Emergency Banana Productions

Seeing as we’ve lately had yet another Australia Day, with all its flag-brandishing, swearword-screaming and beer-spilling-on-train-floor (at least, that was the bit I saw), I’ve been compelled to give some thought to the subject of patriotism.

Patriotism can be loosely defined as “national pride”, and it is something that I have always found a bit hard to logically understand (although I can see some people’s need to have an object of pride to give their life meaning, whatever that object be).

Because, seriously, the country where you happen to be born is in no way chosen by you - it is an entirely random outcome. So why should you feel proud about it? Being proud of belonging to a certain nationality makes just as much sense as being proud of being 173.6 centimetres tall or of belonging to blood group A.

As for the “democratic” argument for national pride, i.e. “Look at us, we’re such a free country compared to such-and-such, we’ve got freedom of speech, sexual liberation and free and fair elections, etc. etc., so we can feel proud of our country because it’s so much better than such-and-such” - apart from sounding arrogant, this argument is excessively simplistic, failing to take into account possible advantages of other societies over one’s own.

This here is an incredibly silly and mostly very funny comic about two Creation Scientists (excuse the oxymoron). It’s a bit profane at times and the spelling/grammar is not flawless, but still great stuff I reckon.

Read Creation Science while you wait for the next Jeff’s Pie Shop…

Gor blimey, looks like our call has finally been answered. Red foxes of the world, unite!

Well, there we are. I, the Most Ninetyeightious Azarov98, have finished my exams for my first year at Melbourne uni. Now I have to select my subjects for next year (and look sharp about it too, because re-enrolment’s due on the 20/11/09 and I still haven’t looked up many options, lazy bastard), and then me and God of the Pie can focus entirely on bringing Jeff’s Pie Shop back from the domains of the somewhat dead.

Here is how it all, approximately, went:

1. Chemistry 2, Tuesday 10th November This was probably my best exam, because I had several days beforehand to revise our materials. Our topics were Organic Chemistry, Quantum Mechanics, Reaction Rates and Transition Metal Chemistry. I actually managed to get to the end of the paper, and I don’t think I stuffed up badly anywhere. I generally regard Chemistry as good fun, especially organics (as can be clearly seen in the latest cartoon). Mind you, the practicals can be a bit of a drag…
2. Genetics and Evolution of Life, Wednesday 11th November Now that I’ve scared off all the faint-hearted creationists, we can continue. In this subject we got told all about exciting stuff such as genetics, protists, plants, animals and the evolution of mankind. (Now I’ve scared off all the remaining creationists, as well as a couple of pedantic lovers of politically correct language.) The exam itself was all right, all though I did have to make a few stabs in the dark and I don’t think my essay answers were all that great… Luckily, there wasn’t too much on hominids. But the protists really got me down.
3. Physics 2: Advanced, Thursday 12th November Dammit, what sort of stupid nincompoops stick three exams in a row? No time to relax a bit or anything. Anyways, in Physics, that most hard and boring of all subjects (which is the reason I did it), we were taught all sorts of fancy stuff about floating things, squishing and heating up gases and what it leads to, electric and magnetic fields, and quantum mechanics. (To all you layman brains out there - yes, quantum mechanics involves a lot more than a possibly dead moggy locked up in a box.) The exam itself I didn’t do too greatly at, spending way too much time on complicated questions in the middle and so missing out on completing the end question. Most shamefully, I couldn’t figure out the first two questions on fluids, both of which I had done before in the semester! The only entire question I did properly was the one on Ampère’s law, which is to do with magnetics. Ah, well, at least I’m sure I passed…
4. Linear Algebra, today, Tuesday 17th November This one has to do with matrices, vectors, vector spaces, eigenvalues, MATLAB and me being among the Front Seat Bandits at the lectures. As for the exam - seriously, there was so much to write: row reductions, inner product proofs, Gram-Schmidt orthogonalisation, and, when you get sick of it all, lots and lots of swearwords (joke). My hand got really sore. Once again, I reckon I spent way too much time on the stuff in the middle that I couldn’t do, so I didn’t have time to get to the end. But I guess that’s all right, since I had no clue how to do the last question anyway… about 70%, I reckon.

Looking on the bright side - at least they didn’t stick all four exams in a row, like last semester…

BTW, God of Pie has also finished his exams (the HSC ones, i.e. what high school kids do in New South Wales before they go on a drunken rampage). A while ago. He should really do a post about it too…

Well, it looks like the glorious nation of Iceland, pressured by financial difficulties, is going to jettison its McDonalds restaurants. All three of them.

Good riddance, I say.

Read the Age article now.

P.S. The Age article makes the incredibly stupid mistake of referring to Icelandic people by their (parental) surnames. This you do not do. It is customary in Iceland to call people by their first names. Silly Age. (Age of Silliness?)

I’ve noticed that I left out a very important point in my post concerning the Black Saturday fires - AAARRRSON. So I’ve added the following points to the article (I also put them here, so you can see them without having to go back to the original article if you don’t want to). Anyway, here goes:

6. Finally, Arson. There are so many reasons people can find for themselves for lighting a fire that I can’t be bothered going through them all (e.g. having fun, offsetting an inferiority complex, not caring what happens if they throw a cigarette out the car window…). One thing I will say, though, is that young, impressionable minds would be less impressed with the concept of creating a blazing inferno if they weren’t exposed so much to this phenomenon in popular action films. Censorship on my part? Maybe.

