How early is too early ...

 ... for Christmas decorations. It's okay for the shops to start doing Christmas decorations before November even starts, but we're supposed to save our Christmas shirts until Santa is almost with us and maybe sneak in a wearing for Christmas in July.  Not this time! We have our new Christmas shirts and we've already started wearing them ... on the 12th of November ... and it feels good!

Helium

Helium. Who needs it anyway?  Well, as it turns out, helium isn’t just about party balloons and doctors around the world are worried about a global helium shortage.  Helium is used in MRI machines - each MRI needs about 2,000 litres of ultra-cold liquid helium to keep the MRI magnets cool enough to work.  Helium, a nonrenewable element found deep within the Earth’s crust - is running low. Part of the global helium shortage is due to a failure in a crude helium enrichment plant in Texas and declining or unreliable production from existing sources, and the delay in Russia’s helium facility coming on-line.  This is the fourth time the world has suffered a helium shortage since 2006. As well as balloons and MRI, helium is also used in high-speed internet, computer hard drives, airbags in cars, and as a coolant in nuclear reactors.  It’s also used in weather balloons - which are released from 900 locations worldwide a couple of times a day. Hopefully the helium supply will improve soon, and that there are plans in place for dealing with Helium Shortage 5.0 should it happen.

Up front training

How much training should you have before you can run “front of house” at a cafe?  We went to our usual Sunday morning venue today - and, admittedly it has had a change of management and it would also seem a change of staff, but you would think they would still be able to run a cafe properly … like knowing how old the croissants are, and when the jam is out of date … and to deliver the take-away coffee order (for multiple cups) to the table, the same way the previous management did.  I was not impressed.  But then, when collecting the coffees from the barista, that the server (who managed the get our coffee order wrong) was just “filling in” - I would suggest not very well but then again it might have just been that he had no specific training or maybe he was feeling put upon because he had been called in to work on the till. It looked as though there wasn’t much help for him either, so that might have been affecting his performance a little as well.

In a word

Is it possible to tell a story in six words? I think you can convey an idea but I’m not sure about the telling a story. If you type “six word story” into a search bar, you will get many results including http://www.sixwordstories.net where there are numerous six word stories. I guess in a world where we have phone text messages as a way of conveying information, it’s feasible to think that people are used to truncating their communications ... and that six words could convey a lot. I remember reading a joke once about a woman and her sisters who ran a farm and she went off to see if she could buy a bull. She did managed to find one and it took just about all of the money she had to be able to secure it. It was the “old days” so ... she went to the Post Office to send them a telegram to let them know she had the bull and that they would need to come and collect her and it. She had enough money for only one word in the telegram so she sent: comfortable. And they did.

Up in the air

Who knew? And what are the requirements? Reading a story today about a woman who had been tricked into paying money to a “cosmonaut” who couldn’t afford to pay for his “return ticket to Earth” from the ISS, it said that space travel didn’t work like that … you don’t have to buy your own ticket. The amazing thing, though, it seems like private astronauts (and cosmonauts?) can pay for their own tickets to board the station. The price does include a return trip to Earth. I knew you could buy tickets to travel to "space" with Space X and other companies, I just had no idea you could buy a ticket to the International Space Station. So how much does it cost? What are the requirements/restrictions? And how much would it cost to take a Fisher Space Pen on board and see if it really does write in space.

Intelligent AI?

Plagiarism is a dirty word when it comes to study and research but it may be harder to detect now that some students are using advanced language generators to write papers for them - and this can’t be detected by plagiarism software. The issue is that AI-generated text is not copied from somewhere else - and that’s what plagiarism software checks for. In the article “Sneaky Students Using AI to Write Their Papers For Them”, one student suggests they still do their homework on things they need to learn to pass, but they use AI to handle the things they don’t want to do, or they find “meaningless”. I guess it’s fair to say that we all learn in different ways, and that this might be a part of this. It also may just be a way to make “busywork” less time consuming so you don’t have to fill in the details - but rather are doing the equivalent of “dot points” to answer. Hopefully, though, the AI being used is better than the voice recognition software in my car - you would think it would be easy for it to make a call to someone it has called many times before, rather than suggesting something like “email” which really doesn’t have a phone number attached to it.

