But maybe help is at hand for next year: NASA have published a design for a one person, safe and quiet flying vehicle. And better yet, it is battery powered so it does not create any pollution.

Of course, NASA have more dreams for new technology than the NSW government have plans for new transport solutions. And of course, both NASA and my state government seem to lose interest at about the same time the first press conference finishes.

Imagine if my state government actually delivered on the grand idea of upgrading our local transport systems to cope with our growing population.  That would be an awesome Christmas present.  Cheap, frequent trains all across Sydney – I’d be happy with that.

OK, even in an election year I guess that is too fantastical to even comment on. But the flying car option is at least plausible.

NASA will probably move on now to another fun dream, but most car companies are currently working on hybrid and electric cars.  So what if one of them decides to think outside the box and build a simple, cheap and hopefully safe commuter air vehicle?

You can ask Santa for world peace or a new pair of socks if you want. But if someone gives me the flying car NASA are working on then I will be completely happy.

School crossing corruption crack-down

It appears that some school crossing guards (called lollipop ladies by News Ltd) may be accepting gifts around Christmas time.  As a result some local councils are cracking down on this potential source of bribes and corruption.

Have you noticed that some students seem to have to wait for ages to cross the road, while crossing guards sometmies seem to stop traffic suddenly for “special students”.  Well, maybe its not just a coincidence.

Maybe some students are sharing their lunches, the artworks they did at school that day or even thier lollies to get special treatment at crossings.

Naturally, News Ltd side with the establishment and claim that the well-meaning councils are creating red tape by asking crossing  guards to declare their gifts. But lets be frank – this kind of blatant corruption has got to end.

Most hard working coucillors take hardly any bribes when dealing with property developers and other shady businessmen – so why should they sit back idle while crossing guards get fat on spare peanut butter sandwiches or adorn their houses with paintings done by grade 4 maestros?

Especially when the bad school artists with lame pictures and the kids with yucky smelly sandwiches made by mean parents have no largesse to pay with.  Should bad child painters be expected to wait for 15 minutes while others skim across the street in no time? Just because they can draw a picture of “mummy standing outside the house” a little better?

What message would this send to our children? Where would it end?

I say we should take this fight further by installing security cameras at each crossing so that specially trained coujncil security staff can analyse videos for suspicious crossing patterns and potential queue jumpers.

Possibly we should even hire undercover cops who look like young kids to perform lolli-pop-lady sting operations.

Wiki-leaks has led the way in exposing the news stories that the mainstream media should already have been reporting but who is supporting potential whistle blowers who want to blow the cover on corrupt school crossing guards?

If needed I am willing to form a task force with other crack investigators to help bring an end to this corruption.  As long as the government (or councils) are willing to pay for me and my team.

I was a young and eager student learning basic arithmetic.  We went through several examples of addition and subtraction when one eager young student asked:

What is 2 minus 3?

The teacher told him that you can not subtract 3 from 2 as it is mathematically impossible.  But I new this was incorrect and so I told the teacher and the student that in fact the answer was “minus 1”.

Our teacher tried to bluff her way out and told that I was wrong.

But un-be-known to the teacher I was on to her.  I had been learning maths from my mum and my dad for many years and I knew some strange secrets that others might not have learned yet.  For example I already knew that:

1 + 1 usually = 2 …. but not always. 

In fact, if 1 drop of water is added to 1 drop of water = the you get 1 drop.  So in this case 1 + 1 = 1.

I spared the teacher this advanced maths in since she already seemed to be struggling with the concept of negative numbers. But I persisted with my argument that you can take 3 away from 2, sometimes:

Teacher – think about it James. If you have only two apples, you can not give me three.

Me – no, but if I had $2 in the bank I could take out $3 and then have –$1 in the bank.

The teacher told me I was wrong, which was quite confronting for an eager (5 or 6 year old) student of science.

I went home and told my dad about how awful it was that they had someone teaching us maths when she didn’t even understand negative numbers.

My father revealed to me that my teacher might not have been slow witted as I feared – because sometimes teachers don’t reveal the whole truth to the class. 

He alleged that this is because “it might confuse the class” but I was smart enough to know this was a convenient way of saying they lie to the class. 

