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  Newsletter 130, November 2024 - Willis's Walkabouts

Willis's Walkabouts Newsletter 130, November 2024 ― Wet Season Wonders

Taking 2 or 3 minutes to read the Help Save Litchfield from Gamba Grass section and sign the petition isn't a big ask. Your time and signature just might be the last little bit that gets the project going.

The most thought provoking article I've ever posted may be the last one in the Artificial Intelligence section.

If you are viewing this on a mobile, the newsletter and many of the links should work better in a horizontal format.

Restricted content. Articles marked * or ** are on restricted websites Click for more info, including how you can sometimes avoid the paywalls.

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WW 2025 Wet Season

Kudjewk, the Monsoon Season is one of my favourite times of year. If you're curious, click the link and see why.

January ― Special Offer

We have three trips in our program and are offering a 20% discount on all of them.

Any of these trips which doesn't have the bookings we need to run it a week after this newsletter goes onto the website will be cancelled.

February ― Two trips and an incredible special offer

  • Kakadu Light: 16 February - 1 March. List price: $4995, discount: $2795
    Two sections, either of which can be done on its own.
    Guide: Russell Willis wants to do this trip so much that he is offering a $2200 discount.
    Conditions apply. Details in the PDF trip notes.
  • Bungles in the Wet: 16 February - 1 March
    A major expedition. Helicopter in and out. Two weeks seeing a Bungles that dry season visitors can barely imagine.
    We have left the 2024 price in effect. The 10% advance purchase discount applies until 16 December.

March ― Two trips

  • Kakadu Highlights No. 2: 9-22 March.
    Two sections, either of which can be done on its own.
    If the Kakadu Light trip doesn't run in February, I will be desperate to get out bush and will offer a big discount on section one for sure, section two if I feel I'm up to it.
  • Drysdale Pack Rafting: 23 March - 12 April. List price: $8895; discount: $8005.
    Definite departure. Guide: Sébastien Heritier. Discount expires 12 December.

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Your Health

The first two are the ones everyone should read. The third is especially important for parents.

  • Paramedics Share One Tip That May Save Your Life *
    Every second counts, experts say.
  • Why Sitting All Day May Shorten Your Life *
    Spending too much time in a chair can unravel your fitness goals and make you feel older. Here's how to counteract it.
  • Parents Should Ignore Their Children More Often *
    I read the advisory from the surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, warning that many parents are stressed to their breaking point. There are plenty of reasons for this worrisome state of affairs. One is that we don't ignore our children often enough.
  • For older people
    • The Cutting-Edge Hearing Aids That You May Already Own *
      Apple is preparing to turn its AirPods Pro 2 into easy-to-use aids for people with mild to moderate hearing loss.
      "With the upcoming software and a compatible iPhone or iPad, users will be able test their hearing. For those with mild-to-moderate hearing loss, the AirPods Pro 2 will adjust sounds in their environments and on their devices."
      Read for details about negatives, not all that bad. Limited battery life and can't wear all the time.
    • What to Do About Erectile Dysfunction *
      Sooner or later, most men will experience a problem achieving or maintaining an erection. But today, there are more treatments than ever.
  • Flying
    • 1 dead, 30 injured on Singapore Airlines flight during 'severe turbulence' **
      The Boeing 777 was carrying more than 200 passengers and diverted to Thailand after the incident, which killed one person.
      the plane had fallen into an air pocket as cabin crew members were serving breakfast before hitting turbulence very suddenly there was a very dramatic drop so everyone seated and not wearing a seat belt was launched immediately into the ceiling. Some people hit their heads on the baggage cabins overhead.
      "Clear air" turbulence, which refers to violent and sudden shifts in air that are nearly invisible, has been increasing because of changes in climate caused by rising carbon emissions, research shows. Scientists at Reading University in Britain in a study published last year found that the duration of severe turbulence on one North Atlantic route had risen 55 percent between 1979 and 2020.
      Deaths caused by turbulence are extremely rare but have increased, Paul Williams, co-author of the Reading University study, said in a statement. "Our latest future projections indicate a doubling or trebling of severe turbulence in the jet streams in the coming decades, if the climate continues to change as we expect," he said.
    • How risky is turbulence on a plane? How worried should I be?
      About 25 in-flight turbulence injuries are reported to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau each year, although it is thought many more are un-reported. Some of these reported injuries are serious, including broken bones and head injuries. Passengers being thrown up and out of their seat during turbulence is one of the most common type of head injury on a plane.
      we need to put this into perspective. In the year to January 2024, there were more than 36 million passengers on international flights to Australia. In the year to February 2024, there were more than 58 million passengers on domestic flights.
      So while such incidents grab the headlines, they are exceedingly rare.
      Rare or not, it is easy to keep your seatbelt fastened while seated and avoid the potential disaster.
    • Are some routes more prone to air turbulence? Will climate change make it worse? Your questions answered
      In 2017, a different study used climate modelling to project that clear-air turbulence may be four times as common as it used to be by 2050, under some climate change scenarios.
      The article has several interesting links as well as more pics from the Singapore Airlines plane.
  • Hospitals worldwide are short of saline. We can't just switch to other IV fluids ― here's why
  • Are Artificial Sweeteners Safer Than Sugar? *
    Health concerns have been mounting for decades. Here's what the research suggests.
  • Ambulance ramping is getting worse in Australia. Here's why ― and what we can do about it
    Ambulance ramping occurs when paramedics are made to wait at the hospital's entrance and are unable to transfer their patient into the emergency department within an appropriate time frame ― defined as 30 minutes in South Australia.
  • Australia's health, visualised
    Good picture of the country. Peoples' view of their health is more optimistic than justified.
    Interestingly, "while nearly nine out of ten Australians perceived their health as good, in 2022, 61% of people were living with a chronic condition, and 38% with two or more chronic conditions."

