Why call it NOTSEP?

Here are some propositions:

• We have allowed parts of our built environment to decay or become trashed
  
• People walk, run or drive past this mess every day, and they see it, but they never do anything about getting it cleaned up - because it is somebody else's problem to take care of it
• No it's not.  Nothing will ever be done about it unless someone takes an active interest in fixing it.  
• Don't hang around waiting for someone else to take action - get off your bum and take some action of your own.  It's really not that hard.

So there you have it in a nutshell.  This blog will hopefully act as a guide to anyone else who has become sufficiently steamed up about what they see around them, but has never known what to do about it.  

If you want things to improve, the first step is to accept that it is not somebody else's problem.  That's the hard part.  Once you can accept that, everything else is a breeze.

What is this blog about?

I am not a tree hugger by nature.  Living in the inner west, there really aren't that many trees nearby to hug anyway.  What we do have though is a lot of built environment - buildings, walls, bridges, structures, posts, roads and so on, and that has become the forgotten environment.  Which is odd, since that is the environment that 90% of us live in.  We live in suburbs of varying density, but the common feature of all of them is that there are bits that need looking after - and they aren't being looked after.  The Greenies can go hug whales and things - I'm more into getting pot holes filled in and graffiti covered walls cleaned up and abandoned cars towed away.  

I'm not terribly into doing that myself mind you - mainly because there is so much to be done, it's a full time job for 10 people in our area alone.  Instead, what I do is pester the people who do have a responsibility for keeping our built environment in a descent condition.  Building owners, Councils, authorities of various sorts, government agencies, businesses, tenants and so on.  What I have found is that in most cases, the people responsible for our built environment are so physically distant from it, they have no idea what condition it is in.  They simply need a gentle prod from time to time to get out of their distant ivory towers and come out and scrub up the stuff in our suburb.  So that's what I do - I act as a pair of eyes for what you might term "absentee landlords".  

Not all of them appreciate that of course, but that's not my problem.  That's somebody else's problem.

Intro - what is an SEP?

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

An SEP field is a generated energy field which affects perception. Entities within the field will be perceived by an outside observer as "Somebody Else's Problem", and will therefore be effectively invisible unless the observer is specifically looking for the entity. This effect is greatly heightened if the entity within the field is already unexpected or out of place. The primary example of this was given in the third book Life, the Universe and Everything, when a spaceship built to look like an up-ended Italian bistro utilizes a SEP field to land unobserved in the middle of Lord's Cricket Ground. Another example occurs when the aforementioned ship's field is extended so that the characters fail to notice the fact that they can't breathe or the fact that the asteroid that they are standing on doesn't have enough gravitational force to hold them down, and thus are able to breathe and stay grounded. It should be noted that a SEP field won't render an object invisible if it's expected to be there, and an SEP-cloaked object may be noticed out of the corner of the eye.

The SEP field requires much less energy than a normal invisibility field (a single torch battery can run it for over a hundred years) due to the natural propensity of people to see things as Somebody Else's Problem. This is very close to the idea suggested by Terry Pratchett (who has often been compared to Douglas Adams): People don't see whatever they are sure can't be there.

In the novel, there is a character mentioned to try and create an invisibility field, and given a year, (with a bet on his life) he could render an entire mountain invisible. It's said he spent so much time fiddling with an invisibility field which never worked, that at the very last possible second, he did the most drastic last-minute work ever seen by the known Universe, and by the deadline, the mountain was gone from vision. However, he lost the bet shortly afterwards because there was a curious new moon discovered around the same time. Had he instead painted the mountain pink and erected an SEP field around it, he would probably have won, as most people don't expect to see a pink mountain, especially when someone claims it invisible (or absent).