The Last Great Frontier is in Your Mind, in Cyberspace and in Crypto

Hello again, world!

The Preface, mate.

Having put blogging on hold for a couple of years, it's time to put more hopefully  thought-out and coherent essays out than what gets published onto Facebook and Instagram. The impetus for this is essentially the culmination of my researching (essentially web-surfing / googling and reading stuff / watching Youtube videos) on the broad subject of the economy, and money.

• The next posts on here are expected to mainly focus on this aspect of life, with links to the most useful sources from whence my information (and misinformation) has been derived.
• An alternative to these posts would be to publish in my Youtube Channel. In essence, I think it is easier for me to publish text links and pics here, even if a link might go to a video in my channel (should I ever put more up there), and is a more efficient way to return to revisit a topic via a blog post, without for instance having to wade through a video to find a bit of info/opinion in future.

Your Mind, Cyberspace and Crypto-currencies

1. Your Mind: You (we) in the western world and beyond have been brainwashed in many ways for a almost a century. It happened first politically, including by the Nazis in Germany, then in the commercial-consumer world mainly since the end of WWII, and then progressively in the political world: Watch this BBC documentary explaining it, and weep, or get angry, or get smart, or something. Get smart being realising that all holders of power have used similar ideas to control/brainwash their followers/subjects. That is essentially how folklore and superstitions were turned into religions, institutionalised and deeply embedded into national/sovereign laws.
2. Cyberspace: the escape from sovereign law. It's a global facility, follks, although many citizens of the USA seem to think it is an American facility and controlled by their law, judging by their posts on Facebook and Youtube, etc. Oh dear, you Yanks, you really out to get out of your country a bit more and learn how the rest of the world works.
3. Crypto-currencies: A natural consequence to the economic bullshit, greed, decadency, and inevitable  chaos and collapse that has run rampant from time to time throughout human history, ever since we became organised into groups and one sub-group or individual asserted control over the rest. This blog is resurrected so subsequent posts will deal with specifics of our global economic malaise, its history and how crypotcurrencies are the logical outcome of this. This follows a few years now of study from time to time, from formal history studies in high school beginning in 1970, to the present day, and especially in the past decade. Stay turned: the next post should be out in a week or so ... no promises :-).

Your homework :-) - watch that BBC doco, all of it. It is probably the most important documentary you will have ever seen in your life, if you are smart enough to understand it and what it is telling you.

(From the 'Eggs in One Basket department') - Images vanish.

Posterous, Picasaweb and Vimeo are long gone, and therefore so have some images that were in some of the previous posts of this blog. If you read a post below, and the image is blank, it's because the service providing it has disappeared (or in the case of the image being in Google Photos, I might have removed it to keep below my 15GB free file limit.) So much for putting too much faith in any internet services remaining around. 

I actually did do back ups of images from most of those internet services to a local hard disk. However in about 2013, just before that disk was about to be fully backed up to another disk, I knocked it over on the desk, and it died. So unless I ever get to recover that disk, most of my files from the '80's until then have been lost.

Life goes on ...

Here is a nice calming photo of Rusty taken a few days before this post was written.

Organic Farmshare at the Currumbin Eco Village Open Day

Organic Farmshare had a market stall at the highly successful Currumbin EcoVillage 2010 Open Day held on Sunday 12th September (more pics here). Organic Farmshare is a new public company whose prospectus is expected to be approved by ASIC and released shortly. It is an opportunity to own part of a farm just inside NSW, which is expected to be purchased late in 2010. At least 200 shareholders are needed at startup, and 700 is targetted for full realization of the farm. Expansion to more farms are envisaged as more shareholders buy in.

• Shareholders have access to its organically sound produce, which will be transported to the Gold Coast.
• A share is expected to cost $4,000. There is an option to pay by $400 deposit plus $158 per month over 2 years.
• Shareowners may stay on the farm in holiday accommodation for a few days each year.

More details -

1. will be available when the prospectus is released
2. see their website,
3. attend a "Kitchen Table Talk" presentation - dates and locations are notified here. Email to reserve a spot, and obtain the address. (Edit 14/09/10: I attended one at Isle of Capri, and am pleased to note that this is an very interesting information and discussion evening, with no "hard sell" at all. These folk seem to hate "corporate hard sell" as much as I do.)

