Hi folks,
I'll just remind you that today is the fourth anniversary of my cardiac arrest and subsequent resurrection. I'm well, thanks, and looking forward to the next third of a century or so! Thanks to those of you who sent in congratulations or condolences.
Life is too short to keep standing still, so I'm keeping on working at a fast pace - refereeing an article for a US journal this morning, having an article of mine accepted yesterday, working on two consultancies, and presenting 4 conference papers in the next three weeks.
See you soon ... well, in the course of the next 12 months.
AS
Saturday, 19 November 2011
Sunday, 13 November 2011
More Flowers
Spring is nearing completion here as we approach what is mid-May in the northern hemisphere. However, our temperatures are rather flash compared with what passes for an English Spring and, after a cold start last month, ours have hovered around 25C for the last few days ... albeit with some high humidity and a series of thunderstorms.
Given the warmth and great soil moisture, our garden has put on an excellent display this year. I've already posted some pictures of the garden in full bloom, but have a look at these images. The first three are of our bottle-brushes, so-called because their shape resembles the kitchen brushes used to clean .. er.. bottles. They come in various colours and ours are pink and red, and the honey-eater birds like them as much as we do!
The final picture shows a lovely bush on our western wall, though I do not know its name. It attracts a lot of bees collecting pollen. And just to the right you can see one corner of our massive honeysuckle bust with its fragrant yellowish flowers that last all summer. I love this time of year when all is fresh and green, especially after lots of rain. The only problem is mowing all the grass.
AS
Given the warmth and great soil moisture, our garden has put on an excellent display this year. I've already posted some pictures of the garden in full bloom, but have a look at these images. The first three are of our bottle-brushes, so-called because their shape resembles the kitchen brushes used to clean .. er.. bottles. They come in various colours and ours are pink and red, and the honey-eater birds like them as much as we do!
The final picture shows a lovely bush on our western wall, though I do not know its name. It attracts a lot of bees collecting pollen. And just to the right you can see one corner of our massive honeysuckle bust with its fragrant yellowish flowers that last all summer. I love this time of year when all is fresh and green, especially after lots of rain. The only problem is mowing all the grass.
AS
Friday, 28 October 2011
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
AS
Tuesday, 25 October 2011
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
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
Wednesday, 19 October 2011
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.
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.
Monday, 17 October 2011
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 (21st 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.
Saturday, 8 October 2011
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
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
Tuesday, 20 September 2011
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
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
AS
Wednesday, 7 September 2011
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.
AS
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
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