About a week ago I discovered the hydro was not producing power at the usual convenient time of 11pm and in the usual conditions, it was raining.  I went down to see what the problem was and one of the belts had broken, and the other was burning up under the strain.  “Ah good” I though, as obvious and simple a repair as it gets.  Up and down the waterfall in the dark to replace the belts.  Start her up and…….. bugger.  Can’t get up to speed, looks like an electrical problem like a dead short and the belts melting down was only a secondary problem.  Midnight by this time in the dark and rain with leeches having their wicked way with me, is the not the best circumstances for clarity of thinking.  Time for bed.  Next morning I do electrical tests like testing for a dead short in the hundreds of meters of transmission line.  It happens some times that a branch with a fork drops on the wires dragging them together, and in the tangle of trees, it is not easy to see visually.  No short.  Still can’t get up to speed with no load so try mechanical drag as bearings give out.  I can detect movement on a bearing on the turbine shaft so replace the bearing there.  With great difficulty as the belt pulley has seized onto the shaft and the gear puller is at the limits of its capacity trying to drag it off.  A big whack with a lump hammer finally gets it moving.

New hydro shaft bearing, whoopee!.  Still no go.  Double bugger!  Now to replace the bearings in the generator.  Hours of dismantling slip rings trying not to drop the tiny nuts into the creek.  Had to re-solder some connections as they have become a bit dodgy over the years.  Result, failure.  I finally deduce that the generator is fucked.  Going from the blackened parts, I think the field coils have shorted out.  The final, irrevocable collapse of the the machine.  Triple bugger!  No amount of ingenuity or bodging is going to fix this.  This generator has been operating 24/7 for 33 years in the harshest of service conditions.  At the bottom of a waterfall in a tropical rainforest.  Cyclones have flooded it at least 10 times sweeping it off down the creek and burying it underwater in rocks and sand.  I have press-ganged guests on Xmas day to drag it out of the creek and up to the workshop for some TLC.  I have fabricated slip rings out of brass bar and discarded paneling from a bathroom upgrade, I have shimmed out worn housings with old piston rings and broken carpenter’s tapes.  I have super-glued together the stubs of carbon brushes to make them long enough and soldered on extra bits of wire to burnt out wires.  I have patched the rear covering that was rusting away with aluminium sheets (from a caravan siding), until there was nothing left to attach it too, then went up-market using a stainless-steel bucket from the hardware store.

I have to admit defeat.  I can no longer resurrect this machine.  In it’s continuous operation of 33 years, it has rotated about 26 billion times, consumed perhaps 15 million tons of water (all returned to the creek), and provided me and guests with electricity.  Probably a few million KW Hours. Do you know of any other mechanical device that has been in continuous operation since 1983?  Heck!, I haven’t been in continuous operation for that long.  I get to sleep at night.

RIP old mate

So now I have had to search for a replacement generator.  I could not find any leads or dealer in Australia.  So I went to Alibaba, the China portal.  My very specific needs for a 2 bearing, bare shaft, 3 KVA, 4 pole, 1500RPM, self-exciting, 240V AC, single phase generator were well catered for.  I then only had to pick the colour it came in (just joking).  After some negotiation, today I sent off the money by telegraphic transfer to Mindong in Fujian.  The price for this 100kg machine was unbelievably low.  I know, I know, if it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t, but I am prepared to find out the hard way.  The cost of the generator plus the cost of shipping it to Brisbane is less than a third of the cost in dollars, not allowing for inflation, than I paid in 1983.  How does that work?  And what does it tell us about the vast change in economics when I could source this special machine from my isolated enclave in a remote tropical rainforest and order it from China?  Price paid in 1983 about A$1000 from memory.  New one landed in Brisbane, A$305 which includes $20 bank fee.  I have yet to figure out how to get the 100kg crate from a Brisbane port to Possum Valley.  I suspect it may cost more than the machine.