Commuting by electric bike. Fast, Fun - Go Green!

A lovely promotional advert made in the USA in 2007.
Steps, to do, mate:

1. Watch this ad and get all enthusiastic
2. Get one:
1. Buy one eg off Ebay, or
2. Buy a bike and add a kit onto it to electrify it. I can help you there. See my Electric Pedro conversion service.

QLD NSW QLD NSW :)

ODO 2031km :)
(From my mobile phone) ... posted immediately after taking the pic.

ANZAC day, 2010. My electric bike is for months old and I have taken the opportunity to take in ANZAC day events down at Currumbin and also finally prove that I can cruise from Labrador down to the NSW border and back. I set out somewhat rugged up at 6am, too late for the dawn services, but I shall do better next year. As I passed Surfers Paradise the attendees were heading away from the service there. At Palm Beach, I switched off the electric power and cruised slowly down the beachside tracks via peddle power only.

Apart from a minor detour to cruise down beside the Coolangatta airport sideroad to watch aircraft, I kept to the beachside, as per my usual preference.

By 8:30 I had cruised the Snapper Rocks headland, and then crossed the border to spend an hour cruising the sleepy backstreets and inlets.

By 10am it was time to start moving back north. I returned to Palm beach, mainly via peddle power at a leisurely 10 to 15km/hr, with an occasional help from e-power on uphill or stronger upwind sections.

On the way I stopped to watch the 11pm ANZAC march at Currumbin. It was a really great little march, just about 400m from Thrower Park to the RSL. A good contingent of marchers and   equally good crowd of onlookers materialised 20 minutes before the start of the parade. The march proceeded. The onlookers clapped. It was very dignified, almost casual, yet formal and quite moving in its simplicity. You need to be there ...

One gentleman marched to represent World War One servicemen. I shall guess that he might be an officer of the RSL, as all WWI servicemen have now passed away. The ranks of the WWII servicemen are of course thinning out these days too. The final contingent were from the latest Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns. This now represents almost 100 years of warfare involving Australian servicemen.
I have put more pics up on Google Groups, covering almost the entire parade.

The idea was to keep e-power to a minimum for all riding south of Palm Beach, as I have e-cruised to there and back before, so I knew I had sufficient battery to journey there and back by e-power alone. This is about 44km by my fairly direct route. I ran the battery out recently in 52km hard powering, so I have a fair idea of how far I can go when I use some peddle power.
(Of course, if I peddle entirely I can go any distance, but the objective is to have an easy day without too much effort, and have some e-power to get the last 5 kms home, rather than have to peddle entirely the last bit home.)

Total distance today: over 80km and out for about 9 hours, mostly in sun or light cloud. I wear good head cover, but can feel mild burn on arms tonight as I write  the text of this blog.

Zero Waste: the Clean Bin Project

I am really looking forward to the release of this movie.


Taking out the Trash- The Clean Bin project (trailer1) from Grant Baldwin Videography on Vimeo.

Driven: Shai Agassi's Audacious Plan to Put Electric Cars on the Road

Driven: Shai Agassi's Audacious Plan to Put Electric Cars on the Road: "Driven: Shai Agassi's Audacious Plan to Put Electric Cars on the Road".

Will Australia become "a Better Place"? Let's hope so.

Inhabitat Contortionist Folding Bike Rolls Up Smaller Than a Wheel

Inhabitat "Contortionist" Folding Bike Rolls Up Smaller Than a Wheel: August 5, 2009

Terrafugia: private car / aeroplane

>Is this cool or what!



The Transition is expected to be released in 2011. The estimated purchase price is US$194,000.

Moon landing + 40 years

Forty years ago today, Neil Armstrong & buzz Aldrin stepped onto the moon. Where were you? I certainly know where I was. I remember it well.

I had a sore throat, so I missed school and spent the day at home. I probably would have stayed home anyway, as I wanted to listen in to as much of the live radio broadcast as possible. I was more interested than most, as I had been very interested in astronomy since about 1965 when I was 11, and saw Fireball XL5 on our first TV. Soon after I attended a few night sessions at the observatory owned by the amateur Whangarei Astonomical Society, and was taken there to look through their telescope a few times by a very kind senior member, Mr Kerr.

