Category Archives: Misc

Saturday morning hell

Things that are guaranteed to piss me right off.

  • The people that live two houses north digging up their driveway with a Bobcat at 8am
  • The people that live a few houses south having their overflowing septic tank emptied and the wind is blowing from that direction.
  • The people that live opposite us playing Michael Jackson at disco levels.

It’s been a month since my last post so I really should do some catching up. I’ve only taken few photos too so a trip should be made tomorrow.

Captain’s log

From the UK’s National Archive:

A new partnership between JISC, the University of Sunderland, the Met Office Hadley Centre and the British Atmospheric Data Centre has enabled the use of historical naval logbooks in ground-breaking research on climate change. The logbooks include the famous voyages of Charles Darwin’s ship, the Beagle, Captain Cook’s HMS Discovery and William Parry’s polar expedition in HMS Hecla.

The UK Colonial Registers and Royal Navy Logbooks (CORRAL) project has digitised nearly 300 ships’ logbooks dating back to the 1760s, the images of which can be viewed at badc.nerc.ac.uk/data/corral. For the first time, the accurate weather information they contain is being used as scientific data to reconstruct past climate conditions.

Accurate observations

Research team leader Dr Dennis Wheeler of the University of Sunderland said: ‘The observations from the logbooks on wind force and weather are astonishingly good and often better than modern logbooks. Of course, the sailors had to be conscientious – the thought that you could hit a reef was a great incentive to get your observations absolutely right!

Full article can be read here.

Assorted news

Cyclone season

The Bureau of Meteorology has released their Tropical Cyclone Seasonal Outlook for the upcoming wet season and it looks like it’s not going to be very wet.

The 2009-10 season is expected to be largely influenced by a comparatively weak El Niño event. Therefore rainfall and flooding should not be as extensive as the past two seasons and a tropical cyclone impact on the east coast is a little less likely than in neutral or La Niña years. These conditions would favour a late start to the monsoon.

After a very dry winter this isn’t good news.

Aboriginal rock art

The world’s largest rock art database.

The Jawoyn Association – which represents the Jawoyn people, whose traditional land spans from Katherine up into Arnhem Land – says it has uncovered more than 3,000 Aboriginal rock art sites.

The association’s cultural manager, Ray Whear, says two of the rock paintings seem to depict tasmanian tigers.

I wonder why modern-day paints only last a few years but indigenous Australians could make paint that lasted for millennia.

Farmers accused of wombat slaughter

This is too sick for words:

Farmers are illegally slaughtering thousands of wombats in South Australia, a nature group says.

Brigitte Stevens from the Wombat Awareness Organisation says burrows of southern hairy-nosed wombats are being bulldozed or blown up on Yorke and Eyre Peninsulas and in the Murraylands.

She says farmers can get permits to destroy a few wombats, but that it not a licence to wipe out the entire population.

“There’s not enough or not good enough regulations on what actually happens to the wombat if those numbers are being killed,” she said.

Idiots.