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Privacy

Your Car is Watching You.

  • Your car is watching you. The implications are profound and immediate
    Cars are the worst performing product category in terms of privacy protections.
    Data range from relatively mundane facts such as our name, address, phone number, and age, to more sensitive details such as our religious affiliation, financial and medical information, employment history, and facial features.
    Our cars can also track our location, driving schedule, phone calls, music and podcasts, and even physical gestures.
    These data can be used to create individual profiles describing our interests, cultural preferences, religious affiliations, sexual orientation, and personality traits. Most of the car manufacturers surveyed in the Mozilla report sell our data to various third-party entities.
    For instance, a driver's frequent visits to gardening centres might prompt advertisements for gardening tools and plants; insurance companies might be interested in driving data to assess risk levels and personalise insurance premiums; political advertisers can target users with ads based on their political leanings or interests, inferred from their favourite podcasts.
  • These car brands are collecting and sharing your data with third parties
    Tesla collects short images and videos from cameras inside and outside their cars. Tesla workers have been caught sharing among themselves highly invasive camera recordings of Tesla customers in the nude, as well as images of crashes and road-rage incidents.
    The videos and images Tesla collects may be shared with third parties, Mr Blakkarly said.

Other Issues

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The Economy

Why Not?

Your Food

We already get a lot of our food from overseas. So if nothing changes with farm workers, it will be more, leaving us ever more dependent on other countries for the food we eat.

Real Estate

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World War III ― It's Already Begun

  • Fallout From Cyberattack at Ascension Hospitals Persists, Causing Delays in Patient Care *
    For two weeks at the 140-hospital system, doctors and nurses have had little access to digital records for patient histories, resorting to paper and faxes to treat people.
    No reason something similar couldn't happen in Australia.
  • Why GPS Is Under Attack *
  • The coming polar war Antarctica is rich but vulnerable
    Written from a British perspective. Australia has huge Antarctic claims. We need to pay attention.
    Modern staples like GPS and satnav can only happen because many satellites connect to Earth via Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago some 2,000 kilometres north of Oslo. Whether it's home food deliveries or NATO missile guidance, both would be impossible without Svalbard's network of satellite ground stations. No less important, these barren islands also host a vital high-speed internet cable.
    In January 2022, someone cut the main subsea cable in the area. In April this year, the cables at the Evenes Airbase were disabled too, especially ominous as it's where Norway and NATO keep a fleet of F-35 aircraft. The Norwegians have investigated both events and concluded that there is no clear culprit. But some believe that they're skating around the problem because they don't want to provoke a direct confrontation with Russia.
  • Election 2024: How Russia et al. Warp Your Vote
    Much more than that, cyber security in general, link is to a page linking to the podcast or a pdf transcript of the interview.
    the technology that we employ in some of these power plants or the energy grids, they're built in China. And if they go down, we need the company in China to give us another one. So I'm not even talking about a nation-state hacking, and I'm talking about our replacement for what we have today is not actually in-country, and it's a horrifying concept because now essentially, we're pressurized there, and I think that's going to make things... It's funny, because the power plants are effectively what are going to feed something like a quantum cluster somewhere, and if we don't have the energy, quantum clusters don't work.
    That quote was about the US. In terms of self reliance, Australia is far worse
  • Satellite images show major expansion at Russian site with secret bioweapons past **
  • China sought to hack Trump and Harris campaign phones, officials say **
    Candidates' phones were targeted by a Chinese attack on communications, but it was not immediately clear if attempts were successful.
  • Iran turns to Hells Angels and other criminal gangs to target critics **
    Iran has cultivated ties with criminal networks in the West to carry out a recent wave of violent plots in the United States and Europe.
  • We investigated how China silenced its critics in an American city **
    The events in San Francisco illustrate how the Chinese Communist Party is willing to target U.S. citizens and residents exercising their First Amendment rights.
    I find it hard to believe that something similar isn't happening in Australia.