From that moment I always suspected that I could not trust my teachers … and particularly the nice but dim seeming ones.

Had there been an internet and a wiki-leaks I could have warned my fellow (still naive) students. But alas I had no way to distribute my warning to other sufferers of scientific obfuscation. 

And the few children I did talk to were dubious of my discovery.

So I finally felt vindicated years later when someone broke the news that we did not in fact have 9 planets in our solar system (a core fact my teachers had alleged).

I watched with glee as some commentators tried to reconcile the new evidence (ie that they were wrong) with ways of redefining what we mean by planet to make us right.  Surely even a young scientist knows that when the evidence disproves a theory then it is the theory that should change and not the evidence.

Recently I heard that the big bang might actually be “one of many big bangs”.  In other words it might not have been the very beginning of everything, but rather another step along the way.  Of course the theory is already being challenged by other scientists but it is an intriguing idea.

I seem to remember talking to another student years ago (probably when I was around 14) when we agreed that it would be really interesting to know what happened before the big bang, when our teacher told us that there was no such thing. 

In the same class another student and I discussed how if we don’t know much about atoms then maybe at a sub-atomic level the universe is actually random.  Nope, said the teacher, it is all predictable if you could study it closely enough …. but of course a few lessons later he told us a little bit about quantum mechanics and I was left there wondering once again if he was dim or dodgy.

Now I have discovered that even the periodic table is wrong.  So even the corner stone of our (alleged) understanding of chemistry is incorrect.

Well – apparently it is not “incorrect” just “inaccurate sometimes”.  So once again the school teachers are trying to create wriggle room for clearly misguiding generations of keen young minds.

But maybe it is not the poor maligned CEO’s who are creating a credibility issue in our society (well, admittedly they are rich maligned CEOs but you get my point). Maybe it is those innocent acting teachers who try to keep the real truth from their eager young students.

Maybe if our kids learn to hold authority figures to account then they will come out of school demanding good leadership from their managers and politicians rather than accepting the behaviour we seem to think is inevitable.

Maybe it is time we stopped the cover-ups and created a teacher-leaks site that allows students to reveal the truth to the world when they are given “convenient” answers, rather than the truth.

Well maybe not anymore. I saw a great movie on the weekend – Red.

The story and the action are so out there that I would have thought it would only work in comics and cartoons. But the pulled it off really well.

Tonight I am channel hoping on tv. I saw a great comment in a cartoon:

“I am not really sure what that means but it sounds evil. Now where should I start”.

I thought to myself, “that’s the sort of comment you watch cartoons for”.

But then I turned the news and saw a real politition talking:

“He should be prosecuted to the full extent of the the law (meaningful pause) and if it means changing the law then that should not be seen as an issue”.

Who needs cartoons now. Movies can match their over the top graphics and outlandish adventures. And even cartoons can’t compete with the outlandish and extravagant humour of our modern esteemed leaders.

Due to “the storms” my 6:30pm flight was delayed until 9pm, which was a bit disappointing.  Then they loaded us onto the plane to get ready to go … but unfortunately didn’t have a crew. 

Apparently they were hoping for a crew to turn up (I am not sure if they tend to drop by unannounced but who knows). 

So we sat in the plane for a while and another storm came, giving us a good view of the lightning, but not much other excitement.  Then after a while that storm passed and our captain started looking for a crew again.

But unfortunately it seems not many crews do turn up at 10pm at night during a storm, so eventually (at 10:30) the captain told us that the flight was cancelled and we would have to come back to try again tomorrow.

From what I gather the crew were frantically calling hotels to try and store some passengers over night but a lot of other flights beat us to the punch.  So a couple of hundred of us disembarked, not really that impressed with sitting down for an hour to get a view of some lightning.

As you can imagine there were four or five flight crew waiting to greet a few hundred grumpy (non) passengers.  And to make it worse they didn’t really know what the plans were so they had to wing it. 

They broke into a stash of taxi vouchers, opened the qantas club and stood their resolutely dealing with people who seemed to think the stewardess they were talking to could call in another plane if she wanted to.

But no matter how grumpy we acted the crew remained unphased.  I guess that’s how you know if you are cut out for the role – dealing with a crash is probably a matter of following the drill and hoping not to become a pancake on the ground, but dealing with a few hundred grumpy people would really test your mettle.  And the crew did an excellent job.

