I’m pretty upset today. I found a promotional roll of three-ply toilet paper in my pack of two-ply. If I wanted three-ply, I’d have bought it, dammit.

I use two-ply Baby Soft toilet paper, made by Kimberly-Clark of South Africa. Elsewhere, it may be known by different brand names, like Cottonelle or Andrex, but basically, it’s the best a bum can get. People who use other brands annoy me, and I worry deeply about people who use only single-ply when they can afford better. How can you trust people like that?

In my bathroom, toilet paper hangs with the sheets coming from underneath, so a deft one-handed manoeuver involving a yank and a well-timed tap with the thumb is all that’s needed to sever the required length. I’ve got it down to a fine art, and get exactly the same number of sheets every single time. Even when I’m drunk. I cannot for the life of me grasp the convoluted brain contortions that are necessary to deal with any other way of hanging a toilet roll. My method may be controversial, but it’s me.

Bog roll should be soft. None of this recycled 220-grit stuff, or industrial-strength tissue with the texture and absorbency of cheap newsprint. I demand expensive, luxury softness, as only Baby Soft two-ply delivers. With micro-pocket technology.

Bog roll should be white. Not with pastel butterflies on it. Not with pictures of George Bush on it. Not with funny-ha-ha images of the Rolling Stones tongue. Not with prints of Hello Kitty, which is just sick. Just bog-standard white, of the kind you achieve by adding copious amounts of poisonous bleach as you manufacture your expensive, luxury, soft, white two-ply Baby Soft.

So now I discover this offending three-ply roll in my pack of two-ply, wrapped in a separate promotional cardboard wrapping. That idiotic marketing gimmick alone was a right pain, considering that I grabbed the roll in question when my injured cat wet my bed. This was not the time to make me remove unrequested advertising from the roll, or ask me to read it. Time was of the essence.

Then I got around to hanging the remainder of the roll in the bathroom, but the remainder wasn’t much, since it has only 230 sheets. That’s 120 fewer sheets than comparable two-ply. If I wanted less toilet paper on a roll, I’d have bought it that way. Face it, you’re not going to use only two-thirds of your customary length, which is what the marketing scum are counting on. So they’re ripping you off. And that’s not counting the fact that 230 times 1.5 is 345, not 350, which is what you’d get on a two-ply roll. So they’re ripping you off twice. By contrast, 350 times 2 is 700, which is considerably more than the 500 sheets you get with single-ply toilet paper. So one-ply is stupid, two-ply is a bargain, and three-ply is a ripoff.

As if this torment wasn’t enough, I discovered that my skillful yank-pause-tap technique for severing the required length doesn’t work with this newfangled bog-roll, because the paper is too thick. You need two hands to tear it sheet from sheet — pull, stop the roll, find the perforation, and with a hand on either side of it, tear — which is annoying and inefficient. Moreover, I found it too thick for my liking. I won’t go into detail, but single-ply is too thin, and three-ply is too thick, which is why I buy two-ply. Dammit.

Why can’t they just give me what I choose to buy? I’m paying for it, after all. Most importantly, don’t mess with my toilet routine. I was potty trained 35 years ago. I don’t want to have to acquire new habits just because some marketer thought they’d give me something I don’t want. Not for free as an added extra, but in stead of one of the two-ply rolls I’d normally get.

So, Kimberly-Clark marketing drones, if you insist on marketing at me, put some more of those little fluffy toy puppies in the pack. Kids love them, and my dogs think they’re real and carry them around everywhere. That’s cute. Springing three-ply on me when I’m faced with a cat-pee disaster is just plain evil. Do not ever do that again.

If only to prove that there’s no such thing as “scientific consensus” on climate change, the group of scientists, economists and other prominent consensus-busters that convened in New York issued a declaration summarising its findings last week.

I noted a few days ago that this group, which styles itself the Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC, in pointed contrast to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, convened by the United Nations and patronised by green lobbyists and political pressure groups) had rudely been dismissed by a credulous, editorialising media, which promptly got its facts wrong on the Flat Earth Society.

The Manhattan Declaration that emerged from the conference merited hardly any coverage. The exceptions on major media sites that I could find are a column in the Wall Street Journal that mostly makes the valid point that Al Gore makes an easy target, a disputatious item in a column in the New York Times, a couple of blog posts by Melanie Phillips on the Spectator’s website, and a report in The Register that calls the NIPCC the “IPCC’s ‘evil twin’”.

