John's Incoherent Ramblings

Commencing an orderly shutdown, I think

2011-01-07T20:29:00.002+11:00

Ok, so it's become reasonably obvious that I haven't gotten around to blogging in far too long, and there isn't really any strong suggestion that this is likely to change in the immediate future. There are various reasons/excuses I could offer for my laziness, but those who have been tracking me on facebook have probably heard about all of the adventures (travel, medical and romantic) of the past year or so - and so I think the time has come to post a 'farewell' type of post up here to give an orderly ending to the saga. I guess this blog has been a bit of fun, it's been adventurous, it's been an avenue for me to spout my occasionally ill-considered opinions in the general direction of The Internets just in case anyone happens to wander by and decide to read any of what I have to say... and it seems to have come to a natural end. I'm going to leave all the "content" up here, just in case it happens to be interesting or useful to anyone, and I may even drop back in sporadically to say hi - but for now, this is probably it. Thanks everyone, it's been fun.

Red Bull really does give you wings...

2010-06-28T03:09:00.002+10:00

A nice video of Mark Webber's latest aerial-style Formula 1 adventures here:

(the interesting bit starts at 1:20 or so - and the commentary pretty clearly isn't in English - sounds like German or Dutch to me, but I may be completely wrong on that, given that I don't actually speak either language...)

Anyway, the main reason I'm posting this is because he actually walked away from that crash completely unhurt - so score a big plus for safety engineering in F1 cars! Not so many years ago, that would have been at the very least some badly broken bones, or potentially fatal, but some very clever engineers have done a lot of brilliant work to help keep the drivers all in one piece, even when the car, um, isn't any more.

Long time no post... again

2010-06-14T10:06:00.002+10:00

Ok, so it's been absolutely ages since I put anything up on here. The best reason for this is that I've had a certain number of other things to do that have been more urgent than expounding my ill-founded opinions onto the internet... but such if life. Also, I had planned to upload a bunch of photos, but the Blogger photo-uploader is so horrid and slow that I've decided I'm going to post them on Facebook instead, because their uploader tool is much nicer - so if you want to find photos from now on, they'll be on my profile here.

So anyway, this post finds me in Berkeley (just across the bay from San Francisco), which will be 'home' for the next couple of months; I'm here on an environmental technology research fellowship (Brian Robinson Fellowship) from the Banksia Foundation, working with one of the best research groups in the world at putting tiny little pieces of various types of cement and concrete in front of extremely expensive and shiny X-ray machines, and that sort of stuff. I consider this to be really fun - and Berkeley is a really nice place to be at this time of year, the weather has been absolutely stunning so far. I've also done a brief side-trip down to Merida, Mexico for a conference on the durability of concrete under "severe" conditions - which was scientifically really useful, as well as being an extremely well-organised and fun week.

Anyway, no post from me would be complete without a sequence of my vaguely-organised bullet points:

- It's amazing that there can be 100 channels of cable TV in this motel, and nothing worth watching. Or maybe it just means I'm getting pickier... :)

- In a minor miracle, I have found a couple of places here that make drinkably strong coffee - which is a step up from most other US cities I've been to. One of them is even not all that bitter or burnt-tasting..!

- A new Trader Joe's has just opened across the street from where I'm staying here, and is now my favourite food store in the entire country

- Skype video calling is a technological marvel

- I have no idea how they do it, but almost every burger place in the US manages to produce morsels of absolute deliciousness. It's a good challenge for me to try to avoid eating too many of them and getting fat. Ditto the burritos. The pizza isn't quite up to the same standards, though :S

- Why do people design motel rooms with only one electricity socket?

- Berkeley is a very environmentally conscious place - everyone recycles almost everything (more so than I've seen anywhere else outside of Europe), and it's the first time I've ever found myself wondering what is the grammatically correct plural of the word 'Prius'...

- The Bay Area has a brilliant metro system (the BART), but the seats in the carriages could really do with an occasional laundering...

- I still don't get baseball.

Anyway, keep an eye on facebook for photos from the US, Mexico, China, and maybe even some historical(ish) ones if I get excited...

And going back even further in time...

2010-03-29T21:40:00.012+11:00

...I'm finally catching up with posting the photos from my trip at Christmas as well. So, in approximately no particular order, I've got some holiday happy snaps from Vienna. I love Vienna - it's a place where, given sufficient budget (and yes, that is potentially an issue), a tourist with even half an interest in the arts will never run out of cool things to look at. And so, although my interest in the arts (particularly the painting bit of said arts) is probably at most a half an interest, I do love Vienna for its cool museums, classy old palaces, brilliant collections of shiny stuff, and coffee and cake. Oh, the coffee and cake...! If you can persuade the snooty waiters in the cafes to bring any to you, that is - we managed to get ourselves ignored (on the basis, I believe, of looking too touristy) in a cafe for long enough that we just gave up and left, and found somewhere else to eat instead.

The one trap I have to mention regarding Vienna is the shortage of power sockets in the hotel rooms. I don't know if this was just the place we stayed at or if it's representative of a trend of some sort, but we had a single power outlet in the entire room. So, there were three of us taking turns charging laptops, cameras and mobile phones on the one outlet, which is a nice logistical challenge considering the number and variety of power outlets required for all our variously international hardware...

And yes, although I've been there twice now, I do need to go back to Vienna again. We only had 3 days there, which added to the 1 1/2 days I got to spend there a couple of years ago adds up to at least a week short of getting to all the museums I wanted to see. Still haven't made it to MUMOK, the Leopold museum or the Natural History museum, plus a bunch of the others whose names I can't remeber right now and am too lazy to look up on Wikipedia... And of all the ones I've been to, the only real disappointment was the Secession museum - all the good Klimt paintings are actually elsewhere, so in spite of that being the building where he did a bunch of good work, it's full of abject junk (except for the big Klimt frieze in the basement - which is basically worth the price of admission all by itself, I have to say).

So anyway, enough waffling, and on to the pics...

The European adventures of Super-Camera, part the first

2010-03-12T23:14:00.011+11:00

So anyway, I've finally gotten around to starting to post photos from our travels over the summer - with a shiny new digital SLR-type camera (my first ever decent camera) to record the excitement in some extremely pretty ways. I'm going to work through in roughly backwards-chronological order, because I just have to be difficult. So, first up is Barcelona, the site of a very enjoyable weekend visit (via some flights on Ryanair, who didn't actually strand us or rip us off, but whose planes would be vastly improved y enabling the seats to recline)... Barcelona has some pretty stunning scenery and (particularly) architecture, including the Sagrada Familia (that's the big church which I've got a bunch of pics of), and a load of other stuff by Gaudi, who I didn't know much about before I went there, but have decided is extremely cool.

Yes, I managed to get to the beach on my summer holidays...

2010-02-16T20:36:00.004+11:00

Wasn't exactly swimming weather (the ocean is a little bit frozen here, as the photo shows), but still, it's a beach. Didn't stay for long, though - temperatures well below freezing and a howling gale provided a strong need to rush back inside and have a warm coffee.....

No, I haven't vanished...

2010-01-29T20:21:00.002+11:00

Ok, so it's been almost forever since I posted anything on here, and this isn't actually going to be a very long post at all... mainly just posting a link to this, which is (as far as I can tell) an actual exam paper from an undergrad subject that was very popular among the "student athlete" population of a major US university. To quote some of the questions (and yes, these are a pretty representative selection of the 20 multiple-choice questions that were on this exam paper, with the spelling and random capitalisation errors fixed by me...):

How many goals are on a basketball court?

How many halves are in a college basketball game?

How many points does a 3-point field goal count for in a basketball game?

Mmm, academic rigour... And yes, the "lecturer" (one of the assistant coaches of the basketball team) was fired for this, among other misdeeds.

But anyway - I did promise various people that I'll upload some photos from my most recent trip to Europe here at some point, and I do intend to do that - I'm taking most of next month off work, so will have plenty of time for uploading photos and posting random rantings then. I've been spending this month writing and re-writing journal papers, fixing broken analytical instruments, and revising and modifying (and sometimes rewriting) teaching materials to use this semester... so I've earnt a break, I think.

Assortments and oddments

2009-12-12T19:51:00.004+11:00

- People who drive slowly in the 'fast' lane of freeway really bug me. To the point of questioning their ancestry - not only regarding legitimacy, but also species.

- Ditto caravans on highways.

- The Amazing Race episode ran through Prague this week. I will be there in a couple of weeks. Very scenic, and very cool. Very very much looking forward to the upcoming European Christmas adventure as well. Photos will follow in due course.

- Wearing shorts on planes is definitely the way to go. Partly because it's more comfortable, partly because the blankets on long flights are plenty warm enough anyway, partly because it saves an extra pair of clean jeans for one's destination, and partly because shorts are just generally the ultimate form of clothing.

- Skype is the best thing ever, and I would promise to name my first-born child after it if it wouldn't lead to endless bullying at school...

- Salvation Army brass bands playing Christmas carols will always make me stop and listen. I love a brass band, and I love a Christmas carol or two, so the combination is magic. Keep up the good work, fellas.

- The Euro is one of the best ideas Europe has ever had. Unfortunately, of the 5 countries I will be visiting there on my next trip, only one actually uses Euros. Money-changers, here we come...

Science ain't what she used to be...

2009-12-01T19:49:00.003+11:00

...and in some ways, that's probably a good thing. Yes, all the bureaucracy and ethics committees and so on get in the way sometimes, but it is a little weird to read some of the things that used to be done before such things were invented. A bit of background: the publishing arm of the Royal Society of Chemistry in the UK are celebrating their 350th birthday, and so have posted online a really fascinating collection of interesting papers published over all of those years here. Some of the really early ones are worth a read (if you can pick your way through some of the Ye Olde Englishe and the use of the old-style curly s that looks like an f) - like this one, for example, of which I have translated a few lines into modern spellings (but with capitalisation and punctuation maintained intact) to give an idea of what they were doing:

An Account of an Experiment made by Mr Hook, of Preserving Animals alive by Blowing through their Lungs with Bellows
(and note that 'Mr Hook' is actually Robert Hooke, as in Hooke's Law of elasticity)

I did heretofore give this Illustrious Society an account of an Experiment I formerly tried of keeping a Dog alive after his Thorax was all displayed by the cutting away of the Ribs and Diaphragm; and after the Pericardium of the Heart also was taken off. But diverse persons seeming to doubt of the certainty of the Experiment (by reason that some Trials of this matter, made by some other hands, failed of success) I caused at the last Meeting the same Experiment to be shown in the presence of this Noble Company, and that with the same success, as it had been made by me at first; the Dog being kept alive by the Reciprocal blowing up of his Lungs with Bellows, and they suffered to subside, for the space of an hour or so, after his Thorax had been so displayed, and his Aspera arteria cut off jut below the Epiglottis, and bound on upon the nose of the Bellows.

So, basically, the process of doing science doesn't seem to have changed much over the past 350 years - you do an experiment, people try to reproduce it and fail, so you have to show them again how to do it properly. Oh, and just in case you thought people are particularly much nicer to animals in modern science, this is part of the abstract I grabbed from a paper I was reading not long ago...

"Of the particulates tested, only asbestos, quarry dust, fibreglass and galena (lead sulfate) were visible in vitro. These particulates were then examined after delivery into the nasal airway of live anaesthetized mice; all were detectable in vivo but each exhibited different surface appearances and behaviour along the airway surface."

Ok, so maybe we are a bit nicer these days - the mice were at least anaesthetised before being zapped with X-rays, unlike the poor dog with a bellows attached to its lungs... So, having read that article, I'm actually now much much less inclined to complain about needing to go to an ethics committee for animal-related experiments (and yes, I'm looking into doing some work in that area, and no, it doesn't involve interactions involving concrete... I do other things as well as concrete, it's just that concrete is the main one at the moment)

The other thing to note is that the mean sentence length in scientific/technical writing does actually seem to have decreased over the past 350 years, which I must classify as being a good thing in terms of readability and comprehensibility. Having said that, though, while Hooke's writing style is a bit wordy by my standards, he does have an elegance of expression which is sadly missing in most modern science writing. See, for example, his final paragraph:

I shall shortly further try, whether the suffering of the Blood to circulate through a vessel, so as it may be openly exposed to the fresh Air, will not suffice for the life of an Animal; and make some other Experiments, which, I hope, will thoroughly discover the Genuine Use of Respiration; and afterwards consider of what benefit this may be to Mankind.

As a conclusion to a paper, that's not a bad one...

Some of this sounds familiar...

2009-11-28T09:33:00.003+11:00

From an interview with one of the scientists on the LHC project (the giant particle-smasher in Switzerland):

"It smells probably much like you'd expect -- a bit 'games-heavy'. The experimentalists and the theoretical physicists have a different odour. The excessive amount of soft cheese in the area doesn't add to the spring-time freshness of the site."

Ah yes, the brilliant combination of theoretical physicists' notoriously poor personal hygiene, and fragrant food. I remember noticing the same thing at at least one of the synchrotrons I've worked at - although in that case it was mainly the $2-a-plate spicy omelettes and (incredibly nice) pork dumplings rather than French cheese...

Although, from the same interview, this one is a bit below the belt, particularly coming from someone originating from the northern half of England... :P

"The official languages of CERN are English and French, but it depends which group you're working in. There are around 3,000 physicists. You get an awful lot of German, Italian, plenty of Spanish, lot of Japanese, Russian, Australian (because that's not really English)."

Worst injury excuse ever... well, almost.

2009-11-20T20:33:00.003+11:00

For those who haven't heard of Shoaib Akhtar, he's a Pakistan player who is reputedly the fastest bowler in the world of cricket, but also a reasonably colourful character - having previously been suspended for hitting a teammate with a bat, been sent home from England for turning up to play cricket there without a work visa, been caught smoking pot in a nightclub, tested positive to steroids, and so on and so forth - in amongst destroying opposing batting line-ups and setting world records for bowling faster than anyone else.

However, he's really managed to outdo himself this year. Earlier in the year, he missed a major tournament because, in the words of the Pakistan Cricket Board press release, "the medical board has reported that Shoaib Akhtar was suffering from genital viral warts and the wound needs further care and treatment for another 10 days" (urgh). And now, he's going to miss the Australian summer tour because he "had grown so out of shape in recent months that he decided to have fat sucked from his midriff in a bid to return to the game slimmer and faster. Due to the operation, he will be sidelined for up to five months..."

Yep, that's right, he's going to miss almost half a year of cricket because rather than bothering to exercise to try to remove the extra weight - as most sportspeople would do - he's decided that he can just get it all cut off and be as good as new. It might work for movie stars and celebrities, but I'm afraid that in the world of sports, there's no real alternative to just putting in the hard yards... well, except steroids, but he's already given that a shot and it didn't seem to work for him. Oh well.

An unusual combination...

2009-11-15T09:03:00.002+11:00

International rugby match in France, South African national anthem, reggae "singer", backed by a military band and two Rasta-style drummers. This was never going to end well...

And by the way, the South African anthem really is in my opinion one of the best anthems going around - this is what it should sound like...

On pronouns and possessions

2009-11-14T11:37:00.002+11:00

As usual, it's been a long time between posts... so I'm going to make up for it by posting something that contains actual thoughts, opinions and so on. And yes, it's addressing a strange topic - pronouns and related words, and in particular the fact that the ones we have available to us are at best a blunt instrument to describe some of the concepts we are trying to explain. I will also preface this by saying that I have precisely zero training in linguistics, philosophy, or any of the academic sides of this, so there are probably well-formed theories and discussions addressing exactly the sorts of things I'm ill-informedly rambling about here, but that has never yet been known to stop a blogger yet...

The main complaint I actually have here, and the reason I started thinking about this, is all about the concept of the word 'my'. This indicates ownership - but it doesn't explain in which direction the ownership actually goes. For example, when I say 'my car', it means the car that I own. However, when I say 'my country', there is no way in which I can claim ownership of the country... well, other than the fact that I do own about half of a small inner-city apartment that the bank very generously lets me live in. And yes, I nearly typed 'my bank' in there as well - but I certainly don't own the bank, in fact it's far more likely that they own a share in me, given the amount of money I owe them through my mortgage.

So, the question of who does the owning in the 'my country' relationship is an interesting one - or is there in fact any ownership at all? I tend to think it's more a case of allegiance rather than ownership - I owe, and promise, allegiance to my country, but I certainly can't claim to own it. I would also put the concept of 'my girlfriend' into a similar category - in no way can I claim any form of ownership, but I do promise allegiance, loyalty and love as part of that relationship. It therefore seems unfair to me to use the same word 'my' to describe 'my girlfriend', 'my country' and 'my car' - there are two very different levels on which the word 'my' is working, and I would really like another word to be available to make this distinction, but the English language doesn't let us do this, except in a very roundabout way ('the country to which I owe allegiance' is at best a clumsy sentence). I don't know if there are any languages in which this distinction is able to be made clearly or easily (I haven't seen it in any of the languages I've studied - being English, high-school level Chinese, and now a bit of Spanish), but maybe a multilingual reader or two could comment..?

Just because...

2009-11-06T18:10:00.002+11:00

Why do they waste ink on this idiot?

2009-10-30T22:32:00.003+11:00

The local Murdoch paper's favourite rabble-rouser, Andrew Bolt, is at it again. (note: throughout this post, quotes in italics are from that article). Now I normally just ignore the ranting of idiots, but this time his ill-informed spoutings are a little bit closer to home, in that he's taking pot-shots at academic researchers who are incorporating some mention of climate change into their grant proposals, in the hope of getting hold of a few dollars to do some research with. (Disclaimer: I am one such researcher, and actually won a grant in the particular funding round that he's ranting about here - but not for anything climate-change related, so mine isn't one of the ones mentioned).