In the end I left in my free taxi, got a couple of hours sleep and then came back for a new flight.  I understood the impact of the storm, I still haven’t worked out why they didn’t know if there were any crews going to turn up up when the airport was closed, but I was really impressed with the attitude of the besieged staff.

Anyway – my next trip to the airport I got to try out the new boarding process that involves me getting to check my own baggage without any need for help.  I had a cool electronic baggage tag (free from qantas) and not-really-absolute confidence in Qantas getting the automated process right.

So I followed the instructions and sent my bag on its way, hoping it would end up in the same airport as me at the other end of the flight.

I needn’t have worried though – the process worked perfectly with the minor hitch that my  cool new baggage tag fell off my bag, leaving it with no record of where to go. 

Apparently they either have weight-lifters or evil robots moving the bags around because the baggage tag has a strong “ocky-strap” rope to tie it on with and the strap was somehow ripped in two in the process.  This meant I had a rope attached to my bag but no tag.

Someone (or some non-evil robot) clearly noticed because they attached an “oops – no baggage tag is attached – we guess this is going to Mel on flight xyz).  Happily for me this meant the bag ended up in the right place at the right time and there was no negative impact on me.

So its a cool new system and worked really well for me … but it must be a bit expensive for Qantas if they are ripping more of the electronic (architect designed) baggage tags off in the process and replacing them with manual ones.

Overall it meant two cases of dodgy processes recovered by excellent service.  I wonder though whether in reality it is good customer service to require heroic work from your crew when you could get your process to do the work for you.

One of the most exciting pass times you can have at the airport is to sit near the food service in the Qantas Club. Every so often the staff will come and place some party pies or small fried things at the table and men and women in business suits will surge forward to get them before they run out.  Children are squashed, friends are forgotten and people who are paying several hundred dollars for an airfare start to panic that the experience will not include a small fried thing they wouldn’t bother to cook at home.

After a short time though, a line forms and people block all avenues to any other food, scared that innocent looking passengers might turn out to be evil queue jumpers.

With this and similar experiences being the most exciting (and not very endearing) action at the airport it is no wonder that some airline staff seem bored and unenthusiastic.

But then maybe those are the staff that should look for more appropriate work in dynamic industries such as concrete quality assurance (if you doubt that is an important line of work then stop and think whenever you are on/under a bridge – how important is quality assurance to me right now).

Anyway – there are also staff who are obviously born to do the work they are doing.  I travelled on Virgin a couple of days after their complete booking system meltdown. 

I think it is safe to assume that the counter staff were having a bad week. But I also had an issue – I had a problem printing my boarding pass at home.  I didn’t think it would be an issue so I just rocked up at the airport.  But apparently Virgin IT people decided that you should only get one shot at printing and then the system will refuse to allow you to try to check in again.  This is a green friendly approach, I guess, in that it stops bad people from printing and wasting hundreds of boarding passes.  But it is also a little inconvenient.

So I went and joined a long queue of people to go and get my problem sorted out at the special problem queue. 

As we moved slowly through the queue I heard the lady at the front make a couple of announcements that could help people solve their problems without waiting.  Then when I got to the front she greeted me with a big friendly smile and apologised for their process before simply fixing my problem. 

Honestly, I think that is a pretty impressive attitude to maintain after 3 days of disaster recovery.

Sign at Brisbane Airport

But it left me a little confused. Can anyone explain customer care and the link to empty service desks again?

And we weren’t just patriotic to Australia, we were patrioticly supporting The Dalkeith Nedlands under-12′s, the school cricket team, South Fremantle in Footy, Western Australia, Australia or who ever the most local team was at the time.  And then at the end of the game we forgot about it all and went off for an ice-cream or beer (beer when you are young and ice cream as you get older obviously).

We also new that Aussie’s loved their sport and that we spent a lot of money on it – and that seemed like a good idea.

But we spend a huge amount on elite sport now and yet a lot of schools don’t have adequate play grounds. 

I guess that is fine if we see winning at international events as something of national importance. 

