have known better – anything with East India Pale Ale as a byline shouldn’t be dark brown.

Secondly, they were pints not schooners and they arrived by themselves, fueled by the well-healed graciousness of my fellow traveling wedding guests.

In this regards the smart phone invention wouldn’t have helped on this occasion but I am sure it could have intervened by some other means.

An inbuilt tranquilizer injection capability maybe? I just saw this idea on an old Get Smart episode where the injection device was in Max’s ring. Ok, I am rambling now, back to sleep.

This one didn’t make it into the invention of the day list. It’s more of a problem definition.

There are people that hang onto articles of clothing, for example a t-shirt, of a loved one when the said loved one goes missing.

The function of the article of clothing is to remind the soul of the loved one via aroma memory.

Now the problem is that the aroma fades pretty quickly.

The solution that needs developing is a means to capture and concentrate and store the aroma of a person so that it can be sprayed onto a t-shirt at intervals.

,

Why did the ingénue cross the femme fatale?

To get to the other side.

An add-on for Google maps …

An overlay showing all traffic accident history with different colors representing higher and lower risk areas. Maybe touching on a spot on the map would enable a popup with specific accident information. Slightly morbid I know but a really good time-passer for the anxious on vacation.

My daughter just invented session mobility, over a decade after the fact!

Last night, while jiggling around with mates, she wanted to throw the iPod music to the TV and also get the video.

Just occasionally I get a message that is so juicy that I don’t have to comment on it. I can just add it to my blog in it’s entirety and let the universe out. Such a one I recieved today;

“Dear Parents and Carers,

In the last few days of term 1 it was brought to my attention by a number of parents and students that there has been some peer pressure to have a date as it were for the end of year dinner/dance.

I would like to clarify that the end of year event for Year 6 is a dinner/dance(not a formal)where all of the Year 6 students gather to celebrate their end of primary school. They celebrate as a year group with the teachers and then the parents arrive for the last half hour to join in the celebration. This is an occasion where everyone dresses up in smart casual dress(nothing formal). The whole idea is to have a fun and memorable evening with friends and family.

Please speak to your child about the importance of keeping an appropriate perspective related to these events throughout the remainder of the year. It is imperative that your child remains focused on their school work in order to be prepared for high school.

Thank you for your assistance in this matter.

Kind Regards,”

An algorithm designed to detect a real person from a scamming identity on Linkedin.

You can think of this problem as the Reverse Turing Test – how a computer can detect a real person from a fake person.

If I can spot a scammer from 100 paces, with my hands tied behind my back, at sunset, with a bag over my head, then it wouldn’t be that hard to put an algorithm together. The basis rule of thumb of data and image processing algorithms is that if the human brain can spot it then the algorithm is possible.

The real question is why Linkedin hasn’t commissioned such an algorithm already.

Almost weekly now I am contacted by some dodgy scammer, usually a blonde woman with a barely plausible resume, and for no apparent upfront reason.

They could run such an algorithm over all new users, or even over the current database, and weed out the fakes.

Or at the very least they could offer it as a plugin for those that don’t want to be scammed by blonde imponderables.

The trouble of course is that Linkedin doesn’t have competition and hence aren’t really on their game.

On a final philosophical note; if a computer can tell a real human from a fake human is that a positive test for artificial intelligence?

I would say yes given that there are plenty of blokes that are supposedly intelligent that actually fall for these blonde facsimiles.

But then the counter argument might be that they do this knowingly at some deep subconscious level, trading off truth for hope.

Such an argument, when boiled down, would suggest that artificial intelligence will only occur when computers have a desire to mate.

The Cold Sling©. This one is Lola’s.

When Lola has a cold, which is too often for my liking, she gets a scarf and makes a diagonal sling (Mexican bandito style), knotted at the waist with a plastic shopping bag at the hip. The bag contains a box of tissues and is also a receptacle for the used tissues.

The benefit of this device is that she always has tissues at hand and somewhere to dispose of them, rather than leaving a Hansel and Gretel-style trail around the house.

Taking this one step further, the patented Cold Sling© would be a diagonal shoulder sling containing receptacles for both tissues and used tissue disposal.

It would have a slide in, Velcro-shut compartment at shoulder level for those flat packs of Aloe Vera tissues. A tissue could be extracted through the exposed slot in the sling.