The summary for policymakers — another reference to its politicised counterpart at the UN — is available in PDF format.

Of course, even if there were consensus, it would have no scientific value in and of itself. Science is about observation, hypothesis, experiment, and proof, not about how many people believe this or that incomplete hypothesis. Basing public policy that binds billions and costs trillions on such incomplete hypotheses incurs far more risk than the political pressure groups would claim accompany no action or voluntary action.

The full text of the Manhattan Declaration follows (original link):

Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change
“Global warming” is not a global crisis

We, the scientists and researchers in climate and related fields, economists, policymakers, and business leaders, assembled at Times Square, New York City, participating in the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change,

Resolving that scientific questions should be evaluated solely by the scientific method;

Affirming that global climate has always changed and always will, independent of the actions of humans, and that carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant but rather a necessity for all life;

Recognising that the causes and extent of recently observed climatic change are the subject of intense debates in the climate science community and that oft-repeated assertions of a supposed ‘consensus’ among climate experts are false;

Affirming that attempts by governments to legislate costly regulations on industry and individual citizens to encourage CO2 emission reduction will slow development while having no appreciable impact on the future trajectory of global climate change. Such policies will markedly diminish future prosperity and so reduce the ability of societies to adapt to inevitable climate change, thereby increasing, not decreasing, human suffering;

Noting that warmer weather is generally less harmful to life on Earth than colder:

Hereby declare:

That current plans to restrict anthropogenic CO2 emissions are a dangerous misallocation of intellectual capital and resources that should be dedicated to solving humanity’s real and serious problems.

That there is no convincing evidence that CO2 emissions from modern industrial activity has in the past, is now, or will in the future cause catastrophic climate change.

That attempts by governments to inflict taxes and costly regulations on industry and individual citizens with the aim of reducing emissions of CO2 will pointlessly curtail the prosperity of the West and progress of developing nations without affecting climate.

That adaptation as needed is massively more cost-effective than any attempted mitigation and that a focus on such mitigation will divert the attention and resources of governments away from addressing the real problems of their peoples.

That human-caused climate change is not a global crisis.

Now, therefore, we recommend –

That world leaders reject the views expressed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as popular, but misguided works such as “An Inconvenient Truth.”

That all taxes, regulations, and other interventions intended to reduce emissions of CO2 be abandoned forthwith.

Agreed at New York, 4 March 2008

Are these points worthy of debate? I think so. No matter what you think about the “scientific consensus”.

The New York Times yesterday published a damning column on the experience of some key Windows Vista users:

Here’s one story of a Vista upgrade early last year that did not go well. Jon, let’s call him, (bear with me — I’ll reveal his full identity later) upgrades two XP machines to Vista. Then he discovers that his printer, regular scanner and film scanner lack Vista drivers. He has to stick with XP on one machine just so he can continue to use the peripherals.

Did Jon simply have bad luck? Apparently not. When another person, Steven, hears about Jon’s woes, he says drivers are missing in every category — “this is the same across the whole ecosystem.”

Then there’s Mike, who buys a laptop that has a reassuring “Windows Vista Capable” logo affixed. He thinks that he will be able to run Vista in all of its glory, as well as favorite Microsoft programs like Movie Maker. His report: “I personally got burned.” His new laptop — logo or no logo — lacks the necessary graphics chip and can run neither his favorite video-editing software nor anything but a hobbled version of Vista. “I now have a $2,100 e-mail machine,” he says.

It turns out that Mike is clearly not a naïf. He’s Mike Nash, a Microsoft vice president who oversees Windows product management. And Jon, who is dismayed to learn that the drivers he needs don’t exist? That’s Jon A. Shirley, a Microsoft board member and former president and chief operating officer. And Steven, who reports that missing drivers are anything but exceptional, is in a good position to know: he’s Steven Sinofsky, the company’s senior vice president responsible for Windows.

Ouch. That must sting. Especially when it constitutes evidence in a class-action lawsuit on behalf of plaintiffs who bought PCs labelled as “Windows Vista Capable”, which turned out not to be Windows Vista capable.

Do check it out. It’s complete with PDF copies of the internal e-mails that say things like, “we set ourselves up”.

