Pirates, Sailing, Real Estate

Somali pirates... seems they have amidst their booty containers of 'corn& soy blend' which is 'aid' for poor folks in Somalia... [or not, some sources claim "Maersk Alabama" is sailing on, only the captain has been taken...]
Could someone tell Helen Clark that it costs $158 to pay an African farmer to produce a ton of grain, $285 to buy it in the local market, and $600 to buy it in USAnia? (figures crudely made up from vague memory)
I may eat soy as Lecithin, to boost my neural membranes, in an attempt to avoid throwing my body into the harbour, but should Helen be boosting Monsanto? Or actually helping locals to thrive?
[update the US navy has shot 3 pirates, while 'negotiating' with the 4th. The hostage is safe? OK from here on in who will ever negotiate with the US?]

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sailingscuttlebutt Orange II at speed mesmeric video
Sometimes at night I fancy I am on a giant catamaran
24-hour distance record 706.2 miles at an average speed of 29.42 knots
36.8 metres long

I dont know why I despise 'gin palaces' and their plutocrat owners, whilst I admire Orange II, Undoubtedly a french plutocrat somewhere there
Something about no oil involved.
in the 1860s the clipper record Plymouth to NZ was 68 days. Orange II did a circumnavigation in 50 days

Other extreme sailing:


48 knots sailboat record

youtube
50knots kitesurfing sailing record
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I eat meat. Hell I eat trans-fat-GM-soy-laden meat pies. I dont lose sleep over millions of lab-rats driven insane in their plastic containers.
But, somehow Im glad the Animal Liberation Front is disturbing cretinaceous 'scientists' who are torturing primates with dumb projects. Particularly droogs.

Good News section: counting bed nests indicate there are a lot (140,000?) of lowland gorillas.
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Pando lives on. It weighs in at over six million kilograms, and is likely more than 80,000 years old (although it might be much older).
discovermagazine

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Real Estate
Everywhere I have lived with cheap rents, 5 or 10 years later hoards of yuppies have begged on bended knees, beseeching their bank managers to allow them to mortgage their lives away so they might experience a taste of the reality that I have experienced.
Bad luck Ygen or lateBoomers, money cant buy reality.

In this finite universe, Koh Samui of the 70s will never recur. If there is an infinitude of worlds, then an infinite series of my younger self sits, feet in sand, at a beach-side cafe, finishes a mango shake, accepts a bamboo bong of Buddha from a German girl, and watches a fiercely coloured centipede scuttle across my foot.

Decades later desperate ygens pay $400 at a 'spa', high rise hotels and jet-skis trash the very experience they hunt.
Reality is that half-second between the snick as a rifleshot clips a leaf overhead, and the sound arrives. Or the weary glance from a rice-transplanter bent in the fierce sun as a westerner high on shrooms picks his way on the berm between paddis.

When I built my house, it was in a place beyond the reach of Google Maps - really, the map finishes before my place. There is now a cloud free fuzzy image of my lane, but I remain sure that you could never find my house.

Places I have lived,, and boosted the 'real' estate value of
Freemans Bay, Herne Bay Auckland
Bay Ridge, Lower East Side NY
Darlington Sydney
Notting Hill, Balham, Shepherds Bush London
(Londons drowning and I live by the river))
All these places were cheap rent and real, soon come yuppies, mortgages, unreal.
(Not sure about Bay Ridge, its a long time since Saturday Night Fever was filmed there)

Freemans Bay 1976 .. I had a job as a lab tech at Auckland Gas. On the site of the old 'gas works' where 'town gas' was made by heating coal. A toxic and suicidal brew. By the 70s it was 'natural' gas and the old gasometers at the bottom of Western Park were redundant. I was a feckless attendant. My chief task was to drive a Morris van throughout South Auckland, along the gas pipeline route, and take voltage readings, to see if the Magnesium sacrificial cathodes were protecting the pipe. So I knew many of the streets, before Pacifica arrived. I reckon that cathodic protection is of very limited utility, you need to pump current down with transformers if you want to protect a pipeline
Anyway, back at the lab, I pilfered a variety of fancy lab glassware to use as bongs, and was entranced by the HP35 scientific calculator.
This is the machine that introduced the E for Exponential notation eg light speed 2.99792458 E8 m/s which is the HP35 way of saying 2.99792458 x 10⁸

Lying awake after midnight, I spy a bright star in the southfacing window. Clear skies in this windswept southern capital. After an hour or 2, the star has moved left, East. Beneath the southern pole, undoubtedly Alpha Centauri. Numeric meditations sooth my restless mind. I find that the star is E16 +metres away.
Roughly, good enough for ballpark mental calculations.
I know that light = 3E8m/s, 1 year is 3.2E7sec+ , and alpha Centauri is 4.5LightYears away. Current rockets do 2E4 m/s so the trip will take 5E11 seconds = E4+ years. (10,000+ years)
See the benefit of "E" notation for mental musings.

How can the journey be made? Biological wetware is unlikely to last E4 years. Good planets may be E5 or E6 years away.
The answer comes to me: ECC ... Error correction codes. Every thousand years or so the rocket must wake up, read its script, correct for any damage, and re-write the script , and rebuild the minimal set of nano-bots required to copy the rocket when it reaches its first target.
ECC codes. In the year of my birth, Claude Shannon proved that no matter how noisy the channel, with enough error correction codes the message could get through.
Wet-ware biology has only the crudest form, redundancy. We have algorithms beyond junk-genes, the probes will get through. Unless they lose their urge, cant be bothered. Even robots may get weary.

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Its Eastertime too

Up on Housing Project Hill, it's either fortune or fame
You must pick one or the other though neither are to be what they claim
If you're looking to get silly, you better go back to from where you came
Because the cops don't need you and man, they expect the same

In honour of the season, not in honour of Zimmerman, who has turned out to be a disgusting old man