No go zone

I don't live in a posh part of London, like Knightsbridge or West Hampstead. In fact, it would be accurate to say that I live in one of the poorest boroughs in London. Still, it ain't that bad! I feel completely safe, walking home from the Tube station at night time.

However, Domino's Pizza is less enlightened and has declared our street a 'no go zone'.

It means that whenever we order pizza, the delivery person calls us when he arrives and we have to meet him on the main street, which is 10 metres from our front door. This is the closest that Domino's employees can get without fear of mortal harm. I don't know where they get their information from.

Richard, whose love of tandoori hot pizza requires pizza delivery boys to risk life and limb.

See? It even says 'NO GO ZONE' on the box!

Sweater organiser

It's the little things that excite me. The latest thing to bring me great joy has been the purchase of a sweater organiser from the Futon Company.

I was originally going to buy a shoe organiser to stop me from tripping over the twenty pairs of shoes that I've managed to accumulate in England (few, compared to what I have in Melbourne). When I realised for an extra £2 I could buy the twice-as-big sweater organiser, I did so. I figured I could store both bigger and more shoes in a sweater organiser.

Once I hung the organiser up in my wardrobe, a change of heart led me to put clothes into the organiser. This freed up wardrobe floor space for a pile of shoes. I am very happy! Only Frequently Worn Shoes are out in the bedroom now.

Look how organised it is! And it's still like that, weeks later. That's how you know that an organiser works!

No matter how little I put on the shelves, the organiser still arches at the top. It pains me. It looks like it's being stretched.

Damian joins blogworld

I welcome Damian, my housemate, to the blogworld -- Worldwide Rants. Damian is ruthless and entirely accurate in his opinions. He likes Jaws and bobbleheads. From his blog, we can expect to read workplace woe, praise where he witnesses (rare) competence, and bobbleheads of the week.

Textbook Joan

You might remember a while back when I was suffering neck pain.

On my second visit to a spinal specialist, he waved my MRI scans at me.

'I knew it!' he grinned. 'Textbook case! Adjacent segment degeneration!'

'I'm a textbook case?'

The surgeon explained that a third of patients who had the same neck surgery that I had when I was 12 years old developed this disease. On the scan, he pointed out the dark spots which showed that extra pressure on one of my discs was wearing the disc away faster than it could regenerate.

'It's exactly what I thought at our first appointment', he said with satisfaction. 'What I need to do is refer you to physiotherapy to strengthen your neck.'

So for the next two months, I visited Sha, a friendly physio from New Zealand. It was really great, actually. I learned from her exercises that not only reduced the soreness around my neck and shoulders, but also got rid of my headaches.

At my final session, I described to Sha a problem I was having with one of the exercises I was meant to do.

'In the dumbell upright row, my arm is fine... but I'm having trouble with my right knee. It feels weak and I'm afraid to lock it, which makes it hard to lift the weights. I've had problems with this knee for a long time.'

Sha moved my knee caps around and felt them click. 'They're very loose,' she commented.

She made me stand and examined my legs. Soon she started giggling.

'What?'

'You're a textbook case!' she said. 'Exactly like in a textbook. See how your knees don't line up with your feet? You've got flat feet. It means that sometimes your knee cap doesn't track properly...'

'Textbook,' I repeated. I had heard this before.

So now I have an extra set of exercises for my second unoriginal problem. The good thing about suffering all these creaks and aches is that now I have real and pressing reasons to go to the gym. The alternative is disablement by torticollis and creaky knees.

Toe running

I did something really quite stupid. I read in one of the free London newspapers that the reason why Kenyans are amazing marathon runners is because, like the ancient humans we evolved from, they runon their toes. That is, instead of first contact being the heel ('heel strike'), Kenyans push off the balls of their feet.

Well, there is no greater authority than the London Lite! So last Saturday, I went to the gym, got on a treadmill, and ran for 10 minutes on my toes.

It seemed to work! I really did run faster with no extra effort.

Unfortunately, I seem to have done something awful to my ankle. I've been limping for a week.

Today felt better so I tried doing a bit of jogging -- and had to hobble home from the gym again.

I guess I'll avoid the treadmill for a bit longer!

Bathroom geography

I'm terrible at geography and do my best to hide it. If someone said, 'I know it's crazy, but Mogadishu is next on my destination list,' I'd nod and say, 'Totally!', with only the vaguest idea of where Mogadishu is.

But no more! There is change in my life and that change is a new shower curtain.


'Do you like the new shower curtain?' asked Damian the next morning.

'It's wonderful!' I enthused. 'I finally know where Malawi is! And who knew Madagascar was so big!'

'The only thing I'm not sure about is that I never see America. It's all the way bunched up in the corner,' Damian mused. 'Maybe every once in a while, we can flip the curtain around so that we can see the other side...'

