Roomie, Housie, Flatie

In Australia, flatmates (or roommates if you American) are housemates. So flaties become housies. Last night we had a housies Christmas dinner and secret Santa. (It seems that secret Santa is called Kris Kringle in Australia.) Anyway, lots of food and fun all round. And sing-along carols in a key of one's own choosing.

09-12 HousiesXmas

Queensland

Google maps says it's a 1700km drive from my flat in Fitzroy, Melbourne to GT's house in Gilston, Southern Queensland.


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This is about the same as the total distance I've cycled to and from work since I've been living in Fitzroy. Does this mean I can say that in some way I've offset half the carbon emissions from flying to and from Queensland to visit GT and Sandra last weekend?

Man-made climate change is a hoax?

I saw this in a post from Ken Perrott's blog on the Sciblogs.co.nz site of the NZ Science Media Centre. Other stuff there is well worth checking out too, particularly the video discussing the claims made by climate change denialists about the e-mails that were stolen from the Climate Reasearch Unit in the UK.

Tricams article follow up

I just got an e-mail from Kat, the editor of Argus where my article on tricams appeared. It seems someone even liked the article. Here's the message they sent to Kat:

I thought the current argus was the best version to come out in 3 or 4 years, really top notch.

I really appreciated reading the technical articles about tricams and anchor setups - for me, Argus has relevance to the extent it includes technical articles like these. I suspect the average climbers don't really care about new routes being put up, as we rely slavishly on the guidebooks put out by simey etc. Appreciate the historical record but....

No one's ever written to say how much they liked a maths article I wrote.

Tricams: Rock climbing is easier than mathematics

In the car on the way out to Mt Arapilies the other weekend I was saying how much I liked tricams. Probably in an effort to get me to shut up, Kat asked if I would be able write something about them. I thought it was an odd question and said "yes, probably". It turns out Kat was serious about me writing something: she's the editor of Argus, the magazine of the Victorian Climbing Club. A month later and the article is already in print. This is in contrast with getting something published in mathematics. The last couple of maths articles I had published took a couple of years from being submitted until they appeared in print. Anyway, here's the article. It's no famous Frenchman but I'm pretty happy with it anyway. (Even if the last sentence of the article doesn't really make sense without Ode to a Pink Tricam to go with it as I had intended.)



For people who care, you can find the whole issue of Argus here.

Nano-technology: Hidden killer?

The Melbourne Age had a great example of uninformed, science fearing, luddism in the paper today. The revelation that that there are small things in make-up. If it sounds like science, it could be a killer!

The use of nanotechnology is common in some top-selling cosmetics - but don't expect to find anything about it on the label.

Those are the findings of a new Friends of the Earth report that claims Australian women are being used as guinea pigs by big cosmetic companies after independent testing showed that several high-end concealer and foundation brands contained nanoparticles in some form.

Describing the use of nanoparticles in cosmetics as the potential modern-day equivalent of arsenic creams popular in the Elizabethan court, Friends of the Earth's Georgia Miller called for greater transparency in the beauty sector.

While I certainly hold a very low opinion of the cosmetics industry, that is based on the fact that they exploit peoples' insecurities to sell them overpriced muck, advertised with claims of efficacy that are deliberately untestable and with science-like, self-invented gibberish of the "neutragenics" and "plasmonic anti-againg" variety.
The article in The Age, however, is equally uninformed. The implication is that nanoparticles are as dangerous as arsenic, are untested, and are being poured into face creams by lab-coat wearing, test-tube wielding mad-scientist types. Fear it because it's science seems to be the message in the article. There's no mention of what the nanoparticles actually are. Are we talking about 5nm clusters of gold atoms (used for catalysis), fluorescing quantum dots (100 nm and potentially useful for tracing transport of nutrients, etc, in plants)
carbon nanotubes (10-100 nm diameter and microns in length: potential uses are varied but include a possible delivery mechanisms for anti-cancer drugs),
Zinc oxide/Titanium oxide in sunscreen: ~50-100 nm? In fact, Why is the The Age running a headline about nanotechnology and sunscreen? It's harder to drum up some hype about products that have been used for years with no obvious negative effects and which are known to help prevent people dying slow painful deaths after getting skin cnacer!

There's much to be skeptical of about the current nanotech buzz: putting omega-3 fatty acids from fish oil inside nano-tubes to make what is essentially an ultra-fresh fish-oil pill*, rather than just suggesting people eat some fresh fish (where's the "value-added" profit in that?). There's also much to be excited about; cleaner/cheaper/more efficient/more powerful technologies to save lives/energy/resources and so on. The variety of applications is huge, because the types of science and technology that can be covered by the label nanotechnology is huge. For the typical reader of the article in The Age, the term "nano" could have been replaced by "very small" without any loss of accuracy or understanding. I know it appeared in the "Life & Style" section of the paper rather than the "Technology" section, but uninformed fear-mongering drivel like this article doesn't help anyone.

*It's true! I was at a conference where this was one suggested application of nanotechnology.

