old man emu

I'm not Rasputin that one.

Last weekend I was in Sydney for a couple of days, on the southwestern edge. I was thinking of going to a hobby supplies shop in Newcastle on my way home. That's a roundabout way home, but I would kill two birds with one stone. To get to Newcastle, I would have to cross the metropolitan area: Normally, if I have business at Bankstown Airport, I leave my son's place about 9:00 to avoid the school drop-off traffic locally and on the access to the M5. According to my route planner, the trip to the hobby shop should take two and a half hours, and the whole trip home about seven hours, plus rest stops. So I ask my son when he thought I should leave his place to avoid traffic on the M5/M7/M2 section. He suggested leaving at 10:30! Needless to say, I've yet to make the trip to teh hobby shop. As it was, it took me about 15 minutes to go 4.4 kilometres to get to the main road I took to escape.

Not underthinking, but overthinking. Clock time is an arbitrary thing in our modern world. Time zones are a compromise, partially eliminating the effects of east/west distance between locations while still allowing local time to be approximate with mean solar time. The International Meridian Conference in Washington DC, USA, adopted a proposal in October 1884 that the prime meridian for longitude and timekeeping should be one that passes through the center of the transit instrument at the Greenwich Observatory in the United Kingdom. The conference established the Greenwich Meridian as the prime meridian and Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) as the world’s time standard. The international 24-hour time-zone system grew from this, in which all zones referred back to GMT on the prime meridian. The application of time zones depends on each country. France did not formally use UTC as a reference to its standard time zone (UTC+1) until August in 1978. China uses a single time zone (UTC +8 ) even though its territory extends from Kashgar (75E, UTC +5) to Shanghai (121E, UTC +8). So, if Australia adopted UTC +9 as its time zone, everyone in this modern 24/7 world would be working with the same time reference. Apart from places on the 135E meridian, the position of the Sun at Time Zone midday would be different. However, we have just gone through six months where the Sun at midday in the eastern State (QLD excepted) is west of the overhead position. That didn't result in the collapse of Society as we know it.

I'm sure that they could. I wasn't having a shot. I was just saying that the people in Victoria and Tasmania would have to get used to starting the day in the dark during mid-winter. However, they would be going home in daylight. It's a bit of six of one, half a dozen of the other. I haven't looked at the sunrise and sunset times over summer, as I thought going to work before sunrise might be a bitter pill to some. However, I wonder if having our time based on UTC +9 might remove the need for daylight saving in the eastern States.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ There is also the fact of dispersed concerns. Is a resident of the Northern Rivers of NSW as concerned about the drying of the Murray-Darling system as they would be about flood mitigation on those Northern Rivers? Are you as annoyed as I am that the NSW Government has abandoned the construction of a tunneled highway from the Sydney Basin to Lithgow? Probably not if you don't have to travel that route. Such a highway would dramatically improve access to the West, and at the same time make life for those who choose to live in the Blue Mountains a quieter place and one in which going to the local shops was not a battle with traffic generated by people simply crossing the Mountains. Those of you living in other States and Territories no doubt can provide your own local examples .

The Australian Motion Picture Industry, by which I mean all producers of what you might lump together as "plays", either dramatic or comedic, is equal to any other in the World. The problem is that the market here is too small to support the expenses involved in making heaps of these "plays". The money comes from selling the product overseas, but that's a hard market to break into. One has to wonder how the broadcasters manage to meet the demands for locally produced content that is a condition of their licences. Sport, quiz and Lifestyle programmes do not enhance the culture of a country. There have been a lot of very great productions, but they have been hidden on the ABC and SBS.

You can't tell an ex-shift worker about working through the night and sleeping during the day. The most stupid thing that has happened is Unions agreeing to 12-hour shifts for people like health workers and police who have to be on the ball for the full shift. Firies and Ambos are not active for the majority of their shifts. I used to do seven 2300 to 0700 shifts on my ear, but when they brought in the 12-hour shifts, I struggled after 0330, and I only did two overnighters in a row. Anyway, night-shift workers form only a small section of the population. The majority of the population lives during the day. The most people who would have to change their lifestyle would be Victorians and Tasmanians simply because their day lengths during winter are much shorter than those living further north, above 30S.

Why does Australia stick to the Pre-industrial concept that Life only goes on from sunrise to sunset? Amongst us, whose life is dictated by the sole need for sunlight to enable things to be done? Haven't we driven away darkness with electric light? Doesn't our society operate on a 24/7 system? To plagiarise and paraphrase J.R.R Tolkien, all we need now is one Time Zone to rule them all; one Time Zone to bring them all together, and in that Time Zone, bind them? Australia operates on three main Time Zones - UTC +8; UTC + 9.5 and UTC +10. (There's on odd one on the South Australian/Western Australian border on The Eyre Highway, but that only covers a couple of settlements.) Australian commerce and travel are disadvantaged by having these three Time Zones for a population of only 26 million. Direct, person-to-person communication between an office in Sydney and one in Perth can only be carried out between 11:00 am and 3:00pm when nine-to-fivers are present in both locations. I propose that Australia drops the existing Time Zones and adopts a single one based on the 135E meridian of longitude, which would have the zone as UTC +9. I don't want to have Daylight Saving enter this discussion, so please ignore it. By adopting this single time zone, the whole population would be operating on the same time. The first objection that people would have to this is that they would be getting up to go to work, and coming home in the dark. However, ask a European or North American if that is such an inconvenience. Australians are spoiled by the position of their land close enough to the Equator so that most of it has at least 10 hours of sunlight daily. Here is a table which shows how changing to a time zone of UTC +9 would be reflected in the times of sunrise and sunset on the shortest day of the year in the three existing zones. Click image to enlarge