'An, never mind America,' I dismissed. 'Look how boring it is! Just a couple of big countries, that's all. Now, AFRICA, that's the interesting bit! I never knew there were so many countries in Africa!'

Damian agreed, 'Yes, I suppose you're right.'

America, whose geography is quite dull (without the various States marked in, anyway).

Africa, a far more interesting (and politically troubled) part of the curtain.

My housemates, Damian and Richard, behind curtain number 1.

Undemocratic

From Made in China in The Age.

Yu says [Chinese] policymakers are beginning work on a new five-year plan beginning from 2011 that will intensify the country's current energy, pollution and climate-change efforts. But he says China is sticking to the levers of administrative edict rather than considering a domestic carbon-trading scheme.

"In my view, if there's a huge polluting factory next door, then the best option is to shut it down, rather than allow it to buy credits so it can keep polluting and then pass the higher costs on to consumers," says Yu.

Brilliant. None of this mucking about with this 'market solutions', 'flexible mechanisms' or 'public consultation' stuff, just the all-powerful arm of big government.

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Becoming a Full Time Glasses Wearer

When I was 10 or 11 years old, I got my first pair of glasses. Since then, I have been a Casual Glasses Wearer (CGW), only donning specs when at lectures, the movies or while driving.

In truth, though, I should probably wear glasses more often than that. While my left eye is quite good, my right eye is quite bad. In fact, right now, I'm typing with my left eye shut and I can't even read the laptop screen in front of me.

It's a good thing I can touch type.

When I'm not wearing glasses, I feel like I'm looking at the world with only my left eye. You really only need one eye to see well but it does feel a bit uncomfortable, like wearing a gauze eye patch over my right eye.

I don't think of myself as a Full Time Glasses Wearer (FTGW). I've never been one. In my mental image of myself, I don't wear glasses. However, to be a FTGW is not too far a departure from my self-image. I'm very square, not terribly sporty... Perhaps I'm not Asian enough, if you know what I mean.

However, I've now come to my senses. I've realised that there is nothing actually stopping me from wearing my glasses and feeling comfortable all the time. This is why last week, I decided to become a FTGW.

I wore my glasses for one day, then the next day I was back to my old CGW self. Actually, all that happened was I forgot to wear my glasses. I've only remembered my resolution now, a week later. I guess you could say that I've fallen off the nerdwagon.

Tomorrow is a new day! If I can climb five storeys every day, I can surely carry the weight of spectacles on the bridge of my nose and the shelves of my ears-tops.

It's actually been quite difficult to find a photo of me wearing glasses. Here are my frameless pair. I have an uglier pair that I wear more often. You can see a polar bear wearing them here.

These are prescription sunglasses, which are absolutely necessary for driving when the Australian sun is out. They are also very expensive. I've lost a pair already.

Taking more than your fair share

There are many things I can talk about under this blog post title of 'Taking more than your fair share'. Ecological footprint is the obvious example for me.

However, I've had commuting and the Tube on my mind for the past few posts and I saw something that really irritated me. I sat opposite a man slouched on the other Tube seat. At the next stop, a lady got on and gingerly positioned herself on the nominally vacant spot next to slouched man. Any decent person would pull in their limbs to occupy only their fair share of the seat. But this man, who otherwise looked respectable in a business suit, didn't budge and stared into space while listening to whatever was on his MP3 player.

If he was a large man, I would understand. But he was average sized! I couldn't understand it at all! He was so rude!

Litter or gift?

Here's something I've thought about in relation to free newspapers. Some people get annoyed when they see free newspapers left on the train and the platform. I used to disapprove of littering of this kind too.

However, I once heard someone on the train complaining about the selfish people who took their newspapers away with them. 'Why don't they leave them behind so that others can read them too?' they grumped.

Now that I've taken the train after rush hour and have felt the disappointment of not finding any newspapers, I too appreciate the amenity of 'littered' newspapers.

I wonder if people leave their papers because they're lazy or out of thoughtfulness? I suspect it's laziness in most cases.

Stair climber

I am an escalator climber. Ninety-nine per cent of the time*, I will take the climbing lane (which in London is the left lane, odd because on the roads they overtake on the right).

When I get off my Tube train, there is usually two train-fulls of commuters shuffling to get on the escalator. I immediately migrate to the left of the crowd to get into the climbing lane. This is an imaginary lane -- it's not until you get to the escalator that the climbing and standing lanes are defined.

It can be a teeny bit frustrating when I stand behind someone who turns out to be an escalator stander. It means either I haven't moved far enough to the left or some stander has cheated by illegally using the faster climbing lane to get into prime position.

So every morning I play a game where I try to stand behind people who look like climbers. It's trickier than it should be. Sometimes, perfectly healthy looking men in suits and flat shoes turn out to be lazy standers. Then you have women with dangerously high heels who turn out to be climbers. One trend that is clear, though, is the fatter the person, the more likely that they are standers.

