aka The Joys of Privatization: Public Health (Current UK
Experience)

A second woman has died after chaos in the system to
supply oxygen at home, which was switched to private companies at the
beginning of the month ...
Mr Brady, 74, a retired engineer, said that his wife had needed three bottles of oxygen a week and that he had been unable to get through by telephone to the supplying company, Air Products, ...
The day after she died he received a call about a delivery the following
day

FAMILY doctors unable to obtain oxygen for their patients were advised last night to abandon the newly privatised supply service and revert to an old system to ensure that more lives were not put at risk. As the private companies responsible for the new service continued to struggle with demand, pharmacies throughout England and Wales were
asked to restart their service ...

Pharmacy leaders described the situation as shambolic and said that
many chemists were now out of stock after the Government’s decision
to end their £18 million contract. They said that the Government had
ignored numerous warnings of the chaos that would ensue if the supply
systems were suddenly switched, but had carried on regardless ...
thousands of patients have been unable to get mobile oxygen
cylinders, which cost about £7.50. Some have been given £1,500
“concentrator” units instead, which they described as wholly
impractical and an alarming waste of money and resources.

AND ...

A LETHAL beam of radiation was emitted from a casket containing highly radioactive waste on a three-and-a-half-hour road journey across England, it was disclosed yesterday.

Thousands of people were put at risk by the “cavalier” attitude of workers for the privatised company in charge of transporting the hospital waste.

Only by “pure chance” was no one directly exposed to the high concentration of cobalt-60 gamma rays that streamed from the container because of the failure to install a lead safety plug.

Radiation levels up to 1,000 times higher than a high dose rate were found ... Fortunately, the narrowly focused beam was directed downwards. Had the rays escaped horizontally, they would have contaminated anyone within 330 yards of the vehicle ... AEA Technology (AEAT) was guilty of a series of failings the company used
the wrong safety packaging, and had not noticed the missing safety plug.

It failed to take up an offer of training in the use of the packaging and important safety documents were signed by a member of staff who had no formal training in radiation protection, he said.

The prosecutor said “The risk created . . . was foreseeable and the degree of that risk was significant. There is no “safe” dose of ionising radiation. If no one was directly exposed to the beam, that was a matter of pure chance.”

 
Unusual Films
Prelinger Archives was founded in 1983 by Rick Prelinger in New York City.
www.archive.org/details/prelinger
It grew into a collection of over 48,000 "ephemeral" (advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur) films. In 2002, the film collection was acquired by the Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. Prelinger Archives remains in existence, its goal to collect, preserve, and facilitate access to films of historic significance that haven't been collected elsewhere. Included are films produced by and for many hundreds of important US corporations, nonprofit organizations, trade associations, community and interest groups, and educational institutions.
Rights
Rick Prelinger and The Internet Archive hereby offer these public domain films from Prelinger Archives to all for free downloading and reuse.

You are warmly encouraged to download, use and reproduce these films in whole or in part, in any medium or market throughout the world. You are also warmly encouraged to share, exchange, redistribute, transfer and copy these films, and especially encouraged to do so for free.
[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 2/18/2006 03:34:00 PM

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

 
Low-Friction Diamonds (Post St Valentine's Day)
High Technology Finland 2005
http://www.htf.fi/2005/new_materials/materials/en_GB/diarc/?show=all
Diamonds for lower friction
DIARC-Technology, one of the pioneers in the industrial processing of amorphous diamond thin-film coatings, has developed a new diamond coating: DIARC® Miclub. This is an ideal solution for a vast number of applications where low friction properties are a priority,

Amorphous diamond coatings produced by DIARC-Technology are much harder than thin-film coatings of hard metal nitrides or diamond-like carbon films made from hydrocarbons. It is so hard that it can only be scratched by a natural diamond. The coatings are processed at low temperatures, which makes it possible to deposit them on all types of metal substrates, as well as on ceramic materials, and even plastics.

