Following, Follower

I begrudgingly return. I love this blog, but I prefer to post about interesting things, rather than uninteresting things. 

The anonymous bloggers 'Stop These Things' have recently published a post, in which they list the followers of the fake Twitter account 'Waubra Sarah'. There are complexities around the issue of fake Twitter accounts. Some of the better ones I've seen are Cory-Bernardi-Not and, of course, the legendary Fake Fielding, and his musings on the danger of 'Wind Turbulines'. (See a neat list of them, here). 

Oddly, they angrily denounce the '25 stooges', but on counting the unique accounts in the screenshots they provide, they add up to 28. Even more confusing is that neither me nor Infigen's Twitter account has ever followed 'Waubra Sarah'.

My first suspicion was that they had simply photo-shopped our images and names onto the screenshots, but it seems they aren't in possession of that level of technical prowess. 

The ordering of their screenshots gave it away - they simply took a screenshot of the 'Following' page, rather than the 'Followers' page. Which is, literally, a lie. 

Below is their screenshot, presumably from the browser window of their iPhone, of the proclaimed 'followers' of Waubra Sarah, that they confidently proffer as evidence:

Myself, @Infigen and @carlvphillips aren't actively following @WaubraSarah. Their browser only shows the first six line items - when you open the 'following' page in Chrome or another browser, you see that that last screenshot is misleadingly presented as a 'follower' listing, rather than a 'following' listing. 

Note that the names, and the order, are the same as their screenshot. 

It goes without saying that to be followed, on Twitter, is not a suitable metric for determining associations. In addition to @waubrasarah, I am being followed by:

Quest Brighton Bay - A hotel. 

Find a Car Park Pty Ltd -"Aust's No.1 Private & Commercial Parking Website"

AdNews - "Australia's leading advertising, marketing and media magazine"

TwitterScribe - A twitter CSV export tool

Swiftkey - An android keyboard application

They're (presumably) not in secret cahoots with the wind industry. As I mentioned previously, this sort of non-complex deception is relatively easy to publish, as long as their anonymity is preserved. Here's a PDF of their page, in case they alter their post without acknowledging an edit (as they did last time).

Their profound loathing for social media, combined with an active hatred for wind energy and individuals in the wind industry, is likely what drives their propensity for barely-concealed falsehood. I suspect they feel somewhat buoyed by their anonymity - they liken themselves to the classical Real Life Superhero, masked vigilantes unwaveringly seeking justice for the wronged. 

I feel a good place to start, in their quest for justice, would be a mild portion of honesty, and a discussion of ideas, rather than individuals. 

Wind Farms and Fire Risk

The anti-wind lobby has adjusted its focus, in recent months. There has been a concerted effort to paint wind farms as:

- A probable cause of bushfire
- A significant obstacle to fire fighting efforts

For instance, this article in the Herald Sun yesterday (which seems to have been removed from the Herald Sun website), or this (PDF) submission to the Senate Inquiry into 'Recent trends in and preparedness for extreme weather events'

For this blog post, I'll focus on the first of the two accusations pointed at wind farms. There is actually some historical data on this issue. The table below is extract from testimony contained in the Macarthur Wind Farm panel report, Page 247 from 2006:

No wind turbine fires. 

By the end of 2006, the cumulative installed capacity in Victoria was ~100 MW - see here or check out the sheet named [Cm_Cap] in the workbook. But, what about post-2006, and what about areas outside of Victoria? 

There have been three wind turbine fires since 2006. All three were contained and controlled by fire fighting authorities.

They are breathlessly referenced when attempts are made to suggest wind turbines are a fire hazard. See, for instance, this press release from the 'Australian Wind Turbine Awareness Group' - an organisation that seems to exist only in the header of this particular press release. (Their liberal use of the comic sans font probably gives you an idea of the authenticity of the information within)

There's plenty of falsehoods contained in that document, but let's focus on the instancing of turbine fires as evidence that they pose a fire risk. 

To determine the number of operational hours for each wind turbine across the NEM, all you need is the date the wind farm was registered, and the number of wind turbines at each facility. I grabbed both, and calculated the number of hours logged for each wind turbine up to and including 25/01/2013.

Check out the 2006 statistics in this spreadsheet, or the wind farm classification and operational time data in this spreadsheet. If you have any questions on the data, buzz me via Twitter. 

Of all the wind turbines connected to the NEM (remember, excluding NT and WA), there have been a total of  44,495,998 operational hours - or, 5,079 years. 