And, just above hip level, there would be a round slot to push through used tissues. This would be one of those plastic four quadrant jobs, allowing tissues to pushed through but not allowing them to come out of their own accord. There would be a disposable bag in there which when full would be extracted and disposed of. A replacement bag would then be put in place.

The sling might also contain some small slots for useful things such as bottles of vitamin C tablets, Otrivin, smartphone, mini air freshener, etc.

The sling would have an adjustable strap for fitting but thereafter would be fitted and removed over the head just like a bike courier bag.

This is what I look like after racing across the Timor Sea, both before and after celebrating in Dili for 10 hours straight.

Being truly free includes being open to any possibility that might arise. Going further, it might also entail seeking out the new and the interesting as a life mission.

This is really hard to do in a relationship but just occasionally, very occasionally, you meet a couple that has pulled it off.

Well when I say occasionally, I think I did meet such a couple many years ago while I was backpacking. But I was young and who can say?

Patience, rigor, discernment and bloody extraordinarily luck; this is all it takes to find such a ‘right’ person – the unicorn.

Two unicorns. It sounds unlikely doesn’t it?

And of course it’s only possible after you have sorted yourself out. No unicorn, no cry.

Back to freedom; most people couldn’t find the open cage door even if they fell through it.

Olé, Trappista.

Of late there seems to be Australian footballers getting caught using all sorts of performance enhancing drugs; peptides, coke, steroids etc.

ASADA is forever seeking the next dickhead that has sucked up one protein shake too many.

As an aside ADADA doesn’t actually make it easy to find the list of banned substances – what they have is a ‘check your substance’ search engine which sort of assumes an athlete has it in their hot little hands. Funky.

Enter the invention of the year … homeopathic performance enhancing drugs. They simply can’t be detected.

All you have to do is make a cocktail containing every single performance enhancing drugs known to mankind (see below) and then dilute the buggery out of it until there’s no chance of finding a single molecule of anything.

But it will still work because water apparently has ‘memory’ and this memory will make better footballers out of the most journey of men.

On the patenting front I might have difficulties with prior art, usefulness, and even the idea itself might be obvious to a homoeopath practiced in the art of deception.

A clear sign that I spend too much time on this phone …

I just went into the toilets, had a crap, and only realised I was in the women’s when I came out to wash my hands.

Just the other day I was sharing a coffee with an academic friend. He mentioned that my graduating institution, the University of Sydney, was strategizing its future around becoming an extension to Sydney’s private schools.

I said ‘what?’

He said that they are planning to simply take their incoming students primarily from the more expensive private schools on the premise that parents that are happy to pay $50k or more a year for high schooling will pay even more for the right university degree.

I thought about it and suggested that this might be a brilliant financial strategy and that for most of the degrees, the professional services such a medicine, law, dentistry, vet and the like, that the quality of the students doesn’t really matter that much. All they need is solid training.

He said ‘what about business and economics?’ in reference to the graduates that go into our large financial sector. Even there, I proposed, competence was sufficient, especially in our oligarchical Australian economy. All they have to do is compete with themselves and so long as they are from the same gene pool what can go wrong?

The only degrees where the lack of focus on talent and achievement might bite them in the bum is in the arts and the sciences. In these degrees, in the ideal world, you’d bypass the over-coached over-achievers and go looking for genuine talent from anywhere in Australia, or even around the world.

Oddly enough, I have this suspicion that great talent in the arts and sciences can actually be ruined by too much money/focus/coaching/status in high school. The truly great talent needs time to contemplate during the teens and thereby develop the inner fortitude required to ferment their own ideas and disrespect past orthodoxy.

Think of this like good wine. It needs to be put on a shelf and left alone for years while it slowly matures to its own fancy. Anything that is continuously played with is likely to become corked, or mature too quickly and only be good for immediate drinking.

Back to the University of Sydney. I thought my friend must be simply wrong – they couldn’t be that short of ideas. But maybe the inbreeding has already started?

Today I read in the herald that indeed the University of Sydney is piloting a paid HSC-bypass scheme at one of Sydney’s private schools.

Geez, I might have to take this institution off my resume.

The smart toilet. No specific invention here just a very good idea.

In olden days, before the enlightenment, stool watching was a daily part of life. All sorts of sensible and indefensible insights resulted.

This hobby pretty much disappeared with the Crapper’s water closet. It’s time for a return.

The idea is to add every known sensor to a toilet and also an internet connection so that users can have an app to correlate their shit with their shit.