Dear guests need have no worry that this disaster for me will impinge on their enjoyment, pleasure and relaxation.  The show goes on!  It means the solar panels will have to do the heavy lifting and I will have to patch in a gen-set at peak demand times.  A few hours in the evening perhaps.  It is bunkered over the hill from the cottages and is only a slight hum at the homestead just 30m away.  It might be possible to hear it from Blackbean Cottage on a still night, but I doubt it can be heard at all from Maple Cottage.

The old generator was a Stamford made in the UK.  A couple of years ago I had a mind to give some customer feedback and tell them after 3 plus decades of continuous service in the harshest of conditions, the machine had proved …… satisfactory.  I had some romantic notion that this message would somehow make its way back to an aged designer or producer of the machine, not yet pensioned off, and give them a momentary glow of satisfaction.  It was not to be.  Commercial entities do not stay around that long these days.  Indeed the current turn-over or lifetime of a company in the UK is down to 14 years.  The name Stanford now led me to China where from photos of the generators, I could see the design and brand from Stanford now on license and manufactured in China.  However, I have plumped for a Mindong generator from Fujian.  Mainly because they were the only ones that relied to my e-mails.  I have paid the invoice and now await delivery.  I would be surprised if the machine turns up in less than 2 months.  And wouldn’t be surprised it it didn’t turn up at all.

For the last several years, I have been using spare power dumped from the hydro to heat the water at the homestead.  I now have no hot water.  If the lack of hydro continues into the colder months, expect an increasingly disheveled receptionist.  I do not relish cold showers.  Hot water aplenty in the cottages as they are gas fired.  Electricity supplied as normal, even if delivered from the extremely inelegant resource of fossil fuels mixed with however much solar power can be harvested.

For those of you paying a power bill, I guess that is about all of you, consider that engineers and technicians take care of all these hassles and you just get power.  Nearly all the time.  Compare this with India, or Africa where you will get power outages on a daily basis and have to adapt, like filling up the bath when the water is on.  Next time you turn on a light, think, ‘Ah yeah, there it is’.

Last night I was had a look in the cupboard with all the hydro electrics in and just by scanning the lights I could tell the power was down. I looked at battery volts, well down from full charge, and voltage to the 25A battery charger. Oh bugger, the charger was heroically trying to charge but was only being fed 165V. Might be heading for a melt down so I swapped to the 15A charger and at full output, it was dragging the volts down from 240 to 205V.  Acceptable. I was pretty sure it was the creek so low that the hydro was running out of water and sucking air. So I went to bed.

There was no crisis and the system equipment and batteries could carry the load for a while. Next morning I went down the creek and sure enough there was no water going over the weir and the pipe was sucking air, which is a very poor substitute for a water turbine. This has never happened before in 33 years of running the system, that I have run out of water in the middle of Feb. Not even close. Normally there is more water in the creek than you can poke a stick at … without the stick being snatched from your grasp and flushed down to Innisfail. So now I had to fit the smallest nozzle to the down pipe (I thought I would avoid using the word penstock as I have been faced with many blank stares before). This smallest nozzle is usually the last resort towards the end of the dry season. So I know the water table is at it’s lowest and there is no relief in sight. I have looked on BOM for signs of a monsoon trough and none till the middle of March at the earliest. Perhaps not then. So far this year I have had about 15% of the usual rainfall. This does not bode well for the power in the coming dry season. No build-up of the water table, no power in the dry. I Have 30 solar panels, which sounds good, but they are old ones, not your 250W panels of the current installations. Even when new 12 were 90W and 18 were 60W. They slowly degrade so I am getting less.

So to get through the coming year, I need it to be sunny all day and rain heaps at night. I have put my order in with Hughie, the farmers’ god, the great irrigator in the sky, but I don’t suppose I will have any more luck than the farmers’ frequent requests. Fear not dear guests, by hook or by crook, I will endeavour to deliver electrons to the cottages. They may not be the green ones you are used to and may be tinged with a little black as I patch in a stand-by generator at times of maximum demand, but I can assure you they will work equally well.

