Joan Lindros from the Geelong Environment Council has written an article in the Geelong Advertiser on 10 February 2010 in which she reckons that it is human activity, not excessive fuel levels in the forest, that causes bushfires. Now of course that is true … excessive fuel levels never started a fire yet!

But it misses the point!There will always be bushfires.Joan may want to ban all sorts of activities in the bush - including her favourite bashing targets of trail bikes and four wheel drives -  and increase fines and jail sentences and pursuing people through the courts and cracking down with tighter controls, but we will still have bushfires. Either through human activities, or through lightning strikes. Bushfires are an inevitable part of life in Australia.

But what happened on Black Saturday in February 2009 is not necessary. It wasn’t the fact that there were bushfires that was the problem. It was the savagery of those bushfires that killed so many people. And it is possible to limit that savagery. Its simple - just reduce the amount of fuel that the fires have to burn and the fires won’t get as savage.

The way to achieve that is through control burns. Control burns reduce the fuel loads in the forest by burning dead leaves and branches and other forest detritus on the forest floor. This fuel builds up over the years, until eventually there is a huge fuel load in the forest. Enormous amounts of dry forest materials accumulate. And then if a bushfire comes through it is enormous - like a huge ongoing bonfire that goes for miles! If we then have a control burn in the forest every few years at carefully worked out intervals, we burn up all that material in what is known as a ‘cool burn’ we reduce the amount of fuel available for a bushfire to burn. Its pretty simple, and it works.

And because it works it saves lives. Saves homes. Control burns save both lives and homes.

So why doesn’t Joan want us to use control burns? Because she reckons that will reduce the bio-diversity in Victoria’s forests! That is in itself unproven. And it also raises the question - if control burns reduce biodiversity, what do bushfires do? Increase it? What is proven is that control burns reduce the intensity of bushfires, and in doing so save lives.

Willem

I wrote this as a forum post on AULRO.com, in a discussion on how we can get young guys to behave more responsibly on the roads. The discussion was in the context of the 5 young men killed in one accident north of Melbourne in January 2010.*     *     *     *     *I reckon the problem is that these kids are dislocated from the society around them, and therefore they just don’t care. Not an arrogant ‘don’t care’, but just that the welfare of others in society, and the welfare of society itself, is just not important to them. That’s why they can do things that anti-social and it just doesn’t bother them. That’s why the mate of one of those guys killed was booked doing 165 kmh just a few hours later. Society, life, death … just becomes unimportant. The now, the me, that’s all there is.Willem

 I wrote this response to a post in the AULRO forum:

I reckon prison sentences (in most cases) are a mistake … but finding an effective alternative is not easy!

Why? because prison sentences just put people into a context of lots of criminals and others where they often they learn criminal conduct. So prisons become schools for criminals … at taxpayers’ expense! Its also a cruel form of punishment.

There should be just, and severe if necessary, punishment for wrongdoers. I just reckon prison is a lousy way of doing it, where nobody benefits. Not the victims, not society, not the taxpayers, and not the offenders.

Prisons should only be used for remand centres, and for prisoners who are simply too dangerous to release.

Willem

 I posted this on a blog in ‘The Age‘ newspaper talking about religious trends in Australia. As usual the Atheists got on to it straight away with their strident mockery. It makes you wonder why they defend their Atheism with such religious zeal!

>>I think that its axiomatic that the harder a point of view is to defend, the higher the level of mockery is used to defend it. Therefore, Atheism must be really hard to defend!<<

Willem

They say that you haven’t got a website unless you have it in three places - the site itself, the backup on your own computer, and the backup of your computer somewhere else.But organising backups is one of those things that we love to leave till some other time when we’re not so busy! We hope that nothing goes wrong in the meantime. Well, at least I have a tendency to do that!

My own business website, BlankLabels.com.au, has a very large range of products on it - more that 1500 label products are listed, with thousands of variations - so it has very many hours invested in it. If I were to have to do that all again, it would take months. And I’d lose all the business in that time. And I’d lose all the rankings on Google and other search engines that we have. We would also lose our customer records. It would be a major disaster if we didn’t have the database backed up. So we do - we back it up to the BlankLabels.com.au office computer.

Just recently I have been working at getting a good back up system for my computer going. I have an external hard drive on to which I back up all my stuff, which works well. but what if the catastrophe that nobody wants happens, and the house burns down? Or the thief that steals the computer takes the hard drive as well? Isn’t there somewhere off-site where I can store my backups?

What I used to do was to back up my critical stuff on to a CD and then get a mate of mine who owns the Real Estate Agency across the road to store it in his filing cabinet. That worked all right, but its pretty clunky and easy forget or not get around to.

A few weeks ago I was introduced to a piece of cloud computing called Dropbox. This is a website that allows you to store your files on their server, and it automatically synchronises them for you too! So if you upload something into your Dropbox folder, and you change that on your local computer, it is automatically changed on the Dropbox server. So you always have an up to date version on the Dropbox server to act as your backup!

But wait, there’s more! You can also share your Dropbox folders with others. so it becomes a good way of  sharing photos with friends, or documents with workmates.