But maybe we could be spending our money on integrating local sports into having fun, learning to socialise and learning some values.  Local sports and school sports do this.  In fact I recently saw a video of my neice playing sport and learning the very important social lesson that “If you look to your father for support when you stumble on the field, he will probably be laughing too much to be a source of useful advice”.

But what useful lessons and National benefits do we get from elite sport?

I have extensively researched (ie stumble on) some recent news reports.

The papers in India recently accused the Australians at the Commonwealth games of vandalising their accomodation because India beat Australia in the cricket.

Fortunately the Australian high commission stepped in to correct this mis-perception of how Australians behave:

The report “was factually wrong, insulting to Australia’s athletes and can only be described as a fantasy,” the high commission said in a statement.

He did however admit that a washing machine had been “damaged” (whih meant thrown out the window apparently).  And he admitted that “spirited” celebrations following the Commonwealth Games had resulted in damage to the athlete’s accomodation as a result of celbrating our medals and achievements at the games. He also admitted that we would pick up the bill to clean up.

So I guess our governments formal view is that 

It is insulting to suggest that Australians riot and vandalise because we are losers.  We do it because we are winners.

If my neice and her athletics team had done something similar I think our familly would have apologised and made the kids stay back to clean up.  But the excellent thing abut being an elite sportsperson is that you have other (tax payer funded) people to do that for you while you get on with the important work of winning games to enhance our international reputation.

And apparently its working.  I was told yesterday that Australians had been identified in a recent Brittish survey as the “blondes of the world”.  I should apologise to blondes, many of whom are bright, but it was interesting to find out that Australians as a nation are seen as “fun, energetic but not too bright”.

On the same day, I saw an article in a newspaper that we are reviewing our school curriculums (Just in case … Curriculum = the stuff what the teachers are meant to tell you at school).  Apparently the new maths and science is too hard so they want to simplify (simplify = dumb down a bit) what is included.

One of my teachers once told me that there were no bad students, only bad teachers and that if I didn’t understand something then I should expect more of him.  But more senior education experts have decided that it might be better to lower our expectations of students than to raise our expectation of teachers (or to better equip them to teach).

I was a member of the science fiction club and a middle of the road sportsman so it may be that I am un Australian in my thinking but, I can’t help feeling that aiming to win medals is possibly less in our national interest than expending resources on local communities and basic education (in sport of course but also maybe in some science and stuff for the less athletic).

On my last trip, my driver told me that the money goes to Macquarie Bank (the owners of the airport) to help them administer taxi queues.

But when I talk to taxi drivers they often tell me that they have been waiting at the airport, in a queue, for 45 minutes. 

I tell them that I have also been waiting in a queue at the same airport for half an hour.  The only difference being that I am waiting for a taxi and the driver is waiting for a passenger.

My driver told me that this was actually something that quite upset some of the drivers. “But”, he said, he had a radical idea.

He suggested it would be really good if there was a way to combine the two queues so that the people waiting for a taxi could be in the same queue as the taxis waiting for people. 

That way the taxi might wait 15 minutes and the passenger no time.  I thought this was a great idea.

I told him that I studied this kind of thing at university and that the academics said this was actually the point of the queue in the first place. 

I guess its harder in practice though, because Macquarie have been running airports for years and they can’t find a way to make a queue actually work like a queue does in theory.

Maybe, I thought, this is what the $3 surcharge was for – funding advanced research into queueing theory to see if there is a way for the queue of taxis to integrate into the queue of people so that people can catch taxis rather than waiting for half an hour.

It turn out that I shouldn’t have mentioned my theory, because it upset the taxi driver.

If you catch a lot of taxis, you know the trip seems to go quicker with a relaxed driver than an upset one and my comments really got him upset.

His beef though, was not just with waiting around, it was with hygiene. 

Apparently the taxi drivers sometimes spend over an hour in the queue, losing money the whole time while getting upset (and complaining to each other) about the horrible people at Macquarie and what they would do to them if they got hold of them.

I kept to myself the obvious point that a lot of Macquarie people probably catch taxis and the taxi drivers probabaly get hold of them quite often – I didn’t want to give the driver any dangerous ideas.

But then the driver got more excited and told me that there are toilets there for the drivers – but that they are a health hazard because they are never cleaned. 

So after a day of taxi drivers being stuck at the airport and using the uncleaned bathrooms, he claims, there is a real risk of some kind of disease outbreak. 

