More on Dot's Garden

A week ago, I posted a flower show to let Dot what she was missing in the garden during her absence. I'm adding two more photos taken this morning after more days of grey weather and heavy rain. Spring is now back on track with a gloriously sunny morning. The azalea in the front garden is just stunning and some of the rose bushes survived the storms.

AS

Just in Time

After recent rains and some gorgeous spring weather with sunny days and temperatures hitting 25C, the grass was beginning to grow a little long. So, after riding the 6.5 km (4 miles) home on my bike, I got out the mower, filled the tank with 4-stroke petrol and ran it over our estate. It took a little longer than usual because the grass was thick in places, but I must have finished the job in perhaps 40 minutes. Feeling pleased with myself, I parked the mower in the garage and headed inside for a drink.

I hadn't been inside long when the sky clouded over and suddenly spots of rain appeared amidst ominous peals of thunder. Then all hell let loose. The rain pelted down and the drops began to take the form of hail. The lightening became forked instead of the usual sheet variety and the claps of thunder were deafening. Lake Kenalmac, named after our street, emerged from puddles of water and some of Dot's lovely flowers began to be shredded. Some 25 mm of rain must have fallen since the storms started and it seems we must have been under the centre of the storm cells - several crossed in succession over about 3 hours.

So, my mowing was exquisitely timed and all I have left to do is to tidy up the borders and finish some weeding. That might have to wait a few days, as rain is forecast until the weekend.

AS

Dot's Garden

Spring is now in full swing and, at last it's beginning to warm up. Tomorrow's maximum temperatures here will be in the order of 22C - the equivalent of a British summer! Dot is not round to enjoy her garden because she flew five days ago to be with Emily in Santa Clara. So I took some photographs of the flowers and am posting them to this website in the hope that she, and others, will enjoy them.

I'm not familiar with names of all the shrubs and flowers shown but I do know that the second picture shows a lovely Banksia Rose growing over our patio. The third shows a lovely lavender and the fourth a nearby clump of forget-me-nots under the crepe myrtle tree. Finally, the sixth image shows a recently planted white azalea doing well in the eastern flower bed.

Ig Nobel Award: End of the World

I sent this message to my colleagues this morning, and maybe you'll find it amusing;

Colleagues,

Harold Camping of the USA, who won this year’s Ig Nobel award for mathematics, has predicted that the world will end on October 21, 2011. The citation notes that he has taught the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations, especially after the failure of  his earlier similar forecast that the world would end on September 6, 1994. In the expectation that he has learned from previous mistakes, as we all do, and that he’ll right this time around, I’m inviting you to an End of the World Celebration at morning tea (10.30 am) this coming Friday (21^st October). As it’s possibly the last time we have to meet, you might care to show up and consume fayre provided: cakes, biscuits and dips. Given that Camping lives in the US, where the time will still be 20 October when we meet, the event should be safe.

You can visit Camping’s web-site at: http://www.familyradio.com/english/connect/bio/haroldcamping_bio.html .

To quote Nature, "The Ig Nobel awards are arguably the highlight of the scientific calendar." They are an American parody of the Nobel Prizes and are given each year in early October for ten unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research. The stated aim of the prizes is to "first make people laugh, and then make them think". Organized by the scientific humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), they are presented by a group that includes Nobel Laureates at a ceremony at Harvard University's Sanders Theater, and they are followed by a set of public lectures by the winners at MIT. This year’s winners were announced and awarded on Thursday night, September 29. The ceremony was webcast live.

To make you feel better about the quality of your own research, here are this year’s other winners. Note that Australian’s shared the prizes for Medicine and Biology in conjunction with other nationalities.

PHYSIOLOGY PRIZE: Anna Wilkinson (of the UK), Natalie Sebanz (of THE NETHERLANDS, HUNGARY, and AUSTRIA), Isabella Mandl (of AUSTRIA) and Ludwig Huber(of AUSTRIA) for their study "No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise."

CHEMISTRY PRIZE: Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami of JAPAN, for determining the ideal density of airborne wasabi (pungent horseradish) to awaken sleeping people in case of a fire or other emergency, and for applying this knowledge to invent the wasabi alarm. [The importance of this research lies in helping deaf people to escape fires.]

MEDICINE PRIZE: Mirjam Tuk (of THE NETHERLANDS and the UK), Debra Trampe (of THE NETHERLANDS) and Luk Warlop (of BELGIUM). and jointly to Matthew Lewis, Peter Snyder and Robert Feldman (of the USA), Robert Pietrzak, David Darby, and Paul Maruff (of AUSTRALIA) for demonstrating that people make better decisions about some kinds of things — but worse decisions about other kinds of things‚ when they have a strong urge to urinate.

PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE: Karl Halvor Teigen of the University of Oslo, NORWAY, for trying to understand why, in everyday life, people sigh.

LITERATURE PRIZE: John Perry of Stanford University, USA, for his Theory of Structured Procrastination, which says: To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that's even more important.

BIOLOGY PRIZE: Darryl Gwynne (of CANADA and AUSTRALIA and the UK and the USA) and David Rentz (of AUSTRALIA and the USA) for discovering that a certain kind of beetle mates with a certain kind of Australian beer bottle.

PHYSICS PRIZE: Philippe Perrin, Cyril Perrot, Dominique Deviterne and Bruno Ragaru (of FRANCE), and Herman Kingma (of THE NETHERLANDS), for determining why discus throwers become dizzy, and why hammer throwers don't.

PEACE PRIZE: Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, LITHUANIA, for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an armoured tank.

PUBLIC SAFETY PRIZE: John Senders of the University of Toronto, CANADA, for conducting a series of safety experiments in which a person drives an automobile on a major highway while a visor repeatedly flaps down over his face, blinding him.

See also: http://improbable.com/ig/

A Quick Visit

It's School Holidays here and Rob took Max to visit his parents for a few days down the road in Tamworth - 110km south of Armidale. They visited us for the day yesterday and we went fossicking for gems in the morning at nearby Gara River. Since the river was in flood after heavy rain, finding gems was an uphill task, but Max managed to leave with a small sapphire. The gems, being heavy tend to be found towards the bottom of the river channel - well under swift flowing water yesterday!

Still, he had a good time digging up gravel, sieving out the heavy pieces of ordinary rock, and looking at the smaller pieces in the pan. After lunch, we headed down to the nearby park where, true to form, Max used the equipment in innovative ways not imagined by the designers! I forgot to use my camera out at Gara River, but I had it with me at the park. For once, the weather was pleasant, with temperatures about 18C. However, our Spring has been very wet indeed and, as I'm typing here it's beginning to rain yet again.

AS