July 13th, 2008
Slippery time
Whenever the going gets tricky it will run out on you.
Scientists will study this effect in an attempt to find out where it goes to. Results will be disappointing as the scientists too will suffer an shortage of time. That said, extrapolating from their earlier results, they conclude the following – Time, as we understand it, is a flight risk.
I’d like to remind you that this week the comics will all be collaborative pieces. If you’ve still got an idea for a strip you’d like to see get in touch one way or another…
And I’d also like to point your attention in the direction of Moue Magazine and Sitting Pugs… two sites that have been generous enough to mention this comic in the last week.
Hmm .That sports blog noted you’re not alienating… but if you were in another country it would be alien…
There you go. You should do something on illegal immigration and greys (not my family but the big eyed aliens).
I think I can do something along those lines… although the US is generally way ahead of me, demanding that aliens should be detained just like all other illegal aliens.
OK, it’s on the list – Gray’s Greys.
…and just as an aside, I know of someone whose first name is ‘Gray’. Which i think is a pretty cool first name, until I discovered that it is only due to the fact that his mum mis-spelled ‘Gary’.
If the doctor was aware of the misspelling, he should have been legal required to keep the baby. Who misspells Gary?
I don’t know, but I’d rather be called Gray… perhaps, after registering several Gary’s that day the doctor thought he’d let one slide for fun.
I’m fairly sure I don’t want to be Gray Gray…
guys! guys. i just read the newspaper for today and found out that one of our government officials is called gary gray. i mean fair enough if it happens with a girls name, i mean you cant exactly tell who theyre going to marry and so what their surname will be. but really. naming your song gary gray. its eye-boggling.
Aces, we have contact!
Or some sedition acts maybe? that could get the party started.
Thank you rice krispy treats for mentioning me.
Alien citizens of enemy powers!
I love that phrase. I want to be that phrase (I nearly am, minus the powers).
OK, I’ll take ’sedation acts’ as a title.
Mmm krispy cakes… I haven’t had one of them in ages… bet they’d make a good a subject for a comic too.
I have to recommend a terrible, good film called Evil Alien Conquerors.
Our pleasure. Your inclusion upped Moue’s clever ratio by a few notches.
*Now with added clever*
Thanks, it was really cool to read that, especially for an egotist like me.
Though really it’s my readers that are clever, I just get by on association.
It’s all about riding coattails.
What really really s****s me about fuel prices is the subsidised fuels.
F**k green fuel.
It is worse for cars and soooo much worse for ppl that needed food to eat.
F******g retarded governmint pandering to the dumb masses.
Yeah, sure, fuel is expensive.
So?
You have a job, a house, a car, food, or at aleast access to those things.
The ppl that get the raw end of this deal are paying with suffering, not money.
Not having a go at you Adam, I understand the point you make, just had enough of ppl whinging about the fuel prices, esp, miners who get paid excessive amounts.
I completely understand your view there Ben, in fact I think we’re arguing a similar point…
I’m not whinging about fuel prices – far from it – rather, the fact that oil is a finite resource and as such has an end-point. Our fascination with carbon-based fuels seems to be getting more intense as we run out of supplies.
I suppose I was mocking the price of crude oil rising on such a regular basis that you could set your watch by it.
Similarly, biofuels are the subutex, the methodone, of oil addiction – they’re an alternative, but not a replacement. The concept of ‘green fuel’ in this respect is a little like saying ‘nice bombs’.
I guess there may be a little guilt in my anger being that I am at the profitable end of the carbon habit.
That “you” was a generalisation as well, not direct at you.
*toddles off to anger management classes*
I was listening to the radio at work the other day regarding our governments current debate about subsidising fuel.
The guy talking made the point that ppl really need to accept that they have to slow down with their use of fuels and that the government making fuel/energy cheaper promotes the exact opposite message.
Bio-fuel is a joke that is starving the ppl who needed those food crops and subsidised fuel is like shutting our eyes and pretending the problem will go away.
Yeah nice bombs, shame about the collateral damage.
If we could grind up the poor and power our cars with the by-products then make no mistake, we would.
Denying the living fuel so that you can put it in a car is more than morally dubious. It shows a bewildering lack of respect for life.
I have this horrible feeling that people will choose to wait until the oil runs out before giving in to change, that is that they will wait until they have no other option. The problem with doing this is that developing an alternative will obviously require oil…. so by using it we are lessening our chances of finding an alternative.
As for the anger management, it’s perfectly natural you should be feeling angry, everyone should, and it’s a case of using that anger in a good way.
I also don’t understand how they’re supposed to be “carbon neutral”…
I mean, surely if they didn’t grow the crops there, other things would be growing instead. It’s not like plants just leave the area clear.
It’s like burning a forest and claiming it’s not destructive because of all the nice things it’s already done for the planet.
OK everyone, you heard Philippa… burn down the rainforest…
It’s a fair point… it’s a bit like claiming you’ve won, when at best it’s a no-score draw.
I think the idea is to release carbon that’s only just been pulled out of the atmosphere - if everything could somehow be run on biomass, and fossil fuels were left in the ground then it’d just be a step in the carbon cycle and the net result wouldn’t affect CO2 levels by more than the initial burning, since growing your biomass back sucks it back out of the air.
