Corporate Anti Hero

 So a while back one of the programmers we contract with at Greenpeace said 'I'm giving up this programming thing, I'm going to be a coach', and lo and behold he did just that.

Of course Lars was never just a programmer, he was more of an entrepreneur who happened to be able to programme. So perhaps it's only natural that his coaching business has become an online startup. You can try some of his early efforts at online coaching here (no need to sign up if you don't want to) at his new venture http://www.startfromtheheart.com

The ongoing attempt to recreate part of England* in our garden continues.




More house pictures, including the rest of the baskets/containers here and here. I meant to get more cat pictures, but they're off in other people's gardens.

* Probably the Cotswolds

As ever we took too few pictures (but we have resolved to buy a new, better camera). Still here are some snaps of our lake district holiday and the lovely Linthwaite House Hotel.



Next some pictures of the results of todays labour - hanging baskets!

Well, actually one full hanging basket, one empty hanging basket and two wall mounted containers. Thanks DG Hessayon

Imagine you're going to have some building work done. You know exactly what you want, and the bank, your neighbours, people who've had similar jobs done, everyone says it will cost 1000 pounds. So you start thinking about doing something else with the money instead.

The builders however say it will cost 500 pounds. But they're not willing to give you a fixed price.

So, who do you trust?

I ask this question because once again it has turned out that nuclear power plants cost twice as much as the people selling them say. Everyone from Moodys to the IEA to Greenpeace says that a nuclear powerplant costs 4-6bn. The industry consistently claims 2-3 and refuses to do fixed price deals. *

And governments keep being surprised.


* The French showcase in Okiluoto (Finland) is a fixed price deal as they need a demo plant to drum up more business. So far the French government is paying 1bn Euro to provide Finland with electricity and an inspection found 1500 safety flaws.

I am back from holiday, with much to write about. But that will have to wait, with my promise to spend the afternoon working from home, in an effort to get through the 264 mails lurking in my inbox.

For now let me just note that I was wrong about Boris. Who managed to win an election by being seen as little as possible. I still can't see this ending well though. Rather confusingly the SNP folk I was chatting with in Edinburgh at the weekend seemed much less sure of this, but then you have to remember that for them Labour is the arch enemy and the Tories an entertaining diversion.

The weather may have been a bit random this spring, but the garden doesn't seem to mind.



New garden pictures start half way through this page, and incorporate one bonus cat snap.

Time was going 'on the boat' had a very specific meaning, involving rotating dance floors and unpleasant bouncers. Today it has a different meaning. This evening my much better two thirds and I are off on the boat to Newcastle from where we will head to the Lakes, then back up to Scotland to see my sister before wrapping up, once again on Tyneside.

The boat is an odd experience. Once you realise that there's nothing on in the cinema and only one bar with a non-smoking area worth the name it's pretty obvious where you'll be spending the evening.  The last two times we've made the trip the compere  has been a rather over enthusiastic Swedish chap who ran one of those fairground style horserace/betting games, played the flute, and introduced both the expected cover band and the unexpected Bulgarian Magic and Dance troupe, who mixed tap dance with magic tricks. In one of the other bars there was a guitarist enthusiastically bashing out rock n roll covers. It's all a bit random the first time you see it, but, on the way back (for most travellers just a few days later), exactly the same.

The last time we went on the boat was almost two years ago, so I'll be interested to see who the entertainment is. One thing's for sure though, Jack the Pirate, childrens entertainer extraordinaire remains on the bill. He's a six foot tall parrot with an eyepatch, what's not to like?

What the photography link below shows is the all too common problem that people can't imagine really big numbers well, certainly not well enough to do comparisons. For instance, a typical US coal fired powerplant emits 4 million tons of CO2 per year, and has a lifespan of 30 years. So that's 120 million tons. Which is a lot.

An long distance flight from Amsterdam to Bali would emit 10 tonnes. So the correct answer to "How can environmentalists justify a 10000 person meeting in Bali to act on climate change" would be that

10k people * 10 tonnes = 100k tonnes

Lets assume the summit had only one goal. Stopping the construction of a single medium sized coal fired power plant . If successful it will prevent the release of 120 million tonnes of CO2. That's a number 1200 times bigger. Since 1200 is still a number most people can't cope with we need metaphors people can work with.

If we think about this as heights you could imagine the emissions from the flights would be 1m tall. The emissions from a power plant would be around four eiffel towers stacked on top of each other, or twelve statues of liberty (ground to torch) or 24 Nelson's columns. I'm sure my readers can come up with better suggestions for this metaphor.

I'm off from work at the moment with a second bout of some quite ferocious flu. It kicked in on Wednesday and I left work at lunchtime, bravely promising that I was going to dose myself up on Vitamin C and make sure it didn't get me the way it did the first time. We had some friends round for dinner that evening and my promises of a swift recovery were blown apart when I made it through the starters, realised I couldn't actually taste and didn't particularly want to swallow the mains* and was running possibly the highest temperature I can remember having. (I don't know what it was, but it was bloody unpleasant and Maria assures me it was high..)

The first time I had this bug I actually managed to be reasonably productive. Shacked up on the futon with wireless laptop and a big mug of Coldrex isn't a bad way to work. This time though I'm struggling with both my inbox, and the fact that now the fever has more or less broken the bug seems to have taken up residence in my shoulderblades, which are aching really quite badly and making me want to not type. Ah well.