7. An interesting note on the last thing, though. In urban bushland remnants, fires lit by arsonists are often the only possibility for the ecosystem to regenerate the way it’s meant to (or approximately so); for example, if prescription burns are deemed too hazardous for nearby suburbs. So arson can be a bit of a two-sided sword.

Sincineratingly yours,

azarov98.

Jeff’s Pie Shop, you may have noticed, is rather ill. This is because;

1. It was our first shot at making a webcomic
2. Neither of us had a clue about how to run a webcomic
3. We know nothing about website design
4. We were doing this off-the-cuff
5. We are completely stark raving mad.

So, the site is in sore need of rebooting. Here are some of the features you can expect the new site to have;

1. Wordpress 2.8.3, which apparently allows us to update the site without completely rebooting it
2. A slightly different site address so that the main site won’t be affected if we break the beta
3. A different colour scheme to the WP+CP default
4. All of the comics re-released on a regular (probably weekly) schedule
5. Buffer comics in case Azarov screws up
6. Some of the blog posts (those that aren’t about news or recent events) re-released, again on a regular schedule
7. Blog posts under comics (a la Rob and Elliot) instead of in their own seperate archive (which is silly)

So, when can we expect this? Well, it will probably be worked on at some point after I finish my HSC. Meaning late November-early December is our expected date of actual launching, weather permitting. In the meantime, Azarov can fix his scanner and work on getting into a weekly schedule. On that topic, may I suggest that you next draw the continuation of the story rather than going off on a radio-smashing tangent?

I’ve recently done something most, ahem, environmentalists probably did ages ago - bought a copy of The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery. I am currently in the process of reading it (or pretending to), but before doing a proper book review I decided to point out a logical flaw I’ve spotted (at least, I is thinking it a logical flaw is) in its argument.

On page 28, Tim tells us that “CO2 acts as a trigger for that potent greenhouse gas, water vapour. It does this by heating the atmosphere just a little, allowing it to take up and retain more moisture, which then warms the atmosphere further. So a positive feedback loop is created, forcing our planet’s temperature to ever-higher levels.”

The problem is, I don’t quite understand what precisely Tim means by this. He may mean that “CO2 increases temperature, which increases water vapour, which increases temperature, which increases water vapour, etc.”; that is,  the positive feedback is between the temperature and amount of water vapour. If this were so, then there wouldn’t be any need for CO2 - the water vapour present in the atmosphere could carry out the doomsday climate scenario all by itself, through the aforementioned feedback loop. Seeing as this has still not happened, something would seem to be amiss (a limiting factor, perchance).

If Tim means to say “CO2 increases water vapour, which increases CO2, etc.”; then this simply doesn’t make sense. How does H2O increase CO2?

If, however, he means, “Humans produce CO2, which causes warming, which increases H2O, which causes some more warming; humans produce some more CO2, etc.” then this isn’t really a positive feedback loop - more like a chain thingy.

Ah well, I guess it does pay to use ambiguous but scientific-sounding wording when you are trying to win over the opinion of a layman (or laywoman or layhermaphrodite or layzombie…).

By the way, there is a reference at the end of that paragraph, to a book called The Discovery of Global Warming: New Histories of Science, Technology and Medicine by S. R. Weart (Harvard University Press). I reckon I should look that up.

azarov98

P.S. Await also my upcoming extremely long rant about what’s wrong with modern-day environmentalism.

And he’s a wee bit concerned with the severe lack of update around here…

I’ll do a Germany report later, but right now I need sleep.

On July 2nd, I’m goin’ to AUSTRIA!!! Followed closely by GERMANY!!! I’m going with the Hunter Singers, and we be an awesome choir. If you are anywhere even vaguely close to where we’re performing, you should come. I’m the only blonde male in the choir, I won’t be too hard to spot.

Concerts wot I am singing in;

July 5, Albrechtsberg Church, Albrechtsberg, Austria, 8:30 am

July 6, Musikverein, Vienna, Austria, 8:50 am (the choral section of the Suma cum Laude music competition)

July 7, Musikverein, Vienna, Austria, 5:30 pm (this is the award ceremony and winners’ concert, so we may or may not perform here)

July 9, The Dom, Salzburg, Austria, 12:00 pm

July 9, Abtenau Church, Abtenau, Austria, 8:00 pm

July 10, Kajetanerkirche, Salzburg, Austria, 6:00 pm

July 12, Kurzentrum, Bad Kohlgrub, Germany, 4:30 pm

There will also be concerts in Bremen on the 16th and 17th of July — these have not yet been organised. It’s not our fault.

Also, I have talked to Azarov and we agree that the site needs some serious rebooting in the arse. So, once I get back, I will be rejigging the website at a new adress (jps.emergencybananaproductions.com), setting the existing comics to auto-update as a buffer, and hoping like hell that we get Azarov drawing faster. I will also be reading some Wordpress/Comicpress tutorials to try and get the site easier to use and friendlier.

I’d better damn well see you in Germany,

Godot Pie.