Now, to back-pedal a step or two, this really isn't actually the fault of the researchers: when writing a grant proposal for the Australian Research Council, you are asked to categorise it according to a list of National Research Priorities - which are areas that the government has decided are important things for Australia to research. Climate change is one of the entries on the list, but it's one of many - and, for example, "Advanced Materials" and "Frontier Technologies to Transform Australian Industry" are two others. Bolt is outraged that 10% of grant proposals, in areas ranging from history to hard sciences, are addressing the issue of climate change, and accuses the academics of being "those cunning academics. Those wind-sniffers.", or "the whole hooting, hollering and repent-repent! gimme-cash crowd?. Yes, Mr Bolt, that's right, we're being cunning because we are able to follow the instructions laid out by the government - which have actually not changed significantly in the 5 or so years that I've been writing such proposals - to focus on areas that are identified as being important. Yes, Bolt is a climate-change denier - it's not even accurate to call him a skeptic, he's not so ambivalent or open-minded as that - but he spouts off about that on a fairly regular basis, and I've never bothered to try to argue with him before. As they say, "never argue with an idiot - he'll bring you down to his own level and then beat you with experience"...

Oh, and by the way: those grants that got funded were just barely over 20% of the applications that were lodged, and the average funding level was about 60% of what was requested. So, the whole thing could hardly be described as a "surefire way to get a grant" - it's at best a way to try to provide a little bit of baseline funding to support a research group while seeking out bigger pools of money through industrially-sponsored research or other avenues. A reasonably large 'Discovery' grant (which is the name of this scheme) is just barely enough to pay the salary costs of one postdoc and one PhD student for 3 years, with no extensions allowed - not exactly "scramble on to this greatest of gravy trains" territory..! It's a pretty cut-throat environment, and something that academics work incredibly hard for - so it's really quite offensive to see someone with (as usual) no idea of what he's talking about, spouting off in that sort of way. Worse still, most of the commenters on his blog seem to agree with him. And unfortunately, these people vote. Guess this is how Pauline Hanson got into parliament...

Dipping a toe into the browser war

2009-10-23T22:07:00.003+11:00

I've always been an IE user (well, ever since Netscape essentially bit the dust), but I've also had an installation of Firefox knocking around just in case I came across a website that didn't work with whichever version of IE I was running. And most of those were internal bureaucratic systems at work, which are never compatible with the most recent versions of any browsers, for reasons I choose not to delve into.

But anyway, the story got more complicated a couple of weeks ago when Facebook stopped loading on IE, so I dusted off Firefox, updated it a little (the version I had was really really old), and saw that that did load facebook correctly. Not only that, but it did a better job of Slashdot and a couple of other sites, and once I turned off the stupid tabbed browsing setup that I hate (regardless of which browser is trying to do it to me, I choose to disable it), it seemed fairly well behaved. So, a couple of weeks later, I now find myself typing this post in Firefox, and using it for most of my regular daily browsing needs. However, given my propensity for giving opinions regarding almost everything, here are a few comments on the direct comparison between IE8 and Firefox 3.5... and if anyone knows a trick or two to get around any of my complaints, please let me know, I'm keen to learn.

* I do very much like the concept of Free Software - not as militantly as some from a philosophical point of view, but I do enjoy the open-source principles (and I like not having to pay for stuff). Having said that, I'm not anti-Microsoft by any stretch of the imagination - I like Windows much more than Linux, and run MS Office in preference to OpenOffice because it does a bunch of extra stuff.

* The tendency of Firefox to always ask to remember passwords is sometimes handy and sometimes annoying. Handy because there are a million different sites I need to log in to with different passwords (most reviewer/author login pages for different scientific journals, each of which assigns me a different user name and a different randomly generated password, even though most of them are published by Elsevier - some of the other publishers do have their act together and run a unified system, particularly the American Chemical Society, but I must have 20 or 30 different usernames for different elsevier journals, which is maddening). However, also annoying because it isn't always good at remembering when I've told it not to remember passwords for a particular site, and keeps asking me again.

* I miss the big 'Home' button in IE, which I had located down underneath the Google toolbar so I could get to it easily. The Firefox home button is tiny.

* The 'restore last session' features in Firefox, for recovery after a crash, are also better. I haven't noticed much difference in the propensity to either crash or leak memory, though - they both seem about as bad as each other.

* I'm far too lazy to go searching for add-ons or extensions for any browser, and frankly don't know what extra value any of them would add to my life. So, no major advantages one way or the other there.

* Firefox always spawns a new window when opening a link from Outlook, whereas IE would sometimes (randomly?) do this, or sometimes recycle an old window. Sometimes I like this, sometimes it navigates away from something I wanted to keep. The tendency of Firefox to end up with too many windows (or tabs, same difference) does sometimes bug me, though.

* IE has a nice feature where, when you spawn a new window with Crtl+N, it opens with the same contents and you can use the back button to go into the history of the window that spawned it. Firefox seems to come up with the home page every time instead, which I'm less excited by.

* However, on the flip-side, Firefox is better at remembering the fact that I'm logged in to the University's library proxy server to get to different journal publisher websites and search databases - IE asks for authentication in each new window, Firefox seems to be more generous with me.

* Firefox also doesn't make that faint (but infuriating) clicking noise that IE does every time anything happens.

* The drop-down previously-visited-sites listing in Firefox is much cleverer (uses keywords as well as the start of the URL), but IE gives more options in the drop-down list. I'd like a combination of the two, I think...

* The Firefox download manager isn't as slick as IE, and the 'always do this for this type of file' setting doesn't seem to work at all. And no, I don't want it to drop all the files on my desktop, thankyou very much! (I've got it to not do that now)

* And finally: the Firefox name is much better suited to cute pictures like these (stolen shamelessly from icanhascheezburger.com):

So, after all that: the verdict is a slight win to Firefox, but I'll still keep running IE for some stuff in the background I think.

Some long-overdue photos, part the third (and final)

2009-10-19T20:50:00.005+11:00

Finally, here is the final instalment of my photos from Denmark... and yes, I have done a reasonable job of stringing these out for a couple of weeks' worth of blog posts. The first set of these are from the Aarhus Old Town (Den Gamle By), which is a whole bunch of houses and other buildings from all around Denmark which have been reconstructed as another semi-open-air museum in Aarhus. I was surprised at how colourful the place was, actually - I hadn't imagined that all the old buildings would've been painted in so many different styles, but apparently it is pretty much authentic. They had all sorts of reconstructions and demonstrations of ye olde time-y lifestyles inside the buildings as well, and a few of the big houses has the original upper-class interiors restored and re-painted...

And finally, just to finish things off, I spent about 12 hours in Copenhagen (including an overnight stay - so realistically not very long at all) - but that happened to be during the time that the Olympic host city was being announced there, so they were having a big party in the main city square... including a performance from Aqua. Yes, they're still alive, and still playing Barbie Girl (as pictured below...). Unfortunately, it was a bit dark to take really good photos, and I had to leave for the airport at 5.30am... but I do plan to spend a bit longer there next time I pass through.

Some long-overdue photos, part the second

2009-10-13T21:03:00.006+11:00

So, the second part of my recent European adventures took me to spend a very pleasant couple of weeks in Denmark, for a little bit of work and a little bit of touristing as well. I hadn't really expected Denmark to be a really touristy destination - and in particular I hadn't really expected Aarhus, which is a city of about 300,000 people, to have all that much to offer in terms of attractions for the tourist market. Yes, I'm a big-city snob, and sometimes have been disappointed in cities of this size (e.g. Newcastle, NSW; or Champaign-Urbana, IL). However, I'm glad to say that both the country and the city managed to prove me wrong, in spite of the Scandinavian autumn weather... although, to be fair, it wasn't even all that cold, and the sun was out for at least a few hours most days. I'm going to split my Aarhus photos across a couple of posts, partly to make the most of the fact that I (for once) have some actual content for this blog and want to spread it out a little bit. Yes, that's cheating - but I'm allowed to, it's my blog.

Before the photos start, a few comments about my impressions of Denmark in general:
- they don't use the Euro, they use the Danish Kroner, which is to all practical intents and purposes pegged to a constant exchange rate against the euro. I'm sure an economist somewhere can explain why they think this is a good idea, but as far as I can tell all it gains anybody is a few extra chances to skin people on currency exchange fees. It also means that it takes a lot of mental arithmetic to figure out exactly how much things cost, which is probably a good thing because a lot of stuff is quite expensive - so in the end I just gave up calculating and paid what people were asking, which it turns out is a much better way to be happy with how much things cost.
- the countryside is very picturesque, and has a huge number of little towns and villages sprinkled through it (at least when viewed from a fastish-moving train) - but it's incredibly flat, with the highest point in the whole country being only a couple of hundred metres above seal level. This seems to lead to a certain amount of windyness...
- given all I've heard (and seen) about northern European food, I wasn't actually expecting all that much in the way of culinary delights - and boy was I wrong. Yes, Danish food tends to be reasonably heavy (and makes me gain a certain amount of weight) - but it's based around the combination of meat/fish, potatoes, and gravy/creamy sauces... which is just my style, I must say. Definitely a step in advance of the German/Czech sausage-and-cabbage offerings, too. Oh, and the oven-bake pizzas are way way better than their Australian or US counterparts.
- there is a department store in the city centre of Aarhus which sells excellent Italian-style ice-cream at very reasonable prices. If anyone is in the area, the peach and pina-colada flavours in particular come highly recommended by a wandering Australian icecream-lover

Anyway, enough meanderings and onto the photos... (there may be more meanderings in the second post with the rest of the photos, I can't promise an absence of ill-founded opinions this far in advance!). The first half of the photos are of the town of Aarhus in general

And now some of the exhibits and scenery around the Moesgard viking museum, which is mainly open-air and out on the edge of town. It's a really well set up museum, with a bunch of stuff that proves the Vikings weren't just barbarian hordes who went around looting and pillaging all of Europe for giggles, as well as a really well preserved example of a bog body. This was particularly spectacular - someone who lived over 1000 years ago, but who was buried in a peat bog and so almost perfectly preserved for gawping tourists to take photos of...

Some long-overdue photos, part the first

2009-10-11T23:07:00.006+11:00

So it seems that it has been a little while since my last post... but I do have several good excuses, in that I have been (a) travelling for work, (b) travelling for holidaying, and (c) travelling home and trying to catch up with the more-than-100 overdue tasks which were waiting in my to-do box as a result of my holidaying. (It's now down to about 30, a week after getting home...). This post will be thick on the pictures and relatively thin on the commentary, because most of the scenery speaks for itself - these are the photos from the first bit of my trip, which was spent in Oxford, Abingdon and surrounding areas, running (very successful) experiments at the ISIS neutron source, but did include the chance to sneak out for a couple of afternoons to take some photos in what I am assured is just about the most "English" bit of England. The river in some of the photos is the Thames, which is much nicer at that point of its existence than a bit further downstream in London, where it looks much murkier. Most of the buildings are related in some way or another to Oxford University, which has a ridiculously picturesque aspect to it that makes it quite difficult to take a bad photo... So, here goes:

Which airline to choose..?

2009-09-19T16:38:00.003+10:00

For those of us with OneWorld alliance frequent flyer accounts, there are pretty much two options for flying between Australia and Europe - Qantas and British Airways. Just to tangle the issue up a little bit, they both codeshare pretty extensively on each other's flights - so it turns out that my current trip, on a Qantas ticket, actually resulted in a flight on a BA plane from Sydney to London (via Bangkok, for what it's worth). Having spent a lot of time on the Qantas 747s but doing this for the first time on BA hardware, I thought I'd make a few comparisons for the benefit of the travelling public, as follows... Note that I'm mainly comparing economy class with economy class here, I've sat in QF business and premium economy classes a few times, but only walked through those bits of the BA plane on the way in and out, so comments in that area are a bit sketchy.

The planes
This one is a slight win to BA - both airlines are flying slightly ageing 747-400s, so while the interiors seem to have been refitted not too many years ago, they're all getting a bit worn around the edges. QF have started using some A380s as well, but I'm sticking with comparing like-with-like. For some reason, the BA plane I was on seemed to have really quiet engines compared to most 747s, which was nice - this may be due to details of the cabin fit-out or even just the seats I had, I don't know, but it was a pleasant surprise.

The seats
I'll declare this one a tie. I don't have any hard facts regarding seat dimensions, spacings or recline angles, but it seems to me that the BA seats are slightly smaller and narrower. However, to make up for this, they are significantly softer and more cushiony, and recline better. The QF in-seat headrests are better - they fold forwards from the sides rather than downwards from the top, which means that they're easier to position properly, whereas the BA fold-down ones are a bit too narrow to fit my head in between the two sides while wearing headphones. However, the advantage of the fold-down BA ones is that some of the Qantas ones are starting to get a bit old and so don't stay in place when they're folded out, which is a bit annoying.

The entertainment
Clear win for QF on this one. Both airlines have AV on-demand systems with movies, TV shows and CDs, and both seem to be plagued by computer problems which mean that the system has to be rebooted every so often when the whole thing hangs. Qantas wins on the basis of having bigger screens, a cleverer menu system to find things in, a better printed guide to help decide what to watch. BA has a better system to plug in your own headset (a standard earphones jack, not the two-pin version on QF which needs an adaptor), but I have the adaptor anyway, so it's not a real drama. On the TV-on-demand section, QF has several episodes of each show available, whereas BA just has one of each.

The food
Another Qantas win. BA does a better breakfast, actually, but their dinners are appalling - almost as bad as American Airlines long-haul international flights, which is really saying something. I had a chicken-and-mashed-potatoes dish which was basically uniformly grey and soggy on the first bit of the flight, and a noodles-with-unidentifiable-slop on the second half. QF also has better desserts, including the occasional icecream, and their overnight snack-bag packages are a big help on the very long sectors.

The crews
They do all do their jobs efficiently and in a friendly way - and while I've always been particularly impressed with the QF crews being helpful when I've needed something on the flight or when I've fallen sick mid-flight, I can't complain about the BA efforts on this flight either. So, no award in this category.

What about up the pointy end?
As I said, I only got to wander through the BA business and premium economy cabons, but their premium economy seats don't look all that impressive (they were basically the first airline to have premium economy, but I think the others have overtaken them now). BA business class also has half the seats facing backwards, which I would find to be an absolute disaster for motion-sickness reasons. So, my vote would go with QF if I happened to have enough money to move out of cattle class... which isn't going to happen any time soon, unfortunately.

The verdict
BA do a fairly effective job, and they do have nice seats - but my vote is sticking with Qantas on the basis of what I've seen up to this point, and the increasing use of the new A380s will probably only serve to enhance this, I think.

A word or two of advice...

2009-09-12T20:15:00.004+10:00

If you're the manager of a car-racing team, and you arrange with one of your drivers (Nelsinho Piquet) before the race that he will crash his car on a specific lap to ensure that his teammate gains an advantage from making an early fuel stop... it might be worth then making sure that the driver in question doesn't then get angry at you when you fire him in the middle of the following season. Otherwise, he might tell people what you made him do... to quote:

Mr. Symonds, in the presence of Mr. Briatore, asked me if I would be willing to sacrifice my race for the team by “causing a safety car”.

After the meeting with Mr. Symonds and Mr. Briatore, Mr. Symonds took me aside to a quiet corner and, using a map, pointed me to the exact corner of the track where I should crash

Mr. Symonds also told me which exact lap to cause the incident upon, so that a strategy could deployed for my team-mate Mr. Fernando Alonso to refuel at the pit shortly before the deployment of the safety car, which he indeed did during lap twelve. The key to this strategy resided in the fact that the near-knowledge that the safety car would be deployed in lap thirteen/fourteen allowed the Team to start Mr. Alonso’s car with an aggressive fuel strategy using a light car containing enough fuel to arrive at lap twelve, but not much more. This would allow Mr. Alonso to overtake as many (heavier) cars as possible, knowing that those cars would have difficulty catching up with him later in the race due to the later deployment of the safety car. This strategy was successful and Mr. Alonso won the 2008 Formula One Grand Prix of Singapore.

Sounds a little fishy to me. And yes, they were very justified in firing him for being a rubbish driver - chances are, in fact, that if he hadn't crashed on purpose when he did, he may well just have crashed all of his own accord at some random point in the race anyway and saved everybody the hassles.

And also: it's good to see that Australia isn't the only country in the world where the internet speeds are rubbish...

No, not the alternative ending to 'Armageddon'...

2009-09-10T22:32:00.003+10:00

Came across some cool photos of a town in Spain here:

It's all built in and around a big overhanging cliff, so there are some pretty unusual streetscapes... (plenty more photos at the end of the link, I'm not going to paste them all in here)

And on a completely unrelated issue: if you're going out to sail around the world, and you get run over by a cargo ship on your first night out of home, maybe the omens aren't good... And what's the deal with all these teenagers deciding to sail around the world at the moment anyway - can't they just go to London and work in a restaurant while living in a squat like everyone else..?

New favourite website...

2009-09-05T19:33:00.003+10:00

There, I Fixed It - a portal of improvisational joy to warm the heart of any engineer. And maybe 'warm' as in electrocute whoever it was that put things like these together...

What did you think the politicians were doing during all those long speeches..?

2009-09-04T21:42:00.002+10:00

Photo from here, reportedly taken in the Connecticut state government chambers during budget discussions. My count: two playing solitaire, one watching baseball online (or maybe just reading articles about it). Well, at least they're not getting lost in the mountains and rescued by TV helicopters and top-secret police spy planes...

Oh, and: kiwifruit rock. That is all.

...and yet, je ne pas parle francais...

