old man emu

I watched a pair of eagles (????) thermalling today and a pair of plovers were having a good go at chasing them off. What I find interesting is that there are several species of birds that come for a feed in the paddocks near my place, but I never see any of them being attacked by large hunting birds. There is a pair of what I think are falcons which lives in an isolated tree near the highway a couple of ks from my place. I see the pair hunting, but they never seem to go far from their home base.

You've got yourself an incredible mouse. Just like this fellow,

This reminds me of the householder who refuses to sell their house to a developer as the rest of the people in the street have, so the developer simply builds around that site and the house becomes a streetscape anomaly.

I recently watch a video about the restoration of a 1920 electric radiator heater. The radiator was made in Australia. I've seen other video of restoration of tin plate toys that had been made in Australia. During WWII Australian manufacturing industry ran at top speed. Just after he was demobbed, my Dad worked in the foundery of a company that made plumbing items like taps and such. Actually, during the first 50 years of the 20th Century, manufacturing in Australia was growing steadily considering the small population. I reckon that growth was knocked on the head by Menzies' anglophilia. If it wasn't British it was no good. Australia simply became another British-controlled colony for the production of raw materials for countries that had the foresight to rebuild after WWII. Now we have an economy that is based on primary production and tertiary "industries" such as finance and education. We don't have secondary industry worth a damn.

At least in Sydney they try to keep the street facade when they build skyscrapers on sites already occupied by examples of earlier architectural styles.

I resemble that remark!

Very poor understanding of contract law by the servo. The police weren't quite correct in their response. The correct response is that, since you came in with the intention to pay for the fuel, then that meant that you were prepared to complete the contract for the purchase of the fuel. (Therefore you had no intent to steal, unless you had prior knowledge that their EFTPOS was not available). Therefore the matter between you and the servo was a civil matter, not criminal, so the police declined to get involved. I have seen it where in such circumstances, the attendant obtains your name, address and contact details. The attendant then completes a report form and you sign an agreement to make full payment within a certain time. You have to think of things from the attendant's point of view. The attendant has to account for the release of all fuel during the shift. Some nasty site owners make the attendant make good any shortfalls. So, it's clear that the attendant doesn't want to be paying for other people's stuff. If you don't come back and pay, then that's when you commit a crime. As for the police saying "No sign, so sad, too bad", it actually is a requirement that a merchant advertises (put up a sign) the payment methods accepted. That's why during COVID it was legal for shops to put up signs saying "Card only", or "No Cash Accepted".

I needed some tissue wrapping paper, so yesterday I went to the newsagent. I didn't know how much it would cost, but I figured it wouldn't be more than a couple of dollars. So I grabbed a couple of $2 coins from my Men's Shed smoko stash. The tissue cost $1. That's just too little to be paid for using my card. I wonder how much one would save over the course of a year by paying with cash for regular purchases at supermarkets and servos. That extra "merchant fee" that is tacked onto each use of the card must add up over twelve months. I noticed that even the government collects that fee to pay the card mobs when you pay for things like vehicle registration and licence renewal. Then again, where can you go to pay your phone, electricity or water bill since thee service providers don't seem to have a physical presence in the community to enable these transactions.

Are you referring to me a a "character"?

Sounds like grandfather's axe.

WTF, IMHO, LOL, and ROFL don't make sense until they have been explained to you. It's the same for the letters commonly used in algebra. Once you know what they represent, then you can easily understand what is being written. In simplest terms, another way of saying y = mx+ b is, what is the numerical value of y if x is ... Without diving deeply into a complicated explanation (for which I was confusing myself) let me tell you what the letters mean in y = mx + b. This is the generic equation that will produce a straight line when the results are depicted graphically on a two-dimensional graph. "y" is the answer to the calculation. Its value depends on the value of the other letters and the arithmetic applied to them. Its value can change depending on the value of x. Therefore, we call "y" a dependent variable. The values of the letters m and b remain the same in each particular equation. They are called constants, and I'll explain them in a moment. The value of "x" can change to anything. Most often some of its values are known and from them we can use the equation to find out what '"y" would be for a value of "x" we haven't measured. Because "x" can be anything, we call it an independent variable. What about "m" and "b"? The value of these remains the same for a particular equation. Their job is to describe the direction and location of a line which joins all the values of "x" plotted on a graph. The letter "m" determines the angle the line makes with the horizontal axis of the graph. That angle is known as the "slope". It can be calculated from a graph by "run over rise", where "run is the horizontal distance between two points and "rise" is the vertical distance between them. The greater the value of "m", the steeper the slope of the line. Also, if "m" is a positive number, the line rises front left to right across the graph. If it is a negative number, it falls from left to right. The letter "b" determines where the straight line will cross the vertical axis of the graph. If the value of "b" is zero, then the line will cross the Y axis at the "origin", which has the values of zero for both "x" and "y". If "b" has a positive value, then the line will cross the vertical axis at the point on the axis where the value of "x" is zero and the value of "y" is the same as the value of "b". Here's a diagram which puts that all together. Graphs of equations where "x" is just a plain number are straight lines. If 'x' is squared, cubed, or a square root, the graph will have some sort of regular curved shape. Often in practice the graph of "y" versus "x" will not be so plain, as in torque and horsepower graphs. That's when interpreting them will involve calculus, and I'm not going there!