The free version gives you 2 GB of storage space.  For just ten bucks a month you can increase that to 50 GB.

I reckon Dropbox is a good thing and very useful!

Willem

I have been looking at setting up the accounting for our business, BlankLabels.com.au, on a cloud based accounting package. So far we have trialled two, both of which have merit. But both of them have limitations for our purposes which cause me to keep looking. Just to give you a couple of the criteria I am using:

• The package must be Australian based (I’ll count New Zealand as Australian for the sake of the exercise!)
• The package must be set up to handle Australian GST matters.
• The package should be set up to allow for both the purchase of an item and the sale of it to be recorded from the sales invoice. So when I do a transaction and raise an invoice, both the Income account and the Cost of Sales account have entries recorded.

The two we have examined closely, Xero and Saasu, both handle the first two of these criteria really well. Xero has a much nicer user interface, but Saasu is a more mature application than Xero. It is also considerably cheaper.

But neither of them is set up for the third criterion. Saasu is a little better, having the option of an ‘I buy this item’ entry on the Item listings, even giving a ‘Cost of Sales’ account to attach it to. But it doesn’t actually enter a transaction in that ‘Cost of Sales’ account! So you have to raise both a sales invoice and a purchase order to have things record properly. Which is a right proper PITA! Double handling is never a good idea.

Xero does not yet have  an ‘I buy this item’ option. I have spoken with them about it, and they reckon its a great idea and are keen to set it up. but it looks as though it might be some six months down the track before we see anything happen.

If anyone has a suggestion or experience please post … I am keen to look at anything that meets these criteria.

Willem

Because God created the whole world everyone has had exposure to Him simply by experiencing His creation. We can know something about God just by looking at what He has made - in the same way that we can know something of Rembrandt or da Vinci just by looking at their paintings. Or, to bring it a little closer to home, you can know something about the LandRover design team just by looking at your LandRover.

So everyone has had exposure to God, through His creation, and everyone has the opportunity to respond to Him. They will be judged on that response.

Willem

Sounds like a good time for a bit of humour - and on topic too!

A group of scientists had worked out how to create life (I told you this was humour, didn’t I?). Anyway, they said ‘Well, now that we can create life we don’t need God any more’. So they delegated one of their number to let God know that He was redundant.

Well, this guy rocks up to God and says ‘God, we’ve worked out how to create life ourselves now so we don’t need You any more. You might as well go and toddle off somewhere else’.

God thought for a moment and said ‘I tell you what, I’ll give you a man making competition.’ ‘Fair enough!’, the scientist said, and grabbed a handful of dirt to get started. ‘Hang on a minute’, said God, ‘You get your own dirt!’

Willem

Actually all of these three ‘theories’ are justifications of religious beliefs.

Evolutionary theory is the religious justification of Atheism.

Intelligent Design is the religious justification of Agnosticism.

Creation is the religious justification of Theism.

You see, every religion has to provide a theory of origins, because everybody asks the question ‘Where did we come from?’.

Atheism can’t admit there is a god - or it would no longer be atheism - and so has to come up with a theory of origins which has no god. Evolutionary theory is the theory it has come up with.

Intelligent design is a theory for people who also don’t want to admit there is a god, and yet who can’t ignore the weight of the evidence that shows that organisms of the complexity of human beings must have been designed. So they call it ‘intelligent design’, which recognises the fact that there is a designer, but doesn’t say who that designer is.

Creation ‘theory’ is held by Theists, people who believe that there is a God and that He created all that there is simply because He chose to do that. They maintain that the evidence in the world shows that there is far too much complexity in the world for it all to have occurred by chance. As Dr Paul Brand, the doctor who spent his life working with leprosy patients in India, and operated on literally thousands of hands, said that anyone who looked at the intricate effectiveness of the human hand would have to conclude that there was a brilliant designer at work’.

Or like my mate, who is a Jag mechanic, while he was working on my V12 Jag, said:

‘This evolution stuff is bull****’

‘Why do you say that, mate?’

‘I can see with my fingers. there’s no way that evolved. That’s crap!’

The role of science in this is to check out which theory best fits the facts found in the world we live in. This it has failed miserably to do, because it has decided to take sides. It has decided, a priori, before even considering the evidence, that anything what they called ’supernatural’, was not science and therefore could not be considered. So that meant that both creation theory and intelligent design theory were ruled out of court before they started. So they reckoned that all the evidence supports evolutionary theory exclusively - which is true in their scheme of things because they don’t even consider the other two! How fair is that?

You might say ‘that’s a bit rich! Scientists wouldn’t do that! Well, let me ask you, how many times have you seen an article in ‘Scientific American’ or any other peer reviewed science journal comparing the three ‘theories’ and seeing how the evidence stacks up in each one? You won’t find any articles, let alone unbiased ones! Its all one sided.

So here you have three theories, one which gets plenty of space in the media all the time; the other two are derided and mocked all the time. All without examining the evidence fairly.

Willem

Intelligent design has the same problem as evolutionary theory - it has no explanation for the presence of evil in the world.

Only the Biblical story of creation by God and the subsequent rebellion of mankind against Him has a coherent explanation for the presence of evil in this world.

Willem