2009-08-30T18:43:00.007+10:00

...so why is it that so far this year, I've been to French-speaking regions on three different continents (New Caledonia, France itself, and now Montreal)? Although, the time I have been spending learning Spanish recently does help out with reading French, some of the words do correspond to some extent.

But regardless of my linguistic meanderings, I was there for the once-every-four-years extravaganza which is the World Congress of Chemical Engineering, which brought together almost 3000 often monumentally nerdy engineering researchers in a giant shindig, featuring a guest performance (very very impressive, actually) by Cirque du Soleil at the gala dinner on Wednesday night. And no, I don't have any photos of that, because cameras were strictly forbidden. However, blogging about work and all the things I learnt at the conference would be (a) boring to almost the entire reading public, and (b) completely out of character for this blog. So, instead, I will produce my usual series of random musings, followed by a photo or six...

* Montreal is a city built along a river - and unlike the Yarra in Melbourne, it's an extremely impressive river. There's a full-sized cargo port and a couple of islands, and the water goes absolutely belting along heading ocean-wards from the Great Lakes. They do a bit of jetboating in the middle of the river right next to downtown as well, which is fun to watch.

* They've also got a circuit for auto racing, and I was lucky enough to wander by as one of the practise sessions for the production-car races was happening. They had a few different types of cars running, and I wandered up to the side of the hairpin bend on the track and watched and listened as the cars screamed and howled their way around. Of the cars I saw, there were the usual Porsches with their relatively quiet and refined flat-6 motors, the big growling V8 in the Pontiac GTO (cough - Holden Monaro - cough), and my favourite one of the lot, the banshee shriek of the rotary-engined Mazda RX-8... if you've never heard the scream of one of these in full racing trim, it's a real experience. Not quite in Formula 1 territory, although the RPM count isn't too far short of what F1 motors generate - but the rotary makes a really unusual sound that has to be heard to be believed.

* One of the local 'delicacies' is an offering called poutine, which is the closest thing I have ever seen to an actual plate of coronary disease... take a pile of fairly greasy french fries (yes, Canadian fries are, in my experience, significantly greasier than those found in the US or Australia - and I don't know why), and then cover them with gravy and cheese curds. Now, adding gravy to almost anything meat- or potato-derived is generally a positive step as far as I'm concerned, and I can see why such a calorie-rich concoction would be useful in minus-20 degree winters... but I had it in summer, and that may have been a mistake, as it left me feeling that I didn't really need to eat anything else for about the next 18 hours.

* Qantas premium economy seats are very very nice, particularly when the upgrade is awarded seemingly randomly and for free.... It's basically what I believe business class used to be before they introduced the lie-flat business class seats - so the food is business class style (don't know if it's the same, but it's at least similar), the service is good, and the seats are more recline-y and more spaced out than the regular economy version. So, I made the most of that by sleeping for most of the first 10-11 hours of the 15 hour flight from LA to Melbourne overnight, which is a definite achievement.

* I was absolutely unable to find anywhere in Montreal that sold drinkable coffee. I know that Canadians are particualrly fond of the Tim Hortons chain - but any "coffee" place which appears not to sell anything espresso-derived, and where the staff get extremely confused looks when a customer requests a cappucino that is neither iced nor vanilla-flavoured, is unfortunately short of the mark as far as I'm concerned. The other place I tried was doing a little bit better by having an actual espresso machine and actually using it to produce something vaguely black and coffee-ish... except that it tasted for all the world like it had been made with acetone instead of water. Not good. However, both of these places did better than the coffee supplied at the conference, which was basically a light beige colour, lukewarm, and a little bit sad.

So anyway, here are some photos with scattered comments:

First, a couple of general shots of the city:

The 1976 Olympic stadium is really cool - the tower leaning over the top of it was actually designed to support a lifting-up-and-down style roof, although that had a bunch of technical problems and was eventually replaced by a static version instead. It does still hang from the tower, and the tower has a very nice observation platform at the top. The old velodrome next door has been turned into an indoor zoo called the Biodome, as well.

Left over from the Expo 67 festivities, along with a couple of large artificial islands, was this giant spherical contraption, which has now become the 'Biosphere' and has an environmental museum inside it. I didn't fork out the several dollars to go in, but it does photograph nicely from the outside...

The interior of the extremely impressive main (Catholic) cathedral - and according to the flyers they handed out there, the guy who designed it wasn't actually a Catholic when he started work on it, but converted (from Protestantism) specifically so he could be buried inside the cathedral because he liked it so much. I believe I can see what he was so fond of - it's really quite cool.

And a couple of interesting buildings

Thoughts of a neglectful/preoccupied blogger...

2009-08-21T11:39:00.003+10:00

Ok, so the posts here have been few and far between, but I do have several very good reasons, not all of which I will go into here... :P But suffice it to say that I've been running experiments on a synchrotron in Chicago for the past week, finished last night, and have just gotten back to my hotel room tonight and turned on the TV for the first time since arriving in the US last Wednesday. In the meantime, I've collected just slightly more than 2TB of pictures of tiny little pieces of different types of cement spinning around in circles in front of X-ray beams, which we hope to use to learn all sorts of things about what's going on inside them. So, I think it's fair to say I've been reasonably hard at work...

But work aside, I do have a handful of comments on a variety of assorted issues, just in case you'd been missing my apparent inability to hold a train of thought for more than three consecutive sentences:

- I flew here on the new Airbus A380 that Qantas is running on some of the Melbourne-LA flights, and it's a very nice smooth, quiet plane. The self-service snack bars for those in the cheap seats are also a very nice touch. However, I'm not convinced that it's quite as beautiful a piece of engineering as the 747, which remains my favourite plane of all - bearing in mind that it's been flying commercially for just short of 40 years (starting 1970), the 747 is a wonderful thing. The feeling of a fully-loaded 747 powering up for take-off is unlike any other commercial plane I've ever been in - the A380 is more powerful, but it's so heavy and lumbering that it just doesn't have the same blast of acceleration as it fires up.

- On the flipside, I flew the rest of the way (LA to Chicago) on an American Airlines Super-80. These are a dreadful plane - basically an updated DC-9, with the engines mounted straight on the fuselage at the back, a T-tail, and a long skinny fuselage. What all of this means is that they're painfully noisy, and (to the best judgement of my fairly sensitive stomach) pitch and roll around too much as they fly. It also doesn't help that the last two times I've gotten on AA Super 80 flights, the captain has felt the need to mention in his pre-flight welcome speech the fact that everything on the plane is working nicely today - suggesting that this is something of an achievement, and that we should be grateful for it. I've never heard this from any other pilots before, and it's not entirely a wonderful thing...

- On a completely different note, tonight I saw for the first time a couple of the "famous" white deer which live on the Argonne National Lab sight. Add that to the skunk and the racoon that I saw last time (both the first ones I'd seen alive in the wild, roadkill on the highways of PA doesn't count!), and it seems they've got a good assortment of critters living in this little chunk of forest and science-y stuff in the Chicago suburbs.

- And if anyone wants to read a really interesting story (most of which is probably true, although certain events are bound to have been exaggerated by the participants, there's an article here about some goings-on at NASA a few years ago...

Ok, so this one made me laugh out loud...

2009-08-08T19:45:00.002+10:00

(warning: links are PG-rated!)

Article here: "A young Greek woman, Marina Fanouraki, has become an overnight national hero after setting fire to the genitals of Stuart Feltham, a 20-year-old Briton..."

Long story short: he was being an idiot and groping her in a bar, she persuaded him to stop by setting fire to his bits. Win. And I love that they publish his photo, so everyone knows who he is now - it'll take a while to live that one down. And in the same week as this also hit the news (warning, scary scary photos of the "women" responsible in that story - they all look like dudes) - seems a good week for guys to be being very very careful about how they're behaving around potentially vengeful women...

Oh, and also: what are the England cricket team thinking having Stuart Broad batting at 7? Although, having said that, his first-class batting average is about the same as Graham Manou's... unfortunately, I don't know that he'll play all that many matches at international level, he looks a much better wicketkeeper than Haddin, but just can't cut it as a batsman, and keepers have to be able to bat these days. And also unfortunately, the emphasis on actually being able to keep wickets properly seems to be falling off, even at Test level - which explains why Dilshan ended up being picked as a keeper for Sri Lanka. Fortunately Haddin doesn't seem to drop too many actual catches (which Gilly used to occasionally do), but there do seem to be more than the usual quota going screaming down to the fence for byes...

One remote to rule them all...

2009-08-02T17:18:00.002+10:00

One of the very nice birthday presents I've been given this year is a universal remote, which is replacing the fistful of old remotes I've been using to control my digital-TV-box/VCR-DVD/stereo/TV setup up till now, which required pressing 5 or 6 buttons on 4 different remotes just to turn the TV on and watch something, then a similar process in reverse to turn them all off. The new one (from Logitech, in case anyone was wondering) does the whole lot with a single button-press for 'on' and another for 'off' - well at least it does now that I've set it up properly via the software after an occasional teething problem or two in the early stages. I have to also say that I'm particularly impressed that it manages to communicate sensibly with my $90 no-name-brand digital box, I was expecting a few dramas there but haven't seen any to date. So, colour me chuffed.

In other random comments:

* Since when has Australian football become a giant game of hot-potato, where everyone just tries to get rid of the ball as quickly as possible because anyone who gets caught with it is almost automatically penalised? This annoys me, because it means that the guys who are actually making the play by grabbing hold of the ball are the ones who are always giving away a free kick. So, when someone kicks the ball straight up in the air, everyone just mills around and waits to tackle whoever is stupid enough to try to grab it, rather than going for the ball themselves. Doesn't seem right to me.

* The new Stuart Murdoch album is really good - there's a couple of revisions of previous Belle & Sebastian songs, a few new ones, and a completely different vocal sound compared to the usual B&S style. Works nicely for me. Oh, and Bishop Allen are really good also.

* The start of August means winter is almost over. Yay.

* The Aussie cricket team is doing so appallingly at the moment that I'm actually hoping it'll rain to prevent them from losing again. Surely it's possible for them to find a swing bowler or two to practise against, rather than looking like it's the first time they've seen a ball curving through the air, every single time they play against England? And also, anyone who leaves a ball alone only to watch it hit their stumps should be made to run laps of the oval from now till next Sunday so they can think about their sins. This applies equally to Mike Hussey and Kevin Pietersen, I'm not going to limit it to members of one team or the other...

* The guy who just got eliminated from the Amazing Race reminds me (physically and in speech patterns) a little too much of Cletus the slack-jawed yokel, from the Simpsons. This is unfortunate, because he seemed a nice guy... even if he and his wife weren't very good at the race.

* After reading this very interesting article (and no, I don't usually read Men's Health magazine, I came across a link to the article somewhere else), I'm trying to run a bit less on my heels and a bit more on my toes, to see if it helps me either run better or ruin my knees less. Seems to be working so far, although my calves aren't entirely convinced it's a good idea yet...

That's gonna leave a mark...

2009-07-26T16:12:00.002+10:00

As much as I don't actually like the Ferrari Formula 1 team, I still don't like to see things like this happening to them:

Yes, that's what happens when a ~1kg steel spring falls off someone else's car and hits you on the helmet while you're doing about 280 km/h. And sorry, the commentary is in German - but there's a better description and some photos in this article. And in case you're wondering: he's now having surgery for a fractured skull and eye socket, but it looks like he'll recover, which says a lot for the safety equipment they're running in those cars these days!

Grr...

2009-07-23T21:51:00.003+10:00

I just wrote an entire post, only to have it disappear in an internet drop-out thing because the autosave thing didn't work for some reason. So, to summarise what I had written, because I'm too lazy to type it all out again at this time of the evening...

* Amazing Race is back. Casting seems a little anonymous this time around, but hopefully some of them will turn out to be interesting. First team to be eliminated were being awful to each other the whole time, and I won't miss them.

* Shopping at the DFO outlet mall is a terrifying experience for those of us who are bad at shopping, and find it hard to resist the lure of a 'Discount' sign. I was persuaded to get a nice pair of Skechers (my first non-running-shoe style casual shoes in many many years), and managed to find them just before starting to twitch from sensory overload as far as bargains and '70% off sale' signs were concerned.

* 'Dance your A$$ Off' is a horrible idea, and I have no idea why anyone would want to watch 200kg specimens of humanity clad in lycra, jiggling and twirling on their TV screens.

* Tour de France is an amazing feat of endurance, skill, and stunning French scenery. I'm impressed, as I am at this time every year. Now if only Australia would win the cricket...

* It's far too cold here at the moment, but on the up-side, winter has passed its halfway mark as of last week, so it should all be uphill from here.

And they pretend it's not a sport for thugs...

2009-07-17T18:05:00.002+10:00

This beautifully refined piece of human interaction happened towards the end of the State of Origin Rugby League game last night:

So, two guys go toe-to-toe, one punches the other's lights out. The only disciplinary action to be taken by the judiciary will probably be a one-match suspension to the guy who ran in, grabbed the guy just as he got punched unconscious, and slammed his head into the ground. Classy. Then again, this is from the sport whose players celebrate major victories by defecating in hotel corridors while walking around naked... yep, they're clearly human beings of the highest order who should be used as role models in modern society.

Now I'm not completely sure that this is a good idea...

2009-07-16T19:54:00.003+10:00

There's an interesting court case wrapping up recently in the US, and catching a bit of attention as well. I think this is actually a brilliant example of how the legal system loses any semblance of common sense in pursuit of complying with the letter of the law. And yes, I know I'm writing about this as an outsider (or "alien", as the US immigration department likes to term me), but it relates to science and laboratory analysis, which is where I do make my living, so I think I'm able and entitled to comment at least a little bit on that side of things. And hey, what would a blog be without an occasional slightly-irrelevant opinion..?

So, the argument, as best as I understand it (and do please correct me if I'm wrong) basically is this: the Sixth Amendment (which is part of the constitution, and therefore akin to holy scripture) says that a defendant has the right to confront any witness testifying against them. The defendant in this case, Mr Melendez-Diaz, was caught with a bunch of little bags of white powder that it was alleged were cocaine. The laboratory tests that were run said that it was cocaine. He was convicted of offenses related to possession and trafficking of cocaine. All of this is reasonably standard so far. Where it starts to go wrong is where Melendez-Diaz (or, more likely, his overly-creative lawyer) decided to challenge the admissability of the lab analysis on the basis that he didn't have the chance to 'confront' (6th amendment terminology) the lab technician who had done the analysis to determine that the white powder was in fact cocaine. He took this all the way to the Supreme Court, and ended up winning, which now means that defendants have the right to demand the presence of the specific lab technician, analyst, autopsy-conducting-person (don't know what they're called), etc., who ran the tests which led to the identification of any substance by chemical means. (I presume this would extend to DNA also).

Now, the key thing here is that sometimes this type of analysis will only take a few minutes or an hour to run, but being personally present in court to testify that you've done your (highly procedure-based and often partially automated) job correctly takes much much longer than that. So, if a technician runs, say, 9 analyses in an 8-hour workday, and then spends a day in court for each of them, that means they get to do their actual job one day in every two weeks. This is flagrantly inane - although may actually lead to a boom in the job market for laboratory-trained people, which might be a positive side-effect...

The other question is: if I ran an analysis on an instrument (say a gas chromatograph or mass spectrometer), and the instrument detected a particular signal which takes very little creativity to identify as being, for example, cocaine - is it me that did the analysis, or the instrument? In that case, is it the technician who needs to turn up in court, or is it the manufacturer of the instrument? Or maybe the guy (or team of 20 guys) who wrote the software that controls the instrument? These people almost certainly had more input into the instrument giving the results it did than did the technician operating it; where does the chain stop?

I think it also needs to be recognised that a document written about 220 years ago (like the Bill of Rights, which contains the 6th Amendment) must be placed in the context of the time in which it was written, rather than being read word-for-word and interpreted as such in a modern legal system. The people who wrote the 'rules' had no idea that it would ever be possible for a machine to create evidence for a technician to analyse - so does it make sense to be bound by that in deciding whether the evidence is 'testimony' or simply a statement of fact and therefore not subject to the confrontation rule? I don't think this is the sort of thing that leads to 'justice' coming from the legal system - it's basically just going to mean that technicians can't do their jobs, creative lawyers will continue to be able to find loopholes and create extra billing hours for themselves, and the 'bad guys' will get away with things because of it.

And a follow-up

2009-07-11T20:33:00.002+10:00

To follow on from yesterday's very brief post regarding someone else's experience of airlines and baggage handling, this is a somewhat longer post detailing my own recent fun and games...

Last week I flew Albuquerque-LAX-Melbourne, with ABQ-LAX on United and LAX-MEL on Qantas. I checked in two large suitcases (22 and 22.5kgs/48 and 49 lbs, where the limit is 23kg/50lb on United - so I did a pleasingly good job of packing the two of them to meet the allowable weight without having to pay extra!). Oh, and by the way: I haven't posted any photos from the US leg of my trip, because I didn't actually take any - I was working for 10 days or so at Los Alamos, where I've been a few times before, and didn't have the chance to do any touristing - but there are photos in my previous posts here and here and here (although that last one was in winter, it wasn't snowy this time around!)

But anyway, the ABQ-LAX flight was on a tiny little plane, then swapping, via about a 5-hour connection time, to the big 747 for the 15 hours to Melbourne. When I got to Melbourne, they called my name over the PA system in the baggage claim hall, which is never a good sign - and sure enough, the lady at the counter told me that one of my bags had missed the flight, but would arrive on the same flight 24 hours later and would be dropped off at my apartment for me. The one that turned up on time happened to be my old suitcase which was full of all my dirty laundry; the one that had been delayed was a brand new semi-hard-shell Samsonite case I'd picked up while in the US (70% off RRP at a department store, very happy with that), which had my suit (which I was hoping to wear the following day, but never mind...), my last few items of clean clothing at the end of a 6-week round the world trip, and a bunch of books.

