The ads that appear on this blog are generated on an intelligent principle. A search of the blog is carried out which involves multiple queries of the content. This is a basic approach to searching as used in databases.

Database searches are based on SQL (structured query language). They can search for exact information or alike information. An SQL query such as:

select all things from bloghoster where text LIKE "%parrot%"

will find all texts which have the word parrot in them in the database "bloghoster".

Targeted internet ads work in a similar way. They look for a word in a body of text and select an ad which matches that word.

The problem is that this approach to advertising fails badly to match because it is too simple. If I write a blog article about wild parrots I get advertising about buying birds which have been cruelly treated and locking them in cages. If I write about love I get ads about pornography. If I write about nuclear accidents I get ads for plutonium shares.

The information technology is too crude. Let us have some intelligence in the search procedures. Otherwise the contradiction between ads and content becomes unacceptable to writers and readers.

A new type of genetically-manipulated maize is now under suspicion of negatively-affecting the health of those who eat it, according to Telepolis. Rats which were fed the maize for 90 days had kidneys which were 7% smaller and had signs of infection. The full test results have not been released to the public. The tests were carried out by the company producing the maize type. Not releasing the test results has aroused additional suspicion about the maize. This modified maize will be allowed to be sold in Europe if it is accepted by the regulatory authorities.

"If I show up at the school gate in the tractor, I'm dead." (afr 21 May 2005)

After a few years of being fashionable, 4 wheel drive cars are now suddenly out of fashion. No-one wants them. These expensive cars are now passé, and will be hard to sell. As well as using a lot of petrol, they have now gained a deadly reputation.

After a 5-year-old girl was killed by a slowly moving 4WD outside a school, the Coroner recommended that they be "banned from areas around primary schools". Now it is embarrassing for mothers to bring their children to school with these cars.

4WDs are seen as an extension of privatisation, like high fences and private schools. The view is better from up high but others can no longer see past them. In crash situations, these drivers prefer injuries to be incurred by those in the other car. As in war, they want to minimise injuries and damage to themselves. This is known as the "arms race" on the roads (afr). The biggest and heaviest car wins. The children do not survive.

One 5-year-old was sacrificed to discredit these gas-guzzling tanks in the law courts. How many will have to die before cars are banned from all the places where people move about, like cities and towns?

The most important revolution in human history was the invention of agriculture according to Ronald Wright. This invention was more important than the development of any type of tool or material, such as metals. Agriculture was probably discovered by women in various locations around the world independently.

More important than hunting to extinction the large animals which had been the main source of food, forcing humans to become more vegetarian, was the climate. The climate about 10,000 years ago became stable. The extremes disappeared making agriculture possible for the first time in history. Fluctuations between ice ages and heat waves ceased, allowing crops to be cultivated.

This led to urbanisation and is still today the basis of our urban lifestyle.

Climate change, caused primarily by automobiles, threatens to destabilise this climatic equilibrium, and thereby threatens the basis of our worldwide civilisations. The biggest contribution to stabilising the climate would be the adoption of a rational transport system instead of the car.

Now that the world has reached the peak of oil production, the era of cheap oil is coming quickly to an end. It will not be long now before it is all used up.

People all over the world are realising that the private car as a means of transport was a bad idea ("a really dumb idea" as Alex Steffen writes). Linked with the car is the spreading suburbs of modern cities. The end of oil will also bring the end of the suburbs. Megacities, if they survive, will have to become more compact.

Some believe the end of oil will be the end of civilisation and that modern humans are unable to invent a life for themselves without cars and suburbia. We are not well-enough prepared for it. However Alex Steffen believes that we have the ideas and that we will be able to implement them. He believes we will be able to realise a life without cars and that we will not miss the polluted streets they bring, nor the illness they cause, nor the negative effects on life on the planet of carbon outputs.

"I think we'll get it by imagining a future worth fighting for, and cities worth building," writes Steffen

The ideas are there. We know how to make green cities and sustainable transport systems. We do not have to allow the automobile industry and its supporters to bring about the end of history. Human beings lived for millions of years without oil. It is possible to have a "second industrial revolution" and implement smart technologies for a humane future.

The "survival of the fittest" is not something to celebrate. We who have survived are the descendents of a long series of events which have brought about the elimination of all other species of homo and the destruction of all other cultures on this Earth. This is a history of barbarism, genocide and brutality. It is amazing given this history, that civilisation is at all civilised. But as Ronald Wright writes ("A short history of progress"), those who live in civilisations do not have any interest in ending it. We benefit from access to books, education and scientific information about our universe which were previously not available to our species.

Wright also reports that after the end of the Neanderthal humans, the dominant Cro-Magnons had an enlightened period of culture including advanced art works and civilised practices such as music and elaborate funerals. It may be that even if they did not interbreed with Neanderthals, but just committed genocide on them, that contact with them brought some of their civilised practices into the culture which followed. Neanderthals were known to have used flower pollen in funeral rites and to look after sick and injured fellows. Life was sacred to them.

In Ku Ring Gai national park there is a huge range of habitats and vegetation types. If you move quietly you can have close encounters with the inhabitants who may be quite surprised to see a creature like you. The wrens of Ku Ring Gai have a splendid blue colour. They carefully hop through the undergrowth cleaning up the plants as they go. Where there is no undergrowth there are no wrens.

Schiller wrote about beauty:

See the new dotAtelier exhibition inspired by the Rhine at Dusseldorf here:

geekpolitico writes in Legislation to reduce oil dependency a great new idea to make wasting petrol unattractive.

Add a tax, say 50c per litre, to petrol, collected when it is bought.

Pool all the money and at the end of the tax year divide it equally among the population. Those who use no petrol get a big tax bonus. Average petrol users get their tax money back. Big wasters get something back but nothing like what they paid in tax.

Super idea! Get people walking to the shops, let the lawn grow long, get people onto bikes.

The Banksia is one of the most unusual and beautiful plants in Australia. It grows in different environments, from coastal heath to rainforest, although it is unusual in rainforests where there is usually no fire.

Banksias are adapted to living with fire. Unlike Eucalypts, they do not survive a fire and grow again. But their seeds are contained in hard capsules which only open after a fire. They need a fire to be able to grow from seed.

Their flowers, which come out in winter, look like colourful cylindrical brushes. They drip with nectar which feeds the birds in the day and possums at night.

Banksias have gnarled trunks and branches and attractive seed pods.