“What developing countries need is to develop, not to have their present conditions of life and work preserved like a museum exhibit,” writes Janet Daley in a column prompted by a report that finds “fair trade” to be fundamentally unfair. Thanks to Alex Matthews, over at the excellent classical liberal blog AfroDissident, for alerting me to his own post on the subject. (Granted, he did so two weeks ago, but I have been very patchily connected, thanks to the electronic-frying power of blackouts.)

As you glide along the supermarket aisle past the smartly packaged Fairtrade coffee and guiltily slip the cheaper arabica into your trolley instead, you may ask yourself how much good your overpriced purchase of the Fairtrade stuff would have done anyway.

Well, now you know. Today’s report from the Adam Smith Institute [summary here, or full report in PDF here] will probably confirm your suspicion: Fairtrade labelling is largely a marketing ploy, which makes clever use of the almost infinite capacity for guilt harboured by the residents of wealthy countries over the condition of those in poorer ones, even though that condition is, in no rational sense, their fault.

But rational thinking does not come into this: you and your heaped shopping trolley represent wealth and security, which you have a vague but pretty firm notion that the people who harvest the coffee beans do not have. So maybe you are persuaded to make a gesture: a small strike against “exploitation” and global greed and (if you are old enough to remember this epithet) “corporate capitalism”. And you feel better about yourself.

It transpires that a very small number of farmers are getting a subsidised fixed price for their produce under Fairtrade franchises and that this is at the expense of most other farmers in their regions, who are actually worse off as a result.

But even more serious, the Fairtrade operation helps to keep poor countries and undeveloped economies exactly that — poor and undeveloped.

By sustaining agricultural activity that would not otherwise be sustainable in the global marketplace, it keeps backward populations from developing other forms of modern economic activity that might help them climb out of their backwardness. In order to permit wealthy people to indulge in a bit of sentimental largesse, it effectively preserves an anachronism that locks some of the poorest people in the world in backwaters of primitive economic existence.

What developing countries need is to develop, not to have their present conditions of life and work preserved like a museum exhibit. And the greatest aid to real development — and the proven route out of mass poverty — is through free trade, not Fairtrade.

All of which should cause us to reflect on the various misuses of the word “fair”, and its even more pernicious noun form “fairness”, as it is bandied about in political discourse. As received opinion has it, “fair” means “equal” - in the strict literal sense of the word. Distribution of wealth in a society is “fair” if nobody has much more than anybody else - however much harder they may have worked, or however singular and disciplined their talents may be.

The corollary of this is that taxation helps to ensure “fairness” by seeing to it that those who earn more than others have more of their income confiscated. On this formulation, disparities of wealth are inherently wicked. This is a moral philosophy that you may or may not find attractive. But if you do, you will have to accept that it is fundamentally totalitarian. Disparities of wealth are a sign of a dynamic free-market economy in which some sectors are invariably expanding while others contract: at any given moment, some people’s lot will be improving ahead of others’.

[…]

It is ironic that the very same people who are committed to the idea that “fair” must mean “the same” talk endlessly about “opportunity”. Nothing is a greater killer of opportunities than uniformity.

[…]

How have we come to accept such vindictive uses of the word “fair”?

Of course it was initially the fault of the Left and its special pleading lobbies, which — like some Fairtrade promoters — had a lot to gain. But the Right has been complicit: it has surrendered words like “fairness” and “opportunity” — and accepted caricatures of other words such as “selfish” and “greedy” — with scarcely a murmur of dissent.

Romantic notions of the noble savage, of the beauty of the supposedly traditional pursuits of poor people, are very common. Many developing countries actively play into this misguided view Westerners have of them. I cannot count how often I’ve seen beadcraft workshops in South Africa, as if this is the route out of poverty, or wire sculptures in museums, as if simple crafts are thereby ennobled. The only effect of indulging this romantic, condescending image of Africa is to create an industry that produces singularly uniform curios that delight clueless rich people. Absurdly tall wooden giraffes may be a wonderful way to part a fat prat from his dollars, but it is hardly the best route out of poverty.

Do read the full report (PDF), it’s worth it.

In fairness, here’s the rebuttal by the Fairtrade Foundation. It may not surprise you that it finds the report to be utter rubbish, motivated by evil agendas.

It says, “Releasing this report when thousands of people are trying to make a difference to global poverty by promoting Fairtrade products, is an insult to the effort and commitment of Fairtrade producers and their supporters in the UK.” Ag shame. Good intentions are so, well, good.