When I went down to check the creek, I found that the trash rack to stop debris clogging the hydro was askew, and the water was by-passing the rack. Further, the 2 devices which secure the rack when it floods were missing. Somebody had taken the devices and disturbed the rack. The devices were re-cycled parts from a sailing dinghy, sliding fairleads to be exact. In glorious stainless steel, they were high quality devices from 35 years ago I had adapted to lock the rack in place. Totally irreplaceable, totally useless to anyone else as the tracks were still riveted to the weir. Thoughtless vandalism by one or a few of my guests. I have no idea when it occurred as I only check the system when it needs attention. And was I angry? Yes! Of all the senseless destructive things to do! If a piece of debris in the creek went down the pipe that was bigger than the nozzle …system shutdown. I am also faced with replacing the rack locks with some other devices. Also replacing the nozzle went wrong as debris from lack of a rack got into the pipe and I had to repeat the process to remove the sticks.

As usual when I get all steamed up, I had a think about it. Actually my guests treat me very, very well. They respect the place and property and some even mop their way out of the door. Most of the kitchen equipment is donated, some by accident some obviously by intention, such as a toaster decorated with love hearts and ‘we love Possum Valley’. I can do a little profiling here, and am quite confident that this was girl/girls aged 6-12. Thank you. I have been donated more fry pans than a scout jamboree would require. I have been donated paintings and other works of art from young and old. I run a surplus on pillow cases and towels. I have lost one book, I have gained a library. Thank you so much dear guests for your consideration. It did not take me too long to put my disappointment at thoughtless damage into perspective. Of 30,000-40,000 guests, I have been disappointed a handful of times. How lucky am I?

As in current cop shows, I will now do profiling of the likely culprit of the infamous “trash rack crime”. Almost certainly a young male 9-13 years old. I raised girls, my grandkids are boys, conclusion is that boys definitely into destructive testing of all objects in the material world. Girls much less so. The culprit was most likely in the company of similar aged boys. The mayhem and mischief would be amplified by dares and pathetic attempts to be ‘masters of the universe’. How do I have this insight? You may not believe this, but I was once a boy myself. Reaching down through my memories I can find many even more stupid things that I did which I am not going to tell you about.

So a big thank you to all my guest who treat me so well. To the thoughtless boy, each experience has its own feedback, learn, grow.

I have just learned today that I am being crushed by a universal catastrophe. I have been pushed and pulled by two merging black holes 1.3 billion light years away in space. Before I panic, let’s get some facts. The amount of distortion of my body is proportional to size. So if I were 4 light-years in diameter which is about the distance to the nearest star (putting on some weight, but not quite that big), the change to my body would be about the width of a human hair. Phew, no wonder I didn’t feel it. The LIDO instrument had to measure changes in length a tiny fraction of the size of an atom. Such exquisite sensitivity and accuracy of measurement.

I am really excited about this. Perhaps you don’t understand why. For a full explanation, sign up to NERD for a modest fee. Go to my website NotEverReturnableDeposit.com. with your credit card handy. Thank you. This is really exciting stuff. Since the time of the Kaiser wearing a hat like a bowl with a little spear on top was the top dude, and a patent’s clerk with a lot of time on his hands deduced that space was flexible, this is experimental conformation. Yes, our 3 dimensions wobble like a jelly. Yes this result combined with Godel’s incompleteness theorem, multiplied by quantum uncertainty has conclusively proved that certainty doesn’t exist and and reality is under profound doubt. The logicians out there might have already detected that you can’t conclusively prove that certainty doesn’t exist. You have to be completely bonkers to understand any of this, which puts me in the box seat. On the macro scale the statistically averaged outcomes work all of the time and so we can have some order and laws of physics, on the atomic scale predictable outcomes work none of the time and we have capricious physics. I really like that. I always did have a problem with Descartes view of the clockwork universe. Soooo depressing.

It is such a privilege to have lived in a time of such prodigious advancement in the of discovery of the cosmos. I am still a bit miffed that we don’t know what 95% of the cosmos consists of, but let’s not quibble about details. Most of that is dark energy which is responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe. The rest is dark matter which has mass and its distribution can be plotted by the rotation of galaxys including the milky way. So lets be clear. The universe we can detect seems to be the froth on top of a vat of fermenting ale.