Here's some standout photography from Chris Jordan.

If you've ever wondered what 32000 barbie dolls (the number of breast enhancements performed monthly in the US), or 2 million plsatic beverage bottles (the number drunk every five minutes) look like you can take a look here.

It seems my LJ account is a plus one, which explains the presence of the adverts. What I don't know is if I've always had such an account, or if I used to have a paid one which has expired. Ah well. I've also managed to find the setting to make the interface appear in English not Dutch which is a big improvement.

Lots of people are surprised to learn that Indonesia is the world's third largest emitter of Greenhouse gases. The reason? Deforestation. In particular the deforestation of Indonesia's peat swamps which releases huge amounts of CO2.

The reason for the deforestation is demand for palm oil, which is used to make soap, butter and all kinds of other products. For years Unilever, who describe themselves as the world's largest consumer of palm oil have chaired the 'Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil', a group which was supposed to work out what sustainable palm oil was, and issue certificates so companies could do business in a sustainable manner. Three Six years later - no certificates have been issued. This is bad for the forests, bad for the Orangutangs who live in them, and bad for the climate.

Which is why Orangutangs have been busily disrupting Unilever operations around the world, and why we'd quite like you to see this




If you haven't seen the original version of this, it's here

So a while back I suggested that playing Spacehulk on a computer might make people want to play it on a board again. Only you can't, because it's no longer in print. But that's OK because playing Spacehulk on a computer turns your mind to all kinds of things , like painting miniatures, which used to be a fine way to pass weekend afternoons.

So off to the local games shop where they sell many excellent board games, roleplaying games and a decent selection of citadel miniatures, paints and so on. I bought some Imperial Guard snipers, principally on the grounds that they look really good, painted them, liked them and wanted some more. Now I'm not the kind of person to *just* paint stuff even if I'm highly unlikely to actually play 40k again I just find it more satisfying to assemble actual forces. So I bought the army list, 'Codex, Imperial Guard'


Anyway, painting miniatures is still fun. I've even almost reconciled myself to the face that most of the models now for sale are plastic not whatever lead alloy they use for the 'real' ones.

Saw Elizabeth last night on telly. In the unlikely event that my readers haven't seen it, I recommend it. What struck me however was the fact that Daniel Craig's performance is basically one big warm up for Casino Royale, several shots/scenes in Elizabeth were recreated in Casino Royale in a way that makes you think Bond's self description as "Half monk, half hitman" has it's origin in the scriptwriter watching this movie.

Still, this is a good film and Casino Royale remains my favourite Bond, so it's not like I'm complaining.

Perhaps not surprisingly Greenpeace has at least a passing concern with the security of our operations. As anyone who has worked in secure environments can probably attest the hassles caused by this are just plain annoying. So in some ways it's reassuring to recieve confirmation that our corporate targets really do employ private security firms to go through our trash and infiltrate our offices.

"A private security company organized and managed by former Secret Service officers spied on Greenpeace and other environmental organizations from the late 1990s through at least 2000, pilfering documents from trash bins, attempting to plant undercover operatives within groups, casing offices, collecting phone records of activists, and penetrating confidential meetings. According to company documents provided to Mother Jones by a former investor in the firm, this security outfit collected confidential internal records—donor lists, detailed financial statements, the Social Security numbers of staff members, strategy memos—from these organizations and produced intelligence reports for public relations firms and major corporations involved in environmental controversies."

Mind you, quite how much use our internal strategy documents are is anyone's guess.

I thought I paid for that not to happen?

"With all the movement we've got, we need someone to stand still, and (Viduka) he's the one."

Tactical genius that man, genius.

This is brilliant, hat tip to Thijs, and while he doesn't mention it the copy is lovely too.

Chatting with Eco-Geek yesterday who has just finished my copy of the best book ever written on advertising. "So", I said, "will you support my crusade to make all our advers consist of a half page photo, killer headline and extended body text, liberally broken up with subheadings?"

"Well", he said. "Those ads do all look terribly old fashioned now. But I read all of them."

We need to try this stuff. We need to get back to advertising like it's 1954 or something

If like me you read a lot of coverage of the US elections you see a lot of stuff like this.

"Clinton 46
Obama 49
Margin of error +/- 3.7%
This is a statistical dead heat."

It's that last statement I have issue with, because I don't think it's true. I think what we're actually being told is that

Clinton's numbers are 99% likely to be within 3.7% of 46% (It might not be 99%, depends on the sample size etc.) and normally distributed, which means that 46% is the most likely result, and also that 47% is more likely than 48% etc. The remaining 1% of the time we could do the same research and discover a result outside those boundries.

The same is true for Obama, except that he's more likely to be at 49%.

So what the pollsters are really saying is Obama's probably ahead, but not by much and we can't rule out a small chance that he's actually behind. With that small chance being greater than some number Martin can't work out from here, but probably more than 5% and less than 20%.

That's not a statistical tie. That's a result which contains some good information, and some unreliabilty.

Can one of you mathematical types confirm whether or not I'm right about this?

Lars is piloting an online course to help you work out what kind of company you should be running. Lars wants to be a coach - so I guess that works for him.

He's looking for pilots - you can sign up here.