What to do with $75 in Sydney

• Go to see Belle and Sebastian at the Enmore Theatre in Sydney on June 13
• Get an hour of massage at Go Vita Leichhardt (inlcuding Reiki) and have $15 dollars change thrown in for pasta and a coffee over the road at Grind.
• Make a dontation to Practical Action that could buy jute panel walls for 8 flood resistant houses in Bangladesh
• Buy 30 250ml bottles of regular water at $2.50 each.
• Buy two C class tickets to the new piece "Directors Cut" by Sydney Dance Company at the opera house. (One for me
  
• Take yourself and four friends to see X-men 3 which has nice spacey title graphics with a 3d animation of mutant cells and lots of spiralling DNA. Also very pretty.
• Buy 1.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide offsets through climate friendly, and Australian company that invests in renewble energy and energy efficiency.
• Get entry to the Korean Baths including a skin scrub and facial, with $3 change for a coffee on Darlo Rd.
  

Water feels emotion too, man

I was going to give some free advice from your Aunty Bee, for anyone planning to see Dr. Masaru Emoto talk about "messages in Water" in Sydney. However, the latest news just in - after researching this post - its been cancelled due to lack of bookings. Shame. (The advice was: just don't.) Above are some suggestions for non-material ways ways to spend that $75.

I have to get it off my chest: this guys stuff is the most ridiculous piece of twaddle, blatant manipulation and fuzzy headed thinking I have come across in years. There's science, there's wonder and magic, and then there's this crap. So a few quick points for the non-initiated.

• Water is intrinsically fascinating stuff. Its is less dense when in a solid state than liquid, which is why ice floats on water. This is a feature unique among any known substance. Water droplets suspended in air can refract light forming rainbows. Everybody loves a rainbow. Water cycles through the environment and is found in solid, liquid and gaseous forms naturally. Water is an important feature of thousands of years of spiritual practice and agriculture - often intertwined.
• Ice that forms in a hexagonal crystalline structure is called snow. Snow is also awe-inspiring. No one is actually sure how symmetrical snowflakes are created. The two major suppositions are summarised here on Wikipedia.
  
• A double blind test is one where both the subject and the experimenters do not know which group of subjects have been exposed to the treatment being tested. It is a methodology important for drug testing to try to eliminate the known placebo effect and discover whether a compound does have a statistically significant effect on the test subject, greater than just random chance. That is, the person allocating drug A and inert substance B does not know which one is actually the compound being tested.
  
• What our man Masuru appears to do is this (c/o Wikipedia):

1. Place water in glass
2. Expose to words, pictures, or music for a while
3. Divide water into numerous petri dishes, 5 cm (2 inches) in diameter
4. Freeze at around −25 °C
   
5. Leave for 3 hours, then allow dishes to warm
6. Examine ice grains through microscope. Crystals may form in some dishes as temperature rises. Photograph. Optional: analyze the aesthetics and quantity of crystals.

• According to snowcrystal.com and suite 101 crystals of frozen water can be from 140 microns across (0.14 mm) up to 5 mm and are plethora of different shapes. The first also has some gorgeous photos of water crystals under light microscopes.
• According to the good doctor, bad things make ugly patterns and good things make beautiful, symmetrical crystals. Like the words "Hitler" or "Mother Theresa" taped to jar.
• On hearing about this snippet of a movie I assumed that punters just enjoyed the beauty and poetry of the shapes for themselves, without attaching any meaning to the messages part.. but no, apparently not. Bring it up in a beachside share house lounge room, and apparently, yes, emotional intent effects water's "molecular structure". Shrug. Of course.
  
• One: they're not molecules, they're a cluster of molecules behaving in a natural way. Two: this is not a repeatable phenomenon under testable conditions.
• So a Petri dish is 5 cm across. That leaves room for up to 333 individual crystals of 150 microns wide just across its width.
• The researcher is free to have a good look around every sample before taking his snaps. Reckon you could find an ugly bit in a "heavy metal" sample and a pretty bit in a "blessed" sample out of more than 300? I'd be happy to give it a shot. And for AUS$75 a per head, per seminar there's a bit of motivation to do just that. Oh and US$25 per book and US$35 per one ounce bottle of "highly charged hexagonal structured" Indigo Water.
  
• The emotions and water thing has only ever been published as a photo essay. It is not in a journal anywhere that is peer reviewed by qualified chemists (or qualified anyone).
  
• To test that any treatment causes significant and repeatable changes to the crystalline shapes in water you need to provide the samples to the photographers without meaningful labels and then give them a standard methodology for scanning and photographing each sample (eg. randomly generated grid coordinates).

So, in summary. "Messages from Water" Pretty: Definitely. Revelatory: Maybe, if you are awed by the beautiful complexity of the earth. Mystical, healing, worth any money: No.

Being kept in the dark

The house we are currently laying our weary heads in has a strange mode of energy saving through timer lights. However, this system seems to have absolutely no rhyme, reason or pattern. There are no motion sensors, so lights go on and off at random and you seem to have a wait an arbitrary amount of time before they go on again automatically, or find the remote to turn them on manually. In this "down time" the switch doesn't work.

So a couple of nights ago I'm sitting quietly as the sun goes down, with only the bedroom light on to accompany my aimless web-surfing. Suddenly the light goes out and the whole house is in pitch darkness. I've only been staying here three days and don't know where any switches are. I feel my way out into the black space of the living room arms out front like a B-grade sleepwalker. Light doesn't work. Stumble and trip into the kitchen, find working switch. Jump out of my skin when the kitchen light illuminates the approximately life-size blurry face of the Hawaian girl on the wooden-bead curtain against the backdoor window, who is suddenly an inch from my face. Recover. Still can't see into the hallway, no idea where remote is kept. Feel like I'm in one of those old fashioned text-only computer games. Manage to light the gas heater, and sit in semi-illumated gloom of the lounge room watching SBS world news. (Note: not enought light in the rest of the house to read a book, and the kitchen was too cold) Eventually the bedroom light does come back on and I can find my way to the remote, restoring absolute control over the lighting equipment. The story doesn't really go anywhere you know. Sorry. You can take it as a metaphor for our antipodean position crouched in the south-east corner of the globe, with a dimly illuminated view of world events, if you like. Waiting for some force beyond our control to turn the fucking light on.