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

A Blast from the Past

Every morning at 7.40 the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) runs a segment called "On this Day". Today being September 20th, it listed a selection of important events occurring on 20/09 over the last 200 years.

One of those was the launch of the Queen Elizabeth II on Clydebank on September 20 1967. Well, I was there on that day! I was then working on my doctorate at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and was friends with several students in the arcane engineering field of Naval Architecture. Somehow or other they received several tickets for the launch and we headed off by car to Glasgow about 180km away.

In those days, Glasgow was a dour working class city and Clydebank with its ship-yards lay close to its heart. We crammed into to the ship-yard and I found myself standing mid-way along the hull close to the drag chains required to stop the vessel from hitting the opposite bank of the river. I found out afterwards that being close to the chains was not a good idea! I was also at the base of the hull, with the entire height of the vessel towering above me, albeit minus quite a bit of the superstructure. That would be added during the fitting out stage downstream.

The launch was not without several dramas despite the generally festive atmosphere. To start with there had been much discussion in the press and other media about the ship's name. One of the favourites was the "Winston Churchill" and it was something of a disappointment when the Queen, who slammed a bottle champagne against the pointy end, intoned over the ether "I name this ship Queen Elizabeth II". At my proletarian end of the ship there was a decided groan at that outcome. The second drama ensued immediately. Once the lever is pulled, ships are supposed to glide seamlessly down the slipway. On this occasion, the vessel refused to budge. It took a team of workmen maybe 15-20 minutes to remove the blockage and, starting almost imperceptibly to great cheers, it accelerated down the slipway. Then the drag chains ground into action and, to further cheers, slowed the hull sufficiently to prevent it hitting the opposite bank of the Clyde.

When I saw a replay of the launch on TV that evening something was very wrong. The Queen announced the name, exploded a bottle of champagne, and the vessel glided down the slipway more or less simultaneously. That was my first introduction to the art of video-editing. Apart from that sleight of hand (or should it be celluloid?), it was a grand experience.

As a postscript I might add that 1967 was a wonderful year for me. A little over 4 months earlier I had another stunning experience. On 10 May, my university gave an honorary degree to one of the greatest people of the 20th century - Dr Martin Luther King - and I was honoured by the opportunity to meet him in private audience (just me and one other student) for about 40 minutes. Our conversation almost exclusively focused on American Civil Rights. More about this on some other occasion!

AS

Dramatic Change of Season

We're almost on the equinox, a time of year when Australia's Winter in metamorphoses into Spring. This year, the season has transgressed theory and launched into summer. For the last week our temperatures have been considerably warmer than the UK managed in August at the height of its so-called summer. Indeed, the last few days have seen temperatures peak at around 24C, which is close to the 26C reached in Nottingham in 2010 - whose citizens were expiring in the heat according to our media. In my mind, temperatures in the mid-20s are delightful and all the flora in our garden are racing into leaf or bloom. In comparison with the UK this explosion of greenery is very early. September is the equivalent of March in the UK, a time when Winter is just beginning to abate, and don't forget that we're at an altitude of 3250 feet (1000m).

AS

On the Road Again ... and Again

I'd only been back home for about 8 days when we hit the road again and headed this time for Canberra. Dot and I had withdrawal symptoms after not having seen Max for 4 months and felt imperative to see him. So, we spent most of Friday doing the 750-800 km between Armidale and Canberra and then did the return trip on Monday. It's a long day's drive, but manageable with two drivers and the relatively empty roads via the back route we take.

It was a good weekend to go, because Max played in a soccer match early on Saturday morning (which his side - the Peacocks - won 1 - 0), Beck played in a semi-final in the Belconnen Women's soccer (fourth grade) for Bel - North (which they lost 2 - 0, with both goals scored in the first 8 minutes), we could take Max to the brand new skate-board park alongside Lake Gininderra, and we could see Mike and Moira who had just returned from Santa Clara with a father's day gift for me, a mysterious letter only to be opened on 9/11, and a copy of Ella's birth certificate necessary for setting up her Australian bank account. The latter was very elaborate compared with the UK and local versions I've seen.

The photos below commemorate several of these events.

Max is on the left of this first photo, and the second (below) shows the award he got for his first season playing with the Peacocks. No comment is needed on the third.

Rebecca played in the #5 position for her team on a full-sized pitch and I gather that her opponents had one or two former Matildas ... people who represent Australia in women's soccer ... albeit perhaps in their 40s! Rebecca, by the way, was coach of Max's team,

AS

Itsukushima

After the gloom-laden morning in Hiroshima and a spot of lunch, Kawai, Miyawaki and I decided on a trip to Itsukushima. This Shinto Temple is on a rather beautiful off-shore island, and is world heritage listed while

several other buildings and artifacts are  listed as Japanese National Treasures.

Getting there was slightly complex. I needed some cash badly and so we headed off in search of a bank whose automatic tellers would accept a foreign credit card and tell me how to extract money in English. That took an extra 30 minutes or so in suburban Hiroshima.