The long and short of it

Why did the T-Rex have such short arms? A study published in the journal Acta Paleontologica Polica suggested that the T-Rex evolved short arms because they fed in packs - and by having short arms it meant they wouldn’t bite off each other’s arms. Or was it a matter of the arms didn’t get shorter but that the legs got longer - that’s a suggestion put forward by John Hutchinson at London’s Royal Veterinary College who is an expert in the biomechanics of movement in large terrestrial animals - both living and extinct - who also noted that there was no way we could really know what was involved or the triggering factors. It is interesting to think about this piece of evolution differently though - because we do tend to think of T-Rex anatomy and the short arms that way. 

Sounds of music

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious - I think that’s how you spell it; I once read that you spell it exactly as it sounds - and it sounds like that! I must watch the movie (“Mary Poppins”) one day … although I remember it from when the child actors in “The Sound of Music” talked about how Julie Andrews would entertain them on set with songs from her previous movie … “Mary Poppins”. Although, me for mine, I’ve always been a fan of “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” and that famous line after she returns from the Von Trapp family house and the Mother Superior says to her “Maria, what is it you can’t face?”. I wonder how long it will be until they decide to remake “The Sound of Music” - they seem to have remade a whole lot of other movies which were perfectly good enough the first time around!

Date of birth

Why do they need my date of birth for a competition entry? Isn't it enough that they have my name, email address, phone number, physical address and ... well, I'm sure there was something else they needed before they would let me submit my competition entry. Bad enough they now have all my marketing information without making it easier for them to identify me. I can't help but wonder how secure their digital and cloud information and databases are, but I guess for the prize - a $21,000 cruise, it's worth a go.

Droning on (no, not really)

Following some close-up viewing of drone footage last week, I decided it was time to think about pulling my drone out again for another "go". Or was it? I've never had much luck with it ... the battery life is not great (12 min) and it is quite light which means I haven't been able to take it out flying if there was even a whiff of a wind. The drone and I have spent some time together - mostly stressful as it tried to fly away or fly at me or be somewhere so far away that I couldn't actually see it anymore and had to search the (practice) sports field to find it. Hmmm ... is it possible that what St was saying was true - a $600 drone is going to fly better than a $100 drone especially when the $600 drone has GPS and a good interactive app and good instruction information including lots of Youtube videos explaining the features and functions of the drone. So I have purchased a new drone - the DJI Mini 2 - which does HD stills and 4K video as well as a selection of "QuickShots" - pre-programmed modes for the drone. I watched a couple of instructional videos on Youtube last night and took DJ out this morning for its first flight (only because there is now a "no drones in the house" rule). I was impressed. Usually I can't get a drone off the ground and flying in a straight line - but this one was up and flying within a couple of minutes. I loved that I could set a height and distance maximum - so when I was in the middle of the field, the drone was never going to go outside the field - so there would be no chance of losing it in the surrounding bush - which had always been a worry with the other drones.
I have a lot to learn about DJ but it is gratifying to know that it is going to be "fit for purpose" and not the source of a constant sense of anxiety and stress - like the previous drones. 

Footage from the first flying is shown below. 

CoVid Brain

I would not have believed how much you could not be able to think clearly if I hadn't experienced myself. At one stage there I even thought about withdrawing from my TAFE course and enrolling in the next intake ... hopefully when cognitive services returned to normal. Each time I sat down to work on my assignment I couldn't concentrate and I really needed to as I set up several social media accounts with different passwords and email addresses ... confusing at the best of times but a real challenge if you can't keep your thoughts straight ... and while I understand the need for multi-factor authentication, it did not help!
In the end I did what I could - hoping it would be enough - and submitted the assignment last week and I'm now waiting for the result. I had decided, quite uncharacteristically I think, that if I needed to re-submit, that would be okay, because the lecturer would tell me what areas needed to be worked on and hopefully also provide some pointers about what needed to be done ... they're there, afterall, to help!

Get those arms up!