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Artificial Intelligence

AI and Energy

AI Now

AI in Future

  • What is AI superintelligence? Could it destroy humanity? And is it really almost here?
  • Generative AI is a Resurrection Machine
    This is one to make you think!
    "In the very near future, maybe even today, I believe that generative AI makes possible the preservation of human consciousness beyond death, at scale and at extremely low cost."
    Maybe the author is wrong, but there is a real chance that he is at least partially right. If so, the implications are mind boggling. It's a fairly long article, but I think it's one of the most important I've ever put in a newsletter.
    It has some really interesting links.
    I've thought about this quite a lot and suspect that it will become possible to create something that will be able to 'talk' to people in such a way that they couldn't tell whether or not it was you or an AI version of you. But when I think about all the stuff that goes on in my head, dreaming at night, daydreaming as well, that has never been recorded, I can't see that any AI in the foreseeable future will capture that so it won't be 'me'.

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WW ― April and Beyond

Australia

  • You can see which trips already have bookings on our Availability and Specials page.
  • Special Mention Russell's 80th Birthday: May-June.
    Time has taken its toll but I can still do some things. My dream is to explore an area, most of which WW has never been to before. I've flown over the rest. Amazing rock formations and plenty of water. Short stretches of carrying packs combined with exploring without packs.
    There is more to come, but the link above should give you a good idea of what it will be like.

International

  • Southern African Spring. This trip will be a mix of different things we've done in the past, perhaps with something new. If you want an idea of what our trips are like, have a look at the trip notes for three of our previous trips.
      • 2017
      • 2018
      • 2019
  • New Caledonia: 6-27 October
    It will be possible to do only part of the trip. There is an optional add on at the end.
    Guide: Sébastien Heritier.
  • Patagonia: December-January. Two of our new guides speak Spanish so they will lead the main trip which will include a number of multi-day walks. If enough others are interested, I might run a parallel trip doing day walks (maybe even one easy overnight) and shifting vehicles for the main group if they do a through walk. If you want an idea of what our trips are like, have a look at the trip notes for two of our previous trips.
      • 2016
      • 2019. On this trip, we had a number of people who wanted longer walks so we ran two groups, one doing the longer walks and one moving vehicles and doing the shorter ones.

Guiding for WW

In my last newsletter, I mentioned that we need new guides who are available for only a few trips per year. We had a few enquiries, some of who have already done trips as guides or assistants. If you expressed an interest and haven't heard from me recently, please remind me. I lost a number of emails recently and might have lost yours. If you might be interested but haven't yet told me so, please let me know ASAP. Thank you.

Price rises

Some of the prices have had to go up far more than I would have hoped. Why?   • The guides hadn't had a wage rise in two years.   • Some of our other costs have risen dramatically.   • I'd miscalculated last year and had badly underpriced some trips.   • We need to allow for the advance purchase discounts. We can't run trips unless we know they will run far in advance. The advance purchase discounts are the best way we've found to do this.

For a few trips, I haven't added in some of the expenses. By letting people pay when we know what those expenses actually are, I've been able to keep the total cost lower, sometimes substantially lower, than if I'd included them in the price where I'd have had to include the worst price possible.