Sensors in the seat include mass, temperature, moisture and pulse.

Plus some sort of user ID system, maybe using a combination of sensor data.

Possibly a camera with a bit of image processing smarts for the early detection of hemorrhoids, and also for the measurement of the (very important) colour (of the stools and urine) and shape of the stools.

And then all sorts of biosensors in the bowel for detection of bio markers related to good health, disease and specific conditions such as pregnancy.

We may as well chuck in the Japanese style warm water cleaning retractable arm system.

The first one will cost a few million but eventually the insurance companies will catch on and buy them for us.

Invention du jour; a vacuum cleaner with a mini pyrolyzer buried within.

The pyrolyzer reduces the organic component of vacuum cleaner waste to carbon dioxide, water and ash.

The volume of ash is well less than 1% of the volume of the original vacuum waste so the thing never needs emptying.

By the time the bag is full the whole vacuum cleaner needs replacing.

And then the whole thing can be dumped in the yellow-lidded recycle bin and subsequently pyrolyzed at the waste-to-energy plant to make electricity and even more ash.

The ash can be used as a filler for the plastics in the production of the pyrolizer vacuum cleaners and the electricity from the waste-to-energy plant far exceeds that consumed by all such pyrolizer vacuum cleaners in their working life.

Thus and therefore this invention proves that the second and third beliefs of thermodynamics are simply guidelines, lassy.

This one isn’t an invention, it’s an innovation because the prior art is too close.

A brake lever for a bicycle that includes a hidden bike bell. Aesthetically speaking, spot on. Market opportunity; me and a couple of other blokes. Chances of me building one, close to zero.

Bastards, someone stole my idea …

I don’t have a bell on my bike because they look sort of poxy. But the other day I decided I could hide one inside the body of a brake lever.

A short google search later and I find some clowns actually filed a patent on this idea last year. Their first claim reads:

“A bicycle bell incorporating a handlebar-mounted-bicycle-brake-component comprising: a cable housing adapted to be operationally connected to a spring loaded brake lever wherein said cable housing is adapted to contain a bell drum; and wherein said spring loaded brake lever is adapted to contain a bell striker; and wherein said spring loaded brake lever is to exert a force such that when the rider releases said spring loaded brake lever said bell striker is caused to ring said bell drum of said bicycle bell.”

Now there is a difference between their idea and mine – they have incorporated a bell but they haven’t hidden it. Their motivation was cost and safety not aesthetics.

In any case, I can’t imagine spending money on patenting a device that the Chinese could knock off in about 3 milliseconds.

Sydney, easter, rain … synonymous.

It has always puzzled me why.

If it was seasonal then the moving feast that is the date of easter should mess this hypothesis up.

But maybe it is because it’s a lunar anniversary and not a solar anniversary.

That moon must bring the rain.

No easter show today.

For the next two weeks there will be an invention per day, just as an exercise in keeping Lola occupied.

Today’s invention is a brain monitoring system.

The hardware is a set of in-ear headphones where the rubber earplugs contain microwires and thus also act as contact electrodes.

These headphones can be used as normal headphones for listening to music and making phone calls, but they can also be used to monitor brain signals.

A device, say a smartphone, will detect a brain signal under various conditions, say open circuit, DC and various frequencies of AC, over four quadrants of an IV curve assuming some power can be fed to the electrodes. Yada.

A detector in the phone will capture the return signal and do the signal processing.

An app will convert the signals into information that can be reported in graphs and riddles, and also used to sell stuff to the user based on their needs.

An example would be to correlate certain brain signals to stress and then use the app to flog vitamin B to the user.

If there aren’t any really useful brain signals it wouldn’t matter. People love mood stones after all.

There is nothing good about a push button electronic handbrake.

The biggest issue is that a handbrake isn’t meant to be a digital device with just an on and off setting.

For example, a slow release is great for reversing back up a steep hill

And how in the world can you execute a handbrake turn with a button that won’t engage unless the car is stationary?

I was just ‘news-lettered’ by sciencemeetsbusiness.com.au

And right up front I read “A patent is a right granted for a device, substance, method or process that is new, inventive and useful when compared with what is already known. It gives researchers an exclusive right to commercially exploit an invention.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Oh so wrong.

A patent gives the patent owner (which is rarely the researcher) an option to sue a third party that has commercialised a product or a service that they (the patent owner) believes reads onto the claims in their patent.