The friction coefficient of a DIARC diamond coating against steel under dry sliding conditions is only one fifth of the corresponding figure for steel, which means that it can serve as a permanent dry lubricant.
The newly developed DIARC® Miclub coating reduces friction in lubricated contacts as well,
[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 2/15/2006 11:08:00 PM

Monday, February 13, 2006

 
St Valentine's Eve? 13th February
The 28th anniversary of Australia's first putative terrorist bombing, which killed three people on George St opposite the QVB bus stop on the night of February 13th, 1978?

I am thankful that the memorial plaque, which worryingly disappeared for a year or so, has reappeared on a street-side pillar of the renovated Hilton Hotel.

I wonder if the night of the 13th should be called St Valentine's Eve? If we called it "the Valentine's Eve bomb", instead of "the Hilton bomb", it'd be easier to remember the day, and I'm sure the Hilton Hotel people would be happier, but then, it seems to be so far out of our consciousness that they don't need to worry.
[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 2/13/2006 02:56:00 PM

Saturday, February 11, 2006

 
Oh dear
Bloody Hell. Here I am (with help) struggling to drag mysel' from the morass of depression, despair & defeat (aka The Slough of Despond) and this is the message I get. Probly deserve it for trying the quiz in the first place.
I still wonder if my store of courage was used up by the decision to keep on trying to live (by invoking my Inner Mongrel), struggling through the months of treatment & recovery, when it would have been so easy to quietly slip away, and that's why I feel so incapable & cowardly now.

QUIZ: How Will You Die?

You scored as Suicide. Your death will be suicide. What more can I say? Fact: Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. If you want to know how you will commit suicide, take a look at your second highest percentage on the bar graphs. Suicide 93% Bomb 73% Disappear 73% Posion 60% Disease 53% Suffocated 47% Gunshot 40% Natural Causes 40% Eaten 27% Accident 27% Stabbed 27% Drowning 7% Cut Throat 7% How Will You Die?? created with QuizFarm.com

[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 2/11/2006 08:45:00 PM

Monday, February 06, 2006

 
Four Big Cruise Ships turned over at the Quay in a week
February, February, stinking, sticky February. I loathe Sydney's weather in February. It's come early this year, that feeling of being trapped under a grey flannel blanket with a steam-iron above it. Cockroaches bloat on the heat and damp -- the engineers back in the old wooden ferries, where you could look down a hatch into the engine room, called them 'steam flies' -- and go zooming around seeking richer pickings. One sweaty evening not long back, I had to bat one fat shiny brown and BIG buzzing critter back with folded newspaper as it flew happily in through my windows, stretched wide open to try and catch any cool evening breeze.

In the lingering heat & humidity of night, the air seems to cling and carry any scent. An overpowering sweetness from the Murraya hedges or jasmine vines, seaweed trailing over the shore, leaves and blooms quietly rotting down under the green branches pushing out.
[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 2/06/2006 11:46:00 PM

 
English has several words for different types of cattle ...
I'm repeating this post below, which comes originally from the blog's beginning, in 2002, because it's still relevant, and has been discussed again recently by people around me.

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One of my reasons for reading science fiction/speculative fiction (as opposed to sword & sorcery style fantasy or space-located varieties of westerns, &c) is that it can deal with all sorts of ideas & speculations about humanity, society, reality, &c. This edited extract deals with a subject that's been discussed very many times.
From "Inheritor" by CJ Cherryh (p 365 of my paperback edition): Third in a series set on an alien world where stranded humans are co-existing uneasily with another race who are said not to have emotions in the same way as humans. CJC tends towards the 'higher' end of 'space opera' — lots of action & excitement, but reasonable characters and touching on bigger themes — tho' she also does other sub-genres. The protagonist is a translator.

"Not love, he thought to himself. And then thought, ... maybe they'd had such rotten luck with the love and man'chi aspect of relations because that word in [English] blurred so many things together it just wasn't safe to deal with.
They were lovers. But Ragi said they were sexual partners.
They were lovers. But Ragi said they were associated.
They'd made love. But Ragi said there they were within the same lord's man'chi.
They'd made love. But Ragi said there were one-candle nights and two-candle nights and there were relationships that didn't count the candles at all.
They'd made love. But a Ragi proverb said one candle didn't promise breakfast. ...
He was quite out of his depth trying to reckon that. But with Jago he certainly wouldn't count the candles. Whatever they could arrange, as long as it could last from both sides, that was what he'd take."

