The Miracle of Birth, pt. 1

I have been lucky enough to witness the birth of a few animals; kittens, puppies, lambs, calves, foals, piglets ... and now two human children.

Watching a foal stand up seconds after being born on shaky legs was very memorable. Our cat giving birth to two all-white kittens was magical, since it occurred on my mum's sweater and we kept them. Obviously, a predator like a cat can afford to give birth to blind and helpless offspring. The herbivores, on the other hand, had to hit the ground running, or at least wobbling.

Human babies are also rather helpless and hopeless when born. Even the cute factor doesn't really kick in for a while. My wife referred to our wee boy as an angry red potato when he was born. To be fair, after pushing him out like that she could call him whatever she wanted to. All I could think of after that was, "Ouch!"

Our first child was born by c-section, and I got to watch. It was surreal to see, and hard to even think of it as happening to my wife. They laid a surgical sheet over my wife's stomach which had a teletubby like gap in it; further removing it from reality. She was drugged up, but conscious, and kept asking for updates.... Informing someone as to what is happening to their insides is a very, very odd thing to do.

"What are they doing?"

"Um ... they've just cut you open ... can you feel that?"

"Nope, not a thing. Now what's going on?"

"They are using what looks like giant ice cream scoops to push your intestines out of the way."

"Cool, now what?"

If I could have channel surfed it would have been just like watching TV. I wonder what animals are giving birth on the other channels?

Artwork by Guy Landry

Chicken Little of the Sea

The sea is rising! The sea rising! Twice in the last couple of months I've encountered people talking about a possible 100 (one hundred) metre (meter) sea level rise in the next one-hundred years. I've even seen one article that showed maps of Australia after a predicted 300m sea level rise. This seemed like a heck of a lot of water, so I wondered if anyone had done the math, volume calculations and so forth. It turns out a good number of people have done the math ...

So let's be boring and talk volumes. There is a lot of ice out there in the world. If all the ice in Greenland was to melt, for example, the global sea levels would rise by 6-7 metres. There's some wiggle room in the numbers because it is hard to accurately gauge the thickness of the ice, but the calculated volumes are all similar. That's quite a rise in sea levels from just one block of ice. It is a very large block of ice though ...

By-the-way, there are climate change deniers who point out that the Greenland ice sheet is actually thickening ... which they use as a 'counter-example' of warming. However, the truth is, as always, more interesting. As the Greenland ice melts around the edges, as ice tends to do, the increase precipitation (rain and snow fall) in Greenland due to the warmer average temperature deposits more ice on the top of the pile. So it is growing thicker, even as it loses mass to melting.

Back to sea level rise. So, all of Greenland equals a 6-7m rise ... this sounds bad. We can add in some more ice ... The Antarctica Peninsula ice would add in about half a metre, and this is about the same amount as all the world's glacier ice. If all the Antarctica ice were to turn to water, the whole continent becoming incontinent as it were, then you are looking at some serious changes ... about 60m in rising sea waters. However, even when you add in all the snow and ice from everywhere in the world, a melted earth, you still don't get to one hundred metres. In fact, you don't get to 90m even when you add in water expansion from temperate rise.

Seventy or so metres of sea rise sounds pretty bad, but remember the entire world has to melt to get this rise. Not a drop left in ice form. This would mean a change in temperature of plus 37^oC in various places. As far as I'm aware no-one is suggesting a global temperature rise of 37^oC by 2100. If that were to happen, sea level rises would not be our most compelling problem. Building extremely deep underground bunker complexes or leaving the planet would be much higher on our to do list than worrying about the lapping water around our necks.

The actual scientific figures out there estimate a global sea level rise of between 0.1mm (one tenth of a millimeter) to 0.95mm (just under 10 centimetres) a year until 2100 (By scientific I mean from places like the Max Plank Institute and the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)). This means that we have a predicted average sea level rise of up-to-a-metre in the next century, but probably less, assuming change continues as predicted. This is 1% or less of the 100m 'prediction' I have been seeing splashed around lately. By the way, the key phrase there is 'average rise' ... individual results may vary.

The odd thing is, a 1m or even half metre sea-level change will have massive consequences ... higher waves, higher flood waters, costal erosion ... but for some reason no one wants to say 'one metre' or 'half-a-metre' or even 'up to a metre' ... it sounds too small. Too tiny to be frightening. So radio, web and TV experts just seem to make up numbers, scary numbers, as it sounds and looks better. Five meters, 10, 25, 50 100, and even 300m ... For example, there's a Google Earth add-on that allows you to change the sea level ... but adding 0.5m to the program changes nothing as the resolution is too small. Instead you are encouraged to enter 50m or 100m to simulate the sea level changes from global warming (indeed there is a popular website of showing generated world maps showing 100m sea level rise), and when you do massive changes occur, but the problem is these numbers are made up. The only basis for entering such large changes is to see large changes on the map ... there's no science behind those numbers, and there's just not enough water out there.

As a contrast, at the end of the last ice age the change is sea levels was about 120m. There was a lot more ice on the planet then (about three times as much as today) and while various kid's films may suggest the melting happened in a hurry, it was a slow change of several thousands of years. This means we currently have media climate 'experts' telling us to expect a change nearly as dramatic as the end of the last ice age to occur thirty times as fast as it did then.... And no-one questions these experts, because to do so is to be labeled a horrid denier of global warming and worse than (insert enemy of the month here). Once these exaggerated figures get out into the public domain they are slavishly copied and repeated without checking.

