Fradam

I’ve just spent a sunny weekend up the coast, and whilst there, learnt a few random things about the land to the north.

• The speed limit for Learners is 110 km/h (in Sydney, it’s 80 km/h). It is debatable whether it is safer having 16 year olds doing 110km/h on a motorway, or having them driving at  80 km/h in the left lane (particularly in merging situations) is safer… but needless to say, discovering this on my last day certainly explained why so many cars were happy to sit right on my tail on the motorways. Good thing Queenslanders are renowned for being relaxed on the roads and all.
• You can’t do a U Turn at a set of lights, unless you see a specific sign indicating it is permitted. I’m sure it’s the other way round down here..
• This isn’t specific to Queensland, but I love Wikipedia to a fault - but need to be reminded every now and then to not simply believe everything I read there: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/07/wikipedia_jarre_hoax/
• It is possible to purchase adult cinema tickets, at full price, and be paying less than $8 - it wasn’t even tight Tuesday! Unheard of in Sydney.
• The expansion of the Gold Coast airport, in order to allow it to field more international flights, is in a southward direction, i.e. further into NSW. On my return back home, I drove from QLD, to NSW (entrance to airport), walked back to QLD (where the gate was), then flew across the border into NSW (in a plane!). All in the space of an hour or two. I consider myself now a seasoned traveller.

Keep your eyes peeled for more trivialities in my soon-to-be-published “Guide Book to QLD”.

Okay, maybe not quite a hundred billion.

But two in two weeks? It seems highly coincidental.. both the stories drifted across my nose in the past week.

Bottle #1

From: ~160km east of the Mississippi river delta, USA, in the 1960s
To: Pirates Beach (yaar!), Galveston, Texas, USA, mid-January 2009
Distance travelled: ~1000kms across ~45 years
Why: Drift bottles; experiment to learn about ocean currents and surface circulation.
Random: A group of school kids analysed the reasons how the bottle got there and suggested that perhaps Hurricane Ike had something to do with it.. and that it probably “went through sharks, fish, squid, octopus, coral, seaweed, shrimp, crabs, boats, dolphins, whales, seals, eels, sea turtles, nets, surfing and other things close to the top of the ocean”.

Bottle #2

From: Cooks Beach, NZ, 1984
To: Cooks Beach, NZ, 2008
Distance travelled: 0km, 24 years
Why: No particular reason, “just wanted to do it”
Random: The bottle owner was tracked down via the Old Friends website.

I’m sort of curious, what is more unusual? A bottle that goes everywhere, or one that goes nowhere?

Sending out an SOS… Now I want to go write a message in a bottle. Makes me wonder though, what would I put in there? Something which across the ages, could track me down (perhaps a library card; librarians can always track you down when you’ve got something overdue), and hopefully meaningful.. hmm. What would you put in there?

Today, reports of Atlantis flitted across my table. With the launch of an Ocean in Google Earth, searching beneath the ocean has never been easier. How exciting to have this opportunity! The fact that oceans cover nearly three quarters of the entire globe, yet we know so little about what is actually down there is.. intriguing. A lot of it is well over 3km deep… there is a lot that can fit down there. Like the infamous colossal squid, which we still know… so little about. Except that it is not terribly small.

Generally, when comparing large objects, the usual denominators are simple: how does it compare to a London bus? How about a sperm whale? Well, here we go:

So the colossal squid dwarfs all else. Well, not all else, but everything in our sample space. Mind you, they apparently first proved the existence of colossal squids by discovering the tentacles of one, in the stomach of a sperm whale, so perhaps being so big isn’t so wonderful.

Usually, if you put squid and stomach in the same sentence, I think of something more like…

.. which got me thinking. Your average serving of salt and pepper calamari has about 125 grams of actual squid, which will generally take me about 12 minutes to consume.

The colossal squid that was snagged last year, weighed in at nearly 500 kg. So if my job was to eat the colossal squid; i.e. I ate for 8 hours a day, it would take me a 100 days to eat the entire thing. I just hope Burnsie is cooking it… with that amount of eating, I wouldn’t want to get bored.

All in all though, it is an amazing creature. Tentacles are laced with more than your average suckers; hooks of a varying nature also adorn the limbs. Scientists use that sort of information as evidence to support the idea that it is an aggressive creature, but really, there’s no way to know. The eye of the colossal squid is the largest eye we’ve ever encountered - my my what large eyes you have… So we’re still discovering new things about the world we live in…which I find incredible. God made it so rich and abundant of life and variety that the depths of our oceans sometimes feel as mysterious as the outer reaches of the universe. I hope one day I can be so fortunate to be making discoveries about one or the other. Maybe I’ll drill 20,000 leagues below the sea and find chocolate!