“Moreover, the opinions in this report will be rebutted by the producers themselves during Fairtrade Fortnight…” Well sure, but those producers are of “the very small number” cited in the Adam Smith Institute report. Besides, they comment on only a very limited fact: that they get paid more for their coffee. Of course they’re going to say that’s a good thing. They’re hardly likely to consider their personal windfall in the context of the macro-economic impact on development.

“Those of us who have had the privilege of seeing and hearing at first hand the difference that Fairtrade makes to poor communities are not going to be persuaded otherwise by the rehashing of simplistic economic theories.” Indeed. Economic theory has seldom stood in the way of socialist, statist, collectivist or protectionist preachers. Especially not when there’s money to be made from gullible saps.

Update:A fellow calling himself Angry African posted this link to his own post about Fairtrade as a comment to this piece over at the Mail & Guardian Online’s blog site.

It’s well worth a read, especially since it claims Fairtrade not only charges consumers more for the label, but charges participating farmers for the priviledge of being Fairtrade certified. If true, Fairtrade starts to sound more like a protectionist cartel — no, worse: a protection racket — in the Proudly South Africa vein.

“Pay us and we’ll put our label on your products, mark it up sky-high, and give you a small kickback,” then comes to mean, “Pay us, or we’ll guilt-trip people into not buying your products, so you can be sure you won’t get your products to market in our rich countries.”

The Free Market Foundation’s Jim Harris did some back-of-the-envelope calculations, and found some interesting statistics:

Anthony Minnaar, a crime researcher at Unisa, has conducted a … survey. He finds that house robbers have committed on average between 80 and 105 crimes before being caught and convicted. And captured heist gang members have been involved in between 30 and 40 heists, of which there are between 300 and 400 a year. So there are probably between 20 000 and 30 000 criminals in South Africa involved in most of the crimes. That happy notion implies that the remaining roughly 48 million of us are not criminal. Not yet, anyway. It hardly seems impossible for a determined and focused police force to capture 20 000 – 30 000 criminals within a year or so of single-minded investigation. Thereafter, presumably some low-level mopping-up effort would keep the authorities on top of opportunists rushing in to refill those emptied job-opportunity niches.

That does indeed sound manageable, though it raises the rather depressing question of how on earth South Africa’s criminals manage to clean out 100 houses before getting caught.

More interesting, though, is Harris’s stab at a solution:

The market-like trick would be to incentivise the police with variable wages dependent on captures, convictions and crime levels. Better still, outsource the task and its rewards to the private sector for quicker and more effective profit-driven action.

In principle, I’m okay with the notion of incentive pay (especially if it counters the allure of bribery). I’m also okay with the notion of a private police force. There’s no reason why such a force can’t be subject to the law, including special laws designed to apply only to them. There’s every reason to believe such a force, if subject to free-market competition, can be more efficient and effective than a public monopoly. Besides, it’s not like the notion of private armed security is foreign to South Africans. They’d have no market for their services if the public police force were sufficiently effective.

I do, however, have some questions on the subject, on which free-market philosophers may be able to enlighten me.

First, if a pay incentive is offered for captures and convictions — whether to private or public police officers — does this not create a perverse incentive to invade privacy, plant evidence, beat up the guilty, harrass the innocent, and otherwise abuse the extraordinary rights a police officer has over individual liberty? How could such an unintended consequence be neutralised?

Second, if a private police force is established, how does one minimise the problem — already common in our public police forces — of focusing largely on cash-generating activities like enforcing minor traffic infringements on perfectly safe roads?

Third, if bribery and corruption are rife in our current public police force, what guarantee — other than trusting in the self-interest of shareholders — is there that the problem will be less severe in the case of a private police force?

As I said, in principle I like the idea. It’s not like our current police force is very effective, or immune to the lure of easy money, either of which would make a good case for retaining the status quo. However, one would have to not only prevent abuse of a police force’s extraordinary powers, but sufficiently reassure those who are instinctively skeptical of private firms and free markets. A legislative framework that achieves these goals will have to be fleshed out considerably if the concept of a private (or private-like) police force is to get any traction.

A core function of government is to protect the person or property of its citizens from unlawful infringement by other citizens. This can be done privately, of course, but the point is to have an independent third party assigned to protect citizens from each other, to amicably resolve disputes, and to act against those who infringe on the rights of others.