It might affect the size of forests, or the biodiversity of the planet (I’m envisioning acre upon thousand-acre of whatever that grass they’re able to use for biofuel is) but the headlines can read “Yay, we beat the CO2 monster”.
In truth, all the carbon on this planet has always been here, so we’re not going to be able to make things any “worse” (in terms of atmospheric carbon dioxide at least) that it’s been at some point in the history of the planet, the only problem is that a lot of points in the history of the planet weren’t so hospitable, had sea on top of bits we now live on, and probably wouldn’t have supported so many humans.
I think that the net effect would be more positive than neutral as the whole plant can not be used.
The waste will have stored carbon and each cycle will remove just that little bit more CO2 from the atmosphere.
How ever, any one that has farmed anything before knows that intensive farming isn’t a great thing, crop rotation will be required and that will chew up massive swathes of land that would other wise be used to grow food or was a forest.
Hell it may even prevent suburbia from expanding and that would be a fucking tragedy.
Only if the waste is sealed in concrete, or otherwise isolated forever and ever.
More likely there’ll be some use found for it… mulch or charcoal or something, I don’t know what. Or it’ll be buried, either way it eventually decays back to CO2 (or goes into another plant/organism, which eventually dies and decays back to CO2 or goes into another plant/organism… /recursion)
Fortuently not the case.
The waste could be turned back into the soil. Alot of carbon would then remain in the soil.
It could be allowed to break down in certain conditions to produce methane, which could be burnt (tho this would allow it to release its carbon).
It could be processed to make fiber for products like paper and cheap fabrics.
It could be used to make mulch to help grow trees to re-populate the depleted forests.
Wait, we knocked them down already, didn’t we.
Meh, bugger it, burn it all.
i was thinking about this the other day
you keep hearing about how there are some people, countries trying to cut emissions and change the nature of industry in trying to do their bit to stop killing the environment and save fuel and you think oh, thats good, theyre in negotiations and things will be ok, maybe
then every day on the way to school i go past two brickworks, and there is smoke pouring out of the chimneys and i remember that even while people are trying their hardest, years will go by before anything huge gets done, and every day we are doing so much bad and using all our resources in the meantime
it makes me a little depressed
Don’t let it get you down too much… Sure, we could be doing better, but as a species this is the first time we have had to face anything like this – there’s bound to be teething troubles… besides, we move slowly at the best of times.
It will get sorted out, I’m in no doubt about that… It’s just whether we get to sort it out on our terms, or if it happens to us regardless.
Is it Chrysler who are offering to “lock” the price of your petrol for a few years if you buy one of their cars? (i.e. they pay you off for whatever you pay over their locked price)
Incredibly f******g irresponsible – they’re essentially telling people to go ahead and buy a gas guzzler, and not worry about the price of gas or the depletion of resources or any of these issues.
While they’re at it, why not bundle in a service to filter anything scary sounding out of the news so they can ignore the world’s problems that much more effectively
Y’see, I did not know that.
That’s crazy… and I bet they have a caveat too, that if the petrol becomes too expensive they can back out… but still, way to encourage something artificially.
As for the service filter, I do believe it says in the instruction manual ‘in the event of unwelcomed news, place index fingers in ears and repeat the phrase “I can’t hear you” until the problem resolves’.
back when gas was v1.25, i used to walk to school
when gas hit v2.50, time had doubled
but some people were left behind a grade.
i wonder what happened to them…
being in an accelerated academic program,
v3.00 came sooner than expected.
now time is at v4.53 and i don’t have
enough memory to run it.
lol wow…
[...] Flowfield Unity: Sunday, [...]
So does the price of oil dip sharply overnight?
I was assuming that it just kept creeping up… sure that would put most analogue clocks out of use… and digital ones would eventually run out of digits… clocks and oil time – there are complications.
However, since oil prices are integral to the global economy I can imagine the price being reset at midnight just to stop traders having to work in silly numbers.
They could have an absolute oil price, and then a relative oil price. I’m not sure which would be used for time, of course.
That idea was a bit of a nonstarter, really.
Yeah, sort of blew a massive hole in the comic too… collateral damage or letting an ugly fact destroy a beautiful idea…
I think the problem is that I have mixed up time-lines. Oil price would work for measuring something progressive, like the date, but I’ve stuck it to a cyclical system. Rookie mistake.
Muahahahaha, hahahaha, hahaha, haha, ha, etc.
*cough*
Still a good idea, though, because you may be able to get it to work. You’d just end up with a really horrible conversion equation, though.
Use the differential between the absolute and relative prices to determine the current time, so that the value of A-R=T.
That would allow for fluctations in either value and it would still give usable values of T.
Given that oil prices are some what cyclic in nature as it is, this system will work.
I think you could be onto something there. I’ll go get Greenwich on the phone and tell the poor sods they’re out of a job.
Yup.
I refined the system even more last night and this morning.
The average price of fuel seems to rise at a steady rate every week, but fluctates during the days and also over the week.
Prices peak at rush hours and on mondays and are at the lowest on sunday.
Graphing that against the steady expected rise should give a usable value of T.
Now if only I could be bothered breaking out Graphmatica and plotting the functions so I had proof of the theory.
sorry, that should be ‘naming your SON’