When I was about 25 (1975 if you must know), I was of the opinion that cosmology had been pretty well sorted out and just a bit of refinement required. Oh how wrong I was. The questions exploded faster than the answers and now we know less than Newton thought he knew.

I have been waiting with breathless anticipation for TOE, the Theory of Everything. It has seemed on the horizon from time to time, but I now doubt I will see it in my lifetime. There is also the logical dilemma that any complete description of the universe cannot be less complex than the universe itself.

Rough ride ahead.  Things turning to shit everywhere I look.  From the Baltic Dry Index to the US trucking rates, heavy transport is in sharp decline.  People aren’t buying stuff, Walmart is closing about 1300 stores, caterpillar can’t sell a yellow dozer and the world is in deflation.  China has an export based economy based on industries up to the neck in debt and now markets are drying up.  These are highly leveraged companies no longer able to sell their stuff.  This very quickly translates into not being able to buy our stuff here in Australia.

After many decades of debt driven expansion, where debt is borrowing from the future, and future demand is spent in the present, the music has stopped.  Find a seat if you can.  There are hundreds of trillions of dollars sloshing around the derivatives market that relies on the fact that few or nobody make a call for their money, they just enjoy the proceeds of fictitious money.  There can’t be a payout, no settling of debts, no balancing of books, as the notional money exceeds the GDP of the whole world for the next few decades.  Yes, if the entire population of the world works without eating, consuming anything or even using toilet paper we could pay that off by 2050.

Phew, good job I have some money in the bank that is even guaranteed by the government.  First of all is the question am I depositing my money with the bank for safekeeping, or making a loan to the bank.  Do they take my sweat stained notes and lock them away in a vault, or use that money in the markets to their advantage.  I think the fact they pay interest, a nominal amount of a few cents per year in my case, indicates you are extending them a loan.  So you and I are a creditor of a bank which is not truly solvent.   Because they can lend about 10 times the assets they hold.  And they do because they make their money on assets they don’t have.  And the government guarantee? More smoke and mirrors as they are bust too.

But speaking of the banks, I went shopping today and went to the ATM at my bank to find they had installed yet another ATM.  Still with the flashing lights.  I told Westpac last time they changed the ATM, I didn’t like the flashing lights.  It was only about 9 months ago I think, but I suspect my request for non-flashing lights went astray in their no doubt super-efficient feedback system.  This new one was fitted with a cowl over the number pad to make it more difficult to use.  I didn’t require an envelope and it promised to recognise notes and cheques immediately.  .  I got the whole point of the new machine right away.  It wasn’t to make it easier for me the customer, it wasn’t to make life a whole lot better for the Westpac staff, oh no, it was to reduce the human percentage of handling, increase the machine percentage and fire people.  Thus bolstering ‘productivity’ which is CEO speak for firing people.  I had written out a deposit slip provided by Westpac because that is the way it was done last week.  I shoved the slip and notes into the orifice.  I was depositing $240 in notes.  This marvelous new machine equipped with the latest software in character recognition and super-sophisticated 10 point criteria to recognise the limited number of Australian bank notes though about it for a while and printed out a deposit slip I saw was crediting me with $260.  No, no, I count money carefully, that is wrong.  It then proceeds to reject all four $50 bills, and shoves them out of the orifice.  I was rather confused, but still manage to grasp that I put in $240, I have been credited $260 to my account and have $200 in change.  Way to Go!  It did accept a $10 and 2 $5s.  So it took $20 and credited me a total $460.  So is this a good day or what!!  The sensible thing to do in such circumstances is to quit while you are ahead.