Then we needed to get to Miyajimaguchi, a little port from which the ferries departed. We decided to take a tram, which is not the fastest means of transport and

spent perhaps 45 minutes ambling out of Hiroshima and southwards down the coast. Parts of the journey threw interesting light on life in a large Japanese city, but I was glad to get to Miyajimaguchi.

There, the trip rapidly became a lot more interesting and we bought a cheap ticket across to the other side with one of the two ferry companies frequently plying the route. The first picture shows the recently departed JR ferry with Itsukushima island in the background. The island was shrouded in mist and low cloud, as the picture shows and it reminded me of some of the more mysterious and romantic travel

brochures one sees.

The first pleasant surprise on getting off the ferry were the deer roaming freely over the island. They were unconcerned about the movements of humans, and someone like Max could easily have gone up and patted one.

After giving the tourist shops the slip, we walked along the island foreshores towards the Shinto shrine. You can see me here in front of what I suppose is the Temple entrance guarded by some stone animals of dubious existence. One thing that had immediately

impressed me about the island was the large number of children roaming around. Obviously, this was a top tourist destination for families.

Turning a corner, we saw one of the images of Japan often portrayed on travel brochures: the 'arch' standing in the placid waters of the bay, with the mountains of the mainland in the background. It was a very beautiful sight, enhanced as I mentioned before by the gray skies, misty clouds and, now, the falling of light rain.

We all posed for pictures in front of the structure and, since you've seen me, I show Kawai and Miyawaki. There was a constant scramble my a large number of people to take this kind of souvenir photo.

We ambled around the temple complex and reached the rather attractive inner sanctum shown sixth photo. I joined with my hosts in what must be a Shinto ritual of tossing some coins into a very large box, bowing to what I presume is a kind of Altar, and - except for me - clapping one's hands. I would have liked to have struck the large drum, which took my mind back to a

an evening I once attended in Armidale of Japanese drumming performed by a professional group.

And so we moved on in heavier rain to return to the ferry past a rather beautiful temple tower ... I do not know the proper name of this structure. However, I am sure you'll agree with me that it is very attractive. The voyage back to Hiroshima was much faster than our arrival because we took a local train rather than the tram. There I bought a Shinkansen ticket for Okayama and soon departed in the gathering gloom of evening for Doo-Chul's home.

This bought to an end a perfect day helped greatly by Kawai's and Miyawaki's kind assistance. They even presented me with a little wooden souvenir of the temple, which was very kind. Thanks, guys, for a memorable occasion.

AS

The First Ground Zero

I went on a kind of pilgrimage today to see the site of an event that occurred just 52 days after I was born, and the destination was Hiroshima whose population is now 1.175 million, up from 400,000 at the time of that famous event on 6 August 1945. Nearly everything in the city post-dates 1945 when the first atomic bomb in the world roasted the city centre. So, around 9.00 this morning I boarded alone the Shinkansen from Okayama for the short (50 minute) journey over the 140km between the two cities. However, I was met at the other end by two postgraduate students from Hiroshima, Kawai Toyaaki and Miyawaki Kentari.

 Both are pictured here outside the Honkawa National School, which was closer to ground zero than just about any other building in the city. More about that school later.

The most obvious symbol of the bombing was the Commercial Exhibition Hall, whose twisted steel dome is THE symbol of Hiroshima's disaster (second picture). This, and the school building, are two remnants still standing of the pre-war city. We saw plenty of maps and models showing the utter devastation wrought on the city. Within a 3 km
radius, just about everything except reinforced

 concrete was vaporised.

The third picture shows a modern bridge on the site of the one almost directly under the explosion. The bridge was half-way between the exhibition centre and the school.

Nearby is the site of the fourth picture which is the children's memorial. Many died, but a 2 yo girl survived until she contracted Leukemia at the age of 10 and died. The sadness of this event led to a campaign to construct such a memorial funded by subscriptions from Japan and other countries.

The fifth picture shows the ceremonial avenue connecting the current museum (behind where the picture was taken) and the convention hall. The museum comprehensively records the events on that fateful August day. It covers the choice of cities to attack,

 the nature of the atomic weapon and its origins, the bombing mission itself, pictures and memories of the explosion, the dynamics of the fire-ball and its spread, and - most harrowing of all - the horrific things it did to people, and why most injuries sustained could not be treated. The museum also traced the attempts to restore some life to the city and eventually re-build it.

I walked around the exhibits listening to English commentaries on the artifacts and exhibits, with well over 50 separate commentaries.

 We found the famous Chinese Parasol Tree which was severely damaged by the explosion less than 1km from ground zero. However, its hollowed out and blackened trunk survived and regenerated before the tree was relocated to just outside the museum - a symbol of hope and regeneration.

Finally, we headed off to the Honkawa school and looked around the blackened walls of the gaunt surviving part of the structure located in the current school grounds. It was eerie see the inside of a building that took the full force of the explosion. The final picture shows a little of what the building looks like today.

After a whole morning on our feet, we finally decided on some lunch at a nearby cafe. Our day was not however over as the next post shows!

 AS