When a government takes it upon itself to protect citizens from their own stupidity, carelessness and recklessness, however, things get rather silly. First, you’ll be told that you can’t smoke, because your likely early death doesn’t make up for your medical care, paid for by others. Then, you’ll be told that you can’t eat this or that variety of fat, because some fraction of the population (probably not including you) is overweight and too lazy to do something about it.

Eventually, they cover objects in foam padding, to prevent you from carelessly injuring yourself if you don’t look where you’re going. The Daily Mail deserves a nod for referring to “the dangers of ‘unprotected text’“.

Is Britain turning into a taxpayer-funded padded cell? A communal, egalitarian bedlam?

Yesterday, either CNN or Sky News reported on the Heartland Institute’s conference on climate change. (It was CNN — see update.) The three-day conference, held in New York earlier this week, was designed to answer some of the questions that would be relevant to my “10 reasons to reject” and “10 more reasons to disbelieve“. Questions such as:

• how reliable are the data used to document the recent warming trend?
• how much of the modern warming is natural, and how much is likely the result of human activities?
• how reliable are the computer models used to forecast future climate conditions? and
• is reducing emissions the best or only response to possible climate change?

The conference was addressed by leading sceptics of the political orthodoxy emanating from the UN’s IPCC, including many sporting doctorate degrees or other distinctions. The lengthy speaker list included Fred Singer, Ross McKitrick, Anthony Watts, Barun Mitra, Václav Klaus, Craig Loehle, Willie Soon, Roy Spencer, Lord Monckton, Marc Morano, and South Africa’s very own Free Market Foundation man, Leon Louw.

The report ended with a snide comment: “The Flat-Earth Society didn’t shut up shop in 1492.”

Not only does this flippant insult illustrate the media’s clear bias on the subject of climate change, but it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny itself.

For a start, the Flat Earth Society either originated with Samuel Rowbotham’s book, Earth Not A Globe, in the 19th century, or was founded in 1547, depending on whom you believe. I’d bet on the former, which is corroborated by a a Flat Earth Society FAQ and by Wikipedia. The latter date comes from a tagline on a Flat Earth Society page.

Moreover, the notion that Columbus sailed west against the prevailing wisdom of the Flat Earth Society is a fiction that first appeared in a historical novel by Washington Irving, The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, in 1828. Never happened. He probably wasn’t widely mocked for his notion of reaching India by sailing west, and even if he was, by failing to reach India he did not prove the earth was round. That the earth was circumnavigable was proven in practice not by an American icon, but by Ferdinand Magellan, who reached the Phillipines on two voyages, one heading east and the other west from Spain, in the early 16th century. This was also well before the Flat Earth Society claims it was founded. Thing is, the notion that medieval scholars believed the Earth was flat is a myth.

If the media’s snide dismissal of any debate around climate change is itself a fiction, why would anyone believe the editorial opinion about climate change they can’t resist injecting into their news reporting?

Update: It was CNN, which was still running the “news report” today, 13 March. The exact insult by “reporter” Miles O’Brien was: “Even the Flat Earth Society didn’t fold its tents in 1493.” Earlier in the story, he interviewed one of the participants and without blushing asked what planet he was on. No biased editorialising there, either.

The environmentalists must have got wind of the spike’s plot to conquer the green category in the SA Blog Awards 2008. It does not make it to the green blog shortlist, despite said shortlist being shorter than that of most other categories.

The silver lining on this ominous cloud is that ivo.co.za has been nominated in three categories: best political blog, best original writing, and best new blog. Those nominations are much appreciated, indeed. Voting is now open.

Tough luck for that cheetah cub, though. Guess I’ll have to set my sights on some new promo technique. Stuff the cute fluffy animals. Sorry, are the puns a little off-target?

By “global warming”, I mean the wider orthodoxy not only that warming is happening, but that it is caused by human activity, that it will lead to catastrophic consequences, that action to change the climate is urgent, that said action consists largely of limiting CO2 emissions and reducing energy use, that such action will be effective, that such action is required of developed and developing countries alike, and that it can only be achieved by using taxation, legislation or other forcible, government-imposed means to make people comply.

A while ago, I listed ten reasons to reject global warming. I’d have to be wrong on all of them before I could rationally consider measures such as cap-and-trade, carbon-tax or other elaborate, invasive and expensive government measures to combat climate change.