Additionally, more often than not an invention can’t be safely commercialised (free from the risk of being sued for patent infringement) unless licenses to other inventions owned by third parties are also secured.

Plus the invention has to be ‘not obvious to someone practised in the art’ in order to get granted in the first place.

Two interesting data points for you to consider:

1. In Australia more than 80% of patent owners that are aware of potential infringement by third parties do nothing about it because it costs too much time and money to take these cases to court compared to the minuscule benefits of winning these cases.

2. In the UK more than 50% of patent infringement cases result in the patent being invalidated by the courts. That is, more often and not the courts over-rule the patent office that granted the patent in the first place.

So the quote should have read “A patent is an option granted for a device, substance, method or process that is new, inventive, useful when compared with what is already known, and not obvious to someone practised in the art. It gives patent owners an expensive right to sue a third party for supposed infringement of their patent, noting that such actions more often than not result in financial losses to the patent owner.”

The kids in my daughter’s class have to practice giving little 5 minutes speeches in preparation for the Multiculturalism Perspectives Public Speaking Competition.

Here are the pre-chosen subjects.

Respect
Team Australia
Growing up together
Words can hurt
My identity
The meaning of Australia Day
Refugees
Learning languages
Multiculturalism on-line
Living between cultures

You have to love the public school system – they are working hard to get tolerance into the little Eastern suburban minds before the kiddies get sent to expensive private high schools where you’d have to imagine the list would morph a tad.

Respect Team Australia (yachting)
Growing up together (with people just like me)
Words cannot hurt my identity
The meaning of Australia Day (A booze-up)
Refugees Living between cultures (on Nauru)
Learning languages (for those OS holidays)
Multiculturalism on-line (booking those OS holidays)

At the present moment the most popular Internet of Things application in the USA is motion sensor-triggered video clips of the outside of user’s houses between the hours of 1230am and 4am, sent to apps on the user’s mobile phone.

Apparently you do increase your own wealth by increasing the sense of insecurity of others.

There is an old proverb in Provence that goes something like this “if you can wrap a tree once then you can wrap it again”.

A koan is a paradox to be meditated upon that is used to train Zen Buddhist monks to abandon ultimate dependence on reason and to force them into gaining sudden intuitive enlightenment.

An example is “provide a definition of a ‘powerful’ question.”

According to Jan Willem van de Wetering “All koans are illogical and go beyond the reasoning mind. The monk in training may try to give a sensible answer, but if he doesn’t it will be just the same: the master will ring his bell and the monk has to leave the room until the next instalment of a proposed solution. The answers which, after many years of hard work, despair and near insanity, may be accepted, will be diverse. Perhaps the monk will make a nonsensical remark; maybe he laughs, or looks at the teacher in a peculiar way or does something, like knocking on the floor or waving. If the master nods, the next koan will follow, to deepen the monk’s insight. There are rows and rows of koans, and the monk who solves them all has to leave the monastery to practise his insight in the world, perhaps as a teacher, perhaps as an inconspicuous civilian. Only very few disciples come to the end of the road, which doesn’t matter, for the monastery is not a school intended to produce nothing but masters.”

Koans make no sense without intent and a master. One wouldn’t, for example, expect great insight if a koan was tossed in the direction of a bunch of Australian service providers during one of those HR-ish one hour training sessions. But you never know, there might be a domino effect where someone, somewhere, ends up thinking about it muchly. Who knows where the earthquake will be once the butterfly has flapped its wings?

Google now has twigged, a month later, that I cycle not drive!

44 minutes my arse. I’ll do it in 30.

This morning I visited a bunch of twenty-something kids that have developed the most amazing technology.

One of them is doing a PhD in neuroscience (or something like) that and in the course of his work noticed that here is a chemical potential difference between two side of a human head when measured at the ears.

The electrical engineer amongst them has managed to rig up a system to extract a micro-current from this chemical potential and they have developed a prototype set of wireless headphones which only consumes the power extracted from the head. That is, in principle it never needs charging!

It incorporates a specially modified and low power wireless data transmission technology which is good enough to transmit music in real time, some very low power speakers, and the energy capture and storage system. The power they have to work with is substantially below that used by current headphones and given this I was amazed at the sound quality of the prototype.

One of the very innovative inclusions is that the chemist amongst them has filled the rubber earplugs with micro-wire and this is used as a contact electrode. Just amazing.