As usual, your diligent host did the daftest thing possible, and went into the bank to complain about the non-functional ATM.  There was almost nobody in there, which is the result that Westpac the institution wishes to achieve.  The welcoming smile of the teller, Wendy, soon turned to a frown as she realised this was going to take a heap of work to defeat the machine.  A huddle of staff (two to be precise which now seems to be 66% on the payroll in the bank, the rest becoming school janitors), kindly asked me to take a seat while they opened the machine to see why it had been so generous.  It had taken the deposit slip as a cheque and credited me with $240.  It had failed to recognise 4 $50 bills and spat them out.  Two separate errors on one transaction.  Perhaps there is a reason bank share prices are crashing.

Recently Woolworths in Atherton had an ‘upgrade’ and refurbishment.  I noticed a similar theme.  It wasn’t about making it better for the customer or the staff, it was about squeezing the humans out.  They put the vegies in little baskets to make them look better, but gave less amounts and choice, they put the baskets further from the entrance making it more effort.  They changed the lighting.  But worst of all they reduced the number of check-out aisles to half.  They want to squeeze us through the self-checkout, or pay the penalty of queuing for ages to actually have a human being to process.

I have mostly abandoned Woolworths in favour of IGA.  I vote with my feet.  Don’t put up with this shit.  Corporations and chain-stores would like to squeeze the workers out of the system so that machines and top managers were the only ones left.  They would enjoy obscene pay, and the shareholders collect the rent.  Am I a tad miffed by this trend? Perhaps a little annoyed?  No, not at all.  I am totally fucking outraged that a tiny percentage of people have seized the means of production and left the majority of people on the margins.  Hmm, that sounds a bit Marxist.  Perhaps it is.

About noon today I had just finished servicing Blackbean Cottage, the last thing being to mop my way out leaving via the veranda doors.  I walked round the cottage to pick up linen basket and my thongs but was stopped in my tracks by a cassowary standing about 3m from the entrance door.  Fortunately, he had his back to me so I didn’t spook him.  I will continue use ‘he’, ‘him’, though I don’t know the gender as they do look alike with the females larger.  ‘He’ wasn’t the largest I’ve seen though with all the mature features, so ‘he’ is my best bet.  I feel too fond of them to use ‘it’.

I haven’t seen a cassowary at Possum Valley for about 5 years, but I knew there was one around as guests had been seeing one along the track in.  Both when arriving by car and walking.  Up here on the tablelands, they haven’t been habituated to tourist food handouts, and take off with great alacrity on nearly all occasions.  I have been bailed up for 20 mins in the rainforest here when a cassowary was making threatening booming noises and circling me (safely holed-up in the cab of my 4WD), but I didn’t get to see him/her much being mostly hidden in the jungle.

When he wandered towards the creek, I went back into the cottage which made a perfect hide.  I was correct in thinking his pea sized brain could not identify anything not fully outlined and not moving.  So I got the best look at a cassowary I have ever had from 2 or 3 meters sometimes, and had time to look at the details of the massive feet, the mauve dangling wattles, the peacock blue head, the bright orange knobbly skin on the back of the neck to vividly rival any human hi-vis outfit, and some long dangling feathers that seemed totally non-functional.  This animal was designed by a committee of acid-heads.  Sorry Mr Darwin, here we have solid evidence of non-intelligent design.  OK, the basic chassis may be functional, but the adornments I couldn’t have dreamed of, let alone applied to an animal.  Anyway I don’t dream in colour.  I have heard some people do, but I will never know what that is like.

Stock photo as nobody has managed to get a shot at PV

After about 20 mins of very slowly ambling about the cottage, occasionally preening, and generally looking relaxed, ho hum another day another skink or two, he leisurely strolled up the hill towards the other cottage when something caught his eye in a patch of forest and he slid into the trees.  Of course I didn’t have a camera.  In some ways I am glad I didn’t have a camera.  It makes it a personal moment for me.  A delicious glimpse of nature no one else will share.  Is that selfish?  Is that regretful that I couldn’t capture the moment to impress others?  If I had a camera, I don’t think I could have resisted using it. Does that make me a self-effacing raging egotist?  There is something troubling me about the onslaught of pictures recording everything.  It used to be memory that recorded our history.  Memory is fickle, fragile and capricious, as well as being so malleable to our prejudices, pictures are so truthful in recording the exact scene, but only for one thousandth of a second.  So what do you want?  A dubious memory contaminated by prejudice and feelings, or a tiny slice of time that may not even represent the next second?

