slightlyodd

Ever wanted to see the inside of my eyeballs?

Posted on 15 March 2011 | 2 responses

Here is your opportunity! Lucky you!

The white bits are the optic nerve. The darker section is the macula, and in the middle, my fovea.

The good news is, they’re in good shape. Apparently the white sheeny stuff is reflection from the vitreous. Gross, huh!

Attention very angry man in the van behind me!

Posted on 11 March 2011 | No responses

There is a really good reason why I’m driving fairly slowly and leaving a large gap in front of me on the Warringah Freeway. Believe it or not, I’m doing you a favour – you and everyone in the lane behind.

When driving in heavy traffic, patterns of stop-start movement will emerge; sometimes because of a near miss, sometimes because of an accident, or sometimes because of absolutely nothing at all. But once that pattern has emerged, shock waves propagate slowly backward though the traffic, causing people to have to hop on and off the accelerator and brake. It’s no fun to drive in (particularly when, like me, you drive a manual).

Here’s a video both explaining and illustrating the phenomenon:

One Seattle driver discovered that there was a solution for his frustration of getting on and off the gas & brakes. By driving at the average speed of traffic, instead of rushing straight toward the stopped bumper ahead, he caused the flow pattern of his entire lane for miles behind to smooth out. In traffic flow terminology, he figured out the secret to transform a “wide moving jam” into “sychronised flow”. Amazingly, this behaviour can actually improve the overall flow rate of the traffic: more cars can travel along a given road in synchronised flow than in the presence of a jam.

Anyway, angry flashy-light van driver, I thought I’d do you the courtesy of explaining my behaviour. I hope you understand.

Philips NMS 9100 – our first PC

Posted on 10 March 2011 | 5 responses

A wee bit of nostalgia today – I found a few pictures of what was our first home PC. It was a PC/AT compatible 286, running at 8MHz.

As seen in the image below, it came with 768kB of RAM. If I remember correctly, at some stage we upgraded it to 2MB.

On it, I played such immersive games games as “Dark Heart of Uukrul”:

And wrote up school projects in WordPerfect:

Now I can look at stuff like this with the phone in my pocket. The CPU in my phone is (at least) one hundred times faster, has more than 250 times as much RAM. It can tell me where I am using satellites in the sky. I feel old:

How a carbon tax needn’t break household banks

Posted on 25 February 2011 | No responses

There’ll be, no doubt, lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth about how the awesome, large and novel carbon tax will send Aussie battlers broke. But it needn’t be that way. Let’s assume that the government will provide tax relief to low-middle income households (because that’s what they reckon they’ll do). Here are two scenarios to help make my point.

Both of the following households earn median income ($66,820 according to the ABS, 2007-08). Today, they spend money on goods and services in the same way as most Australians. Hypothetically, their carbon-intensity spending breakdown might look like:

15% household income ($10,023) on high carbon-intensity items (eg. coal-fired electricity, petroleum, etc.)
85% household income ($56,797) on medium-low-no carbon-intensity items (eg. food, clothes, mortgage, water, council rates, trips to the movies, bags of potting mix, whatever you like).

Let’s imagine that high carbon-intensity items increase in price by 10%, and that medium-low carbon-intensity items increase in price by 1% (on average – some would increase by more, many wouldn’t increase at all). If this family’s spending mix remained the same, then they’d be spending $1002 more on high-intensity products and $567 more on medium-low intensity products.

Let’s also imagine that the government provides tax breaks to average families to the value of $1,350. This might be because the government has made the reasonable assumption that the average Australian’s spending on high-intensity items would decrease somewhat due to the price signal.

Household A are average consumers. They don’t think too hard about where they spend their money. Some products on their supermarket shelf become more expensive and they consequently buy them less frequently. Petrol increases in price a bit, so the family make a little bit more of an effort to catch public transport or walk. All up, they change their spending mix to be 12.5% on high carbon-intensity items and 87.5% on med-low-no carbon-intensity items. They’ve expended minimal effort on this, and are around $50 worse off per year.

Household B are savvy, informed consumers. They seek out discounts, they aggressively change their spending behaviour to get the most bang for their buck. They also care a bit about the climate, providing more of an incentive to buy low intensity stuff. When high intensity items become more expensive, these guys avoid them like the plague. They get rid of one of their two cars, using carshare, public transport, bikes and legs as a substitute. They put in solar hot water to cut their electricity bill. They manage to cut their spend on high intensity items from 15% to 5% of their income. That represents a change from $10,020 to $3,341 and they consequently spend $63,476 on med-low-no intensity products. In total, they are spending $969 more per year due to the tax, but the $1,350 rebate leaves them around $380 a year *better off*.

The numbers are made up, but the principle is about right. The message is – if there’s a carbon tax and households are compensated, by aggressively curbing spend on high intensity products, some households will actually manage to come out in front.

(Image from http://www.mikejs.com/)