I asked them about intellectual property and apparently one of them has a mate who knows a little about patents and they have self-filed a US patent application. I further inquired as to what they were claiming as their invention and they said the chemical potential of the human head. I noted to them that this was a dangerous strategy because one isn’t supposed to be able to get granted patents on natural features of the human body. I hope they listen to me.

It occurs to me that even if their system doesn’t work in practice that the low power consumption technologies that they are developing will allow headphones with rechargeable batteries to go around a month between recharges. Even that is something worth considering.

I can’t get too excited about this stuff. In my working life I have seen dozens of such breakthrough technologies that never got to market. The primary reason is because there is often some ‘gotcha’ in the technology that means that a critical feature can’t be released. Often the techies fall so in love with their ideas that they continue to ignore these gotcha features until they run out of money or energy, or both.

Nevertheless, I will keep an eye on these kids and see how they go.

If you can be bothered arguing the toss over who owns the islands in the South China Sea then just build some new ones. That is what China is doing; building artificial islands in the South China Sea loaded up with ports and air bases. Very innovative, very strategic, and very blunt.

At the same time some states in the USA are passing laws that allow individuals to cite their personal religious beliefs to refuse service to a customer or resist a state non-discrimination law. This lot will end up huddled behind walls containing like-minded religious nutters with all their guns pointed outwards at the neighbouring nutters.

Eventually you’d have to think this behaviour would hit consumption of goods and services in the USA; everyone will simply refuse to serve each other. They may even start requesting that internet transactions are kosher.

My prediction; China will wake up to the fact that it will have to start consuming all of it’s own shit and turn the new islands into Club Meds.

Nelson Mandela said:

“For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others”

Assuming that Nelson knew a thing or two about freedom, if you are in the process of casting off the chains and becoming free then you have to be very aware of the second part of this quote.

I don’t think that it’s any coincidence that most of the prophets were people that stood back and were very careful with their engagements with other people.

They were simply very aware of the impact of their own behaviour upon others and they accepted this as a responsibility, almost as a price they had paid for the enlightenment that they had achieved.

One of my learnings in life is that empathy is a two-part process; the first being aware of how another person is feeling, and the second is caring about how they feel. Without both, empathy can’t be achieved.

Oddly enough, when I put all these thoughts together I have realised that you can’t live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others if you don’t have empathy. You simply wouldn’t know enough about them, or care enough about them, in the first place.

Which is to say, you can’t be free if you don’t have empathy. But having empathy doesn’t necessarily make you free.

The financial pages are full of talk of tax reform.

This because the libs won in NSW, so many self-serving souls are saying that unpopular reform can be pushed through if the reform is well-spun to the masses.

Somewhere there is an economist that could rigorously forecast the impact of various changes to the tax system and come up with a great plan that takes into account all of the myriad of parameters.

But between that economist and any actual reform there lies the rest of us with our self interest, disinterest, mistrust, brown paper bags and cricket bats.

The whole thing seems to be an effort to soften us up for an increase in GST and more taxes on superannuation funds.

Rather than raising taxes on superannuation funds, the government would be better off if they just borrowed their money from the superannuation pool, forcibly if needs be, via bonds.

This way, because the debt is in AUDs, they could just print money to repay their debts and in the process make Australian exports more competitive and reduce the consumption of imports.

This would give them a real lever over the economy. One which they don’t have now.

Just about to fly back to Sydney. I checked out the pilots as I was boarding. No obvious signs of suicidal depression. Still, a little reassurance over the tannoy wouldn’t go astray.

Something like a cheerful duet of pilots cooing ‘what a great day for flying folks, we are really looking forward to not touching these controls as your autopilot looks after you and ensures your safe arrival.’

I would rather the plane was a drone not the tannoy.

Too much to ask?

An idea for Google’s gmail …

Yesterday I got an email from a distant colleague which was sent straight to trash because it was a charity-ish request for some cause that I have no interest in.

After I deleted it it kept coming back because some of the other people he had cc’ed it to just kept on replying.

Without spamming him I couldn’t get their joviality out of my inbox because of gmail’s conversation mode.

What gmail needs is a settings option that says “trash a conversation once, trash it forever”

Generally speaking there is a need for a partial spam mode where it is the subject matter that is spammed and not the sender.

Even when they are brand new, elevators in universities all over the world seem not to work properly.

A coincidence?

Maybe it’s because they are programmed for offices and hotels which have different traffic flows.

Or that universities just cheap out and under-spec them.

Students might be practiced in the arts of abuse.