I don't always believe what I read on the internet but I was hoping that this one was true. We've all had those situations - when you or someone with you laughs or does something just as they eat or drink and it "goes down the wrong way" leading to coughing and spluttering as you try to catch your breath. So I was happy to read that you could help fix this by raising both arms in the air to help clear the airways. I've been waiting for the chance to check it out and last night someone did the "wrong way" thing and I told them to raise their arms as someone else raced to get them a drink of water because we all know that can help. I am pleased to say that by the time the water arrived it almost wasn't needed - the arms in the air trick worked. No-one was as surprised as I: but apparently if you say something confidently enough people believe you know what you're talking about - even if you're just repeating something you read on the internet!

What's that?

It's great when just being yourself can make folk happy! We went around to my sister and her partner's house where they had been getting ready for a surprise birthday party which in the end didn't happen as the Guest of Honour and her three children had all come down with a lurgy. The decorations were up when we arrived and while most of the balloons and other bits and bobs had been relocated to the Birthday Girl's house, the Happy Birthday sign Wa and Ma had strung together was still there. It wasn't until we were in the middle of dinner that I noticed that Birthday had a couple of letters in the wrong order. When I mentioned this, Wa and Ma burst out laughing and high-fived each other. They had done it intentionally and had been sure that if anyone noticed it would be me - they were so happy they'd been right.  I'm so glad my reputation for noticing stuff remains intact - and that they enjoyed it so much!  I'm just stunned that it took me over an hour to notice! 

Jurassic Park

The next movie in the Jurassic Park franchise is now only a couple of months away and the promotion for it is flying thick and fast. I was hooked from the teasers before the Beijing Winter Olympics and with each new release I am getting more excited. The latest promo was released only a couple of days ago: Jurassic World Dominion Legacy Featurette. I checked on the Outlook site to see when the film is due for release in Australia. The worldwide release dates are shown - but it seems the world has shrunk to include only Canada, Germany, the UK and the USA.  Hopefully they remember to bring it to Australia because it's a long way to go to see a movie - but we'd do it!

Now ... that's lucky!

We had a lesiurely breakfast at a cafe which supplies newspapers for their customers to read - which is how we chanced upon the story "Alleged acid attack appears on TikTok". It seems a TikTok "personality" was live-streaming as she was waiting outside a Sydney restaurant on Friday night when police say three masked men got out of a black Mazda SUV and approached her before allegedly attacking her with a chemical substance. The attack was caught in her live stream. She continued a live stream from the Hospital where she was treated, saying how lucky it was she had  "... my glasses on. Imagine [if] I didn't have my glasses on." Yes, thank goodness she was wearing her sunglasses at 11.15pm at night when the incident occurred. Were they her glasses? I had a look at her account on TikTok and the couple of times I saw her with sunnies on, they seemed quite different from those pictured in the live stream of the attack. Yes, that it was one lucky "personality" - and she did not sustain serious injuries in the attack. First responders were not as lucky and it has been reported that a number of them suffered chemical burns while on the scene.

Life imitates art

Let's call them Murder Dogs.  I first saw them in "War of the Worlds" where they were roaming the countryside sampling human DNA. Unfortunately that required them to shoot a bolt into people's foreheads. Since then I have seen pictures of then in the real world in Shanghai  where at least one remote-controlled robot dog walks the streets with a megaphone strapped to its back. The robot dog is about the size of a terrier and barks orders to residents: stay inside, wash your hands, check your temperature.
The "dogs" have been adapted for military use as well. I'm not sure if they are remote-controlled or autonomous - but either way they are a scary proposition if they're on your trail. 

Let the games begin ...

The Federal Election has been called for 21 May 2022 and as we wait for the big day to arrive, the Liberal and Labor Parties (and the others) will be doing everything in their power to sway the voters to their side.
Current PM Scott Morrison has already come out swinging - making less than polite comments about Mr Albanese's physical appearance. This may well be one of those elections where they criticize the person rather than the policy. It used to be that that was a sure sign that someone was "losing the argument" but it doesn't seem that it works like that these days.

