Political Systems... New Balls Please!

So what sort of political system should we have in this modern age? The original democratic system was based on each individual qualifying citizen having his say directly in the Senate at Athens. As cities became bigger we had to move to a system of representation.

All systems of representation are not truly representative of the thoughts of the populace. Now however for the first time since the Athenian age we can provide individual citizens the power to have their say via the Internet. This makes political parties and indeed politicians completely unnecessary!



Here is the type of system that I propose would make an ideal substitution for parliament.

1. Every year all eligable citizens would be issued with a unique 20 character identification, linked to their name. They can log into the peoples parliament site using their surname and the 20 character ID code.

2. Via a forum system on the site any citizen may sponsor a bill if they can get 100 votes from other citizens. The citizen writes the draft of the bill which is then passed to a civil service cleric for research into the practicalities of implementation and emerges no later than three months after submission as an official first draft.

3. The first draft is published for criticisms and people write notes on what they see as the good and bad points. After one month the bill is withdrawn for redrafting and republished as a final draft one month later.

4. The bill is voted on as a whole, people voting on the bill have to prove that they have read the bill by getting an 80% pass mark on a multiple choice test based on the bills contents.

5. If the bill is declined it cannot be resubmitted in any form for 12 months.

6. If the bill is passed it goes into the refinement stage. Every clause is similarly voted on to be good or bad. Clauses voted bad are subjected to revision as per 3 above and those judged to be good are passed to be included.

7. The final bill is now presented on the website for an adoption vote. People who dislike the bill may post articles on why they dislike it, people who are for the bill can post articles stating why it is a good idea. After one month these articles are frozen and 5 days of voting begins.
People voting on the bill have to prove that they have read the arguments by getting an 80% pass mark on a multiple choice test based on the contents of the pro and con arguments.

8. The bill goes into legislation or is demoted back to step 3 above.

In this way everybody can have their say on subjects they feel strongly about and hopefully a more correct legislation will result because people who feel strongly on an issue often have more knowledge.

Tattoo Removal (Laser tattoo removal and skin graft)

I guess I was lucky that in my teens and early twenties I avoided the horrors of the tattoo shop. Now many of my friends are in their forties and fifties they are thinking again about the wisdom of having a band logo tattooed on their arm or (in one case) Rude words across the knuckles. I have only one tattoo and that is a little dot that happened when somebody threw a drafting pen at me, I caught it and the nib stuck in... ouch!

Friend 1 who had an inappropriate tattoo of an ex boyfriends name on her arm did start out by suggesting that her husband change his name to Gary. He refused and so she headed for the laser tattoo clinic. It took 6 treatments to remove and each one was more painful than the last, however her tattoo is now just about invisible. When the healing process fades it will be gone completely her removal artist said. She testifies that laser tattoo removal is far more painful than getting the tattoo done to start with. She was lucky though - her tattoo was monochrome black/grey the easiest to remove.

Friend 2 had a botch job of a tattoo that was a kind of multi-colored splodge. It was once, he insists, a bunch of flowers but it spread because it was tattooed wrongly. The trouble with multi-colors is they do not take to laser treatment too well. After four sessions it still looked as awful as ever so he decided to go for the ultimate solution and have it surgically removed and a three inch circular area of skin grafted over the spot. Not only was this painful for weeks and incredibly expensive but now he has to avoid the sun since the new skin plus its scar tans unevenly.

Please think carefully before you have any sort of tattoo done. Think 'will I still want this when I am 85?' If the answer is yes then get a monochrome black/grey tattoo, at least they can be removed using a laser tattoo removal machine!

If anybody needs a reason to prioritise Space Exploration

Here is the perfect reason. This little black dot is actually slightly larger than the planet earth. This almost unimaginable Jupiterian disturbance was caused by an asteroid strike. An asteroid which had it struck the earth would have wiped us out. 100%.

I find it inconceivable that we can spent untold billions on global warming, which may or may not be actually happening, and which if it is happening might cause sea levels to rise 50 feet within the next 400 years. Compared to the absolute certain knowledge that all life on earth larger than a microbe will sooner or later be extinguished by a metorite and it could very well happen in 5 minutes time.

Why cant we put the same effort into the colonisation of space and stop putting all our eggs in one basket?

See also: Time to leave this world today

Weird Mars Stuff in todays email

Did anybody else have a wierd picture emailed to them today? I had an email from a bogus untraceable address with an IP that seems to be in Florida. The title was 'Mars anomaly Picture' and the body simply said 'This was airbrushed out of the published stills." As you can see the picture was rather provocative. Sigh. I wish these people would come out of the closet because if its not a fake then its worth millions!

Windows 7 is Tragic

Today we start getting all the usual hype you expect on a Windows pre-release. And hey you can pre-order it but nobody knows when it will be released. Thats odd. I always thought doing this was illegal in the UK and very against consumer law here.

Personally I dont understand how anybody would even consider windoze of any sort as an operating system. I was brought up on windows 3.1, managed the terrifying transitions via 95,98,ME,XP,XP Pro,Vista complete with data loss and hardware changes and then got extremely pissed off with it all.

Windows is a software/hardware treadmill. I bought (un-necessarily) 5 new PC's to try and keep some sort of speed in my computing life. Each upgrade slowed me down. Then Microsoft FORCED me onto Vista by releasing a mod for XP that completely screwed both it and my hard drive. Well sorry guys that was a bridge too far.