This makes me think of positive (self-reinforcing) feedback loops.


In related news, I've finally bitten the bullet and resolved to take the stairs to the fifth floor, where my desk is at work. I did it every day last week. I hope I can keep it up.

Five floors is not a lot. It takes me about two minutes, which is about the same time as it takes to wait for a lift and stop at all the floors in between (which is what happens at rush hour). I've avoided taking the stairs because (I know this sounds weird) I felt embarrassed walking past the crowd waiting for the lift. I felt especially embarrassed if someone in that crowd knows I work on the fifth floor because they, too, work on the fifth floor. In that context, being a shown to be a stair climber seems self-righteous and snobbish.

So now I breeze past the lift crowd, (a) avoiding eye contact with anyone I might know, and (b) pretending I only need to go to the first floor.

(If someone gets in the lift on the ground floor and gets off on the first floor, I have nothing but ridicule for them. Unless they have a disability, like a limp.)

The main reason I climb stairs and escalators is to build up my chocolate consumption credit. Also, as someone told Damjan, who told me, there will come a time in my life when I physically don't have the option to climb stairs (and, of course, climbing stairs now can delay that future deterioration of my body).

*I stand on escalators when I'm with someone else and I want to continue a conversation and in case they don't want to climb.

Lost ID

I had a great weekend with Damjan, the last one for six few weeks because he's going back to the southern hemisphere for a while. The only grey cloud on the weekend was discovering that I had lost my driver's licence.

I had taken my licence out of my wallet at Paddington station so that I could pick up my pre-paid train tickets. I must have lost the licence somewhere in the station or on the train. I am extremely absent minded. I've been getting better but I've lapsed a few times in the past couple of months.

Mostly, I was worried about having my identity stolen. As the weekend went on, I started to regret not signing up for the identity insurance that my credit card company tried to badger me into buying.

Today, I made phone calls to the train company, the Paddington ticket counter, customer service, Heathrow (because I had loitered at the Paddington Heathrow Express counter), and the pie shop where I bought my dinner on Friday night.

Finally, I was given the phone number for Paddington's left luggage service. Not only do they store luggage for a fee, but they also collect lost property and release it back to their grateful owners for a ransom.

My desperately crossed fingers must have done the trick because the person on the other end of the phone line said, 'Yes, we've got it.'

Hooray!

After work, I took the Tube to Paddington and scurried to the left luggage office next to platform 12.

'Hello! I called today and the person on the phone said that you have my Australian driver's licence.'

The boy went to the back of the room and came back with a small rectangle. My heart leapt as I recognised the month and year of my birth date at the back of the card.

'Is this it?' he asked.

'Yes! Thank you!'

'Do you have any ID, a driver's licence or something...' He caught himself. '...besides this one?'

'No.' As I've written before, ID is not something I have in the UK.

'If it helps,' I added, 'that licence has my photo on it.' I smiled a big smile, the same smile that's on my licence.

He swayed, uncertain for a moment, then shrugged. 'Okay. Here you go.'

(As a bonus, he didn't charge the £3 normally due for reclaiming small lost items.)

Absent army

Stepping out of the Tube train onto the platform of my usual station, I was surprised to see a clear plastic garbage bag taped to the wall. It was filled with free newspapers, the most common detritus of the Underground. I saw another taped bag ten metres along the corridor.

One of the quirks of the Underground is that there are no bins -- not a single one. I found this out early on in my Tube career when, suffering severe sniffles, I couldn't find a bin to dispose my mass of used tissues.

It's because of terrorism. Even before 9/11 and 7/7, since the 1970s the Underground has been under attack from groups like the IRA. Bins are potentially handy places to hide bombs, I guess.

Even without bins, you'd be surprised at how clean Underground stations are. I don't remember any litter in stations, except for occasional newspapers. Each station is patrolled by an army of cleaning staff, picking up papers and bottles, mopping up pavement pizza...

As I climbed up the escalators, an announcement on the PA system explained the taped up rubbish bags.

'Attention! There are no cleaning staff at the station today. Please take all your litter with you, including free newspapers.'

I expect that by the end of the day, the station looked like a landfill.

Biofuels in 400 words or less

One of the questions I really struggled with in the IEMA exam last week was this one:

"Biofuels are the sustainable future for transport fuel."

Define what a biofuel is; discuss the advantages/disadvantages of biofuels; and provide an opinion, supported with reasons, on whether you agree or not with the above statement.

The production and use of biofuels are an extremely complex sustainability issue. This question was accompanied with the instruction to candidates:

Each answer per whole question (not for each part of each question) must be between 250 and 400 words (including words within diagrams) - candidates who exceed the 400 word limit will fail that question

Yikes! In 400 words or less, solve the world's energy security/food/climate change/habitat destruction/rural displacement/biodiversity problems!