So anyway, the missing bag did turn up the following day - turns out United hadn't actually put it on the plane from Albuquerque to LA, maybe because it was a tiny plane and I checked in two bags, although it was nowhere near a full flight - but it instead got sent ABQ-Denver-LAX-MEL, with the hope of making it onto the same LAX-MEL flight as me, but didn't quite get there. And somewhere on its journey (which may or may not have been related to the missing-the-flight thing), one of the corners of the suitcase got completely mashed in. Now remember that this is a good-quality and fairly sturdy suitcase, with a hard (metal?) frame and shell inside a cloth exterior - so just dropping it or putting something heavy onto it wouldn't be expected to do that sort of damage; the frame is bent and buckled, one of the wheels is at a really funky angle, but there's no scratching or damage to the exterior. No idea what could've caused that...

But anyway, after a couple of failed attempts at contacting the Qantas baggage office at Melbourne airport (as suggested on the Qantas website) to try to see if I could get them to fix it or pay for fixing it (but they never answer their telephone), I just decided to call the Qantas frequent flyer phone number and see if they could help. Note also that I am a high-level Qantas frequent flyer, which almost certainly helps in this process... but anyway, they put me through to the Melbourne baggage services on an internal phone number, which was answered almost instantly. They then gave me the phone number of their preferred suitcase-repairer in Melbourne, and a reference number for my 'incident' - I dropped the bag off there this morning, and it seems that it will be repaired (panel-beaten, most likely) and handed back to me with no further dramas and without me needing to pay for it. So, that all seems very easy, and is a much much nicer experience than the guy in yesterday's post had with United. And it may well have actually been United who dented my bag to start with, I can't be sure - the Melbourne baggage services people didn't seem at all fussed by this, it seems that they're keen enough on keeping good customer relations to not worry about trying to pin the blame on a different airline and make me jump through hoops to try to persuade United that they were to blame and ask them to fix my bag instead.

So, in short, this is why I keep flying with Qantas - it's not about the planes (some of which, particularly the 747s, are getting a bit frayed around the edges), it's not about the in-flight food or entertainment systems (which are generally pretty good but occasionally have a few glitches), it's not even about the airline lounge membership and frequent flyer points (which I could collect on different airlines instead if I so desired) - it's that they actually care about keeping customers happy, and have helped me out in a variety of situations where honestly they could probably have made the argument that they didn't absolutely have to. People who help customers keep customers, and this is particularly so for airlines - and I'm very happy that my nice new suitcase is going to be un-dented and returned to service, as well! (Oh, and by the way: it's a pretty big bag, but does actually and miraculously fit in the boot of my car because it's just the right shape to slot into the gap underneath the support strut which cuts my boot space in half and means my other big suitcase won't go in there. I consider this to be a good thing.)

A rare event...

2009-07-10T19:30:00.002+10:00

It's not very often that I'll post a country music-style video here, but this one is worth it. Breaking a musical instrument is a crime against humanity...

(story here, in case you want to know the actual details...)

Now this is just inane...

2009-06-29T02:55:00.002+10:00

You know the push for "road safety" has gone too far when an ad showing a car travelling at probably all of 40 km/h, in a warehouse, with paint all over its tyres to make 'art' on a giant canvas, is banned in Australia because the car - shock horror - loses traction and skids a little bit as it's driving. Yes, it's clearly going to teach all the kiddies bad habits... the 'offending' video is shown below, please feel free to express your disgust at its pure depravity and evilness in the comments thread.

Oops...

2009-06-28T11:19:00.003+10:00

Just in case you were thinking of moving to China and living in a high-rise apartment building... (photo from here, the building is/was in Shanghai)

UPDATE: I just came across some better (and bigger) photos here if you're keen to see more...

Colombia es pasión

2009-06-23T13:24:00.013+10:00

That’s the national slogan, and it’s a good one. I had a really enjoyable time there last week, for a wide variety of reasons, most of which I won't go into here except to say that I had a very interesting and valuable few days at the university I was visiting, found everybody extremely welcoming, and have every intention of heading back for a longer period of time in the not too distant future – this post is mainly a tourist ad for a country which hasn’t got a great reputation internationally due to some unfortunate history, but which is a stunning and very welcoming place, and deserves far more visitors than it gets.

My visit was to Cali, which is the third-biggest city in the country, and sits in a tropical valley in between two huge and stunning mountain ranges:

Cali also has one of the best zoos in Latin/South America, according to various tourist guides and wikipedia (and wikipedia would never be wrong about anything!), so I felt the need to go and check it out - and, although it's the only zoo in the region that I've ever been to, I certainly agree with them. I do like to go to zoos when I travel, partly because they're always an interesting touristy thing to do and a nice afternoon walking among trees and stuff, and partly because I'm a sucker for a cute animal... But there are a couple of things that a zoo really has to balance in its design and operation - the animals have to have the sort of surroundings that they can be happy in, but they also need to be visible to visitors (rather than just being a tail poking out of a cave, or a foot sticking out from the middle of a tree). So, somewhere like Melbourne zoo has a lot of really happy but completely invisible animals, whereas zoo in China tend to have highly visible but clearly unhappy inmates. Cali zoo is one of the few places in the world I've seen which has the balance really right - the animals are in big enough enclosures with nice enough surroundings that they seem really happy, but they're also very easy to see. Some of them are pretty distinctively South American as well, and live in some very nice surroundings:

I also had the chance to get a little bit out of Cali to a couple of nice places in the surrounding(ish) countryside over the weekend that I was there - the Hacienda Paraiso, which is the setting for one of Latin America's most famous pieces of romantic literature:

And also the National Park of Coffee (Parque Nacional del Café), which is a coffee theme park up in the mountains, and (surprise surprise) produces some absolutely stunning coffee, as well as some of the usual tourist-park attractions, rides and stuff, but in a very nice tree-lined setting rather than the usual gaudiness and tackiness that usually dominates such places (yes, Luna Park, I'm talking about you). The first photo is me, drinking coffee, next to a coffee bush - which is a very nice situation for me to be in, I must say - and the surrounding scenery isn't half bad, either...

So anyway, what more can I say about Colombia..? It's a great place, the food is stunning (particularly fried plantain, but also the marinated steaks, the coffee, the fruit juices, and the ice-cream... ohh, the ice-cream...), and I never felt even slightly unsafe in any of the places I went to (in spite of all the dire warnings of the Australian government's official travel advice site). I don't think I'd be keen to do much driving there myself - the traffic is pretty manic - but taxis are easy, cheap and safe (if ordered correctly by phone). Being able to speak Spanish would be important for people who don't have local friends to show them around and look after them - but fortunately I did, so the fact that my Spanish has been obtained purely through academic reading (and so I went there knowing the Spanish words for 'X-ray diffractometer' and 'variance' but not 'breakfast' or 'yesterday') turned out not to be a problem. So, all in all, highly recommended for a visit, and I'll certainly be back.

Playing some catch-up (2 of 2)

2009-06-15T14:33:00.004+10:00

And as a separate post (because it's a separate place), here are a handful of photos from Carcassonne, where I went for a day-trip at the weekend. Carcassonne is basically famous for its old fortified city, which is basically the subject (and/or location) of all of these photos, because the rest of the town is relatively unremarkable to my eye (except maybe for the old bridge leading to the fortified city, which shows up in a few of these photos). The old city itself is reasonably spectacular, though, I'm sure you'll agree...

Playing some catch-up (1 of 2)

2009-06-15T14:12:00.005+10:00

Ok, I'm at least a week (and an entire country) behind in posting photos from this trip - so I'm going to quickly try to do some catching up. This post is a bunch of photos from Toulouse:

As well as some which need a bit more explanation: this funny-looking building is actually the main cathedral, which was built in bits and pieces over the centuries according to various different plans, and so has a mis-aligned central axis and half of the interior (the older bit) offset significantly from the newer bit, as you can see in the photos taken inside. So, it's probably one of the least classically aesthetically pleasing cathedrals around the place at the moment, but is really interesting (and has a very impressive and huge wall-mounted pipe organ up above everything)...

And also, upon request, the proof of the tiny-ness of my hotel room. No, I'm not going to name and shame the hotel responsible - but just enjoy the masterpieces of interior design here. Note in particular the convenience of opening the bathroom door by all of 8 inches with my suitcase positionedd in the only piece of empty floor in the room, and also the nice easy access to the shower cubicle...

A few photos from Prague

2009-06-07T08:10:00.006+10:00

Ok, so I’ve actually been in France for most of this week, but I haven’t yet gotten around to posting my pics from Prague yet – so here goes. I'll post my France (mainly Toulouse) photos in a few days, when I've gotten around to downloading them from my camera.

An explanatory note or two: I was only in Prague for 2 days, and had extremely limited spare time in that period (basically between the afternoon conference sessions and the dinner that evening) so it was very much a dash-around-and-see-the-best-bits-all-in-a-couple-of-hours type of photographic excursion. Having done a very similar duration trip to Prague about this time last year, many of the photos I’m posting here are bound to be of very similar things to the ones I posted then, but I’m too lazy to check and they’re all photos of nice things, so I don’t really care. It us almost criminal to spend such a short period of time in such a stunning city - but there is an upside to making multiple short visits, in that you can look at the same amazing stuff every time and it's always fresh and new. Well, almost all of it is fresh and new - I was staying in a student accommodation block associated with one of the universities, which is very much of the labyrinthine, monolithic, grey communist-era style. Serves me right for choosing the cheapest accommodation option offered by the conference organisers, I guess.

But anyway, here are the photos:

This is central Prague (old town on the left, new town on the right, river in the middle):

You don't often see one of these smoking a cigarette...

The Cathedral of St Vitus is one of the biggest and most impressive in the world - to me, it comes second only to St Peter's in the Vatican in terms of sheer spectacle:

And inside the cathedral is the tomb of St Vaclav, better known in the English-speaking world as "Good King Wenceslas" of Christmas carol fame, including this shiny little golden trinket (about 60-80cm tall by my guess):

The King Charles bridge is also pretty famous, dating back hundreds of years and having survived some cataclysmic floods a few years ago:

From certain vantage points, different landmarks (like the big church whose name I can't remember which faces onto the Old Town square) can be made to line up with the TV tower that overlooks the city, which gives a nice photographic effect:

And to finish with, a few shots from around the Old Town, mainly in the town square:

Київ/Kyiv/Kiev/however else you want to spell it…

2009-05-31T18:48:00.008+10:00

…and for what it’s worth, I’ll use Kyiv here because that’s the official Ukrainian-language transliteration (Kiev is the Russian version)…

But anyway, my first ever adventure into the former Soviet bloc has been a really fun time, although a lot of hard work as well, being a couple of full days of concrete committee meetings in which I was both an active participant/arguer and also the official scribe – so I now have about 40 pages of handwritten scrawl that needs to be transcribed and turned into actual English at some point. But work things aside (and frankly the work things are probably interesting to me and absolutely nobody else, so I will leave them reasonably well aside), I also had about 1 ½ days of touristing around the city, which has been a really interesting experience.

The first challenge is the alphabet – it’s the Ukrainian version of Cyrillic script, which is apparently only marginally different from the Russian version, but since I’ve never been to Russia and never learnt Russian, that little piece of information is of remarkably little value to me. On the upside, a lot of words are phonetically very similar to English, so knowing 90% of the letters helps guess what the rest are – a bit of memorisation of the alphabet charts in the back of my Lonely Planet guide on the flight in from London helped out there. The main ones are: the Cyrillic H is English N, B is V, P is R, C is S, the backwards N (И) is Y or I, the backwards R (Я) is ‘Ya’. A few of the others are similar to Greek, which I learnt doing maths – something similar to the Greek capital gamma (Г) and capital pi (П) characters also turn up to represent the G (or sometimes H) and P sounds. So, putting some of this together: PECTOPAH (and yes, I’m writing all in capitals because I didn’t learn the lowercase forms…) is ‘restaurant’ (or phonetically ‘restoran’, CTOП is ‘stop’, and one of the local food chains is MICTEP CHEK, or ‘mister snek’ (i.e. snack). See, it’s not all that scary!

My amateur attempts at linguistics aside, Kyiv is a really cool place – it’s been here for over 1000 years, used to be the capital of a major empire (‘Kyivan Rus’), has a bunch of cathedrals and classic old buildings (in addition to the anticipated Soviet-era grey concrete), and a really outrageously stylish Metro system with some of the deepest stations in the world. Yes, 102 metres down is really quite deep for a Metro station – the escalators, running at about the same speed as most others around the world, take so long to get down to the bottom of the station that people actually sit on the steps and read a book on the way down. And there is actually a good reason for it being so deep – Kyiv is really quite hilly, so the stations in the low-lying areas aren’t all that far underground – 5-10m only for some of the ones I went to), but to have the lines running all on one level, the stations up on top of the ridge where the city centre sits have to be dug down a long way. And not only is it a really deep Metro system, it’s also got some very stylish and immaculately maintained art deco-style stations, trains that run every 1-2 minutes during the day, and a fare set at 1.7 hryvnia – or ~20c Australian – to ride as far as you want to go. I’m very jealous.

The food here is also quite an interesting experience – one of the local delicacies is a strip of spiced pork fat, served cold as an appetiser. Yep, that’s right, they get the fat from just under the skin of the pig, and serve it in cold clammy white chunks as a key part of a formal dinner. And actually, it’s really quite nice – you have to intentionally not think about what it is as you eat it, but it’s very pleasantly spiced and the preparation process apparently also helps the texture so it’s not greasy or slimy at all. Of course it’s probably horrendously bad for you, but calories eaten in foreign countries officially don’t count.

A few other random observations:

- There was some sort of street party going on in the city centre last night, with the usual array of street performers, carnies ripping people off in the throw-tennis-balls-at-milk-bottles game, hippies in drum circles, Hare Krishnas chanting, gypsy pickpockets, buskers dressed as pirates, local celebrities singing 80s pop songs in slightly erratic English and without always knowing all the lyrics, and dance troupes performing the traditional Ukrainian art of combined hip-hop/Irish (Riverdance) dancing… Provided me with a couple of hours of very enjoyable entertainment. And helped build my skills in dodging pickpockets – no, I didn’t lose anything to them.
- The young people of Kyiv seem to have taken very vigorously to western culture, which is leaving some of the more conservative older folks who have lived through the Soviet era basically standing around looking a little bemused at all the mobile phones and miniskirts. Well, the seedy-looking old dudes looking more leeringly rather than bemused at the miniskirts, but it’s difficult to hold that against them…
- There’s also a pretty dramatic divide between the ultra-rich and the rest of the people – I think pretty effectively highlighted by the fact that we were sitting this afternoon in a little Romanian car driven by one of our local hosts - a middle-aged gentleman with a brilliant sense of generosity, the regulation eastern European mustache, and something of a tendency towards wearing black fishnet t-shirts to work (at a university) – while being passed by a half-million-dollar Bentley coupe being driven by a 30-something guy drinking a cup of service station take-away coffee.
- Ukrainian Orthodox churches don’t have chairs or pews in them, everyone has to stand up. This could be a good incentive for the preacher to keep it brief… and may therefore be a good idea.
- I've used quite a lot of official tourist maps found in hotel rooms over the years, and they've all got all sorts of different ads for local attractions on them -but never before have I seen one that's more than 50% sponsored by what are clearly prostitution services ("exotic massage", "lady guides for your visit to Kyiv", "international introduction and marriage agency", and so on...).

But anyway, enough of my wafflings, and on to the photos:

The view from my hotel room window:

The little yellow church just up the street from the hotel (no idea what it's called):

The Universitat Metro station:

The river Dnipro, and the suburbs of Kyiv - it's a spectacularly green city, which really surprised me, there are probably more parks and trees here as a percentage of the city area than any other city I've ever been to:

2535 The belltower of Pecherska Lavra monastery

The monastery cathedral:

Some domes (in the monastery complex) & the river:

A huge Soviet-era rocket truck (I think - couldn't read the sign, but it's in a military museum full of tanks and stuff, and the think on top looks like it could have something to do with rockets?):

A couple of shots of the rodina mat statue:

The old (11th century, but reconstructed fairly recently) "golden gate" - apparently not the same one as the 'Great gate of Kiev' in Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, which was never actually built - but a different, real one:

A nice-looking random old building near the gate:

St Sofia’s cathedral belltower

Me proving that I've actually been here, not just downloaded photos from other people's websites while sitting at home in my apartment:

2631 – St Michael’s cathedral, which was demolished by the Soviets in the 1930s in a 'modernisation' campaign, but rebuilt again recently:

One of the buildings (a hotel?) in the city centre, on the main boulevard where the street party was:

Another really ornate building:

Independence square in the city centre:
One of the ambulances from the Chornobyl evacuation - the writing on the side says Chornobyl in Cyrillic script; and again, Chernobyl (the spelling we see more often) is the Russian not the Ukrainan version:

And finally, the really really classic Soviet-era bus that we were transported around in for most of the week - with the grating over the engine at the side held open by a piece of string and a stick to enhance airflow through the engine:

Curing the curse of shrapnel

2009-05-23T12:14:00.002+10:00

The newspaper today has this article, which to me is some of the best news I've heard in a long long time: they're talking seriously about scrapping the 5c coin, and rounding prices in shops to the nearest 10c at the cash register (like what we do with rounding to the nearest 5c now - for international readers, the total amount is rounded, not the price of every item). I see this as being a wonderful idea, and really don't mind paying a couple of cents extra per trip to the supermarket if the rounding happens to send the price up rather than down. Although, I usually use a credit card anyway, and they don't round the totals for electronic transactions...