If you don't use algebra, how will you find out Y = mX + b ?

This is how the rain is falling this morning 26/9/24. It is moving diagonally top left to bottom right. At the same time, Sydney and points south are copping a hiding from a cold front from the southwest. There's a saying around here that when it rained on Noah for forty days and forty nights, this place only got forty points. For you metrificated lot, rain used to be measured in "points". There are 100 points to the inch of rain. One inch of rain is now recorded as 25 mm, so 40 points is 10 mm. But you can't modernise the old saying because it loses its wit. The rainfall measurement reflects the depth of water covering one square metre of surface, so one millimetre of rain represents one litre of water on a one square metre space. Is it any wonder that so much water can be collected from a house roof during a heavy downfall, or why the roofs of shopping centres collapse during thunderstorms. It also makes you wonder how much water is suspended in a band of clouds.

It's called the bank's logo.

I had to get a "cash out" at the supermarket to get some $2 coins to pay for smoko at the Mens' Shed. So tell me. Assuming that you pay most of your bills electronically, and use a card for the fortnightly grocery shop, how much do you reckon is a reasonable amount of cash to be carrying between pension days? Give me a figure on a per person basis if you have an "other half".

All this week the BOM has been going on about a rain event coming diagonally across the country from the Kimberley to the NSW South Coast. I was looking forward to getting a bit of rain to settle the dust and to kick off the Spring. However, it looks like the rain will pass to the northeast and southwest of my place without dropping a whole lot on me. This is the weather radar at 5:30 pm 25/9/24. See how there is a broad diagonal band of dry with Gilgandra in the middle. That bit of white is a shower that you could dodge the drops from.

But we don't get woodworm in our furniture. I love it how they go on and on about the wood swelling and contracting in response to humidity changes. Where I am the humidity is constantly so low that wood never gets much moister than kiln-dried.

It annoys me when I watch woodworking videos made in the States or England. Every variety of wood they use seems so easy to cut, plane or chisel. Australian woods just want to keep fighting you long after the tree they grew in has died. The only easily worked wood that is readily available is pine, but that doesn't have the extraordinarily straight grain that those Northern Hemisphere woods have. I'd also like to know why 19 mm plywood is so expensive.

The picture I meant was the one of the wattle in flower. The Belah, Casuarina cristata, is a different species from the Swamp Sheoak, Casuarina glauca, I grew up with on the shores of Botany Bay.

Yeah. I've seen videos of similar things, sometimes made from a ladder. Under $100 is less than I thought a store-bought one would cost. My BIL wants one to mill some Cypress pine which grows on the place. The BIL identified some local trees for me. Someone here metioned that they saw belah (????) trees in a photo I posted. The BIL showed me a big stand of them. I know them as She-oaks

Pictures, please?

I'm keeping a breast of them.

There are a lot of local members who actually try to do what they said they would try to do for their electorate. However, these are the backbenchers who don't seem to have much say in the course the Ship of State sails. You might say that these backbenchers are the cooks, engine room crew and cabin stewards of the cruise ship. The big decisions affecting the course of the ship are made by the elite on the bridge, who have access to their charts and environmental factors that affect the course.

The other day I cleared my Youtube viewing history. Now I don't get any videos relating the Trump or the US Election. Winner!

I wonder how many people are actually financial members of a political party.