For now though, I’ll be content with the discovery (thanks to Kellie and Woody) of a new friend - Banjo. A beautiful fighting fish (betta), he enjoys fervent swimming at dinner time, docile snoozing in the afternoons, and making pouting faces at the Bart Simpson figurine on top of his tank. I wish my camera was able to take a photo of him that actually did him some creative justice as he is quite the poser. The fins, almost gossamer in nature, shimmer with a back light; he seems to have understood this and appeared to quite enjoy dancing in front of it. I am beginning to recognise a personality as well, which is an exciting thing to witness develop. Clearly, size does not matter when it comes to appreciating the wonderful things in the world around us. Banjo so far has not expressed displeasure at my singing either, so as far as friends go, he is definitely doing well

So, the next time you are over at my place, please do ask to say hello to Banjo, he definitely has enjoyed meeting new people, being the social butterfly fish and all.

I didn’t want to make a deal of it when it happened, but I was robbed a few months ago.

It was the first warm spring day in a while and I decided to hang some washing out on the line. When I came home, two socks were missing, and one of my favourite pairs of underwear! I liked to think it was just a strong gust of wind, but deep down, I knew that someone really weird in Mosman was stalking my washing. Possibly the same person that had stolen Jonathan’s iPod, since it was around the same time. But there was a bit of a buzz in the news too, about an alleged “Mosman underwear thief” that was on the prowl..

To be fair, I’ve not really thought about it much until I heard this morning that the stealthy cat burglar had been caught, but no charges had been laid!

The photo took me by surprise as I realised this was not the first time I’d come face to face with this feline felon; he had taken me by surprise when found lazing on our porch on a sunny December afternoon once… right under the clothes line, funnily enough.

So, lesson to be learnt; if you ever find your unmentionables missing, mention it to your neighbours.. particularly the ones that own curious cats. Have a happy Tuesday!

UPDATE: This just in, a goat is being held for armed robbery. Yes, that is right, it is the week of animals taking over with criminal activities!

An oldie, but still good…

Did you know?
1) No known species of reindeer can fly. BUT there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.

2) There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since Santa doesn’t (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that’s 91.8 million homes. One presumes there’s at least one good child in each.

3) Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc.

This means that Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second - a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour.

4) The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element.
Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium-sized lego set(2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that “flying reindeer” (see point #1) could pull TEN TIMES the normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases the payload - not even counting the weight of the sleigh - to 353,430 tons. Again, for comparison - this is four times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth.

5) 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance - this will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy. Per second. Each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.

In conclusion - If Santa ever DID deliver presents on Christmas Eve, he’s probably not in a good state now.

Merry Christmas all

Apparently, today is my lucky day because a bird pooped on my arm. I’m not even mad, but I do wish I got to eat a whole wheel of cheese after.

Here are some random things I discovered that have been happening in the world of bird droppings:
- Bird droppings could be the secret to Posh and Beckham looking good
- Mistletoe is so named after bird droppings - so kissing under it means…
- Canada declares wars on bird droppings

The conclusion? The secret to looking good as the celebrities and being romanced in a most idyllic of situations comes at grand cost: war with the Canadians. Happy lucky Tuesday all!

Earlier this month, we witnessed a Jupiter-Venus conjunction in the sky - the two planets so tightly packed in together, that when the moon came along for a visit, it created an astronomically pretty smile. I think it is pretty amazing that all over the world, people could witness this (although, over the in the US, it was a bit of a frown..) Anyhow, photos of this have been flying around this week, so I thought I might put up a few of the ones I liked. Enjoy!

- Central Coast, Australia

- Hawaii

- Bahrain

- Pakistan

- Warners Bay, Australia

- Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Yes, it appears Malaysia is still the best for the smile.. Warners Bay with a close second. How amazing!

… when you’re mad.

So, 2007 is about to end, and I’ve not touched this in sometime. Many a thing has happened, life in some ways almost seems operatic with suds on the side. Betrayals, infidelity, death, adultery, work shuffles, concerts galore, globetrotting family members… and I beat Steven in squash! (yes, it was a noteworthy enough achievement to mention). Needless to say, life was busy.
I don’t intend on doing one of those ‘year in review’ style thoughts, as am a little quiet at the moment, and am just hoping that the new year brings about a nice change… come on 08!

You have to wonder what the world is coming to when it seems anyone or anything, can get its paws on a credit card.

I wonder what the credit rating would be like on one of those giant trees…