Bruce

My first computer was an 8 bit machine... 8 bits = 1 byte . A bit is a 1 or zero. Thanks, I didn't know they had leap seconds and stuff, I only know that wind and tidal energy comes from the rotation of the earth and so the earth must be slowing down. Maybe I should have known from engineering school, but all I remember that a solar day is different to a star day. You need that stuff like books of tables written by government astronomers to do surveying on a big scale if you don't have a GPS, and you also need a radio to get the time signals. All useless knowledge these days. Sometimes I think Captain Cook would weep at the sight of a GPS, he was the only sea captain who could work out his longitude using lunar-star angles. That was before any time-signals. And space, DIN stands for Deutch Industrie Normale , which is their standards lot.

If we had 8 fingers and not ten, we might have invented computers sooner. What about time? if a day is 24 hours exactly, then the second must be changing as years go by. If the second is held constant, then 12 noon will drift and become earlier in the day as the planet slows its rotation.

It takes quite a few solar panels to recharge a car, I think about 20 depending of course on how far you drive each day and how big the car is. Then there is the problem for commuters who are at work when the sun is shining. All solvable, but expensive , such as having 2 lots of batteries.

What about desert oaks willedoo? There are some nice ones on sandy country to the west along the Stuart highway.

A young farmer who won a study tour to the Ukraine said how over there they had 1 metre of topsoil and 1 metre of rainfall. Here we have 100mm of topsoil and grow wheat with 300mm of rainfall. And our topsoil is, on average, 5 cycles of soil to sedimentary rock to soil etc. No wonder the soil needs phosphorous , and Australia imports 80,000 tonnes a year of the stuff despite mining some ourselves. "golden soil...bullsh#t

Did you hear about the company making explosive prayer mats? Prophets are going through the roof.

" with golden soil and wealth for toil" is nonsense. Australia has the poorest soils in the world.

Malcolm Fraser, Liberal PM at the time, wanted Waltzing Matilda and I agreed with him. Ampol, a fuel company of the day, proposed some new words which I didn't like, but they did and spent money advertising their version which at least kept the tune. Gosh, I would be proud to have as my anthem a real song about a suicidal sheep-thief instead of the jingoistic rubbish that is normal. But it was put to a democratic vote and that is why we have the existing anthem, which I reckon is terribly unscientific and an exhortation to overpopulate.

If you could see my bike, you would know that I am not a racist. My top speed is less than the peleton cruises at. Getting back to housing, I wish we could see more cheaper housing for all those in need and not just aborigines. The alternative for some is the street and I hate seeing them do that. Surely we can do better as a society, and I don't care if the homeless are deserving or not, I don't want to see them outside in the cold. OME, are aborigines in your area exempt from the backyard fire regulations? They are in Alice Springs. Here's another thing which annoys me... Aborigines are allowed to kill wild animals, even those prohibited to the rest of us. I would agree with this "traditional hunting" if they used traditional weapons. Alas, they actually use whitefeller rifles.

In suburban Alice Springs, this carpet contractor I knew was asked to quote for a new carpet in the living room of an aboriginal tenanted house. There was a blood-soaked area 2m by 1m in the middle of the floor where they had butchered a kangaroo. Too primitive for carpets, we thought. So did this group we knew who tendered for "appropriate first dwellings " at a settlement well outside the town boundaries. The tender group consisted of an architect, a building supplies shop manager and an aboriginal elder. It was rejected by Canberra as " racist"... yep, no carpets.

Yep OME, that rubbish sure wasn't part of the world of the aborigines dreamtime. But they bought it ( with whitefellers money ) and dropped it where it offends the eye of other whitefellers like me. Of course, their traditional way of hunter-gathering was disrupted when the whitefellers took their land for cattle stations. There is a photo from the 1920's which haunts me to this day.. a group of whip-lean aboriginal young men in chains, about to be marched from Alice Springs to Port Augusta ( the nearest court) for cattle stealing. I have tried to find out more but haven't succeeded.

OME, you got me to look up Aboriginal philosophy, and I am impressed. The idea that we are the land and through the land, everything is interconnected, is actually scientifically correct. Just consider the atoms that we are made of to see this. Wow. But just to be a grumpy old man, I have to say that their idea of caring for the land should have included picking up rubbish.

Yep space, if we were to stop burning fossil fuels, and use half our military budgets to make and bury charcoal, we could yet save the planet.

Marty, I have been there when there were no indigenous rights ( before the Hungarian uprising in the 1950's) to now when the cops don't want to hear if the crime was done by indigenous. And they suffer from too much money which is used to buy grog ( look at what happened recently at Ceduna after royalties were distributed to indigenous people ) . We just can't get the right balance. My guess is that the indigenous will suffer a terrible fate when the wheels come off the whitefeller gravy train which currently brings them all things. They should be supporting the kids too.

I thought it has taken some time for the kids to see that the state of the world in 50 years time is very much their business. Our generation will be long gone, but they will be in their 60's. I'll support them if I can. And I agree that the response was terrible. Just when I was thinking good things about some liberals after the floor-crossing here in SA.

It is only with homicide that you get an idea about the territory. I was there when the deal was that it was no good ringing the police to complain about indigenous crime. This sure would make the crime statistics show very little indigenous crime huh.

The 7 days of the week come from the 7 heavenly bodies known to the first civilization. Mercury, Venus, sun, moon, mars, jupiter and Saturn. To this day, we have Sunday, Moonday and Saturnday. If those pesky vikings had not jumped in with TiwsDay, Wodensday , Thorsday and Freyaday then we would still have them properly named. Well at least there is a female up there, Freya. Better than that misogynistic middle-east lot with their all-male trinity huh.

I tried to google if pastafarians were recognized by the ATO. All I found was that Rastafarians are recognised in pommy prisons. Bad news huh, it seems an intelligent religion. ( pastafarians that is...).

Octave, in my opinion you are right about crime in Melbourne. Sexual assault may not have actually increased though, that is a crime which has mainly gone unreported because of the repercussions on the victim for reporting. So it may be that an apparent increase is a sign of a healthier society because victims are less afraid of reporting than they were. I would still be hard on refugees who commit crimes in the country which has given them refuge. They should have their new citizenship revoked and deported back to where they came from.

And it's no good saying you belong to the aircraft religion or something like that. You need to have a supernatural powerful spirit and some sort of organized rituals to praise this spirit. Not kidding, you can look up the tax laws.

They get an exemption willedoo. And we all have to pay more tax than otherwise, so we are all paying for terrorism indoctrination. ( I looked up if islam is included in the tax free business and concluded that it is)

thanks willedoo. interesting how little we get told normally

Big news about the russians taking over ukrainian navy ships , as they tried to go through the passage between the crimea and russia. Whats going on willedoo? is there going to be a war or is the ukraine going to lose out? or what?

There was more than one editorial saying, with the benefit of hindsight, about how many usual liberal voters were repelled by the right wing conservatives ( climate-change deniers, religious nutters, homophobes etc) who seem to be running the liberals right now. I guess that democracy was at work, but I would like much more democracy than we have now. For example, a big majority of voters do not agree with religions being tax-free businesses. ( does this include islmaic religious places too?) There would have been room on the gay-marriage plebiscite to fit in this question, as well as some others.

Thanks willedoo. Lots of stuff I didn't know.