Loose change is one of my personal bugbears - Australia doesn't have the handy coin-counting-and-converting-to-real-money machines that some parts of the world do, so if you've got a pile of change, you're stuck with it. I just checked the size of my pile of useless 5c coins by a quick and dodgy method using my kitchen scales ($1 in 5c coins is about 60g by my scales, so a rough total can be calculated by just weighing the whole pile and dividing by 60... which is way faster than counting them!) - I've got about $12 in 5c coins that have accumulated in the 2 years or so since I moved into this apartment. Yes, I could go to the bank and try to get them turned into real money, but I've never yet gotten around to it, and the bank tellers look really weirdly at people who do things like that. Parking meters, tram ticket machines, vending machines and all those sorts of things don't accept them - the tram machines don't specifically say that they're not accepted, but last time I tried to use a handful of them to get a tram ticket, most of them fell straight through the machine without registering, and the machine timed out and cancelled the transaction before I managed to feed enough of them into it.

And yes, part of my annoyance with loose change is the fact that, because I travel quite a lot, I've accumulated miscellaneous coins in about 15 different currencies. I like to hang onto international (small-denomination) banknotes, and I do often drop my last few cents/pennies/pesos/whatever they're called into charity collection bins at the airport (or hand them to a busker on the street when I'm about to go to the airport - which is actually my preferred option, because I like buskers, and sympathise with them, having spent quite a bit of time busking myself) - but I still end up with miscellaneous coinage rattling around in the bottom of my backpack at the end of every trip. I like to use a ridiculously-worthless banknote (generally worth 10c or less) as a bookmark - my current bookmark is a Chinese 5-jiao note, worth about 9c in Australian money I believe. My previous one was a Peruvian one that I actually found inside a library book, never having been to Peru - it was from a currency that was actually no longer in circulation, so literally not worth the paper it was printed on - but I lost that along with a library book that I left on a plane a couple of years ago, which was a moment of sadness...

And on an entirely unrelated matter: I'm also celebrating the arrival of a new laptop battery, which means I'm back up to about 3 hours of battery life, from a previous low of ~40min because my old battery was dying. Dipping below 50mins was a problem, because that's how long it needs to last in my lectures...

Random meanderings of the week...

2009-05-10T19:25:00.002+10:00

Nothing in particular, as should be expected by now. Yep, another one of the type of post which gives blogging a bad reputation, where we use all this wonderful technology and internet-ness to waffle randomly about the irrelevant minutiae of everyday life in the pretense that it's actually interesting or somehow valuable...

* I've been watching a bit of Merlin on TV tonight, with the following comments:
(a) it's enjoyable, but it's no Robin Hood - neither quite as funny nor quite as dramatic, and doesn't have the tongue-in-cheek anachronistic references (or the Sheriff) which make Robin Hood so good.
(b) for some reason, I always imagined Guinevere would be more attractive... I don't think they got the casting quite right there, considering that she's meant to turn into the stunningly attractive woman who causes a bunch of trouble between Arthur and Lancelot a few years down the track
(c) and wasn't Merlin meant to be a bunch older than Arthur?
(d) I keep expecting them to run into a French taunter
(e) it's also weird to see Giles without his glasses on. Yes, I know actors are allowed to move on and play another character after a long-running and much-loved series finishes (and I've also seen him on Little Britain), but it does lead to inevitable comparisons...

* Damir Dokic, will the wackiness never stop? Yes, I know he's an evil man who beat his daughter up, but there's just something faintly comical about his string of idiotic stunts over the past decade, from complaining about fish prices, to lying in front of cars, to threatening to kidnap his daughter when she ran away from him, to now being tossed in jail for threatening to blow up the Australian embassy and being caught with a house full of weaponry and explosives which could be used to do exactly that...

* It's amazing what I find when I tidy my desk at home for the first time in months... To be more precise: 12 pens (which explains where all the pens which used to be in my backpack have gone), an empty German christmas-cookie tin, a mountain of old electricity and credit card bills dating back to about November last year, about $5 in loose change, my old watch, a dictionary, two sets of conference proceedings, two PhD thesis drafts, 5 or 6 papers I've reviewed for various journals, and a box of envelopes I'd forgotten I had. And, for some reason, a pile of grocery shopping lists. But at least it's nice and clean now.

* I still think rugby league is a pointless sport, and a waste of good rugby players who could help the longsuffering Wallabies actually beat the ABs for once. (comment brought on by the fact that Sports Tonight is now on TV, in case you were wondering)

* I've started reading a potentially interesting series of books recently - but it's spoiled somewhat by the fact that all the characters speak in an annoyingly written Scottish accent filled with apostrophes and strange spellings ("Ye may have the use o' our taproom, for sure.... Och, I dinna ken..." etc.) Not sure how long I'll be able to put up with that for - it'd be less irritating if it was actually written by a Scottish author, but it isn't - she's an Aussie.

I think that'll do for now - back to work I go...

And also...

2009-05-02T17:56:00.003+10:00

...who does The Age have proofreading their football article headlines for them..?

Oops.

Random loves and hates

2009-05-02T16:16:00.002+10:00

For no specific reason...

Hate: Lady Sovereign has just set the world record for the worst ever cover version of any song by the Cure. What makes this achievement even more spectacular is that it's ripping off such a good original song...

Love: Just made my first ever (as an adult, not counting school excursions) visit to an art gallery in Australia to see an exhibition featuring some of my sister-in-law's drawings. I've been to dozens of galleries overseas, but never before in Oz, and never before to look at art with the same surname as mine on it. And this was some really good art, as well - it was a 'realist' art show, which means it was drawings and sketches by people who can really draw well, and I much prefer that to things where you either have to squint sideways to try to figure out what they're meant to be, or alternatively where you have to be careful to read the labels to figure out what is "art" and what's just garbage left lying around the place...

Hate: being woken up at some unholy hour of the morning (ok, 7.30am... yes I know some people are at work by then, but I'm not, and that's the point) by the sound of an orbital sander grinding the paint off the windowframe less than 3 feet from my head, while they're repaining the outside of my building.

Love: A sunny Saturday after a cold and rainy week.

Hate: Alexandra Pde traffic on a Saturday afternoon. How can it take an hour to get from Parkville to Camberwell..?

Love: IPL cricket on the new free-to-air sports channel every evening

Hate: The worst rule in football, where the guy with the ball breaks through a tackle and runs off but has it taken off him and given to the guy who made the failed attempt to tackle him, just because the fend-off involved contact above the shoulder of the failed tackler. Shall be henceforth referred to as the anti-Buddy rule.

Love: Being able to spend Saturday afternoon doing interesting science

And finally, here's a little video of a former cricketer pretending to know about synchrotrons, which I thought was reasonably classic (particularly with the misspelled captions cropping up underneath him):

All for the love of the sport, of course...

2009-04-27T18:57:00.002+10:00

The video here explains why I watch car racing... it's just like poetry or dancing, but with speed, smoking tyres and crashing-into-walls-upside-down-then-climbing-out-of-a-burning-car-to-wave-to-the-crowd.

Random and unsolicited opinions

2009-04-23T10:07:00.002+10:00

Warning: this post may sound even crankier than usual, because I’m at the end of an overnight synchrotron run tagged on to the end of a day of work yesterday, and with another day of work ahead of me today before I can go home and sleep. (And yes, I did volunteer for it, so it’s my own silly fault!) I do generally enjoy synchrotron work, but changing samples and aligning the capillaries every 10-15 mins from 3am to 8am is a bit too much like hard work for me… the 30 min runs we were doing up to that point were a fraction more civilised, but not nearly as much so as the 20-hour runs that it’s possible to do on some instruments around the place. 10 mins just isn’t enough time to get anything useful done (either work or relaxation) before the next changeover is due.

- I really don’t mind whether you “think you can dance” – or sing, or cook, or lose weight, or participate in almost any of the multitude of self-betterment shows that seem to be proliferating all over the TV at the moment. I’d really rather just be left alone to watch sport plus reruns (and the occasional new episode if the network is feeling particularly generous) of Top Gear, NCIS and Bones...

- I have been very pleasantly surprised by the weather this past couple of weeks – 20-25 and sunny most days, which is very unusual for this time of year in Melbourne (it’s usually starting to get cold and damp by late April). Ever since Easter, I’ve had this feeling that each nice day might be the last we see for a while, but they’ve kept rolling along, which is downright civil of them in my books.

- I’ve been reading a handful of toxicology papers recently, for various reasons – and the writing style and emphasis are so completely different compared to in engineering or chemistry, it’s almost unbelievable. To start with, the toxicology stuff is actually written in comprehensible English, which is almost unheard-of in engineering at the moment. They also seem to run a battery of statistical tests to ensure the validity of every single statement that’s made, as opposed to the tendency of engineers to waffle, speculate, propose things which may or may not be a good explanation for the data at hand, and so on. It’s a really interesting stylistic shift – but I’m actually glad I can speculate the way I sometimes do in papers without being bound by the rules of probability and statistics. I do believe there’s a place in science for (appropriately labelled and disclaimer-bound in publications) instinct and gut feel in explaining data, and although this will obviously sometimes turn out to be downright wrong (as my published guesses have on at least a couple of occasions so far), it also provides more scope for moving forward and enabling major advances in the field. Yes, journal reviewers complain about it – but science can only advance by increments if the only things you’re allowed to say are things that are only a tiny tiny distance away from what you’re absolutely certain is true. So anyway, there’s my occasional rant on the world of academic publishing for you…

- I’m trying to decide whether Coke or coffee would work better to liven me up a little bit this morning, and starting to realise that neither is in fact likely to do me much good at all… so I might give each of them a shot and see if the combined effects are helpful. And in case any of my process engineering students are reading this: please be kind to me this afternoon when you come to ask me difficult questions about the nasty assignment I’ve set this week!

Pick a demographic, any demographic...

2009-04-18T14:54:00.003+10:00

I've got the TV sitting chatting gradually to itself in the background as I'm catching up on some work this afternoon, and they're showing the car racing (V8 supercars, for what it's worth) - with some surprising ad selections in between: the last one they just showed was an SMS baby name generator service, where for a cost of only $3 per message, you can sms "your name and your boyfriend's name" to them and they'll sms back the ideal name for your baby. Pretty clearly targeted at the 'idiotic 14-year-old female with daddy paying the mobile phone bills' demographic... who I wouldn't have guessed would be spending very much of their Saturday afternoons watching car racing on TV?

More local tourism

2009-04-14T18:30:00.009+10:00

After a last-minute change in plans regarding my Easter long weekend adventures (I was meant to go to my grandmother's place, but there was a slight glitch in that plan), I ended up spending the weekend doing more semi-local tourism, by driving a loop around from Melbourne to Wangaratta, over Mt Hotham to Bairnsdale, then back along the coast - about 1100km all up, which I split over 3 days to give me plenty of tourism time along the way. So, it was a weekend spent doing things I enjoy doing: driving reasonably fast (cough... no more than 100km/h, of course, because any more than that would clearly be irresponsible and wrong of me...), taking photos of stuff, and singing along with music that's turned up slightly too loud...

The area just north of Melbourne has a lot of roads that look like this photo (and yes, I did use the freeway a lot of the way, but the back roads are far more interesting...)

A couple of hours north of Melbourne is the tourist-kitsch town of Glenrowan, famous only for the fact that it's where an outlaw (and homemade-armoured and spectacularly bearded folk hero) by the name of Ned Kelly was eventually shot and captured by the police about 130 years ago - as depicted so realistically by this elegant and refned sculpture located on the site of his capture:

From there, the next obvious destination is up into the mountains - and yes, they're only just over 1800m tall, so they're not exactly the Swiss Alps, but they're high enough to get snowed on in winter, while being gentle enough to drive up, as you will soon see...

And given that this holiday was just me and my car, I did feel the need to take a photo of two of my 'travelling partner'...

And some more photos from up the top of the mountain, including the sections of eucalypt forest that got burnt a couple of years ago and don't yet have all their leaves back:

And here's another one of the car, with the summit of Mt Hotham (and a ski lift) just behind it:

Then off down the other side of the mountain, there's some more classic Australian scenery:

Then on just a fraction further and down towards the coast, the Ninety Mile Beach appears, along with some more coastal scenery and little port towns:

And finally, just to prove its resilience, here's a tree down in Gippsland which was incinerated in the recent 'Black Saturday' fires, and which is already starting to grow back again.

So having done all of that, I have an observation or three:
- Bugs splatter really badly when you hit a big flock of them at high (cough)sorry, moderate (cough) speed... I got to spend an hour or so this afternoon returning my car to its normal blueness, back from its previous colour of blue-with-liberal-splattering-of-multicoloured-bug-guts.
- Anyone driving more than 20km/h below the speed limit should be ticketed, in the same way that people driving over the limit are. Particularly those who are either (a) driving large trucks at 40km/h on roads that are clearly unsuitable for them, with 100km/h speed limits, (b) towing caravans, (c) driving a kombi van (particularly those who are driving the traditional old soot-belching versions), (d) towing a horse-float, (e) clearly terrified of driving at any more than 60, and/or (f) in my way. Although, having said all of that, the 350Z has a willingness to accelerate and overtake that I've never come across in any other car, it's almost as if it's just sitting on 100 waiting for a chance to go faster, and will grab any opportunity it can get...
- $75 will buy a very habitable motel room in country Victoria, even on a public holiday long weekend
- I love driving twisty mountain roads in a nice sports car, although it can be a fraction rough on the poor tyres...

Touristing around home...

2009-04-10T13:32:00.011+10:00

I haven't had any holiday happy snaps to post on here for a while, but a couple of weeks ago I did spend a very pleasant sunny Saturday afternoon strolling around the city taking photos of stuff and showing it off to a friend who had been visiting Melbourne for a year or so. So, here's Melbourne showing off some of its pretty sides - it's not as spectacular as somewhere like Sydney (due to the lack of things like a snorting great harbour, a huge bridge and an opera house in the middle of the city - but the convenience of not having the harbour getting in the way of everything all the time makes up for at least some of this), but it scrubs up pretty nicely nonetheless... (and by the way, all of this is within walking distance of my apartment - I do enjoy inner-city living...)

First, here's my apartment block (and yes, it's pink and peach coloured, which I do quite like), and a shot down the street I live in - which has apparently just been heritage-listed, for being a 3-section road with 4 rows of trees and a set of tramlines down the middle of it. All of which is very nice, except when you're trying to cross it (either in a car, on a bike or on foot) - which is a little bit (or a lot) like a game of Frogger: cross the first bit to the first median strip (or the gap in the median strip if in a car), make sure there are no cars or trams coming northbound and scoot out onto the northbound side of the tram lines, make sure there are no trams coming sounthbound and wander onto the southbound side of the tram lines, wait for a gap in southbound traffic and get onto the second median strip, and then get across onto the far side while dodging both cars and bikes in the other southbound lanes...

My local post office:

A couple of shots from the Melbourne University campus:

The old shot tower inside the Melbourne Central shopping centre (called a shot tower because they used to make lead shot by dropping molten lead from the top of the tower, it makes a nice round ball as it falls and cools), which now has a big glass cone over the top of it:

A few random-ish shots from around the city:

The State Library:

The mosaic on the side of the Fire Department building:

The Catholic cathedral, made from bluestone (a traditional building material around here, and a bit unusual... but makes for a pretty imposing if slightly severe appearance for a cathedral):

Another one of the more interesting buildings:

The old Forum theatre (which coincidentally was owned for a few years by a church I used to go to):

Federation Square:

The Yarra river, Southbank and the sports stadiums (or should that be stadia..? - in any case, the big one with the light towers is the MCG, which seats 95,000 or so, and which hosted the first international cricket Test match in 1877):

The floral clock just south of the city:

The Shrine of Remembrance (our main war memorial):

And just to finish with, here are a handful of pictures taken from the top of the Shrine, showing the city, the suburbs, the Westgate Bridge (yes, we also have a big bridge..!), and a little bit of the bay as well.

Only in England... I hope.

2009-04-04T13:44:00.005+11:00

This is one of the funnier articles I've come across recently: this guy is an English aristocrat, 62 years old, with no sons, and wants a young couple to have a son on his behalf to become his heir... but there's a catch, you have to meet his fairly unique set of qualifications:

- not drug users
- not homosexuals
- not 'communists' or 'socialists'
- not 'gipsies'
- don't read the Guardian newspaper
- not from Africa
- not French
- not Dutch
- not from anywhere starting with the letter I
- not from anywhere which has green on its flag
- not from anywhere that doesn't require wearing an overcoat in winter
- not from the area immediately around his manor house, because the locals are "Very strange people. They would have webbed-feet and probably have six fingers. They're genetically inbred. Very odd. Not the sort of people you'd want in your parlour. They don't speak right either."

So, basically, it seems to me that you'd have to be either upper-crust English or from the northern half of North America (and possibly maybe Tasmania) to qualify.

And yes, he's an unusual sort of a guy - he listed his ex-wife's cat as a respondent in their divorce case because it once took a dump in his briefcase, and loves his labrador dogs: "I had to get rid of one German girl because she said the dog's breath smelled. It was terribly rude and hurtful for the dog."

Ahh, you've gotta love an aristocrat...

When I say Yodel Aye, you say Eee Oooooo...

2009-04-02T15:46:00.002+11:00

Finally, an X-Box game I could get into: link...

And yes, I know it's an April Fools joke, and I know that was yesterday - but it's funny nonetheless... "Shake the mountain tops with 100 classic Alphorn tracks including, 'Whose spit is in my horn?' and 'More goat bell (It needs)."

To skip the line or not to skip the line..?