Don't get me wrong here, I'm not a climate change denier. I'm not saying sea levels are not rising. I'm not saying that even a less-than-half-a-metre change isn't going to have terrible consequencess. I'm not saying something dramatic couldn't happen ... such as a large chunk of the Western Antarctic ice sliding into the water and raising sea levels several metres. I'm just saying that anyone who tells you that the sea level is going to rise 100m in the next century is talking bollocks ... complete and utter, unsubstantiated bollocks.

Artwork by Guy Landry

You can call her Betsy

For some reason my wife and I were talking about milking cows. I cannot remember why. From my limited experience with herds of cows (Heard of cows? Of course I've heard of cows!) there is always at least one in every herd that has a peculiarity. There always seems to be one cow, let's call her Betsy or number 83, that just has to be hand-milked rather than machine suckled. Or maybe a cow that has a specific booth it must be milked in, no other spot will do.

This is something I have had first-hand knowledge of on more than one occasion ... but it was the first time that always sticks in my memory. I was a wee lad when I first got to stay on a dairy farm for a day or so. I don't remember many specifics of that time, I was young, but I do have a crystal-clear recollection of my first cow-ride (something I am reminded of whenever I play the Wii Play made-of-wool cow-racing game).

The cow probably had a name, let's say it was Betsy or number 83, and was considered to be the tame one of the herd. It was milking time, and it had been going on for sometime. I probably looked bored, so to liven things up the farmer asked if I wanted a ride on Betsy (83). I'm sure I said, "No", but the "No" of a young kid never really counts for anything in these circumstances. I was duly picked up and plonked onto the back of Betsy.

There were right. Betsy was a very calm cud-chewer. I should probably mention that I seem to have bad luck when it comes to riding animals. I once rode a pony that would not stop chewing my toes. Even a moon-hopper got away from me once.

Betsy was one of those cows that just had to be milked in stall number 2. None of the other five stalls was good enough for Betsy. There I was, nervously perched on Betsy's back when stall number 2 became vacant. Like Moses, Betsy seemed to be able to part the sea of bovine backsides ahead of her, and she raced towards her favourite milking station ... with me on her back.

I ended up hanging from the bar above the stall entrance, knocking off the little reciprocating rod that was part of the suction machinery, bringing proceedings to a halt while they rescued me, and, more importantly, reset the milking system.

Needless to say ... I have never ridden a cow since.

Artwork by Guy Landry

Geek reference alert

For whatever reason, the Popmundo cartoons Guy has drawn for me have not been accepted by the game's magazine. We are still hopeful they will consider them in the near future. Not sure what reason they have for not using our strip. It looks far better than most of the ones they do take. It uses specific in-game situations (such as theft and police security tagging as in this one) and meets their size requirements. I'd post the one's they do accept just to show you the contrast ... but that would only be embarrassing for all. Being rejected is one thing ... being rejected when they seem to have accepted any old thing in the past (they have actually posted a broken link in a recent issue!) just makes me feel ... actually I don't know how that makes me feel ... confused I guess.

Anyway ... since I'd like someone to see the strips I'll post a few more here over the next week or so. This one requires obscure geek knowledge to make the most of the punchline ...

Busy, busy, busy

A frantic week of child-rearing, working, writing, online shopping, and cooking. Which has seen me fail to find time to post anything.

Started my xmas shopping, which is always a bonus in August.

A children's story poured out of me over the last couple of days, but there'll be a lot of editing and tweaking to get it right.

I cooked cajun blackened fish last night (with assorted veges), and rogan josh for tonight (I can smell it slow-cooking as I type, and it's making me hungry).

I had some webpage work this week, which was a little frustrating, but I hope to finish it this weekend if I get some alone-time.

Our wee boy has decided that he's not going to sleep during the day anymore, which has made it much harder for me to get anything done. The good news is that he is sleeping through at night in longer stretches ... so I can now at least think clearly about all the stuff I don't have time to do.

Musing

One of the guilty thoughts that I had when my children were born was that they would help inspire me to write stories. So far there just hasn't been much time for inspiration, but our four-year old does enjoy the occasional made-up-on-the-spot tale.

A while ago I asked her if she'd like a story written for her. At first the idea didn't fly. But then one day she seemed to be keen on the idea. We got her to tell us the elements she wanted in the story: herself, her baby brother, three friends, some fairies with butterfly wings, a rainbow, crayons and colouring books, and a rock that turns out to be an egg. The rather wet story that followed was not my finest creation, but it did satisfy its patron.

Suddenly, however, the wee lass has become my muse. As the games we play together have become more imaginative, so the ideas for stories have started to flow. So this week I've started writing two of the better ideas in earnest.

They say children's stories are one of the hardest genres to write. To me, they seem like a large-panel format comic. I hope it can be thought of that way. Perhaps I'm just setting myself up for a fall? But as long as my muse is amused by the stories they will be a success.

Empirical Lass & Skepticman

Well ... it only took a day for one artist to draw the dynamic dowsers of determinism . Thank you Guy.

Apparently my superhero power is the ability to grow more hair!

My daughter thinks she makes a great superhero. But don't tell her she's the sidekick. I listed them in the correct order in the title of this blog.

Go Empirical Lass!!! and her sidekick, Skepticman.

Guy isn't planning to draw the strip, however.