This would be bad since taxi drivers move all around the city and would quickly come into contact with a lot of local people, as well as half the people going to the airport.  It would be a real ground zero for the next outbreak of what might become known as the taxi flu or the Macquarie Virus.

I told him that the people at Macquarie are highly paid (which didn’t seem to help to calm him down) and highly educated and that I am sure they were smart enough to know that you can’t have unhygenic bathrooms being used by such a large number of people who rely on them so heavilly. 

But he reminded me that they still don’t know what a queue is – so maybe we should be worried.

Anyway, I suggested that Macquarie could use the surcharge hire a cleaner and he said he could hire some cleaners for them for a lot less than $3 for every taxi that ever goes through the airport.

So I suggested that, in the spirit of health and safety, he and the other taxi drivers should invent their own surcharge. 

They should charge each “Macquarie” passenger an additional $3.  (A Macquarie passenger would be anyonge going to visit Macquarie Bank, anyone being picked up at a Macquarie Bank building and anyone who works for Macquarie if you could spot them).

The  surcharge would allow the taxi drivers to hire someone to clean the bathrooms they are forced to use at the airport (and thus protect the rest of us from virus outbreaks) and maybe even set up a fun park for them to use when they are stuck at the airport for an hour.

The driver said that he would talk to the other guys about it.  Apparently it is hard to do officially but maybe, he said, they can all agree that any Macquarie passenger will incur an additional fee unofficially and then the taxis can buy a porta-loo. 

At least its a start I guess.

Of course they could also use the money to research queues and see if there is a way to have a queue of taxis merge with a queue of passengers to that we don’t have both of them wating for over half an hour. 

This would also take the pressure off the plumbing at the airport.

I wonder if Macquarie Bank has access to any experts in infrastructure or logistics who could help?

Then, many years later, I got married and my wife discovered my book addiction – I was probably buying a new book every week or two. 

“At least”, I told her, “I am no longer reading them all.  I can proudly say that I own many books that I have only read a small part of”.

I was proud of this because I used to have an even worse condition than book addiction – the compulsion to finish reading everything I started, even if it turned out to be dreadful.

On rare occasions I would be surprised by a twist at the end and my long slog of reading would be justified.  But more often than not I was only reading the book because I felt I should do so.  Or I was leaving piles of books next to my bed that were not finished (nor likely to ever be finished) because I didn’t think I could put them away unread. 

So it was a big moment for me when I rebelled against my guilt in not finishing a book and then openly and proudly stated that I would never waste my potential reading time again on anything I didn’t find interesting.

Originally these unread books served some purpose when they sat on a bookshelf impressing my friends with all the books I read (or might one day read).  But over time I had taken to putting the books in boxes and storing them out of sight. 

So the unpurchased, unread books really just sat in a box, being hidden from any readers who might actually enjoy reading them. I guess I was providing a service to society by removing the boring books from view so that nobody would get stuck reading them, but I am not sure this was really worth the money and effort I was expending.

My wife then reminded me that I can outsource all this storage and save a fortune by joining a library.  So I grudgingly went back to the boring old library – but with the warning that when I had partly read all the books in the library that interested me I would go back to buying and partly reading my own books.

But as it turns out the library near us has a LOT of interesting books for me to read or partly read and I am still trying to get through them all.

And yet I missed buying books.  So I started to sneak out and buy my own books on top of the many that I get from the library.  I even bought a Kobo ebook reader to give myself an excuse to buy more books.

But it turned out that the Kobo came with 100 books for free (many boring but some interesting).  So that slowed me down for a while.  I read Machiaveli, Lewis Carol and other authors I have been meaning to read for a long time.

Then my wife discovered that the library also has a collection of ebooks that can be read on my Kobo (in both e-something format which works well or in PDF format that sucks) or on my computer (good for technical books but not for real reading).

Now I can sit at home and browse dozens of in an hour and the settle down to read any one of them until I get bored.  Or I can go to the effort of downloading a book and then I can take it everywhere.  I now rarely travel without 100 books in my coat or satchel.

And yet I still feel the need to buy a new book every now and then.  I just need to stay one step ahead of the library because they seem to be somehow staying one step ahead of me all the time.