Category: Satire

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Let’s All Burn Our Waste Paper!

In these environmentally conscious times, we are constantly exhorted to recycle. This is a tedious ritual involving coloured bins, soggy cardboard and the faint smell of moral superiority. Yet I submit that recycling is, in fact, the least responsible thing we could do with our waste paper.

Instead, I propose a bold, innovative, and unquestionably sustainable alternative.

Burn it. All of it. Immediately. Preferably with gusto.

“He’s kinda sexy and mysterious about it. Hot eyes, all my judgement is clouded. I’m in your city, can you show me round it? You can put your money right where my mouth is.”

“But burning paper releases CO₂!” you cry. But here is the true genius of the plan.

Once we stop recycling paper, industries that rely on recycled pulp will face a sudden, catastrophic shortage. Their only recourse will be to turn to lumber mills for virgin fibre. Lumber mills, in turn, will be forced to plant vast new forests to meet this demand. All that CO₂ we released earlier will be taken up by all those newly planted trees and taken out of the atmosphere!

Compare that to recycling paper. Send slow-moving fossil-fuel burning trucks to everyone’s house to pick up waste paper. Pulp it, bleach it and flatten it and you’ve got recycled paper that’s not quite as good as wood paper. Why not cut out the middleman and let nature grow the wood for us?

By burning paper, we create a powerful economic incentive for growing more trees, bigger forests and a greener planet. In short, every time you set fire to a stack of old utility bills, you are personally contributing to reforestation.

Furthermore, the lumber industry will enjoy a renaissance. Rural economies will flourish. Entire regions will be revitalised by the sudden need to plant millions of trees to replace the ones being fed into the paper mills at industrial speed.

🔥 Imagine the community cohesion created by weekly neighbourhood paper bonfires.
🔥Imagine the joy of watching junk mail fulfil its highest purpose.
🔥Imagine the catharsis of consigning tax forms to cleansing flame.

Recycling never gave anyone that. ♻️

“Daisy’s bare naked, I was distraught. He loves me not, he loves me not. Penny’s unlucky. I took him back and then stepped on a crack and the black cat laughed.”

But seriously…

Yes, I am joking, but only a little bit.

I had the idea when I was reminded of a TV advert from some years ago from a toilet paper company. Their bold promise was that for every tree they used to make toilet paper, they would replant three. Sounds good, but I had a slightly more cynical rewording of that slogan. “We’ve taken steps to secure the future supply of the raw materials we need.”

I mean, those three trees they planted are going to end up being cut down and turned into more toilet paper, right?

But I can’t be really cynical about toilet paper manufacturing. Even if you apply maximum cynicism, the worst I could say is that their industry is neutral. They grow trees which take carbon out of the air, but then they turn those trees into toilet paper which gets used and decomposes, releasing that carbon. Which then becomes more trees. The circle of life.

And honestly, I could hope to be neutral too. I buy potatoes, made from carbon that was taken out of the air, but then I cook and eat those potatoes which means that carbon ends up in the air again. The paper industry has more in common with a potato farmer than a plastic factory. Agriculture, even at industrial scale, is the application of the natural carbon cycle.

Recycling plastic and metals make sense, but recycling paper? Sure, I’m going to keep dropping my cardboard packaging into the recycling bin, but if I were to suggest we should recycle potatoes after we eat them, you’d call me insane. (And I must apologise for the disgusting image I put in your head just now.)

The real issue isn’t how many trees we plant, but what we do with them. Cutting down a tree and planting three saplings doesn’t remove carbon from the atmosphere; it just keeps the short carbon cycle spinning. If we actually want to lower atmospheric CO₂, we need trees that grow, mature, and stay standing. Planting three trees only matters if at least some of them are allowed to become forests rather than future toilet rolls.

And if that means lighting the odd ceremonial blaze in the name of carbon sequestration, well, that’s just responsible citizenship.

Credits
📸 “Bonfire” by Jonas Bengtsson. (Creative Commons.)
📸 “Cat on Laptop” by Doug Woods. (Creative Commons)

Thanks to my sis and sis-in-law Heather and Hilde for their insightful review. Thanks also to The YIMBY Pod for the inspiration to write this.

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Gravity on a Flat Earth? Notes from a Helpful Glober.

Lately, I’ve been posting in flat earth social media, mostly asking why ships appear to sink behind the horizon when they sail away. Why? Because of XKCD number 386.