2009-03-28T10:29:00.002+11:00

I'm reasonably convinced that I believe this to be a horrible idea:

Passengers at London's Luton Airport can pay £3 ($6) to enter a channel taking them to the front of the line for security scanning

Given the amount of time I spend in airports, you may think that I'd see any way to speed up the process of security theatre would be a step in the right direction - except that I don't think it will speed it up for anyone except those who are willing to pay extra for the privilege. And I wouldn't be, for two reasons:
(a) I don't see paying $5 in return for an extra 20 minutes of sitting down in a departure lounge rather than standing in a terminal to be a good investment (well, except when I'm hungry and there's a Qantas Club lounge to go to where I could get fed, then it might be worthwhile. American Airlines lounges don't count, even though I can get into them the same as the Qantas ones, because you have to pay extra for the food, and there's no internet access if you're a 'visiting' member waiting for a Qantas flight instead of an AA one, which is really rude), and
(b) I'd feel really guilty walking past all the people dutifully waiting in line, just because I've paid money to jump ahead of them. And yes, I know that having bought a Qantas Club membership and being allowed to use the business-class checkins does often have exactly the same effect, but when I set my double-standards for myself in such matters, of course they're going to be internally inconsistent!

I've also seen a system a bit like this in operation at LAX, where passengers are asked to sort themselves into one of three categories to go through security (article here describing how it works at Denver, where it's also used): the green lane for beginners or families with kids, who expect to take ages to go through, the blue line for people who aren't really familiar with the process but think they can manage it pretty well, and the black line for serious, experienced travellers. Unfortunately, almost everybody self-identifies as 'expert', and those who are truly incompetent very rarely recognise it (and even for those who don't often read scientific papers, the one at the end of this link is a pretty interesting and readable discussion of the phenomenon) - meaning that this 'expert' line is usually overcrowded and slow, and the truly savvy traveller should instead use one of the theoretically slower but much less congested lines. However, unless you're particularly good at feigning incompetence, I'd suggest the 'intermediate' one rather than the 'beginner' one - and all the more so if you have 'Gold Frequent Flyer' or equivalent stamped on your boarding pass..!

In defence of the 350z... sort of

2009-03-16T23:38:00.003+11:00

Yes, I know they showed the old (2002 I think) episode of Top Gear tonight, where Clarkson drove a pre-release 350Z which had a whole lot of things wrong with it, and he pretty much ripped into it. So, I thought I'd comment, because hey, what's a blog for? - I've had mine for about 3 months now, so I think I can comment sensibly on it.

Anyway, to start with: Yes, I agree with him that it's designed for people who like a subwoofer that kicks them in the kidneys, plasticky interiors and lairy-looking flared wheel arches. The build quality on the actual production ones is much better than on the pre-production one he drove, though - none of the plastic bits on mine shake, rattle or wobble, which is nice. Yes, it has ridiculously hard suspension, a tiny boot cut in half by a big fat strut, is a heavy car for its shape and size, and is pretty noisy on the road - but as my 'Top Gear Cool Cars' deck of cards says about it: 'A proper man-size car with a meaty V6 engine and a sountrack to match. Looks good too, and puts a big smile on your face. Unfortunately, Jeremy doesn't like this car very much, but then he is quite old'. It's not a Lotus or a BMW, it's a Nissan designed largely for the US market - which means heavy. Fortunately it doesn't mean saggy suspension and cruddy brakes (unlike every American car I've ever driven - yes, Pontiac, I'm looking at you) - the ride is wonderful considering how hard it is (except on cobblestones, like the laneway behind my house) - it's actually less choppy across tram/train lines than most cars with normal 'soft' suspension. And it's pretty quick - claimed top speed is close to 250 km/h, although that's probably in the 6-speed manual version rather than the automatic I've got. Still, it's more than quick enough for what I need, and also sounds really nice when you give it a boot and it roars into life down the freeway on-ramp...

So it's not a really 'sensible' car - it's pretty wide to get in and out of parking spaces, visibility backwards isn't great, and it's hard for the elderly or infirm to get in and out of because of the low seats and wide sills - but that's all part of the fun of a sports car. You do learn to live with the complete absence of boot-space (just the right size to fit an acoustic guitar into though) or glove compartment - the passenger seat footwell is good for carrying bulky items, and there are some clever little bins behind the seats just above the subwoofer that Clarkson loved so much. On the upside, however, it is a really fun car, and I think it looks really nice - a touch aggressive, not classically beautiful or elegant, but pretty slick nonetheless. Drives nicely, corners nicely, goes like stink, and very comfortable to drive (unless you've got a bad back, in which case the hard suspension would probably get a bit annoying - but fortunately I don't, so it doesn't!).

So, the question really is: do I think I bought the right car? Absolutely, if I had to go back in time and make the same decision again, I'd definitely buy a 350z. Would I buy another one the same if this one was stolen or wrecked? Honestly, I'm not sure. There are a handful of other nice cars in the same price/style bracket that I'd be interested to have a go at as well - not to say that I think any of them would be better, but just that they're something different to try which might be fun also. Maybe something with a boot that will take my suitcase, this time...

Best name ever...

2009-03-16T21:56:00.003+11:00

Grlenntys Chief Kickingstallionsims, Jr, basketballer at Alabama State University. 215cm tall. Bet nobody made fun of him at school...

That is all.

Hey, he said it, not me...

2009-03-15T10:31:00.002+11:00

...but I do choose to repeat the comments of the Lord Mayor of Melbourne (Robert Doyle), who said in today's newspaper:

you could not even compare Adelaide to Melbourne, so devoid was it of redeeming qualities.

"We should immediately commence the orderly shutdown of Adelaide," he told The Sunday Age

He also had a shot at Brisbane and Sydney while he was at it, but that's the one that really appealed to me. Why couldn't he have shown this sort of personality (or even the slightest hint of personality) when he was state opposition leader, rather than basically sitting inertly as Bracks just went and did his stuff almost unopposed?

This LOL did make me laught out loud...

2009-03-12T20:25:00.001+11:00

From PunditKitchen:

Beware, gentlemen...

2009-03-12T11:34:00.002+11:00

...and be glad you're not in a zoo. Here is an interesting article about a chimp in Sweden which has shown, apparently for the first time in the animal kingdom, the ability to plan ahead rationally for something other than a pure survival-related activity (i.e. not just storing up food for the winter). Unfortunately, in the case of Santino the chimp, what he was planning ahead was a stockpile of rocks to throw at visitors to the chimp enclosure - which he placed carefully in the correct places to enable him to throw them at the visitors, including breaking up pieces of concrete to make them the right size to throw. So, what's the official response to this piece of apparent animal genius? To quote: They ultimately decided to castrate him in the autumn last year. Yep, that's right, Swedish zoos have the ultimate implementation of tall poppy syndrome...

Good call from the world of the LOL...

2009-03-05T21:01:00.003+11:00

From PunditKitchen. Pictured are members of our old favourite the Westboro Baptist Church, in case you were wondering...

More meanderings...

2009-03-03T22:05:00.005+11:00

* It's been raining for a couple of hours this evening, for basically the first time this year in Melbourne. Very nice to see - particularly given that it's still nice and warm, and I love warm rain.

* I've also got a nice new office which doesn't leak - so I can sit inside and watch the weather outside, rather than have it come in and greet me where I sit. I'm also somewhat closer to the department's coffee machine and photocopier, which is nice, but much further away from the lab, the instruments I need to look after, and all the people I usually hang out with. I think I'll get used to it though, it's a very nice office and has some good furniture in it... including a meeting table and chairs, so people who come to chat about things no longer have to perch on the corner of my desk.

* Some of the keys on my keyboard seem to have started to bounce every so often - which means I'll occasionally end up typing semi-official emails with 'wee' instead of 'we', for example. AutoCorrect catches some of these, but not all of them - and also only seems to check my spelling in Outlook when I'm typing a plain-text formatted email not a HTML one, for reasons I don't completely understand. In fact, there are a lot of things about the Outlook/Exchange setup that I don't really understand - in particular the file format, which I think is inane, and the way Enterprise Vault always seems to archive and then randomly refuse to un-archive all my old emails.

* In somewhat less happy news, some bunch of morons has just decided to try to shoot up the Sri Lankan cricket team in Pakistan. Just when people where starting to think that it might be safe to start going there to play cricket again, it's been proven pretty convincingly that it isn't. Fortunately none of the players were badly injured, although several of the security guys weren't as lucky. So, no more international cricket in Pakistan for a while, which will be a real shame, because they're always an interesting team to watch. This seems to reflect the view of the cricket world on the situation.

* In other cricket news, Andrew McDonald seems to me to be surplus to requirements in the Australian lineup - yes he's the token ranga in the team, and he's bowling pretty well at the moment to stop anyone scoring too many runs, but just stopping runs isn't enough for a Test-level bowler, you need to be able to knock over a good batsman. He just doesn't seem to have the penetration or pace needed to do that, and isn't really necessary as a #8 batsman given that Mitchell Johnson has made a bunch of big scores this summer and is perfectly capable of moving up a notch in the order. Bring on McGain, I say.

* And in a final piece of cricket news, I'm actually back in the saddle (so to speak) and playing some 6-a-side indoor cricket with a bunch of the guys from church in one of the local compatitions each week now. It's all a bit of fun, and we actually manage to hold our own against at least some of the teams they line us up against - tonight we were playing a bunch of the local teenagers, who we basically routed (149 to 30) - and I then got a bit of a bonus when one of the teams scheduled to play after us needed a couple of fill-in players, so I got an extra game for free and had a chance to play against a pretty good team. I can't promise I'll ever be particularly good at indoor cricket - my style isn't all that well suited to the geometry of the indoor setup, I like to hit the ball square of the wicket while the best scoring chances are straight back over the bowler's head - but it's good to get back into it, a good 4 years since I last played any sort of remotely serious cricket (while I was in the USA, would you believe?)

Hate to say I told you so...

2009-02-25T10:54:00.001+11:00

Well actually I don’t really hate to, except that in this case I was mainly thinking it rather than saying it (at least on this blog…): The big Melbourne observation wheel thing was a stupid idea, and the fact that it’s basically gone and melted in our recent heatwave only serves to reinforce my views on this matter. To start with, it’s in a fairly skeezy end of town that they’re trying (with limited to moderate success) to turn into a new shopping centre development - Google Maps still shows the area as being a piece of wasteland in the middle of an industrial zone – so it offers a really great view of the container terminals, the factories, the second-best football stadium in the city, and a bunch of apartment buildings. Add to that the fact that they’re charging $29 for the privilege of a ride on the thing, and I have to conclude that their two target audiences are:
- Group tours populated by people who get hustled in to the thing by tour guides as part of a prepaid package, and so have no idea how many yen, yuan or ringgits they’re forking over for the experience, or
- European tourists who are so used to paying for things in Euros that to them, a hideously overpriced ferris wheel ride in Melbourne costs about the same as a McDonalds meal at home

So, with that sort of spectacular scenery on offer, is it any wonder people end up looking for alternative forms of entertainment during their rides, if and when the thing works..? (and by the way, it was meant to be ready in 2006 for the Commonwealth Games. Almost made it to completion in time for the 2008 Olympics, which were unfortunately held somewhere else entirely…) London has a wheel, and Singapore has a wheel (which works most of the time, apparently) – so why does Melbourne need one? We don’t have the scenery of either of those cities, so why pretend, and how could they possibly imagine it’ll turn a profit (to coin a phrase), even without the melting-in-the-summer problems it appears to share with our train system. Except that the train system is still melting down, and now it’s probably the fault of the union. And if a Labor government is blaming a union for things, the union must really really be at fault…

And just to complete the trifecta of infrastructure-related whinging, I had the misfortune yesterday of driving along the Monash Freeway/Citylink Tollway from the city out to the eastern suburbs. That is by far the most horrible road surface to drive on, with holes, cracks, craters, partially removed lane markings, insufficient bitumen coverage, expansion joints that seem to be crooked and are really rough, and speed limits between 60-80 km/h all the way. And they still charge the full toll for it. Now, when I pay for a service (e.g. the use of a road), I expect that service to be delivered in marketable form, or to be offered a discount or refund. When I drive along a road that’s more likely than any other road in Melbourne to end up shredding my tyres on jagged bitumen or bending my steering in a crater, I don’t like paying full price for the experience – it’s a substandard service being billed well over the odds, and that annoys me. Having said that, however, it is the most convenient way to get to and from the Synchrotron site, so I will continue to use it, and to pay for it – but let it be known that I’m doing it grudgingly.

And yes, I know I sound unusually cranky today – but such is life, and I’m sure I’ll get over it!

Now that's a cool photo...

2009-02-13T09:44:00.002+11:00

The story of the fairly eventful wedding I was at on Saturday turned up in both major Melbourne newspapers this morning, accompanied by a particularly impressive and unique part of their wedding photo collection:

That's way better than the snapshots I was getting out of my phone..!

There's also an audio interview with the mother of the groom here, if anyone is keen...

...and now for a slightly more rational rebuttal

2009-02-11T22:09:00.002+11:00

So now that I've got a little bit more spare time in which to type, I thought it'd be worthwhile explaining why exactly I think Danny Nalliah is wrong (see links in my previous post for what he's been on about - basically claiming the bushfires are God's retribution against us for having passed less restrictive abortion laws recently). So, other than the obvious point that if God wanted to smite those responsible, he'd be better off setting fire to Spring St and the state government buildings rather than random areas of bushland, here are a couple of scriptural points with which I choose to rebut this alleged "pastor"'s comments...

First, Luke 13:1-5 (21st Century King James translation, for what it's worth)

There were present at that season some who told Him of the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices.

And Jesus answering said unto them, "Suppose ye that these Galileans were sinners above all the other Galileans, because they suffered such things?

I tell you, nay; but unless ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.

Or those eighteen upon whom the tower of Siloam fell and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all other men that dwelt in Jerusalem?

I tell you, nay; but unless ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish."

So basically, just because something bad has happened to you, it doesn't necessarily follow that you've done something wrong. It may be that you have - and in fact, it's more than likely, because the simple act of living a human life invariably results in doing things that are against God's will (only Jesus has ever managed to live a perfect life, the rest of us have to rely on God's grace). However, the Old Testament situation of, to quote the Simpsons, "do you want a happy God or a vengeful God?" isn't the issue any more - everyone will die at some point, and it's what happens between now and then (whenever 'then' happens to be) which is important. And as to the 'when' issue, Ecclesiastes is always good for a comment on this one (Ecc 9:11):

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all

Very briefly...

2009-02-11T19:00:00.002+11:00

Danny Nalliah appears to be becoming Australia's answer to Fred Phelps. I do not consider this to be a good thing. I'm a Christian, I don't for an instant think God would set fire to the whole state of Victoria to demonstrate his objection to our abortion laws, and I object to the lunatic fringe giving the rest of us all a bad name. We don't need our own Fred Phelps - one of him in the world is more than enough.

And now to return to your usual service...

2009-02-09T21:34:00.004+11:00

Ok, no more genuinely content-filled posts here - this one is just pure stupidity on the part of one of the local professional football teams (and by 'local', I mean 'based at the stadium that I can see while standing on the footpath in front of my apartment'), where they had a bit of a dust-up in an intraclub practise match. Youtube gives me the video...

In which possible world does it seem a good idea to punch a teammate in the head, and then kick him in the crotch as he lies stunned on the ground?

An interesting weekend in sunny Victoria...

2009-02-08T18:34:00.010+11:00

Australia's weather just keeps on getting more and more interesting, with some fairly cataclysmic results (as most will have seen fairly extensively discussed on TV by now, and in far more detail than I'll go into here) - but suffice it to say that the hottest day ever in Melbourne (46.4 was the final temperature I heard), coupled with 100km/h winds (Force 10 on the Beaufort scale, which is classified as "Whole gale/storm") turned the already dried-and-shrivelled state into a sequence of raging infernos. Being a city slicker, I'm usually quite some distance away from where bushfires happen, and just end up watching them on TV instead. However, this time, I was at a wedding at a vineyard out in the Yarra Valley, and so got a front-row seat to the whole thing - literally. There was a big plume of smoke probably 40-50km north of where we were from about mid-afternoon onwards, but they decided it was far enough away that we should go on with the whole wedding thing - so we did. And I can assure you, it's completely the wrong weather to be wearing a suit and tie in..! (jackets came off very very early in the piece, but it was still plenty warm enough - although on the upside, I was wearing a nice cotton long-sleeved shirt and wollen trousers, which is exactly the sort of natural fibre that my mother spent my entire childhood insisting I carry in my school-bag in case there was a fire - so the advice did sink in, even if it was a bit coincidental) Fortunately, the cloud of smoke above us was thick enough to block out the sun - otherwise it would've been even more oppressive. I did snap a few photos on my phone camera, which explains the shoddy quality of the pictures...

By the way, the reddish glowing spot in a couple of those photos is the moon, seen through a cloud of smoke.

But anyway, after the ceremony, we were meant to be having a nice sit-down dinner in a big white tent they had set up. Obviously, a tent is not a good place to be when a fire is approaching - and this one was certainly approaching, there were burning embers falling dozens of kilometres ahead of the main fire, which pretty soon started to set fire to the forest on the hill opposite the vineyard buildings. So, being a good bunch of city slickers, we stood around outside and took photos until they ushered us all into the nice brick winery building, which they then hosed down from the outside with fire hoses... and then we stood inside and watched the fire through the windows, and also continued to take more photos...