Here is my response. It took me a whole day to write this so that I could be within the word limit. It's times like these that I'm quite glad I'm not an expert in biofuels! People who know more (Yap, I mean you) might find this response necessarily simplistic

---

Biofuels are made from biomass, most commonly plant material (DFT, 2005). There is worldwide focus on the potential for liquid biofuels to substitute petrol and diesel in meeting future transport needs (OECD/ITF, 2007).

Advantages	Disadvantages
Greenhouse gas (GHG) abatement – Biofuels produce less GHGs compared to fossil fuels; emissions are offset by the carbon that plants absorb while growing.	Emissions arise across all lifecycle stages – Fossil fuels are used to operate biofuels infrastructure, in cultivation, conversion, distribution and use. Compared to fossil fuels, grain-based biofuels reduce GHG emissions by as little as 10-30% (OECD/ITF 2007, Royal Society 2008)
Energy security – By displacing fossil fuels with biofuels (which are renewable), countries can reduce reliance on increasingly costly imported oil.	Limited land – The UK will be unlikely to achieve significant levels of fuel security by growing biofuels on its own land (Royal Society 2008).
Rural development – Biofuels industry can generate income for rural communities in both developed and developing countries.	Driving deforestation – Biofuels demand can drive deforestation, as farmers seek to generate income from as much arable land as they can control. Other impacts of intensified agriculture – Biofuels cultivation is likely to increase water use, soil erosion, fertiliser use, convert ecosystems to monocultures, and impact visual amenity of uncultivated land.
Waste as feedstock – Second generation biofuels can use waste feedstocks (e.g. vegetable waste and cooking oils). This can lead to GHG savings of around 70% (OECD/ITF 2007, NNFCC 2007).	Food shortages – First generation biofuels use conventional food crops (e.g. wheat, maize, sugar and palm oil) (Royal Society 2008). Demand for biofuels could divert both crops and land from food production.

Are biofuels the sustainable future for transport fuel? In the case of first generation biofuels, the answer is 'no'. Their relatively low GHG abatement does not justify the high risk of driving food shortages. However, looking to the future, a sustainable transport system should incorporate biofuels that:

• Are based on dedicated high yield energy crops, co-products from food production, and organic wastes (Royal Society 2008);
  
• Wherever possible, make use of marginal land of low agricultural or biodiversity value;
  
• Are cultivated on sustainably managed cropland (integrated management of biodiversity, water, soil erosion, chemicals use, etc.);
  
• Run efficiently in vehicles designed to use biofuels; and
  
• Are priced to reflect environmental and social costs.

Advanced biofuels can then form part of a sustainable transport system, one that promotes biofuels alongside energy efficiency and reducing the demand and need for motorised transport.

Word count
397

Cited references
DFT – Department for Transport (2005), Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO) feasibility report, available at link, accessed on 22 June 2008

NNFCC – National Non-Food Crops Centre (2007), ‘Liquid fuels’, website, available at link , accessed on 22 June 2008

OECD/ITF – Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and International Transport Forum (2007), ‘Biofuels: Linking Support to Performance’, Summary and conclusions from the Transport Research Centre, round table 7-8 June 2007, Paris, available at link, accessed on 22 June 2008

Royal Society (2008), Sustainable biofuels: prospects and challenges, policy document 01/08, The Royal Society, London, available at link, accessed on 22 June 2008

Becoming chartered

Becoming a chartered professional has always been tricky for environmental engineers, even engineering project managers. Being an engineer means solving problems. Usually, engineers design physical solutions (bridges, circuit boards, water pipes) for society's problems. On the other hand, for the last few years, I've been working on management systems, policies and strategies. In the traditional sense, I'm not an engineer, yet I think of myself as designing non-physical solutions to the same problems.

We've tried to make this argument to Engineers Australia, who won't allow us to become chartered engineers without us demonstrating that we have design skills. Unfortunately, they're sticking to the relatively traditional definition of design so I've found myself unable to be a chartered engineer in Australia.

I don't object to the way Engineers Australia have chose to define the job of an 'engineer' because I work alongside ecologists, physicists, social policy analysts, media specialists, microbiologists, environmental scientists, geographers -- and we all do similar work. Perhaps they're right. Perhaps I'm not doing engineering work.

To progress through an engineering company, more often than not, one needs to be chartered. That's why for the last few weeks, I've been doing a take-home exam to become an associate member of the Institute of Environmental Assessment and Management (after that, there are a few more steps before I can be a chartered environmental professional). Doing the exam has meant little time for cooking, blogging, seeing friends and Damjan, and regular exercise.

Sitting in front of a computer doing heavy thinking all weekend is never much fun. But if one has to do an exam, then the IEMA exam is not a bad one. I learned a bit and got to write about a pet topic or two.