Feel good movies

A few years back my partner said she would take me to a "feel good" movie ... which turned out to be Slumdog Millionaire. I was quite distressed with the mother being bashed, children being mutilated so they would be more "successful" when they were sent out begging - and just generally. I remember asking her (yes, through what might have been tears) when it was going to start being a "feel good" movie - because it didn't seem like that at all. Today, we were at another movie, a Rom-Com, and it certainly was that but there was a point when one of the characters is having a tender moment with another and as he was about to whisper sweet nothings to her, he gets shot. It truly was unexpected and, I think probably a wee bit violent for what it was. Up until that point in the movie, there had been violence but I don't think anyone had been seriously injured. Have we as a society become too used to violence generally - so that we aren't bothered when someone is seen to be violently attacked and hurt in a movie, and how do we then interpret violence when we see it in real life? It's an age-old question of course - does violence beget violence - or at least the acceptance of it?

Waiting ... waiting ... waiting

I'm not sure what it is about some tradespeople and how they seem to be so not good at scheduling their time or at keeping folk informed when they had made or changed the schedule. It must be good to have so much work on that they can ignore repeated calls from clients to find out when you are planning to get to them - at least I hope they have too much work rather than just not being able to roster and get to the jobs they have. No wonder the local Facebook group has asked for details of "no shows" so they can exclude them from the local businesses directory. Hmmmm.

So how many chances do we give them? I had one guy lined up to do the lawns and after the third unsuccessful try to raise him, I finally, and reluctantly, because he is very good when he does do the lawn, had to try someone else ... I say "try" because, I think it's 10 days later, and they haven't turned up yet ... although, they have now sent a text saying they're planning to be here tomorrow. Fingers crossed!

How long ... ?

I decided that I wanted to rewatch Independence Day and when I did a search on Google to see which streaming service it was on, I was stunned to see that it had been made in 1996. What the ... ? That's over a quarter of a century ago! That makes sense thought when I think about it because we were living in Leichhardt at the time, and that was that long ago.
I remember when it was about to come out, I entered a competition in the newspaper to win seats to the first showing, and then, not confident that we would be winners, I bought tickets to one of the first "public" shows after that. Which is how we came to be watching Independence Day on the Thursday night and then on the Saturday afternoon. It was good ... and I've seen Independence Day a few times again since then. I hadn't been thinking about watching it again but someone made a reference today to "chicken legs" - as in when Blue (their dog) lies on his back he looks like a chicken - with chicken legs - and that made me think about Jasmine's chicken legs - and then, of course, Independence Day jumped to the top of my to-watch list. Thank goodness for streaming services ... although I do have a copy of the DVD here ... somewhere ... but I'm glad I don't have to find it.  It would take longer to do that than to watch the movie on Disney+.

Matrix

I was very much looking forward to the new Matrix - Resurrection movie, and I hate to admit it, but I was extremely disappointed with it. It's not often that I think about walking out of a movie, but I was prepared to make an exception this time. Even the person I was watching it with - who had been looking forward to seeing it even more than I, contemplated leaving. So what was it? The characters were familiar - Neo, Trinity, Morpheus and others - but the plot was slow and there were too many fight scenes with little reason or rationale. True, they were pretty amazing, but since they weren't integral to the story - well, not all of them - It reminded me a little of The Lord of the Rings movies - walk, fight, walk, fight, ethereal lady ... and continue. Of course, there is no ethereal lady in the Matrix - unless you count Trinity - but, did I mention, there was lots of fighting!

Python

Who knew it would be so interesting to type random words, numbers, and symbols into an application and have it do stuff for you? And who knew that Python would share some similarities with Excel? Yes, I have finally done my first bit of coding … using the Python programming language and I enjoyed it very much.

I was a bit surprised when I didn’t sleep/dream in Python last night. I remember when I was learning to type at school, I used to type in my dreams all the time - want to say something … type. Funny stuff, but I have spoken with others who had the same experience.