One thing I’ve noticed is the flat‑earther’s need to deny gravity. I’m not sure why because gravity is one of the easiest things to demonstrate. You drop something, it falls towards the ground instead of hanging in mid-air. That’s it.

Flat earthers seem to tie themselves in knots trying to replace gravity. They’ll invoke buoyancy without realising that it depends on gravity to work. They’ll invoke electrostatic forces which doesn’t depend on gravity but breaks down when you ask where the like-charges-repel effect has gone.

One even told me that Beyoncé was responsible for objects staying on the earth, but I’m quite sure that was an autocorrect error.

All I Want for Christmas is Glue

So, as a friendly glober with a GCSE in high school physics, I thought I’d help. Let’s see if we can integrate some form of gravity into a flat earth.

“Many times I’ve been alone and many times I’ve cried. Anyway, you’ll never know the many ways I’ve tried.”

Introducing Flat‑Earth Gravity™.

Put away your books on Newtonian motion or relativistic physics. This isn’t that.

This is the force that pulls objects towards the ground. Exactly what you see when you pick up a ball and drop it. This force behaves exactly as required for a flat earth to function and not at all like any force known to Glober physics.

What direction? It pulls towards the ground. Perpendicular to the surface of the flat Earth at a constant 9.8 m/s² everywhere. The same acceleration you can measure for yourself with tennis balls and a stopwatch.

Drop a ball in London: down. Drop a ball in Brazil: also down. Drop a ball on the ice wall at the edge of the earth: Get down tonight!

These “down” directions are parallel, because this force is uniform across the entire disc of the earth. All perpendicular to the flat earth surface. This conveniently avoids the need for the Earth to be infinitely large, which is what Glober physics would require.

And crucially, Flat‑Earth Gravity™ does not pull toward the centre of mass. This force is always downwards, never sideways. This is why the flat earth doesn’t collapse into a sphere and why walking outwards towards the edge isn’t like climbing a hill. That’s what you’d get with Glober Gravity, so don’t get them mixed up.

There you go. Gravity fixed. Now flat earthers can stop arguing about density and start arguing about why their new custom‑built force doesn’t also pull the Sun and Moon into the ground. Maybe that’s because of Beyoncé. Or buoyancy.

And to those who point out that “All I Want for Christmas” is Maria Carey. Shuddup.

Credits
📸 “Daventry Ducks” by me.
Thanks to “Ozteric Oz” for the inspiration.

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PHP – Some strings are more equal than others

You may have recently read about the PHP programming language, when it was found that if you compare the two strings "9223372036854775807" and "9223372036854775808" with the == operator, PHP will report these as identical. Most of the time PHP does the right thing, but you need to be careful about these exceptions to the rule.

This was reported as a bug to the people who maintain PHP, but they responded that regarding these two strings as equal was really the correct thing to do. Programmers who feel these two strings should be treated as different should instead use the === operator. This operator checks if two strings are equal, but this time, means it!

But this isn’t the end of the story…

While === is fine for strings containing only digits, there’s a little known feature of Unicode where you can express an accented letter either by a single character such as 'é' (U+00E9), or by using a regular ascii 'e' (U+0065) and then adding a special character (U+0301) which means “put an accent on that last character”. If you want to compare two strings that are the same except they each use different ways of expressing an 'é', you need to add another equal sign and use ==== to differentiate them, as === will see them as equal.

There’s a similar rule about the Unicode smiley face character ‘☺‘ (U+263A) and the more familiar colon-bracket smiley ':)'. These will compare equal unless you use the ==== operator. As well as that, all of these comparison operators see both the white smiley face ‘☺‘ and black smiley face ‘☻‘ (U+263B) as identical, unless php.ini has the ‘Racist’ setting switched on.

Even the ==== operator isn’t the end of the matter. This can’t tell the difference between serif and sans-serif text. Most programmers are happy to treat these as equivalent, but if the text is highly secure, you need the ===== operator which knows that ‘A‘ and ‘A‘ are different.

But the ultimate equality operator is the six equal sign ====== operator. As I write this, no-one has found two values where x======y returns true, even when x and y are copies. Some mathematicians suspect there are no such pairs of values, but a mathematical proof remains elusive.

Picture credits:
‘Equal in stature’ by Kevin Dooley (CC-BY)
‘Equal Opportunity Employment’ by flickr user ‘pasukaru76’ (CC-BY)