Senility is when you buy two sausage rolls for lunch; decide to eat only one; read the posts here while eating, and then find that the other sausage roll is gone, but you can't remember eating the second one.

You are thinking of the erroneous story about Bathurst Courthouse. Constructed in the Federation Free Classical style based on original designs by Colonial Architect, James Barnet, the building structure was completed in 1880 under the supervision of Barnet's successor, Government Architect, Walter Liberty Vernon. Most of the NSW Government buildings erected in the last quarter of the 19th Century were designed by Barnet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Barnet, including Goulburn. https://monumentaustralia.org.au/themes/government/state/display/102416-centenary-of-goulburn-court-house/photo/1

I once pulled Phillip Adams up for speeding on the Federal Highway near Goulburn. Told him that his speeding brought disgrace to the family name, and as penance he was to narrate a talking book for the blind since my Dad's eyesight prevented him from reading, but he loved the talking books. A week or two later a signed copy of one of his books turned up at the Police Station for me.

How things change! The first storage devices were similar in size to a LP record. Then we got 5-1/2' floppies, which were replaced by 3-1/4" floppies in a hard case. Then we got CDs and USB drives. And now it's all in the Cloud. Twelve years ago, my wife had some professional photos done of our grandson and they were delivered on a CD. I gave it to my son yesterday and he said that he could not access them because none of his computers had a CD drive.

The common theory is that they crossed from Asia during the latter part of the last Ice Age when sea levels had dropped where the Bering Strait now exists. Then they spread across North America into South America where they displaced humans who it has recently been discovered share some genetic markers with Australian Aborigines.

Talking about wasting water, house designers don't think that problem through. They place the hot water heater well away from the bathrooms so you waste a hell of a lot of water that has cooled in the pipe while you wait for the hot to come through. I've put my hot water heater within 2 metres of both my kitchen sink and bathroom.

I'm declaring myself cis-. I am adopting a Classical approach to my pronouns: ego, mei, mihi, me.

If I want some TV-type shows, I go to iView ABC. My favourite shows are Death in Paradise and a Ben Elton comedy Upstart Crow which is a sitcom involving William Shakespeare and his misinterpretation of situations that we can see as the basis for his plays. Quite a good chuckle. Otherwise, I spend my evenings studying at the University of YouTube. The other night I learned how to make air-drying modelling clay from bicarb soda and corn flour.

, Alfie?

Do you remember having a 3.5 inch floppy disk?

Nah. I used to roll me own. I was attending a course at a university in the USA which was filled with Yanks, as well as another Aussie and a New Zealander. At the start of a break between lectures the three of us were talking inside to a few of the Yanks when I said that I was going outside for a fag. That stunned the Yanks.

I'm offended by your homophobic hate suggestion. Apologise and withdraw it, or my pronouns won't accept the person known as Red750's pronouns.

I'm talking about a patch that is about the size of a kitchen table, or a single sleeping bed. That size can easily be watered from the household supply or grey water. How much do you need to grow? Just think about how much vegetable you do eat in a year. How many people get a punnet of seedlings and find that they are giving away produce. Don't forget that each member will not be growing the same as everyone else.

In WWII the British were encouraged to "Dig for Victory". In the future it might be "Dig for Survival". Might be a good idea to start creating a patch in which to grow veggies for the household. It would also be a good idea to practice freezing vegetables to store for out-of-season availability. In a family situation, growing vegetables should be specialised amongst the branches of the family if the kids have their own places. That way each branch doesn't produce the same things so that there is a glut that cannot be cleared. Of course, this idea only works if everyone has a little bit of space. Too bad if you live in a high-rise, although there is a lot of balcony gardening and vertical gardens.

It's all well and good to get more up-to-date technology, but isn't there a lot of concern that control and data collection systems that ran on earlier G's will all have to be replaced?

Just looking at the rainfall recordings at a number of airports in the Central West of NSW it seems that the falls were around 25 to 30 mls at best. Closer to the Tablelands the falls got up to 50-odd at Tamworth. At least it was steady rain with some breaks in between to let it soak in. Those grain farmers who had done some ploughing will be happy that they did as the turned ground will capture more water than unturned ground.

A reason for many houses not having solar panels is that they are rentals. Why would a landlord invest in installing solar panels simply to make life easier for tenants? I suppose that if a place was retrofitted with solar panels, the rent would join them on the roof.