The fire on the hill just to the north-west of us was looking a fraction hairy for a while, coming steaming towards the vineyards with the wind behind it - and then the wind shifted around to the southwest, all of a sudden, and even more powerfully than the north wind. This cooled everything down by about 10 degrees and redirected the fire on the hill away from us, but also redirected a grassfire/grapevine-fire in the valley immediately south of the building straight at us. Being a very slow-moving fire due to the nice damp grapevines, this made for some nice photos (some of the ones above taken through the trees), but also generated a huge amount of smoke. Eventually they let us outside again, and we did migrate down to the tent for some very very nice desserts and the traditional wedding-band type of music (although they did slightly predictably open with Disco Inferno). Some of the rest of the photos are pretty dark - my phone isn't a very good camera, particularly when the sun has gone down adn the air is full of smoke - but in the ones that look mainly black, the reddish glowing bits are all fire and the whitish bit is the wedding tent...

So anyway, the wedding ended up being more of an adventure than these things usually are - and nobody was allowed to leave early, because the highway back to Melbourne from that region was cut by fire for almost the entire evening, only reopened after about 11.30, and even then it was still slightly on fire on both sides of the road in quite a few areas and with trees down all over the place. Quite a few of the guests (and the bridal party) were meant to be staying in the local bed-and-breakfast style accommodation places - but most of these actually burned down during the evening, which put something of a kink in those plans... and we actually drove past several of them on the way home, in the later stages of burning to the ground. I do believe everyone got out and home safely though - the fire brigade were in regular touch throughout the evening, because 200 wedding guests (and assorted kitchen staff, musicians and photographers) in the middle of an active bushfire area were apparently some sort of concern to them..! The map I've swiped from google maps and photoshopped (well, technically GIMPed, but that doesn't have quite the same ring to it) shows basically what was going on - the greyed-out bits are the bits I saw on fire (and it may have been more widespread than that on the right-hand side of the map, I don't know), the red circle is where we were, and the non-greyed-out scale bar is at the bottom left. Yes, the fire was reasonably close to where we were - and as you can see from the photos of the hill on fire, it looked much much closer than that for a lot of the time.

It was raining ash and burning crud for the whole evening (good thing I carefully washed my car before the wedding...), but I believe that the worst that came of that is that my suit pants now need drycleaning because they stink of smoke. So, all in all, an eventful day for us all. Not anywhere near the same magnitude of drama as the 4 or 5 towns that have been completely wiped off the map in the past day or two (including 3 that I've been to within the past decade - one only last year), but still quite enough excitement for me right at the moment I think...

Hmm...

2009-02-03T20:09:00.004+11:00

Out of this list of the 11 Most Depressing Songs Ever, I have 8 featured in my iTunes collection... and a couple are marked with 5 stars (Mad World and Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want), which ranks them among the 161 'best' out of my 7131-song library. So, it seems that I'm possibly the only Hawaiian-shirt-wearing emo in the world...

Another meme...

2009-02-02T22:12:00.004+11:00

I just filled this one in as a Facebook meme, but thought it'd fit nicely here also:

_____________________________________________

Ok, so some of these things aren't really news to many, but here goes anyway...

1. I'm not going to bother tagging anybody's name in this note, because by the time I get around to doing these things, else has usually done them already.

2. I'm currently watching the Superbowl, even though I already know who won and by how much. This is because I like American football.

3. On the other hand, I don't like tennis, yet end up watching quite a bit of the Australian Open every year simply because there's nothing else on TV

4. I'm slightly scared of Serena Williams. She's huge. I wish she'd lose more often though.

5. Top Gear is by far the best show on TV. The English one, not the lame Aussie attempt.

6. I am actually really interested in the work I do. That's why I do so much of it.

7. I'm always up for a game of Wordscraper if anyone is keen...

8. I blog because I believe the world is entitled to my opinion, whether it wants it or not. And completely regardless of whether I've got anything useful or interesting to say.

9. I really hate reality TV shows where the competitors cry a lot. This includes anything to do with weight loss, singing-based competitions, talent competitions, and so on. Also, I don't care if you "think you can dance".

10. The reason I sometimes come across as a bit of a grouch is that sometimes I am a bit of a grouch.

11. I'm also a stick-in-the-mud and a luddite. I see these as positive character traits, because they save me from falling for fads.

12. I have no tolerance for bad science in any form. I also have very limited tolerance for idiots, science-related or not.

13. I have very few points of complete extravagance in my life - but my car will almost always be one of them. I refuse to buy a boring car.

14. I rank my musical instruments in rough order of competence as: trumpet, trombone, flugelhorn, guitar, soprano trombone, bass, ukelele. My ukelele playing is lousy because my ukelele is garbage; I probably should've bought a 'musical instrument' grade one rather than a 'cheap souvenir of a trip to Honolulu' grade one.

15. My lounge room is running out of space for living in because of my musical instrument collection - but that's a reason to live more compactly rather than to own less instruments...

16. I will insist on my right to wear lycra shorts while riding a bicycle - proper bike shorts make the whole thing so much more comfortable

17. I only wear shoes when absolutely necessary

18. Ditto long pants

19. Related to 17 & 18, I try to take every possible opportunity to travel to warmer places whenever I can. Actually, I just take every opportunity to travel, and most of them turn out to be to warmer places.

20. I have an appalling susceptibility to motion sickness, but I refuse to let this ruin my enjoyment of travel

21. I'm pretty poor at driving manual cars, and don't see the point of spending all my effort remembering to change gears and use the clutch when a well-designed car is actually a whole lot better at it than me.

22. I insist on being polite to waiters/waitresses, and almost certainly over-tip when in places where it's expected, largely because I'm uncomfortable with the "master/servant" type relationship

23. I love a good debate, and will sometimes disagree with someone on an issue I don't care about simply for fun

24. I am perfectly capable of sleeping in broad daylight or in noisy places, if the occasion suits. And it often does.

25. It seems that when playing Guitar Hero World Tour, I'm much better at vocals than either guitar or bass. This may well come as a major surprise to anyone who's ever heard me sing...

Feelin' hot, hot, hot...

2009-01-29T21:32:00.003+11:00

Talk of the town at the moment is that we're having some sort of cataclysmic heatwave-to-end-all-heatwaves type of event - the past two days have both been 43 degrees (about 110F for those who like to think in those terms), and tomorrow apparently will be as well. What this means for me is that I get to really appreciate the air-conditioning in my office while I'm there, and enjoy the warmth while I'm not. I actually really get into the warm weather - 43 is maybe a bit over the top, but mid-30s is something I find quite comfortable - so I'm currently sitting in my apartment with the windows open and a fan running, which makes it a very pleasant evening at about 35 degrees right now.

Anyway, the whole heatwave thing has put some of the infrastructure around here under a certain amount of strain - apparently the power grid is a fairly minor distance away from going into brownout mode (some areas were blacked out all day today), and they're having all sorts of problems with the train system as well. Y'see, in spite of being in a part of the world where it regularly gets over 37C (maybe half a dozen or so times each summer), every time this happens it seems to cause abject chaos as the trains break down, or their airconditioning systems break down (and because the windows don't open on the airconditioned trains, this is a bit of a problem), or - and this is the best one - the rails buckle because it's too hot for them (photo nicked from here):

The government and the train company can't seem to agree on whose fault it is, but the basic cause is that nobody has spent any money on public transport infrastructure here in a couple of decades (since the City Loop was built in the 1980s), and the last new major train line in the suburbs was built in 1930. So, the system is not only too small for the area it serves, but also painfully slow and outdated compared to basically every major city in Europe, and quite a few in the US and Canada as well. They keep blaming the buckling-rails problem on the fact that there are a whole lot of wooden sleepers (rather than concrete ones) still being used all over the place, and which they're in the process of getting rid of - so let's hope that goes some distance towards fixing the annual 'it's hot so there aren't any trains' problems... Fortunately, I live close enough to my office that I don't need to use public transport any more (I can either walk or bike to work), but on the off-chance that I might at some point need to use a train, I would really like to think that it'd actually work.

In a couple of unrelated things:

* I really hope Serena Williams doesn't win the Australian Open tennis, largely because I find her irritatingly arrogant - so here's hoping one of the swarm of Russians who seem to be dominating everything this year manages to knock her off in the final... Also, I think tennis players who argue with the umpire invariably end up looking like spoilt children, maybe it's got something to do with the fact that they're looking upwards at an authority figure who has no intention of changing his/her mind, and trying to persuade them to change their mind anyway. And finally, I think Rafael Nadal looks like he's playing stunningly well, and will be difficult to beat in the final - but the mere fact that I've said that means that there's a very real chance he'll lose, because I have a wonderful tradition of being completely wrong about things like this.

* Whoever is in charge of wheeling Andrew Symonds around from cricket match to cricket match (and persuading him to turn up sober, rather than either being drunk or just going fishing instead...) should really ensure that he has no opportunity to attempt to speak in a public forum.

* And finally, here is a link to some of the most stunning photos of a city I've ever seen - a photographer rented a helicopter one evening, and flew it over London with his camera attached, and the results were really really cool.

Ok, now for the photos...

2009-01-19T22:45:00.007+11:00

I'm now back home, and unfortunately got to spend the whole of today working through all the bureaucracy that I decided I didn't want to do while I was away on holidays last week... but enough of that, and on to happier things, and happier places, and the promised photos from my week away:

Of course, it wouldn't be a blog post without ill-founded opinions of some sort or another, and so my claims that I now consider myself capable of driving a car with manual transmission (on the basis of having managed to go about 2 1/2 days at the end of my trip without stalling or bunny-hopping the car, and having returned it with some semblance of a clutch and gearbox still intact) will almost certainly fall in the 'ill-founded' category. But that's my claim, and I'm sticking with it. I've also managed to survive an entire week in Noumea without once heading the wrong way down a one-way street (or down the wrong side of a two-way street), which I do consider to be a significant achievement given that its city centre has what I consider to be one of the most labyrinthine arrays of one-way streets I've ever come across anywhere in the world, and drives on the opposite side of the road to Australia. It's also not helped by the fact that they seem to be experimenting with which streets go in which directions, meaning that (a) not everything is all that well signposted, (b) none of the maps handed out by the tourist office actually correspond completely with reality, and (c) there's apparently an attempt to have successive streets alternating in direction, but it's just far enough away from the pattern in several places as to make the pattern completely untrustworthy... Oh, and there's at least one street which runs southbound in the northern half and northbound in the southern half, culminating in a meeting of the minds in the centre, where everyone has to decide who gives way to who without the apparent benefit of any rhyme or reason. Fortunately there's not a whole lot of traffic on the roads anyway most of the time, so it doesn't really cause any problems, just a little bit of added fun...

So, with that long (and eminently skippable) paragraph out of the way, here are some happy-snaps, sorted into a few vague-ish categories:

First, the usual "I'm in a different place and this is what it looks like, and hey, it's kinda tropical" type of shots...

And some landscape-y shots of the interior of the main island of New Caledonia ("Grande Terre"), which I believe has some pretty low-grade soil so not many trees grow there, which gives some very different landscapes:

And a big lake I had a look around, which was made by damming a river and so has bits of 'drowned forest' poking up out of it in various places:

A shot of the fluorescent corals in the Noumea Aquarium (which is very impressive, and definitely worth a visit if anyone is in the area... and this was the best of a number of photos I took in this very very dark room, trying to hold the camera really still so it could take a non-blurry photo with its desired several-second exposure time.

And finally a few that I think are just pretty cool photos for the sake of being cool photos - and show some of the fun you can have with a cheap digital camera, zero image-processing, and no pretensions whatsoever at being a "photographer" or anything along those lines...

Baguettes in paradise..?

2009-01-15T21:03:00.002+11:00

This post finds your intrepid correspondent in one of the more tropical places I’ve been recently: Noumea, New Caledonia. And no, it’s not a work trip – this one is a holiday courtesy of the ‘where can my points fly me to?’ button on the Qantas frequent flyer website (which is one of my favourite buttons, if I’m to be honest with you). I’ve got a week here, and I’ve been strictly informed by several people (largely independently of each other) that I’m not allowed to do any work at all during this time – and 5 days in, I’ve actually managed to stick to that, with the exception of answering some emails each day. Oh, and before I get any further: apologies for the lack of photos and/or links throughout this post, the internet connection I’ve managed to get my laptop onto here is barely capable of uploading plain text, let alone searching for links or transferring photos… but not to worry, I promise I’ll upload some happy snaps later to make up for it. (I’ve taken about 250 so far, so I’m sure some of them will have turned out nicely..!)

So anyway, back to New Caledonia: it’s a little slice of Frenchness in the middle of the Pacific, and everyone speaks French plus a (usually very) little bit of English, plus the usual Pacific Islands array of dozens of local languages. The currency is pegged to the Euro, which makes everything pretty expensive to Aussies anyway, but build in the cost of importing things to an island of around 250,000 people, and you end up with the situation where a 2L bottle of orange juice costs AU$8 in the supermarket… and no, I haven’t been drinking much orange juice (Coke is very very much cheaper, and the tap water is pretty good too)… Yes, it’s a fairly pricey place to hang out, but it’s also a very scenic part of the world - mountains, beaches, rainforest, tropical scrublands, waterfalls, little islands, reefs, old mining areas, a huge lake inland, and so on – and definitely worth a visit if anyone is looking for a holiday destination. All the tourist books say that you need to speak a bit of French before coming here – but I’d alter that to say you need to be able to decipher a bit of French. I’ve generally been able to get by with simple English plus hand-waving when communicating with people – the main linguistic challenge is actually in making sense of the road signage, which is where the ‘deciphering’ comes in.

For a brief diversion, while I’m on the subject: driving around here has also been an interesting experience, with a few challenges built in. One is the linguistic side of things, which honestly isn’t too much of a drama because I’ve been to France a couple of times, and so have a vague idea of how to mentally convert things into English for myself in some sort of slightly-accurate manner. Driving on the ‘wrong’ side of the road is also a non-issue given the amount of driving I’ve done in the USA; it’s basically an almost-automatic switch from one side to the other now. The main challenges are therefore twofold: potholes (which are everywhere, and gigantic), and the fact that, being French, every car on the road here is a tiny little Peugeot or Renault with a manual gearbox. Now, as a good Australian, I’ve spent the past decade or more driving exclusively automatic cars – and having spent a week in a manual here because that’s all the rental company had, I am more convinced than ever that this is the way to go. Other than the tendency of the stupid thing to stall at the most inopportune moments, there’s entirely too much thinking that needs to go into driving a manual – in particular, remembering to jump on the clutch as well as the brake when I screech to a halt as someone jumps out from a side street in front of me, or as I come around a blind corner to be greeted by an array of potholes spanning the whole road and as deep as my head, or etc… Add to this the fact that I tend to forget to shift back down into 1st while waiting at traffic lights, the annoyance of trying to downshift while going up a hill only to discover an entire gearbox full of neutrals, the relative ease with which one can go 1-2-5-“#%^#&”-2-3-4 when pulling away from traffic lights, the joy of going 1-2-1-2-3-1-2-1-2-3-2-1-2 endlessly when driving in town, and the whole handbrake-start thing – give me my automatic any day.

Or better still, give up on the driving entirely and just go snorkelling. (Yes, you need to drive to get to the snorkelling beach, but let’s assume I’ve managed to do that without incident…) The tropics are perfect for snorkelling, mainly because the water is warmer and the UV less burny than in the southern bit of Australia, but also because tropical fish are way cooler, more numerous and friendlier than anything I’ve met closer to home. The little islands just off the coast around Noumea are particularly good – I was on one this afternoon (caught the ‘water taxi’ out there, which was a bit of fun in itself), and they’ve got a marked-out snorkel trail through the reefs, with a whole bunch of fish who are obviously so accustomed to people that they just come up to you for a chat, which is very pleasant of them. And a tip: it’s worth bringing one’s own personal snorkel to a place like this, partly because it’s cheaper (the daily rental rate works out to about the cost of actually buying one…), partly because there aren’t actually snorkel rental places at all the isolated beaches with nice fish-filled bays, and partly because I’d rather not be chewing on the same mouthpiece that 50 previous tourists have also used…

And on the subject of fish: they’ve also got the best aquarium I’ve ever come across here (although, to be honest, I haven’t really been to a huge number of them), with a whole array of fish, starfish, nautiluses (which are an unusual-looking critter), seasnakes, lobsters, a white stingray, a turtle, plus some eels and things, in very nicely put-together displays – definitely worth a look if you’re in town.

So anyway: I do promise photos in the not too distant future, and I heartily recommend Noumea as a slightly-off-the-usual-Aussie-tourist-path destination if you share my love of all things tropical. And I’m doubly glad I came here rather than heading to Fiji this week, judging by the photos of the current cyclone issues they’re having there...!

Miscellaneous, as usual...

2009-01-06T19:05:00.004+11:00

In fairly random news:

* The weather has finally turned good, with summer making it here only a month or so behind schedule. Definitely an appropriate occasion for breaking out the hawaiian shirts for work...

* In an utterly shameless plug, my book is now available for pre-order online here - and yes, it's pretty expensive, but all academic books are because they've got pretty small print runs. It's also listed on Amazon, but the title is currently misspelled... But yes, this explains part of why I've been slack on the blogging over the past year or so.

* I think it's entirely cruel of the Australian Research Council to have the major annual deadline for grant applications in February. This means that all the researchers spend the whole of the summer 'holidays' writing grant applications, which is close to the least fun part of the whole academic world.

* It's certainly time for a shake-up in the Australian cricket team - Matt Hayden has had his time and needs to be dumped (hopefully replaced by Phil Hughes, but more likely Chris Rogers, because the thought of actually bringing a talented 20-year-old into the team is far too extreme for the current bunch of selectors, who will most probably choose the 30-something instead). The experiment with an all-rounder batting at 6 should be taken out the back and quietly 'put to sleep' - they've wound up with a succession of players who can bat well occasionally but not reliably, keep getting injured, and can't bowl well enough to do any damage. Time to go back to picking an actual batsman at #6, and use Clarke and/or Katich as the backup bowler - neither of them could be much less dangerous than a one-legged Symonds... Oh, and a spin bowler who actually spins the ball would be a significant improvement on Nathan Hauritz, who seems about as dangerous as a basket full of declawed and sleepy kittens.