In 2007, my beautiful daughter Alice invited me along on an overland tour of east Africa.  I was the only one out of 15 remarkable, brilliant people who didn’t have a camera.  I think I got the best experience.  I was storing to memory, not to disk.  I was seeing the wider picture, not framing the shot through a camera zoom. I don’t regret it for a moment.  And anyway, afterwards I was deluged with pics and video by the people who had sacrificed their direct experience time for recording for others.  Thank you.

There are some people with more insight, or perhaps luck, who manage to capture a scene that is more timeless than a thousandth of a second.  An old man repairing shoes in a middle-eastern market, a child of 5 leading a chain of water buffalo with a piece of string.  The last image was from memory, as I never did take the picture.   Perhaps what I am saying is that by all means take the picture, but don’t let it be a substitute for what you think and feel about the subject.  And in the end, memories, however faded, tarnished or corrupted are with you always, pictures are dusty relics that may or may not take you back to your memories.

I have digressed from my story of a close encounter with a cassowary, but I hope you will indulge the meanderings of a senior citizen.

My title today features words which have fallen out of favour.  Or for more recent generations, are entirely unknown.  They have not been required skills in the last 70 years, at least in the western world.  I have been to lots of countries in Asia and a few in east Africa, and can assure you there are many people who do not know these English words, but practice the skills every day as they struggle to live, or even survive, on a dollar or two a day.  Indeed, a recent Oxfam survey concluded that half the world’s population, about 3.5 billion, have the same assets as the the 62 most wealthy people on the planet.  OK, Oxfam had every incentive to exaggerate, and I suspect that 3.5 billion people actually had more chooks in the back garden that didn’t get counted than the 62 plutocrats, but hey!, even so, can’t you see something wrong here?  The imbalance of income is hugely destabalising, both within countries, and internationally.

The transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich has been progressing steadily all round the world for many decades and looks set to continue.  The inventor of the board game “Monopoly” supposedly invented it in the 1920’s I think, to highlight the fact that the capitalist system has the dice loaded to produce exactly that effect, and nearly a century later, I see little evidence to disabuse me of that idea.  In some western countries in the middle of the 20th century there were socialist governments did a fair job of redistributing wealth to create a solid and mostly content middle class.  In some countries such as Australia, there are useful remnants of that era such as the state health services and the education system.  But with the steady march of all western governments to the right during the last decades of the 20th century, some of that is eroding, such as higher education.  World-wide, the middle class is thinning out.  The top few professionals joining the rich, and the bulk sliding down the slippery pole to join the poor.  This is most evident in the US, UK and Europe, and least evident in the Scandinavian countries and, I’m glad to say Oz and NooZild.  Or at least in Oz it isn’t really hurting yet.  China and India are still in a growth phase which tends to create a middle class, but I think the imbalance in wealth is already such that they will complete the cycle and largely destroy the middle class in record time.  And China, despite being nominally communist, doesn’t look very socialist to me.  Political theorists going back to Aristotle have argued that a large and successful middle class is important to peace in any society because it moderates the conflict between rich and poor and tempers political extremism.

Totally irrelevant to my theme, is a picture of a leaf-tailed lizard I discovered today, hiding out in the mop cupboard at Maple Cottage.  About 220mm long.  Thank you Linda for the photo.

Leaf-tailed lizard by Linda

So why has not the citizens’ power of the vote and democracy halted slide of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer?  In most countries, democracy has become a hollowed out facade precariously propped up by those that benefit the most from the present system.  Insidious infiltration of the political system has pretty well ensured that only those that fit the mold and conform to the system can get a toehold towards power.  Often there is a financial threshold to overcome before even advancing to “GO”.