Wordle

Is Wordle “new” or just an old game in a new format? Wordle, of course, is the word game that has taken the internet by storm. One (only) Wordle is available each day. The player has 6 attempts to determine the Wordle of the day, getting feedback at each attempt. If they have a letter in the correct place, it turns green. If they have a correct letter but not in the correct place, it turns yellow. Letters not in the word show as grey. By deduction and reasoning, and some luck, the player then has to work out what the Wordle is. There has been screeds written about choosing your first words to give you a better chance of getting the Wordle out in six tries - although the fun is trying to get it out in as few tries as possible - to score bragging rights. You can share your Wordle result without sharing the words although some folk have been known to Tweet screenshots of their working - which is a bit mean giving there is only one Wordle a day.

Wordle has recently been purchased by The New York Times so it will be interesting to see if they monetise it or whether it remains free to play.

 

Popular?

Australia's most popular barista made coffee. Hmmm.
Who determines the meaning of the world "popular"? Because I would have bet - contrary to what their sign would have me believe - that the most popular barista-made coffee in Australia does not come from Maccas! And if Maccas, or a disinterested third party, had conducted a survey would they have put the names of other popular coffee franchises on the list? And if they did, would it have been representative given that most coffee chains are not Australia-wide and even food franchises that are nationally available rarely have a dedicated cafe area? So ... what is their definition of "popular" and how representative was their research?

Archival items

Did you know you can access the Archives of The New York Times online? I was researching technology and the Pandemic and looking through The New York Times recent articles when I stumbled onto a reference to the Archives and that the contents are available - mostly free to subscribers. And the Archivesy are searchable. They can be viewed as text or, via their Time Machine, on the printed page of the edition. I spent some time reading an issue from April 1880! Who knew there was an Institute of Technology even then! And that it would be so engaging to read history in the making. 

New words ...

Each year, new words are added to the dictionary ... and I'm not sure how long it takes for the dictionary people to come knocking at your door after you have coined a word, or a term, but the people who came up with something to call the people who steal delivered parcels from people's doorstep (or wherever the delivery folk have left it) should be hearing the knock on their door any time. Their term? Porch pirates. It's a growing problem of course. I have been watching a few videos on YouTube lately about the elaborate lengths people go to to get back at people who steal their parcels or catch new porch pirates. I quite like the glitter bombs when they go off in their car or house ... or wherever. Better when they get caught on elaborate cameras set up in the "stolen" parcels - with the camera feed going to the cloud so it doesn't matter if they get rid of the actual camera. Smile!

Shortages ...

Since when does any store run out of hummus? It's not something I want all the time but I just felt like some yesterday .. and when I realised how little we had left it went on the shopping list for today. Simple enough ... except our usual Coles store had run out of it ... and a heap of other stuff as well. The other stuff I understand ... but hummus? Usually there are buckets of it everywhere but this time not one little tub of it ... even in those flavours that people tend to choose last - if at all. And don't get anyone started on toilet paper ... people just seem to grab rolls of it whenever there's even a rumour of shortages. At least there haven't been any stories of fisticuffs over it as there were at the start of the CoVid pandemic.

Hot ... hot ... hot ...

Is there nothing that Wikipedia doesn't know? Probably ... but it does know that the hottest day in Australia - which was previously in Oodnadatta (South Australia) on 2 January 1960 - has now been joined by another equally hot day - at Onslow (Western Australia) on 13 January (2022). Both temperatures came in at 50.7°C (123.3°F). They're not the only places in Australia to have high temperatures - both New South Wales and Queensland have had temperatures at 49.5°C (121.1°F) or above in the last 50 years or so. It's interesting, though, that even Australia's southernmost State has had over 40°C temperatures.

While it could appear to be getting hotter, I was reading the other day about 1816 - The Year Without a Summer. According to Wikipedia, severe climate abnormalities caused global temperatures to decrease by 0.4–0.7°C (0.7–1°F). It was the coldest it had been in Europe between 1766 and 2000. The result was major food shortages across the Northern Hemisphere. The reason: a volcanic winter event caused the massive 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies (now known as Indonesia).
It wasn't all bad though (?) ... it was while Mary Shelley was holed up during this period that she entered into a writing competion to see who of her compatriots could write the best horror story ... and thus Frankenstein was born ... or would that be ... created!

Ethically speaking ...