Who knows, maybe there is some darker force at work punishing us visitors silly enough to step foot onto a campus.

One thing I do know, nine times out of ten my university elevator seems to be some sort of padded cell that gives me this weird “get me out of this asylum” feeling.

Twice a year we have neighbourhood chuck outs.

The streets start filling up with detritus of Chinese manufacturing at least a week before the deadline, which is tomorrow I think. There’s this fridge magnet thing I keep losing with the dates on it.

And forget about the council website; it’s useless. I just checked … Homepage > ‘living’ > ‘resources recovery and waste’ > ‘recycling and waste services’ > taken to dodgy contractor site > skip popup offer of free plastic bag > ‘collection services matters’ > ‘bulk household service’ > ‘when is my collection?’ > enter number and street name > select correct address from table with no obvious instructions to do so > and finally the dates appear!

All the stuff – it’s not that the Chinese can’t manufacture well; it’s more that they specify cheap input materials that result in the products not lasting very long.

They do this because their Western customers are cheap arses that will only buy cheap shit.

When the plastic kids’ furniture, teak chairs and BBQs get biannually hoiked, we all wander around and pick up each other’s shit.

Net, net; we are ensuring genetic diversity in the Sydney cockroach population.

There are also professional modern day tinkers that collect the good stuff, that is more than ten years old and not made in China, and flog it at auction for export as antiques to China. I know because I have a good mate with a PhD who does this for a living.

These tinkers are very important because without their efforts the system would blow up. All that incoming Chinese material would eventually cause Sydney to sink into the fracking depths if it weren’t for the tinkers and their Hiace vans.

Milk crates; they don’t get picked up. Nobody wants them. Especially the blue ones. Don’t get me started on this one, except to note that there are now more unused milk crates in Australia than there are cows.

Around a day or two after the deadline some contractor’s truck comes around and picks up the really bad shit that nobody wants.

But they won’t take chemicals, paints, building materials, unbundled green stuff, unwanted cars, dead cats, and a list of other stuff as long as your arm.

Chuck out week resembles a cultural spring. People carting their stuff out to the footpath, or wandering around the streets, scabbing, discover that there are people in the other houses on their street. This is a great opportunity for some very old-school banal conversation.

The only other time this happens is on election day. Long lines of joviality, all declaring a lack of care and interest. Lots of talking to strangers. Me wondering, where do all these people live?

Yesterday we had both an election and a chuck out on the same day. By the end of the day the introverts were totally fucked from all that small talk.

I suspect that the most affected crawled up into bed with a hot milk brandy and took their pain away by watching the libs get crowned as the least obnoxious and marginally less corrupt.

When we get fully inserted into the Matrix they would do well to institute weekly elections and chuck outs in there. A happy operative is far less likely to want to bust out of thing and pull the plug.

I vote and I’m hungry.

On this state election day I was just accosted by aging agents representing the local liberal and labor candidates.

I reminded both of them that since the last election that ICAC proceedings had forced about 10 MPs or former MPs from each of the parties to resign.

After that, really, did they expect my vote?

If that wasn’t enough the local liberal candidate (and incumbent) approached me personally.

I asked him how he had represented my interests in parliament since the last election.

Clearly an odd question, but he rallied and rolled off a list of pork barrelling efforts in the local area funded by state government.

I suggested that sounded a little dodgy and noted that I wondered what he gave back in return for these local financial investments.

He was now starting to look quite nervous at talking to this idiot.

I asked what legislative bills he had introduced or promoted in parliament.

He looked very confused at this question.

He did say he had of course supported all the government’s bills.

I decided to let him get back to his main job of charming grannies.

I really think it’s time we get rid of our state parliaments.

The stakes are way too low for this to make any sense but cents.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to talk into your phone and get a blood alcohol reading. But ociffer, the thing said ‘go for it.’

A aeroplanes’ blackbox could be more accurately described as red. No wonder they can hardly ever find the fuckers.

Right this is very obscure … be warned.

If you ever get a patent you will find that your independent claims cost you more than your dependent claims.

The independent claims are broader and hence worth more in any specific patent enforcement case.

But note that it doesn’t cost the patent office any more to process the independent claims.

How is it that a government owned monopoly like the patent office can engage in such an activity as value-based pricing?

Under the ACCC rules the patent office could be argued to be abusing its monopoly position.

They are two types of wisdom in my view.

The first that helps one understand, after the fact.