A comment by a retired geology Ph.D. on this well-considered piece on the irrationality of the climate change debate (from the felicitously named Rightwing Nuthouse) lists ten more reasons to be skeptical of anthropogenic global warming:

1. It has all the marks of a religion; skeptics are treated like heretics and the spokesman is a Baptist lay preacher.
2. Global warming is now called climate change so it can embrace global cooling, also.
3. It is anti-American since America is biggest producer of CO2.
4. I’ve been through this before in the 1970’s with Global Cooling.
5. As I geologist I know that climate changes take a long time since the earth has a very large thermal mass.
6. Humans have adapted to colder and warmer conditions. Manhattan’s average temperature has increased 7°F in the last 50 years but New Yorkers are not wilting.
7. The data for the earth’s temperature for more than 100 years in the past are very sparse and unreliable.
8. The data for the earth’s temperature for the last 100 years is not much better and practically all of it has to be compensated for the urban heat island effect, vide Manhattan.
9. Other measurements of the earth’s thermal condition, for example, shrinking growing season lengths, are not consistent with global warming.
10. Concomitance is not causation.

I don’t agree with all of them. Point three, for example, should in my opinion read, “It’s anti-development, since development, poverty reduction and prosperity growth are big producers of CO2,” but it makes some good points, especially about the quality of the climate record, the selectivity of factors considered in the overall models, the assumption that correlation implies causation, and the failure to adjust correctly for urban heat islands.

Steve McIntyre’s Climate Audit site has been documenting many of these data and statistical problems, prompting in some cases corrections to the official records. See this post on urban heat island adjustments, and see these posts on temperature record errors and corrections, for example. (I covered some of his work inter alia here and here.)

So while Rick Moran makes some good points about our ability to evaluate the scientific basis for climate change theory, even the notion that we just don’t know enough suggests that expensive programmes of enforced action are imprudent, at best. Not to mention that they’re philosophically repulsive to anyone who values individual freedom and bases their views of how best to minimise poverty and maximise prosperity on the vitality of free markets and innovation.

What better treatment for a prize-winning gravity-driven lamp concept than a take-down-and-send-up? Daniel Rutter, an Australian journalist and blogger, is the author of this cutting use of elementary physics to debunk a patent-pending floor lamp designed by a Virginia Tech masters student (!). It won the second prize in a green gadget competition (!!).

A sample of Rutter’s observations:

It’s a funky looking thing, which was widely reported around the gadget blogs, and was alleged by its designer, Clay Moulton, to give the equivalent light output of a 40-watt incandescent bulb for four hours from the energy of a weight dropping about four feet, or 122cm. When the weight gets to the bottom, you just lift it back to the top and away you go again.

Now, it stands to reason that a mere 1.2-metre drop isn’t going to give you forty actual watts for four hours unless the weight is incredibly heavy. Ignoring losses, it would by definition take forty watts of power over another four hours to lift the weight back up again, which is 160 watt-hours, which is quite a lot. A normal adult human in reasonable shape can manage about 75 watts of output when pedalling away on a bike connected to a generator; it’d take more than two hours of such pedalling to raise that weight back to the top of the Gravia light’s tube, if the weight were heavy enough to make a constant 40 watts on the way back down.

So I just assumed the lamp’s brightness was greatly overstated, and wasn’t even four-watts-of-LEDs-that-are-sort-of-equivalent-to-forty-watts-of-incandescent. But since they’d clearly actually made the thing and it’d won an award, I presumed it did work, if only as a night-light. Fair enough.

But neither Clay Moulton nor anybody else has, actually, built a Gravia. The damn thing doesn’t exist.

[…]

The original press release about the Gravia on the Virginia Tech site now also contains a disclaimer from Moulton, though without any mention of him giving back the prize. I think it’s worth mentioning one line he uses on both pages, though: “I was told it was not possible given current LED’s, but given the rapid pace of innovation in low powered lighting, it would be a conceptual challenge.”

Yes, Mr Moulton, it certainly bloody would be a “conceptual challenge” to make a lamp that produces more than thirty times as much light as the laws of physics say is possible from the energy you put into it. That would be a pretty damn impressive achievement. I propose Virginia Tech not permit you to graduate until you do it. How’s that grab you?

Ouch. Let’s see what the US Patent and Trademark Office makes of this thing. Bet they issue a patent.

(Hat tip: Kriek Jooste.)

Leon Jacobs alerted me to the hilarious story of a delusional nut named Mark Boyle.