As an example I give you once again the US, the country most advanced in its political decay.  You need a fantastic amount of money to get elected as president.  Obama had a very well done on-line fund-raising machine, the Don Trumpet, I’m sorry Donald Trump, only had to reach into his back pocket.   I’m sure he will understand the problems and faithfully represent a single mother of two kids living in a car.  Now apparently, he thinks he can shoot people and nobody would notice.  He reminds me of the more eccentric emperors in the latter stages of the roman empire.  Bring it on Don.  The world needs a crash and a reboot with an entirely different operating system.  It will hurt.  A lot.

The new society will be built around those experiments already existing though suppressed by the prevailing system.  Perhaps the most important is sustainable agriculture.  It is ancient knowledge that needs to be ‘shovel ready’ when the shit hits the fan.  In fact, shit and fans may be may be important inputs.  To those people out there doing important research to free us from the very high fossil fuel energy requirements of mainstream agriculture, I doffs me hat, I takes a bow, and think your work will be the foundation of a new society.  Bumpy ride though.

In the transition stages the words and practice of thrift, parsimony and frugality will make quite a comeback and the world may never again see the profligate consumption of the last 60 years.

I thought I’d write a post and what came to mind?  Nothing!  So I am going to write about the fascinating subject of nothing.  I will search the universe high and low in pursuit of my topic.  I will define it as a complete absence of matter and energy in a 1m cube.  Along the way, I will assume infinite resources to construct any experiment, and a plentiful supply of ‘perfectium’, that very handy element I can give any absolute property I happen to need at the time.

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

So I go to the shed and get a large cardboard carton and look inside and see nothing.  That was easy! and nothing found.  But wait a minute there is air inside.  OK, I’ll get a vacuum pump and suck the air out.  Oh bugger, that doesn’t work either as there are still a few atoms of air floating around, and the walls of the container will ‘out-gas’ a few atoms at a steady rate.  Nothing for it but to go into space where a very hard vacuum already exists.  But not near the sun where a powerful if tenuous solar wind is blowing, or even between stars in the galaxy as it is ‘packed’ with hydrogen, helium and dust.  No, lets go intergalactic to the empty places where galaxies don’t inhabit.  They are clumpy and stick in bunches so there are voids in between.  Oh rats!  There are still 2 or 3 atoms of hydrogen per cc.  Surely we can flush the last few atoms out with a few ‘scrubber’ molecules which absorb the last atoms and then stick to the sides.  At last! A cubic meter free of matter!

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

But what about other stuff like the cosmic background radiation left over from the big bang that floods the universe still?  OK, this is where we need the perfectium.  A cubic meter of it impervious to microwave radiation such as the cosmic background.  Have you checked the price of perfectium recently?  We are getting into seriously expensive experiments here, conducted in intergalactic space with rare materials.  Right.  Cosmic background radiation blocked.  Phew!  Now look inside the box to see if we have nothing.  Oops!  You can’t look inside the box without disturbing Schrodinger’s paradox that you can’t observe without altering what you observe.  Quantum physics.  This is getting difficult.  And I have another problem.  I haven’t thought about neutrinos yet.  They stream out from the sun, from nuclear reactors and fantastic numbers of them still circulating from the big bang.  About a billion a second stream through your body every second.  Don’t worry, they are antisocial and don’t react with ‘real’ stuff like me and you.  They can go through about 2-3 light years of lead before they are likely (50-50%) to have anything to do with what we consider reality.  Perfectium to the rescue!  I now require it to be impervious to neutrinos, though I may have to make it a bit thicker.  This quest is much more difficult than expected.

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

So here we are, at great expense out in the wilderness of intergalactic space, can’t even look in the box because of Schrodinger, and wondering if we have achieved nothing.  Actually, I seem to manage that most days, but in this analysis, it seems to elude me.  Then the final crushing blow.  Virtual particles.  In case you haven’t heard, quantum physics requires that particles spontaneously invent themselves out of nothing, have a brief jig, and disappear.  Anywhere in space.  At any time.  This is demonstrated in the Kirchhoff effect where two plates very close together have a positive attraction from the teaming virtual particles around them.  This is a seriously alarming thought, that a grand piano could spontaneously appear in orbit around Jupiter, then disappear again.  I’m losing my grip on reality, but that is a prerequisite to understanding the quantum world.  Relax Paul, enjoy the ride.