And the second, that prevents one fucking up, before the fact.

It would be a mistake to believe that doing nothing, and therefore not ever fucking up, derives from the second form of wisdom.

And it would also be a mistake to believe that successfully applying the first sort of wisdom necessarily has any impact on the frequency of future fuck ups.

Therefore and thus, my wisdom for you is that it would be a mistake to mistake any sort of wisdom for knowledge, at any time.

When someone says ‘precisely’ you may think that they are agreeing with you whereas in fact they may be just noting that you always have the same opinion on the voiced subject.

If they agree with you they should say ‘accurately’. Oddly, no one says this.

What they do say is ‘exactly’ or ‘correct’ implying that they are the arbiter of the perceived truth, not just an observer of it.

It has come to my attention that in certain segments of the professional services market that ‘innovation’ is about two buzzwords back.

Since ‘innovation’ was last the consultant-lecture-torture du jour they have had ‘ingenuity’ and ‘value’.

You might think that innovation and ingenuity are the same thing but they are not.

Innovation is, say, figuring out how to improve productivity so as to get a Friday afternoon off for a drinks session down the pub.

Whereas ingenuity is figuring out how to head off to the pub and have everyone think you are somewhere on site working.

Value is a $3 schooner of New during happy hour.

I just watched a young mother de-Volvo with three young kids, babies really.

She seemed blissfully unaware of her surroundings and the excessive time it was taking to get the deed done.

I suspect that if she was on a tight time budget and anxious to appear in any specific controlled manner she would go mad at her inability to achieve even a reasonable pass mark.

Lucky for her that the external environment is so safe. In times past a tiger would have had them for breakfast.

Why for mesh?

I have noticed that people who feel strong entitlement in life also have a tendency to blame others when they don’t get their valued entitlements.

Unrelated, I have noticed of late more occasions of car sickness whilst tapping on this phone in a cab. It’s those bloody hopeless cabbies and their brake-happy ways, not me. Really!

Some people are just born naturally more innovative than the pack. They just are.

A small fraction of the genuinely innovative types get positive reinforcement around this aptitude when they are young.

An even smaller fraction of these bother to learn business, science or technology in a rigorous fashion.

Very few organizations have a place for people in this smallest of small fractions.

This is primarily because most organizations, despite what they might say to the contrary, don’t want or need innovation and can’t stand people that are unhappy unless it’s always happening (which is what an innovator is – take note, this is how to weed out the pretenders).

Rightly or wrongly, this is because the upside of executing any innovative plan is generally viewed as being outweighed by the risks.

The only time this paradigm breaks down is if the organization is under some sort of external threat, in which case they may be forced to innovate or die. Backs to the wall stuff.

This is when innovation occurs and when the most minor of minorities get to shine.

Generally though, as soon as the organization is over the hump of the threat it goes back to its staid old ways, and they execute the pesky innovators.

The only truly innovative organisations in the world are those that have the key innovator at the top, as the CEO or equivalent.

Failing this, in any organisation the innovator is either a pain in the arse or a nice mascot.

At the current moment ‘innovation’ is a business buzzword so everyone is paying lip service to it.

But its nearly done – the next buzzword is …..?

“Earlier this month, Federal Treasurer Joe Hockey announced the first forced divestment since 2007 when he ordered the sale of a $39 million Point Piper mansion that had been illegally purchased by China’s 15th richest man.”

How about this:

1. Confiscation of the property when caught, and

2. A bounty hunter award of up to 10% for anyone helping to uncover illegal ownership, either direct or by beneficiary

That would make the foreign illegal property buyers think a little harder.

Way back when I lived in a block of flats in Bondi.

One tenant was the curse of the block – parties all night, loud music and loud rooting.

It didn’t bother me too much because I was brought up in a pub.

But it did bother my neighbours, greatly.

Months of assiduous complaining to the body corporate by the accursed brought only temporary relief.

The antagonist truly thought that each complaint was ephemeral; specific to the incident at hand.

He had not the capacity to extrapolate to the root cause, namely a general dislike of not being able to sleep.

I think this was because he slept during the day and couldn’t see why they wouldn’t as well.

One day, over a beer and a smoke on the back verandah I tried to explain this to him.

I like to think that it was I who precipitated his next action; he made a formal written complaint to the council about his own noisy emissions.

You couldn’t argue that he didn’t have a sense of humour.

But I was the only other person in the block that was laughing.