Boyle used to run an organic food company, until he sampled too much of his own merchandise and decided the world should do away with money. Presumably, the owners of the organic food company disagreed. So now Boyle is on a pilgrimage.

Travelling under the name “Saoirse”, which means “freedom” in Gaelic, Boyle won’t stoop to dirtying his hands with grubby money. Instead, he decided to travel the world on foot, subsisting only on peace and love. (And, presumably, a way to blog about it.) His intended destination was Mahatma Ghandi’s birthplace, in India.

Tushar Kanna, an Indian who commented on his blog was rather skeptical of this pilgrimage: “I really dunno what kind of haloed idea of India you have. … I feel if you want to explore India, board onto the next flight to take an enriching experience back home. The country as such is fantastic — a treasure trove of cultures bound to create a single nation. But if you just want to experience poverty, I’d recommend you to rather serve in the slums of Kolkata or Mumbai. Man, you’re really wasting two precious years of your life. … when I told my friends about you in school they passed it off as a story of a crazy foreigner with nothing else to do.”

You can see where this is going, can’t you? Hint: it’s not India. He got as far as Calais before the universe, in which he had placed his trust, told him not to be so daft. That’s where he discovered not only that the French have the audacity of speaking French, but that they don’t particularly like jobless, homeless backpackers, freeloading in their country. Oh, sorry. Calling him a “freeloader” is “harmful to the cause“, it’s unfair, and it’s the exact opposite of “accepting the gifts of the universe”. (By which he means getting some sap to buy him a ferry ticket, and giving him her daughter.)

Not only did the French speak French, but they didn’t much care to trade food for his valuable friendship. Worse, his offers of labour didn’t sell very well in a socialist republic where employment has been curtailed by decades of dirigisme and rigueur, which regulated and protected the unemployment rate until… well, let’s just say France stopped publishing an official unemployment rate.

So Boyle and his buddies made “a really brave decision — to go home”. What poor Britain doesn’t have to put up with. Boyle will now walk around his native country, learning French. Not that I can see why, if the French didn’t like him speaking English (and sleeping in their toilets), the average resident of English seaside towns will love him speaking French. Besides, they don’t speak French in Italy, Turkey, Iran and India, so this is going to be one long tour.

Illustrating the depth of this idiot’s delusion is his comment on a group of Ethiopian refugees he found in France. Apparently, his message about the moneyless life doesn’t apply to people who don’t have money. Especially not when they’re Ethiopians escaping “from Iraq and Afghanistan”. This level of geographic confusion doesn’t bode well for his hope that the next time he hits the road he’ll be more attuned to local culture. Let alone being more attuned to human nature.

Moral of the story? Lay off the organic nuts, lest you become one.

I’ve been fairly quiet recently, partially because I’ve had a lot of work that took me out of the office, and partially because I’ve had trouble with my computer on the few occasions I wasn’t. If I hadn’t been so quiet, it’s fairly certain that the continuing South African power crisis would have been high on the agenda.

This morning, after days of by-elimination guesswork, made more challenging by not having internet access, I realised that a power surge caused by Eskom’s policy of random blackouts has fried important bits of my new computer. My decision last year — to replace the computer I lost to an armed robbery with a new desktop rather than a laptop, on the basis that mere convenience was an unaffordable luxury — proved to be woefully over-optimistic and ultimately mistaken. It now turns out that a notebook computer, with its ability to shrug off daily two-hour power failures, is a basic necessity for anyone who needs a PC to do their job. As if that blunder wasn’t serious enough, now comes the icing on the cake: the unproductive alternative has been rendered entirely non-productive, having become a terminal victim of the very reason it was unproductive in the first place. It’s like I was robbed twice.

I’d like to thank Eskom, with all my heart. I eagerly await a cheque with which I can buy a new laptop. I’d also like to thank my parents, for their understanding and support, my friend Brian for lending me an old box of his, and my dogs, who endured my frequent irritability and late nights while tracking this problem during a week that was crazy with conferences and meetings and functions and missed deadlines. I feel so special. Last, but not least, I’d like to thank Alec “The Bolt” Erwin, who deserves my gratitude for his unwavering reassurance that the loss of my contribution to South Africa’s gross national income will not affect economic growth. Thanks for picking up the slack, Alec. These tears are tears of joy. You can e-mail my overdue copy to slavedriver@poorhouse.co.za.