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

So I have failed in my quest to find nothing.  It seems it can’t exist in this universe.  I wish I had come by this thought when I had teenage children.  When I asked them “what happened today?” and got the reply ‘nothing’, I could have regaled them with my recently acquired knowledge into the nature of nothing.  ‘Nothing does not exist’.  I don’t expect I would have been thanked for this revelation.

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

For Martin.

We have all survived the excitement, the hassles and cheer with friends and family in the special ritualised way that the Xmas and new year season has acquired.  At Possum Valley, I did not have any family present, but the very warm and convivial company of friends and guests who are one and the same was heartwarming.  Thank you dear people who shared your family Xmas with me and Charlotte who was far from home and family. You, wined and dined me, then paid me for the privilege.  I was invited to dinner several days with roasts vegies, salads and sauces, with crackers and silly paper hats.  How lucky can you get?  Even luckier.  For the last few weeks I have had the company of an American PhD biology student staying with me at the homestead with the charming name of Charlotte studying the latitudinal distribution of species.  A Berkeley student, with assistance from ANU, she thought Possum Valley might be a nice quiet place to do some serious work on the thesis.  She had not realised the perils of having her ears talked off by a dialogue deprived old man.

Charlotte is an outdoors person, and has some physical goals as well as intellectual.   A daily jog to the main road in the rain is part of her routine (about 8km).  It has been raining ever since she came to PV.  She has done some field work in the PNG highlands with lizards to test their tolerance to temperature ranges.  She loves PNG, its people and environment, but not the leeches.  I understand that.  I have had a long term intimate relationship with leeches and wish there was some way I could get a divorce.  But Charlotte had somehow, through great diligence and attention I suppose, managed to avoid even a single instance of being bitten.  I think this indicates a phobia for that level of viligance to be maintained.  Charlotte intends and desires to continue studies in PNG, grants permitting, and had some desire to overcome the leech phobia with a cathartic experience.  Always prepared to take the hard road of confronting ones fears, her chosen method was to climb Bartle Frere in the wet season.  To get the full effect, she decided to protect the upper body and most delicate parts with ‘goanna salve’ around the thighs, but leave the lower legs unprotected.

I dropped her off at the Tablelands end of the Bartle Frere walk at 8 am.  It was reckoned to be a 2 day return trip by National  Parks, but she is fit and reckoned she would hit the summit in just 5 hours and return in 3hrs.  I had no reason to doubt that.  I got a call from her mobile at 2 pm to tell me she was on the summit.  For the second time, as in the clouds she had overshot the summit and gone down towards the coast for a very difficult scramble of 1km amongst the boulders.  Arriving at the heli-pad for emergency evacuations she realised her mistake and came back.  On a cloudless day, you could look around and see there was no more up, the highest point in Queensland, but in the fog it is not obvious you are on the summit.  The descent down took her longer than expected as the issue isn’t strength, but traction, as the wet slippery rocks and mud can more likely cause injury than on the way up.

A leech scrum

She emerged from the rainforest at about 5:30 pm.  She had taken no precautions or considerations of leeches since 8 am.  She took off her boots.  I have never seen so many leeches in my life.  She took off her socks that were writhing with hundreds of leeches.  Blood was dripping everywhere.  She started to de-leech her legs by flicking them off, but the situation was well beyond that.  I assisted her by grabbing handfuls of them, knotted in balls, and flinging them off into the bush a dozen at a time.  We eventually got control of the situation and Charlotte started to calm down.  Her legs were running with blood.  The boots, socks and trousers still writhing with leeches were thrown in the tray of the ute.

I have never met anyone with a phobia so prepared to charge it head on.  She was bitten hundreds of times.  I hope it has the desired effect of having faced the ultimate challenge so now a slight leech infestation of a dozen or so can be shrugged off.  You have my admiration Charlotte, but kids, don’t try this at home.