Ever met a Sagess? I have.

Last week I designed a new scooter and I have no idea why.

The basic idea is to have two half size (350mm/14 inch diameter) front wheels (half the size of racing bike wheels), with a scooter platform and a small rear wheel as per the picture below.

The whole thing would fold-up (for the scooter platform and rear wheel) and drop down (for the handlebars) such that the whole mechanism can be contained between the two wheels except for the protruding handlebars, which would be used to carry the thing when not in use.

The standing platform could include a battery which could drive an electric motor in either the front or back wheels.

Is there any benefit over existing designs?

Well, the big front wheels help stability and smoothness on rough surfaces, and the double front wheels offers a nice fold-up capability not possible for large single front wheeled scooters.

The mind of a Gen Y goldfish has been trained not to notice much.

By way of example, the young French girl in the local cafe.

After she makes a coffee she had no idea who ordered it even though she took the order.

She will happily get distracted with some non-time critical activity even though there are customers waiting.

When prompted to serve an exasperated customer she shows no remorse or recognition of the customer’s feelings.

The idea of letting this customer know how long my slice of quiche may take to get packaged is well beyond her.

I believe this lack of awareness results from being brought up in a totally safe environment.

We of other generations were brought up with more anxiety.

We needed to watch and observe our environments in order to predict when issues were coming up.

It might have been the bad mood of a mother or a potential bite from a neighborhood dog.

Danger was lurking everywhere and we watched and simulated scenarios without realizing what we were doing.

Until this process became second nature.

So you see, it’s not just the overuse of antibiotics that has compromised a good slab of a whole generation.

If the premier of NSW loses the upcoming election it will be because of two reasons.

One, Tony Abbott, which we can’t really blame Baird for. Although he seems a lot closer to the onion eater than is explicable by any measure of intelligence.

And two, because he wants to sell our electricity poles (aka telegraph poles) to a private monopoly (that will subsequently rape us for their use) and then recycle the sale proceeds into transport (roads and trains) and probably a little debt repayment.

You have to wonder why our politicians feel the need to do anything? As soon as they do they become a target for the opposition and the press.

If I was in government I would be selling long term leases to government monopolies rather than ‘selling’ them. Same thing really but much better politics.

For example, they could sell a 20, 30 or even a 99 year lease on the poles with options for renewal. The value of such a lease wouldn’t be much different from the sale of the whole shebang – the value of the business would be based on the discounted cash flow of the operating profits, and the underlying assets would be a cost neutral and deteriorating asset that needs a pesky and constant injection of capital by the lessee.

Hang on, this is what they are doing. You wouldn’t know it from the public discourse. All they need to do is put in penalty clauses on price gouging and it would be fine. This is just a matter of communications.

Just as aside we might be better off flogging the poles before everyone goes off grid. As power storage becomes more cost effective, the move to ever-cheapening solar energy will accelerate. The residual grid connected customers will then pay more for the privilege, hence creating even further incentives to go off grid. No amount of government intervention can permanently get in the way of such an appealing option.

On the just announced InnovationXchange.

A new foreign Aid initiative by Australia and the Bloomberg’s founder – a $35m per annum center in Canberra (of all places) that will focus on assessing why decades of foreign aid, like Australia’s supposed $5b per annum effort, hasn’t sorted out any of the world’s problems

“The former New York mayor’s Bloomberg Philanthropies will contribute $US85m (cash or in-kind I wonder?) towards the cost of the Data for Health project. The Australian government will contribute $20m, of which $15m will come from the new innov­ationXchange budget and $5m from the health segment of the remaind­er of the aid budget. The (residual $15m of the) $140m outlay over four years for the innovationXchange centre will come from the overall aid budget”.

This is brilliant. Foreign aid expenditure that is spent in Australia. A building in Canberra for people to visit. Data for Bloombergs to capture and re-sell. An opportunity to abduct all the metadata in the pacific just for the hell of it. And at virtually no incremental cost to the government. It’s what you would call a no-brainer.

The foreign minister Ms Bishop “hopes innovation­Xchange will develop a hi-tech start-up mentality”. In Canberra? And just to double down on this one – “It will be headed by a senior Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade bureaucrat”.

I wonder if anyone has ever made a movie without some sort of crisis in it?

This after watching Paddington Bear where they managed to include both a chase and a villain (a very unbelievable Nicole Kidman) into a story extracted from a book of short stories that had neither.