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Help Save Litchfield from Gamba Grass

Litchfield NP, south-west of Darwin, has long been a destination for Willis's Walkabouts, both for short walks and longer ones where we've trekked across the wild, rugged and beautiful Tabletop and Tableland Ranges. Sadly, scientists say this beautiful park has a bleak future ― unless something is done very soon about the spread of invasive, highly-flammable gamba grass. They say more and more intensely hot gamba fires will bring about "ecosystem collapse" and serious risks to visitor safety.

If we act now, we may still be able to prevent this. Please consider signing an online citizens' petition (organised by Gamba Grass Roots, part of Landcare NT) asking the NT Government to implement a plan which scientists say will protect the most precious parts of the Park from the spread of gamba ― for the sake of plants, animals, the tourism industry and bushwalkers! The petition supports an Open Letter from 90 businesses, organisations, scientists and environmental professionals, to be published as a full page ad in Darwin's NT News on Saturday November 23rd and tabled in the Legislative Assembly the following week.

YOU can sign the petition, watch the information video and read the Open Letter by visiting the petition webpage.

More Info

The impacts of gamba grass in Litchfield National Park (NT) and how scientists once had hopes that park managers would better direct their resources to control the threat were highlighted in this ten-year-old video, Research helps tackle gamba grass in Litchfield National Park.

Unfortunately that research was utterly ignored by the powers that be, hence the title of the report these same scientists published just last year "The Cost of Not Acting". Both the extent and density of this highly-flammable, ecosystem-modifying invasive grass increased substantially since that video was made, leading researchers to warn in surprisingly blunt language what will happen if this inaction by the NT Government continues ― looming "ecosystem collapse", "damage to Park infrastructure" and increased "risk to visitor safety" as horrendously hot gamba wildfires get more frequent and widespread.

Gamba grass is a serious environmental problem in northern Australia. This African grass was heavily promoted and highly valued as an alternative pasture for cattle during the 1980s, due to its prolific growth and an ability to thrive under harsh conditions. In the 1990s, the weed began to spread outside pastoral land. Now infesting much of the Top End between Darwin and Katherine as well as parts of Northern Queensland, it threatens to transform much of Northern Australia's ancient savannas into treeless gamba monocultures ― unless Top Enders and their representatives in government choose to act very soon.

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Bushwalking

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The Lighter Side

Humour

Stories I found interesting

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News About This Newsletter

Restricted websites. The NY Times allows non-subscribers to look at ten free articles each month. I've got more links than that in this newsletter so I've marked them with a red asterisk (*) so that you can choose which are of most interest to you. Bloomberg allows three free articles. The Washington Post and The Economist both have limits but I'm not sure what the current limits are so I've marked their articles with a double red asterisk (**).

How to Get Past a Paywall to Read an Article for Free
Even if you regularly support journalism by paying, sometimes you need to get around it.

Coming Next Issue
  • Not sure. It will be a surprise to me as well as you.
  • When? Hopefully before Christmas

As always, I welcome a bit of feedback about some of the things in this newsletter and suggestions for the next one.

Sending the newsletter

I'm now using a paid version of MailChimp to send all of the newsletters. I'm not sure what I'll do if the list goes over 2500.

walkabout@bushwalkingholidays.com.au is the contact address on our website. If you would like to continue to receive these newsletters, please include this address in your "friends list" so that it isn't blocked.

Emails sent to walkabout@bushwalkingholidays.com.au are currently automatically forwarded to rrwillis at internode.on.net. If you want to send an email to that address, replace the word "at" with the symbol @. I am trying not to put that address any place where it can be harvested by spam bots.

We don't want to add to the mass of email spam. If you don't want our newsletter, please send us an email and let us know. We'll then delete your name from our newsletter list.

Our email address is walkabout@bushwalkingholidays.com.au.

Note. Both MailChimp and the other program we use to send some of these newsletters have an automatic delete at the bottom. Clicking that link will delete you from the mailing list on the server but it will not delete you from our main database. One of the programs will not allow the auto delete to send me an email notifying me that a deletion has been made. If you want to be sure that you are removed from all further mailings, please send an email to walkabout@bushwalkingholidays.com.au

If you know someone you think would enjoy this newsletter, please forward it to them. The more people who get it, the more likely it is that I'll be able to run the trips which might interest you.

I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed preparing it.
Russell Willis

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