Mickblog

An interesting combination of shows to watch on the same day is An inconvenient truth and Walking with Monsters.

The former explains how if we don’t stop pumping carbon dioxide into the air, the amount in the atomosphere will increase by something like 5-10 times, and the temperature will increase and the polar ice caps will melt and so much biodiversity will be destroyed and so on.

Then the latter tells, among other things, just how much the earth’s atomophere and climate has varied over its lifetime. Figures were given for the oxygen content of the atmosphere, from about 30% below to 40% above current levels. Carbon dioxide leverls varied even more - at one point they were 12 times as high as today. Average temperatures reached as much as 50 degrees above modern levels, which of course meant no ice caps. And through all this, life, in some form, thrived in those conditions. New species were born, others died because they failed to adapt.

I find that very reassuring. In the big scheme of things there’s actually very little we can do to destroy the cycle of life. At some point, millions of years from now, new life will evolve to adapt to the Earh’s environment, whatever it may be at the time. And it looks like it will be vastly different then to what it is now, regardless of our actions.

Of course there is still the issue of what we will do to the planet in the meantime, and thus what we will have to live with until we evolve to adapt.

These Wikipedia articles have some info on the subject.

For those that were wondering why knobbits.org was misbehaving,

Yesterday I was alterted to the fact that connections into my server were timing out. I checked up on this and discovered that the server’s IP was effectively being blocked. Pings to said IP were being responded to, but not by my machine. Other traffic to the same IP wasn’t making it to my router. Other IPs on my public subnet, however, seemed to be working just fine.

I have since moved the server to a different IP address (DNS servers were on the same address, fun) and everything seems to be behaving now, as of this morning.

If anyone has any idea why this might happen, let me know.

I needed a function to do this to help me do my budget. It was PITA to write so I’m sharing it in case other people find it useful.

Here are versions in perl, python and OpenOffice/MS Office macros. There are also functions to do the reverse, and some extra cruft, but it’s still there.

(I started with the perl version because I didn’t want to be distracted by an unfamiliar language, wrote the office version because I wanted it to work in my spreadsheet, and wrote the python version beause I thought openoffice supported python macros and I wanted to use a real language)

Basically the way it works is do approach the taxed vs untaxed income graph as a series of straight intervals, and finds the one that is intercepted by the taxed-income line in question. The tricky part was figuring out the numbers for each line, given a list of the tax brackets and medicare levy thresholds (well, threshold).

The result is actually ambiguous for a small region around the $50k (taxable) mark, because when your taxable income hits $50k and you get the medicare surcharge, it’s an instant $500 jump in tax. The function returns the lowest taxable income for the taxed income passed in these cases.

The tables in the functions are for the 2006/2007 tax year, and have the medicare brackets set assuming you do have to pay the surcharge (ie don’t have health insurance).

Anyway, hope someone out there finds it useful.