* For some reason, I almost prefer summer TV to 'regular' TV - they show a whole lot more cricket and cheesy sitcoms, and way way less of those stupid dancing/singing/weight-loss/ice-skating/etc "reality" shows. Pity about the repeats of NCIS and Bones instead of new episodes, but I can put up with that I guess...

* Oh, and here are some photos of the beach at Anglesea, where I spent the Christmas-New Year week at the annual church camp. Very enjoyable, even if the weather was a little patchy...

Marginally creepy, some would say..?

2008-12-24T17:09:00.008+11:00

Warning: if you get easily creeped out by statues of skeletons, I don't recommend reading this post...

I've just been flicking through some of my photos from Germany, and realised just how many really creepy-looking statues involving skeletons are prominently displayed throughout some of the places I went to. For example, Nürnberg (spelled Nuremberg in English for some reason) has these two glorious masterpieces sitting in its city squares - the first seems to have something to do with a sailing ship (don't remember exactly what it's meant to be depicting):

And the other is called the 'marriage merry-go-round' or something like that, and depicts several different stages in the relationship between a man and a woman, from courship through marriage to having children to, for some reason, turning into skeletons and strangling each other:

However, having said that, no post about creepy-looking European sculptures would be complete without a discussion of cathedral-based creepiness. So, just for a laugh, here are a few of the best I've got in my collection...

In Mainz, Germany:

In Milan, Italy (this one isn't a skeleton, but he does appear to have been flayed and is wearing his own skin as a scarf):

And finally, in Vienna, Austria (although this one is actually in a crypt as part of a coffin, so it's not entirely unexpected...)

…and a partridge in a pear tree

2008-12-21T07:01:00.007+11:00

So this week finds me in Germany, where I’ve been discussing particle technology with various other ‘Young Researchers’ from various different places, and taking a couple of days of holidays to see some of Europe in winter while I’m at it. And, at least some of you may be glad to hear, flatly refusing to do any work whatsoever during those days on which I’m taking my annual leave (well, except reading a few emails and replying to the ones that I feel I *want* to reply to, and which don’t involve proofreading, revising or compiling any documents to be sent to anyone!) This is actually my first time in Germany (well, I’ve transited through Frankfurt airport before, but that doesn’t really count), and in spite of the weather, I think December is actually a really good time of the year to be here. This is mainly because Germany takes Christmas really really seriously, and does a really good job of it – not like the commercialised “buy this new gadget because your family won’t love you otherwise” attitude most of the English-speaking world seems to adopt, but in a refreshing sense of “the weather is awful, but the town square is full of stalls selling mulled wine, sausages, chocolate and trinkets, so we’re all going to put on our warm coats and hang out with everyone else while ingesting aforementioned mulled wine, sausages and chocolate and buying some trinkets while we’re at it, while standing next to a cathedral.” And strangely, that sort of attitude seems to make the complete (and occasionally eye-burning) kitsch of the trinket stalls fun rather than weird. Oh, and the chocolate-coated bananas and foot-long (or even longer) hot-dogs make a really nice lunch.

And on the subject of food: I think I’ve eaten enough meat this week to last me for months. Not that that’ll stop me at all – I do love a good meat-based diet – but the Germans seem to really have the whole carnivore thing working very nicely. Although, one of the local specialties here in Frankfurt translates into English as ‘hand-cheese with music’ – it’s a chunk of cheese served with bread (i.e. held in the hand), having been pickled in vinegar, onions and other things… so apparently the ‘music’ is what happens to your digestive system after you’ve eaten it. Given that I’m about to get on a plane for a 22-hour flight home, I’m staying well clear of that one.

One of the things I have to say I’m somewhat less excited by is German television. Yes, I know that not speaking a word of German is likely to be a problem to me in figuring out what they’re saying – but a lot of places have at least some of the shows (or channels) in English with subtitles, rather than dubbing absolutely everything. Even my good old friend Eurosport – who can usually be relied upon for something borderline watchable, although again usually in German, regardless of where in Europe I am – seems to be showing endless heats of some snooker tournament. However, in my current hotel I’ve found a Russian channel called ‘Sport Planeta’ (if my attempts at transliterating the Cyrillic alphabet are accurate), so I’ve been watching some bobsledding, biathlon and boxing in Russian while typing this post. Also, in my channel-flicking, I’ve discovered that Big Brother isn’t actually any less interesting when it’s a language I don’t speak, because I’m left guessing at how vapid the contestants are rather than having it explicitly confirmed by understanding what they’re talking about.

I’ve also been wandering around a number of cathedrals in the past few days, which has been interesting in a handful of different ways. Partly just because I love a good cathedral – not in any religious context at all, but purely because so much work over so many centuries has been put into making them as spectacular as possible, as the primary outlet for people’s artistic, architectural and cultural expression – and partly because most of the ones I’ve looked at were actually rebuilt to varying degrees in the mid-20th century following some unpleasantness in the early/mid-1940s. And most of this has been done pretty well, although they tend not to go in for the sheer sumptuousness that the Italian or French cathedrals have – the Gothic architecture really can look pretty special if it’s done well, and they do seem in general to have put the time in to getting things right when they were putting them back together. Yes, it’s occasionally a bit patchy (the interior of the Frankfurt cathedral having had its ‘bricks and mortar’ effect – photographed below) painted on, for example), but I’m not one to be too picky about these sorts of things when they’re rebuilding from a burnt-out shell.

So anyway, having had my several cents’ worth in words, here are a few photos. Starting in Erlangen, where it had just finished snowing when I arrived, so everything looked really nice (but really really cold):

A few from Nürnberg:

Mainz:

And Frankfurt (which had the best Christmas market photos – they all looked roughly similar, but I went to the others mainly in the evenings when it was dark)

Yes, yes, I know...

2008-12-05T21:03:00.004+11:00

With apologies to the two or three people who actually pay any attention to what I'm writing here, here is a long-overdue post. And yes, I do have an excuse in that I've been staying in a conference centre in NZ with inadequate and overpriced internet access, so to make up for it, I'm now posting some nice holiday happy snaps...

Anyway, I've been in Queenstown, and I think the best word to describe it is 'picturesque'. So, in between a week of talking about how best to solve the world's environmental problems while sitting in a tent that was set up on a golf driving range, and gorging myself on some pretty special all-you-can-eat buffet offerings, I did actually manage to get a photo or six:

The pics that look like they were taken from up a mountain were from the conference dinner - which was in fact up a mountain, accessible by gondola-things which trundled gently (and pretty much vertically) past that bungy-jumping platform. One of those pics is now becoming my desktop wallpaper...

Oh, and I've finally now been to NZ - the closest overseas country to Australia, and yet one I'd never previously made it to. Looks like a place I'll need to go back to, though - and next time rent a fast car and go for a drive in the mountains, which looks like a lot of fun.

Farewell to an old friend, hello to a new one

2008-11-21T23:14:00.005+11:00

So I picked up my new (well, new to me at least - it's actually 3 years old) car yesterday, and have been driving it around for the past couple of days. And I have to say, it's a good one. It's fast, it's responsive, it's got loads of gadgets to play with, and looks really nice (see below). Yes, the suspension is very (almost insanely) firm, it's only got two seats, and extremely limited storage for anything inside - but that comes with the territory of being a 'real' sports car. And I do actually like the firm suspension - it's not harsh and choppy, and actually goes more smoothly over tram lines than my old MX-6, it's just really tight and has almost no travel in it. Does make the cobblestoned lane behind my house something to be taken very very gradually, though...

But anyway, I'll talk in a bit more detail about the new toy when I've had a few more days/weeks to drive it around and get a handle on exactly how it does - the main point of this post is actually to commemorate 6 years of usually-faithful service from my MX-6. And I have to say, as much as I like the 350Z, part of me was genuinely sad to see the MX-6 go, because it's been a really great car and I've gotten quite attached to it. Yes, it's developed a nasty tendency to misfire, break down, cost far too much money to repair, and generally show signs of its age - but it is 13 years old, and a sports-ish car (not in the same league as the 350Z though), so you have to basically expect that as it ages. And I did get a decent trade-in price for it, mainly due to the newish tyres and long rego, I think... But anyway, a few comments on MX-6's in general, as I hand in my membership card for the 'owner's club':

* 4-wheel steering is a wonderful thing, and I'm going to miss it. Not that it'd work particularly well on the 350Z (being a rear-wheel drive), but for a medium-sized front wheel drive car, it's amazing what a difference it makes in handling and maneuverability.

* The 2.5L V6 may not be overpoweringly grunty in terms of pure horsepower, but when it's running nicely it's a very slick sort of a motor. Not often going to spin the wheels as it takes off, but plenty of get-up-and-go for things like overtaking on the highways, particularly when the revs get up a little bit. And the only thing I can say about the automatic gearbox is actually the best possible thing to say about a gearbox - I never noticed its presence as I was driving. It just did its thing unobtrusively and calmly, without hunting for gears or jumping all over the place like some do (cough-Vectra-cough)

* However, a surprisingly large boot is actually very little use if the opening to get stuff in and out of it is ridiculously tiny.

* And finally - automotive fashions come and go, but a classically beautiful piece of styling will always bring a smile to me:

Mmm, donkey

2008-11-19T23:34:00.001+11:00

I do believe this is the first video of a donkey I've posted on this blog. Actually, probably the first mention of a donkey at all, outside of the Beijing stir-fry scene... but it is a funny one.

Hmmm...

2008-11-11T22:41:00.002+11:00

An interesting comment from Top Gear Australia last night: They were talking about the worst cars ever to win the Wheels Car of the Year award, and the first two they listed were the Renault 12 and the Mitsubishi Nimbus. Strangely, these were the two cars my family owned while I was growing up - in fact, the only cars my family actually owned until I reached the age of about 15. (fortunately my father had a series of Ford Falcons as company cars, which made up for some of the utter wretchedness of the Nimbuses in particular). On the upside, both the smaller cousin (MX-5) and less-sporty version (626) of my current Mazda MX-6 have each won the award twice... don't know what that says about the MX-6 falling in the middle of the two, but I do think it's a very nice car.

More randomness

2008-11-08T18:22:00.002+11:00

* Sarah Palin's run for the White House is over, but the quotes just keep on rolling... quoted here, talking about the criticism of her $150k wardrobe and her apparently not knowing what Africa was:

It's unprofessional and those guys are jerks

Yep, way to stay classy.

* "Welcome to New Zealand, I'm Phil's dad" has to be among the best Amazing Race finish-mat lines ever. Oh, and also the way the old guy decided that the tearful blondes who had just been eliminated were definitely in need of a hug from him...

* Welcome to international cricket, Jason Krezja... and that's a name which would be really handy in Scrabble.

* The Rugby League World Cup has to be the stupidest event of its type, given that it's a sport played genuinely seriously in only 4 countries in the world - one of which is Papua New Guinea. Even cricket is more widespread than that...

* It's definitely time for a new car, I've decided. Car shopping is a pain... but at least this time I didn't buy the first one I test-drove (which is actually a first). Oh, and: anyone want to buy a 1995 Mazda MX-6? It's a great car to drive and looks really nice, just getting a little bit old now.

* Wasn't summer meant to be here by now?

* I still flatly refuse to watch any television show purporting to turn anybody, (either celebrity or non-entity) into a singer, dancer, ice-skater, supermodel, regular model, etc etc. Surely, by now, the world must just about be running out of attention-seekers who fail to realise the limitations of their talents..? Or maybe I'm just cranky and behind the times. Speaking of which, when I buy a telephone, I just want it to be a telephone - I don't need the internet, more computing power than a 486 desktop, and a built-in video camera. If I want those things, I'll go and buy them - I just want my phone to have reasonably long battery life, and make phonecalls... On second thoughts, yes, I'm definitely cranky and behind the times. And stubbornly proud of it.

Ahh, the joys of multilingualism

2008-11-01T10:35:00.002+11:00

Story from the BBC:

When officials asked for the Welsh translation of a road sign, they thought the reply was what they needed.

Unfortunately, the e-mail response to Swansea council said in Welsh: "I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated".

So that was what went up under the English version which barred lorries from a road near a supermarket.

Lesson 1, for the council bureaucrats: proofread, proofread, proofread. Preferably by hiring someone who actually speaks the language where necessary.

Lesson 2, for the translator: when your client base is hiring you to translate something into a language, it's pretty obviously because they Don't Speak That Language Themselves. Sending out automated emails to them in that language is therefore both idiotic and rude....

But still, nothing beats the classic Chinese cafeteria sign (by the way, the Chinese bit says 'restaurant'; picture nicked from here):

Why?

2008-10-29T15:41:00.002+11:00

This man is an idiot. There is no politer or gentler way to put it.

Home again home again

2008-10-28T22:07:00.005+11:00

Yes, in spite of all the sarcastic remarks regarding my repeated absences, I am actually in Melbourne at the moment. And it's just rolling into summer, which is a very nice thing in several ways: not only is the weather nice and warm, but it's also daylight savings so it's staying light for long enough in the evenings that I can ride my bike home in the last of the daylight after work. Riding in daylight is much much nicer than in the dark - I do have lights on my bike, but I still don't completely trust the cars to notice me...

Anyway, it was a very successful - although utterly hectic - trip to the USA. In 23 days, I managed to fit in 11 flight sectors (should've been 12, but I managed to get a standby seat on a direct flight rather than wasting 3 hours sitting in an airport on the connecting flight I was meant to take), 5 destinations, 2 rental cars, 6 hotels/motels/synchrotron guesthouses, around 20 burgers, not nearly enough salad or sleep, far too many caffienated soft drinks, and precisely zero days of R&R. I need a weekend...

But anyway, while very briefly in California, I did manage to get a really nice photo or two of the sun setting over the Golden Gate bridge:

I do, however, have a few small gripes related to my flight home. The main one being that the toddler in the row behind me seemed to mistake my kidneys for a soccer ball, and spent the entire flight kicking my seat. This wouldn't actually have been anywhere near as irritating if he'd done it either (a) quietly, or (b) without repeatedly soiling himself and stinking out that part of the plane. I'm definitely starting to lean towards the opinion (with apologies to all my friends who have recently become parents) that anyone who brings a child under the age of approximately 7 onto an aeroplane should be seated in a designated 'kiddies' are down the back of the plane, where they can scream and kick and stink to their hearts' content without hassling the rest of us who just want to get some sleep... so maybe that's my grouchy, cantankerous and intolerant side shining through. The other problem with the flight home was that it was the LAX-Auckland-Melbourne route rather than the direct LAX-Melbourne one. Two problems arise because of this: (a) it's several hours slower because of the stopover (and the associated delays when the plane breaks down in Auckland, like it did this time), and (b) the entertainment system in the older-model (747-300) plane isn't anywhere near as good as in the less-geriatric 747-400 that Qantas flies direct. The reason the older ones don't do the direct route is basically that they can't, because they're less efficient and would run out of fuel, hence the stop in Auckland. On the upside, Auckland does have a nice Qantas Club lounge and some very pretty rainbows, which go some way towards making up for the fact that we had to spend an extra 2 hours on the ground while they fixed one of the engines.

So anyway, it may be obvious from the even-less-coherent-than-usual status of this post that it's definitely well past time for me to go and try to sleep off the remainder of this jetlag. In the meantime, let me leave you with this question: what on earth is Cameron White doing pretending to be an international spin bowler?

A possibly overdue update...

2008-10-19T11:42:00.006+11:00

Ok, so since my last post, I've barely had time to sit still in one place for a spare minute or two... so here's a slightly overdue update. To start with, I spent a week in Pittsburgh at a (very interesting) acconference - and was very surprised by how scenic Pittsburgh actually is, and how gigantic the coal barges are. To prove my point, here are a couple of holiday happy snaps...

I then flew straight from the conference to go back to Los Alamos again to run some more experiments there over the long weekend (to celebrate Columbus Day, apparently - which means that they let foreigners use their scientific instruments while everyone is on holidays...), and also took a few photos on the drive up there from Albuquerque:

Oh, and apparently the rental car company was out of 'normal' cars, so they gave me this one:

Yep, the F150: a 5.4L V8 motor with astronomical fuel consumption (about 25L/100km, although I was at high altitude), approximately the size of a small house so very very interesting to park or U-turn, and handles like it's got a waterbed mattress instead of suspension... but could probably tow a small planet, and has a very imposing and ego-boosting driving position - I was wondering what this stupid little car was doing getting in my way, and then realised that the 'stupid little car' was in fact a full-size Jeep Cherokee...

I finished the experiment there on Wednesday morning, drove to Albuquerque, then flew straight to Chicago (getting in 5 hours early because I managed to snag a standby seat on a direct flight rather than the slow and roundabout route I actually had booked), and drove to Argonne to run some experiments here for a few days, using a brand new (and very impressive - capable of elemental mapping at 30nm spatial resolution, which is the best in the world at the moment I believe) beamline at the APS synchrotron. And, of course, APS is famous both for being one of the world's best synchrotrons, and for its tricycles, used to get around the more-than-1km-circumference ring:

Needing a little more intellectual input in a couple of areas..?

2008-10-06T20:26:00.004+11:00

This comment is in today's newspaper regarding how the figure of US$700 billion for the bailout was selected:

A US treasury spokeswoman told Forbes magazine: "It's not based on any particular data point. We just wanted to choose a really large number."

Yep, more signs of responsible governance there, for sure. And even if it's true, you just don't say things like that..!

Also, Google News came up with another one of those interesting story/image combinations yesterday:

Hmmm. And: ick.