At that time got a transistor radio, so at night I would spend hours listening in to the first pirate radio, and more interestingly, to short-wave stations from all round the world. I got to know the times when the BBC and Voice of America stations transmitted towards New Zealand.

Soon after we moved back to Wellington. At my school there we had an American history teacher in 1969, Peter Maunder. He took us to the US embassy to check out their library. When the Apollo 11 mission was approaching, Voice of America advertised availability of a Moon Landing information pack from US Embassies. I posted a letter ordering it, and got it a few days before launch. It included a program tracker: a plasticy double layered round device with an aperture in the front layer, so you could read programmed events written on the bottom layer. There was a metal grommet in the centre so the front could be spun round relative to the back, to expose the program through the aperture, hour by hour as the mission progressed. I wish I had kept that tracker, as it would have significant interest value today.

I would never have thought that after Apollo 17, no one would go back to the moon. In those days I thought we would have been colonising it by now. However, since then some of us have learned a lot more about ourselves, and space, and what our urgent priorities should be. Fireball XL5 and the conquest of space were nice escapist dreams for childhood. Those memories remain, but that was another time, a long time ago. There is an enormous amount to do right here on Earth, if we are ever to be in any condition to venture back out into space in any sort of useful and meaningful way, and I cannot see that we will ever have the capability to actually get to any other inhabitable body anyway. Its time to concentrate on looking after this little planet and making seriously long-term plans for true sustainability, right here.

Across the ocean in a pedal-powered submarine - tech - 28 January 2009 - New Scientist

Across the ocean in a pedal-powered submarine - tech - 28 January 2009 - New Scientist

Ciamillo designed a carbon-fibre "tail" for divers, called the Lunocet. Modelled on Fish's CAT scans of dolphin flukes, the Lunocet has a hydrofoil profile, like an underwater wing. "As dolphins move their tails up and down, they create a forward-directed lift," says Fish. This lift becomes thrust, and lots of it: dolphins have been clocked at 54 kilometres per hour. They can turn 80 per cent of their energy into thrust, compared with a paltry 3 per cent or so for unaided human swimmers and about 10 per cent for people wearing ordinary swim fins.
(This article was saved in January, but lost in my cyberspace until now! I wonder how this project is coming along.)

'She can do it': Teen's sailing adventure - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

'She can do it': Teen's sailing adventure - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

While 16 is somewhat young, it is certainly not too young to achieve this. How old were Hannibal and Alexander the Great when they were commanding armies and conquering the world? As long as she has the experience, which apparently she has, and her parents and other judge that she has the maturity of mind, there is no reason why she cannot succeed, and have a very inspirational time of her life.

And that is probably the perfect size and type of yacht for her to go round in too.

Best of luck Jessica.

Ocean rowers: what do they REALLY do out there?

This post is really just a 'heads up' at this stage ...

Now that Olly Hicks, of Flying Carrot fame, has got taken ashore in New Zealand, I must stop procrastinating, and get round to writing up a waffle on my take of the exploits of ocean rowers I have kept tabs on in the past year or two, ie

* Roz Savage crossing the Pacific in stages.
* James Castrission & Justin Jones, Crossing the Ditch (ie the Tasman Sea, Australia to New Zealand)
* The late Andrew McAuley and his fatal attempt to cross the ditch further South,
* Olly's attempt to circumnavigate the planet even further South, via the Southern Ocean

Outside.online reports from the frontier

Outside.online's Top 10 Adventure Twitters is another great place to find adventurers, probably even a better place than here, presumably because the operator of that site has more time to devote than I do (which would not be hard).

I know, I know, Katie Brown did not make their top 10, but she IS in the site somewhere, and climbing a tree is good too :-).

Steph Davis is their #2 and some of her movies on her site are great. She does some cool climbs, with definitely over "three feet of air" in most of her jumps.

Helen Baxter

Feature: The geek squad by Olivia Kember | New Zealand ListenerIt seems that Helen Baxter and husband were born on the frontier. Interesting article, eg "They view with satisfaction the internet’s rout of traditional business models."