[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 2/06/2006 12:45:00 PM

Saturday, February 04, 2006

 
Thinkin' about Numbers
bellatrys on Nothing New Under The Sun (the ARX acta diurna) tries to help us get things in perspective.

USA Census: What 298 Million looks like (21-Jan-2006)
First, download this PDF ( oddlots.digitalspace.net/ARX/downloads/100k.pdf ). It contains 100k dots in approx 5pt type (Times Roman), arranged in blocks of 1000 (4 columns of 25 blocks = 100,000) on an 8.5 x 11 sheet of digital paper (standard US letter - slightly different to A4) thanks to the wonders of step-and-repeat.

Then, get 6 reams of paper and print out the "100k" pdf onto all but 2 of them. You will now have one dot for every person in the United States, as of the latest census estimates (www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html), give or take a few ten thousand.

-- No, don't really go print off 6 reams of dots, wasting toner and paper. But stack up six reams and look at them, ( but don't drop them on your foot, paper=wood ( )), six blocks of 500 sheets, and imagine every one of them covered in all those tiny dots, and every dot standing for a name, as if microfiched down in a spy story... [more]

[NOTE: I highly recommend this writer, and blog. There is very much good analysis & information in it; this little note is just a small thing that caught my imagination, like this in Hello Cruel World, a while back now.]

A comparable Australian number
Imagine each of those dots is an Australian dollar note — if you can remember what they looked like — or dollar coin. Don't leave off those last two pages, making up the full 300 sheets. That's the amount of money that our wheat farmers (and other taxpayers, I suspect, less directly) paid supposedly to transport our wheat exported to Iraq under the "Oil for Food" program. These were seen as payments to 'facilitate' the process (= bribes) by the Australian Wheat Board (now a private company called AWB), which was iffy enough, but is often seen as the price of dealing with "different cultures". (I won't discuss that problem here.)

It turns out, however, to have been funneled fairly straight to the higher levels of Saddam Hussein's regime, rather than the standard excuse that bribes support poorly-paid lower levels of the government. Whether much of it went towards supporting their extravagant way of life, got socked away in secret overseas bank accounts, paid the army & secret police, or was spent on armaments is probably less important than just the fact that it didn't go into the "Oil for Food" program to buy food, medicine or public health works for the general Iraqi public, whose sufferings were used for propaganda by their regime. The population of Iraq is somewhat larger than the population of Australia, which is 20 million people, but not huge (Iraq is about one-third the area of New South Wales, or twice the area of Victoria). So $300M would buy a fair amount to spread among them. At least it seems they did get the wheat in good condition. One hopes it made some difference to the people's hunger.
[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 2/04/2006 09:42:00 PM

Friday, February 03, 2006

 
The Corpuscle speaks

... reality is a thug and the thug doesn't much care ...

Reality gets things done, you know? Without reference to rules and regulations, or even the best laid plans of mice and men. And it ain't afraid of nuthin' ...

the big kahuna thug has already made sure that all those guys will at least go down in history as the minor thugs they are. In fact, they are already just smears on the windshield, even though the action of the wind gives the illusion their wings are still beating. Surely they have ruined many people's lives, and will ruin even more of them, but the big kahuna thug doesn't much care about individual lives. That's what gives us the feeling that there isn't any real justice in the universe. There is, though. Maybe we can't take much comfort in it. Maybe it doesn't satisfy us the way somebody clearly getting their just desserts always does. But there is some comfort in living in a universe where even the most notorious of the minor thugs the human race generates eventually get sick, rot from the inside, and then die.

Is it human justice? Of course not. Does it make up for all the harm they do to their victims? Not in our minds. But they do, eventually, get what's coming to them. They eventually get pounded by the thug, just like the rest of us.

[permalink][comment] - posted by Mez @ 2/03/2006 09:45:00 PM

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This is my blogchalk:
Australia, New South Wales, Sydney, English, photography, reading, natural history, land use, town planning, sustainability.