I bought Vista - yes. I installed it and after 3 months when things began to get slower somebody suggested 'Oh you need to get a better motherboard and processor, oh and another gig of memory would help'. Errm right. The onboard computer on the Apollo Moon Landings was basically about one thousandth the capacity of the machine needed to write a letter, send email and surf the net? No I dont think so.

I downloaded Ubuntu - a brilliant FREE linux desktop OS. Yes I still have vista on my main machine - but my preferred use is Ubuntu and its been 6 months since I used Vista. Guess what, after reading the hype about Windoze 7 I am going to uninstall vista - bet I dont miss it. After all using a program called Wine (also free) I can run all my serious PC applications under Ubuntu anyway and Openoffice (also free) handles all my old microsoft office files. Oh and the PC runs like greased lightning and never slows down.

Also I now have resurrected two of the OLD PC's I replaced and am running Ubuntu on them too. Hey thats not fair - my 5 year old pentium machine is now nearly as fast as my ten month old AMD Dual Core ... and they are all faster than Vista! Now I have a webserver of muy own running Apache and a spare machine as a backup...for FREE!

Free computing. Try it before you buy Windows 7 - you know it makes sense! My top tip is to download the latest version of ubuntu (it self-updates just like windows) and try it for one week. It comes complete with openoffice but you can load any other programs you need for free (from the Applications|Add Programs sub menu) and dont use windows for that whole week. Notice how much stress you are not getting? How the machine is much faster? How it now never crashes? How much easier things are? I doubt if Windows 7 will match it.

Mission to Mars 1

We hear that the astronauts have just emerged from 105 days locked into a simulated space module - and they did not kill each other! Whoopie doo. There is something very wrong with our entire attitude to the conquest of space. We seem to be determined that space exploration will result in near zero loss of life. Sorry but that is unrealistic. So is our attitude to exploration - sending people millions of miles to spend a few days somewhere then yanking them back.

Can you imagine if this were the attitude of explorers of the new world in the 15th century? We land a galleon (which can only sail during 6 months of the year) put ashore 5 people for a week, then sail back again. Sorry but we would still be exploring the swamps around what is now New York, the silver lining is that the Native American Indian and the Aztecs would still be around....

Folks, exploring new frontiers is a perilous business. Was America settled by scientists, Doctors and Air Force Pilots? Can you imagine what would happen if we tried that? Hmmm.

What is needed is PIONEERS not scientists. COLONISTS not visitors. Yes lives will be lost. When America was colonised lives were lost in their tens of thousands... we need not go that far but we are going about this the wrong way.

Here is what we need to do.

Firstly we need to consolidate our position on the moon.

Advertise for strong young colonists, male and female, minimum IQ of 120 and reasonable (not outstanding) physical fitness should be the only qualifications. Train these people in the use of the simplest space-suits we can design.

While this is going on we send payload after payload into earth orbit using dumb re-usable rockets. These payloads are picked up by space shuttle and have a small computer and booster rocket pack bolted to them, then they are sent on a lunar landing trajectory, coasting most of the way. They contain food and water, equipment to produce oxygen from lunar soil, solar panels, building and farming equipment, seeds, and so on. We aim to put down maybe 1-200 of these packages hard landed using similar inflatable ball technology to the Mars rover within a 12 mile radius of the most suitable apollo site.

The colonists are sent using a similar method but with a 'soft landing', a long slow ride that uses little fuel and lands maybe 40 people at a time, with some 'heavy' equipment and an inflateable shelter. THERE ARE NO PLANS TO RETURN.

The colonists make a permanent shelter by digging a tunnel into the side of a hill (something the moon is not short of) sealing the rock using a sprayed on polymer (like araldite) and erecting a prefabricated airlock and front door assembly. Gap filling foam can seal it to the rock around the edges. This process with the proper tools would take 30 people a month. The remaining ten are gathering the packages that were hard landed and ferrying them to the shelter.

Meanwhile of course more packages are being hard landed every week. When the shelter is finished the solar farm is set up and the air manufacturing plant started.
The inflateable shelter is now to be used for farming. 20 people work on growing plants, chickens and maybe sheep (pretty hardy) for food. 10 people work on extending the tunnel system and 10 people work on water extraction.

Any piece of space junk already in orbit that could be canibalised or used we bundle up, strap a booster pack on and aim it at the moon to land in a designated area.

After 3 months the process is repeated again, but this time less up front hardware is needed because the new arrivals will have the extended tunnel system to use as a shelter, so they will bring mostly farming and building equipment.

After another three months 40 more people arrive and now a second tunnel is started, for low Gee laboratories and factories..... I could continue.

Now once we have a viable colony on the moon that is self supporting (or very nearly) we can look at Mars. In some ways Mars will be easier than the Moon, it is more hospitable. In other ways more difficult (its a lot further).

Probably the best thing to do would be to build a really big spacecraft on the Moon in the 1/6th gravity. Haul pretty much a duplicate of everything that was required to set up the lunar colony plus any items that experience shows us should have been included. Launch from the moon, with its really low escape velocity.

This is the way to explore and conquer new worlds and I think there would be no lack of volunteers.