Philosophy. Hmmmm. I've never really dabbled in it much but I am doing more now that I'm studying a subject that references ethics. I need to give details of three types of ethics - and who knew there was more than one? So I have been looking at Utilitarianism and Kantianism for a start and cannot believe how well some folk explain the concepts. I have found a YouTube channel called Crash Course which clarifies and gives very clear examples of the different principles involved. I'm going to have to watch them a few more times though to make sure I understand them well enough for my next project: determining who was ethically responsible for (spoiler alert!) the death at the end of Louise Penny's The Long Way Home. I had been wondering about it (in terms of what could have been done to prevent it) and now I have a framework in which to process it, I am looking forward to the exercise.

Receipt issues

What do you do when you have a receipt you're holding on to for someone and then you leave it in the car and it fades to the point where you can't read it? Well, you can try to photograph it using different filters and have some degree of success, or you can contact the store and see if they can print out a duplicate - if you could work out what the bar code or identifier on it was (because it really doesn't seem to be there any longer) , or ... you can take it to Coles and they will put it under their special light so they can read it without any problem at all ... and then they print up a Duplicate receipt for you. Problem solved!

Not the duplicate receipt.

Loss of faith?

Who would have thought that Australians seem to be losing their faith in traditional religions? Don't take my word for it... let's use an independent source - the Australian Census ... well a few of them anyway. 

In the years since 1966, those reporting no religion in the Census have increased from 0.8% to 30% in the 2016 Census. That makes approximately 7 million Australians who claimed to have no religion. Hmmmm.

The figures from the Censuses (is that a word), bearing in mind the ones from 1966 to 2006 are not included here:
Census 1966 - Those reporting no religion - 0.8%
Census 2006 - Those reporting no religion - 19%
Census 2011 - Those reporting no religion - 22%
Census 2016 - Those reporting no religion - 30% - approximately 7 million Australians.

Data from Census 2021 will be released from June 2022 and it will be interesting to revisit this then to see if there has been an increase in "no religion" with CoVid and other world events or maybe something else entirely. 

Quick reminder: According to Wikipedia: Religion is a social-cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements; however, there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion.

The Digital Divide

It's amazing what you learn along the way. A TAFE Queensland subject is Develop and extend critical and creative thinking skills. On Page 17 of the Learner Guide, there's mention of something akin to that Generation Gap that folk used to talk about. These days it's more likely to be the Digital Divide. There are two sides of the Divide - and most folk are on one side or the other - Digital Immigrants or Digital Slaves. If you're older, if you grew up in the 1950's and 1960's, you are more likely to be a Digital Immigrant - everyday technology is new and something that you need to learn, normally grudgingly. The other group, the Digital Natives, born in the 1990's and 2000's has no fear of trying a new device or system - it's just natural for them. The boundaries are blurred of course, they must be, given people's different experiences and proclivities ... and don't think I won't be starting to catalogue the folk I run into from now on.

Stellar Pizza ... not just Rocket Scientists?

Did someone say Rocket Scientists? Despite what we may have thought, rocket scientists aka aerospace engineers scored no more than the general population in a study led by researchers at universities and hospitals in London and Bristol. They were given the Great British Intelligence Test which looked at areas of cognition like planning and reasoning, working memory, attention and emotional processing. Who took the test? 300 Aerospace engineers, 12 neurosurgeons and 18,251 members of the British public. According to the report by Rebecca Sohn I read on space.com there were differences between the groups, but they were hard to interpret - but, bottomline, it seems any of us could turn our hands to rocket science, if we were so inclined. 

But what about those who do become rocket scientists? What do they do next? Well, if you've been working with SpaceX, you might turn your hand to Pizzas. Three former SpaceX engineers have set up Stellar Pizza, billed as a robot restaurant which will be able to churn out a pizza every 45 seconds! Benson Tsai, CEO of Stellar Pizza, worked at Elon Musk's SpaceX before rounding up 23 former SpaceX employees to build an automated, touchless pizza-making machine which can fit in the back of a truck. It takes about five minutes for the pizza to be produced from start to finish ... and while the article I read in Business Insider said while Stellar Pizza offers a pepperoni or supreme pizza, customers can build their own with toppings including onions, bacon, chicken and olives.