Assuming a 5 hour duration for each fire, the average percent of time that the NEM's wind turbines were on fire was about 0.00003%. That's three fires, in 5 millenia of wind turbine operation. 

This is a small number of fires, given the conditions that wind turbines endure in Australia. They incorporate temperature sensors, and they shut down when they reach a pre-programmed value. I've seen waves of heat move across a wind farm, reflected as blue points on a SCADA screen as the turbines shut down in response to the temperature. 

From these data, if you were to stand underneath a randomly selected wind turbine, you'd have to wait approximately 1,693 years before it burst into flames. 

To put it another way: In the past 8 years, wind turbines spent ~15 hours on fire, and ~5,079 years being not on fire. Out of the three wind turbine fires, none resulted in a consequent bushfire. 


A wind turbine fire is an innately dramatic occurrence. Due to the sheer salience of the event, we’re unlikely to consider the mathematics of this issue. 

The more you actively dislike wind turbines, the more you’ll ignore instances that are counter to your beliefs (a wind turbine that is not on fire), and the more you’ll over-value instances that confirm your ideas (a wind turbine that was on fire). 

More posts coming soon, on this topic. 

Amost Paradise

Anonymity on the internet is generally found in its darker corners. It's reserved for individuals who wish to publish statements or media content, but do not wish to be held accountable. It's usually limited to comments on articles, and user-submitted content websites like Reddit or 4Chan. Occasionally, an entire site is run by an anonymous author - this rings alarm bells in the minds of most savvy readers. 

This is the case for the new anti-wind website, 'Stop these things'. The key advantage in publishing content online anonymously is the capacity to denigrate individuals, without risking legal culpability for defamation. It's shaky ground, but they choose to stand nervously on it. I featured recently on their page, on a list of individuals who 'do not get it'. 

I share this honour with Greens leader Christine Milne, Professor of public health at Sydney University Simon Chapman and Prime Minister Julia Gillard. 

There's a curious and revealing theme of social-media-phobia in their post. The faceless author writes:

Old Greenies, and there are a few in our group, used to be in the front line, in the trenches.“We were members of the Greens when it meant something,” they say.Now we have a new breed of keyboard cowards.

A gigantic cinder-block of irony contacts violently with our faces, when reading those words, penned by an anonymous author, on an anonymous blog. 

A frequent tweeter, Infigen’s Ketan Joshi has 120 followers.  In our opinion that’s akin to social media masturbation. You’re practically doing it on your own, mate.

I just need 13 more followers, and then we can both be keyboard cowards!

This statement is a relatively unbridled attempt to provoke a reaction, through the use of a graphic insult. (It's probably also worth pointing out that they have 51 followers on Twitter). They adopt a similar ethos in this post, accusing an entire acoustics organisation of being comparable to rapists. 

One can actually determine the frequency with which a particular user tweets. Using SnapBird (A Twitter history tool), we can see that it has been 22 days since @stopthesethings tweeted their first tweet, and they have tweeted 103 times (including re-tweets and replies). It has been 242 days since my first tweet, and I have tweeted 436 times. 

@stopthesethings have a tweet frequency of 4.7 Tweets per day. I have a tweet frequency of 1.8 Tweets per day. Anonymous, you seem to well and truly surpass me, in terms of online masturbatory fury. 

In a departure from form, they then attempt to reference actual content I've written:

Joshi said Sarah Laurie stated that Wind Turbine Syndrome can be perceived “out to distances as great as 30 km and sometimes more”.  Laurie never said that.
It’s an old scam. Ignore the facts. Put words into the opposition’s mouth so you can refute them.

I made that statement in this article. In the article, I included a reference to a comment Laurie made, which reads as follows: 

Andreas, unfortunately I have heard your situation all too often. There does appear to be a group of people who have been badly sensitised, who find it very difficult to escape from the ubiquitous low frequency noise, and who then report perceiving it out to distances as great as 30 km and sometimes more.

Sorry, Anonymous. They follow with another direct insult:

In short, Joshi writes so much fiction we’d amost (sic) recommend him for the Miles Franklin. But his prose is lousy.

Say what you will of my prose, Anonymous. 

My spelling is amost perfect.

Update - 19:38 AESDT 19/01/2013:

Anonymous updated the post to remove the reference to Laurie, with no acknowledgment of error on the page. Anonymous did choose to leave in the typo, and I congratulate them on their steadfast refusal to give up their ground, with regards to basic spelling anarchy.