Training in the heat

I'm not sure exactly what the temperature was when I went out for some cross-fit yesterday evening. The overnight low was 30 degrees so I assume it was a few of degrees that since the sun was still out. I started straight after I cycled home from work so I'm going to include the bike ride as part of the work out. It certainly meant I was warmed up. Anyway, here's the workout:

13km bike ride (30mins)
3km run

5 reps of
10x pull-ups (I swapped between normal and jump-to-bar depending on the other people who wanted to use the bars)
10x burpee push-ups
10x sit-ups
20x walking lunge (10 per leg)

3km run.

Owch!

Friday; the first day this week I've been able to walk properly. I did a short cross-fit workout last Sunday, and didn't think much of it at the time, but those 20 minutes of exercise were enough to leave me with aching legs four days later --- bad enough that I was limping about and clutching the hand rail on the stairs like and old me. The workout that did all the damage?

Five reps of:
100 squats (body weight only)
35 lunges
20 pushups

On a totally unrelated topic, go and vote for my photo on the Petzl win your weight in gear competition. I have 14 days starting from yesterday to get as many votes as possible. To vote you just click on the stars next to the image (preferably on the 5th star to indicate your high opinion of my photo). If you've got a nice photo or video that is something to do with light, you might want to think about entering too. Anyone's body weight equals a lot of Petzl gear!

Warmer Weather

Wellington and Melbourne aren't at very different latitudes, and both are near the coast but the difference in forecast temperatures is pushing 20 degrees at the moment.



Update: The latest temperatures on the Australian Bureau of Meteorology website say that it's currently 35.2 degrees at the weather station nearest to my work. No wonder I have a headache.

Over qualified and under paid.

The NZ Herald reports that two thirds of Bachelor degrees award in NZ last year went to women.

Between 2006 and 2008 the number of male students completing a bachelor degree fell from 7600 to 6900.

In the same period the number of female students completing bachelor degrees increased by 100 to 12,900.

And that currently females make up a higher proportion at all levels of education from level one NCEA (the course you do at high school when you are 15) to doctorates.

Yet, NZ still has problems with pay equity/equality between men and women. (I'm too lazy to look up a good reference for that claim. Start with the article Nats Nix Pay Equity by Anne Else.)

It's enough to make one cringe to be a bloke.

More Arapiles Photos

A few more photos from climbing at Arapiles. The first gallery are photos from the first weekend there with Chris, Erich, Steve and N. The second gallery is from last weekend when I tagged along with some people from the Victorian Climbing Club.

09-10 Araps_Olympus

09-11 Araps2

Cup Day Quietness

Melbourne is nice and quite out near my work at the moment. Classes at the university finished last week, and today is Melbourne Cup Day, so most people in Victoria get a holiday. Cycling home yesterday evening there were so few cars since people mostly take the Monday off work and use Cup Day to make a four day weekend I got home in 25 minutes (instead of the usual 30) on account of not having to mess about with cars at lights (and the timing for the lights was just right). This morning I got to work in 28 minutes. Mostly because there were no cars about again. In fact there were so few cars that my ride took longer than it might have since the pressure sensors at the traffic lights didn't seem to notice me so a couple of times I had to wait a few minutes before a car pulled up behind me in order for the lights to change. I guess if I headed towards the city or Flemmington, where the races are, I'd find things different.

The rest of Arapiles

I've forced myself to find some time in my busy schedule (busy packing for my trip back to Arapiles tomorrow morning!) to post a couple more pictures from climbing at Arapiles last weekend. Actually, most of photos were rubbish (I was too busy climbing) so I'll post some topos and route descriptions from the guide book and a couple of Chris's photos too to spice things up.





The first long climb we did was The Shroud, a 118 m four pitch grade 10 on the Pharos wall. N led her first full pitch of trad while I took photos of lizards (well, mostly I belayed). I led the remaining three.







The rappel from the top of The shroud was a nice long 47m.



My second long climb was Siren, a little further around on The Pinnacle Face which Chris, N and I climbed.





N led the first and fourth pitches, I led the second and Chris, the rest. It must have been well over 30 degrees in the sun and we climbed right through midday. My ankles got burnt in a strip between where my regular shoes and my climbing shoes come to.





On the day we left, N and I managed to squeeze in another long climb (with Chris again), Arachnus, a 105m grade 9 on the Watchtower Face.



Well, I'd better get back to my packing.

09-10 Araps_Chris

09-10 Araps1

Arapiles!

More to come later; for the moment, a photo from Chris:



And one from me:



The climbing was great by the way. The rock, the weather and the company were all excellent.

French Island

I'm going to back-date this post to when I should have posted it. And I'm going to make it short since I seem to be running out of time for everything at the moment. I made my first trip outside Melbourne city last weekend --- to French Island, 70km south east of Melbourne. To get there, N. and I took the train to Stony Point ($3 for a weekend ticket!) and then the ferry over to the island. About two thirds of French Island is national park. The rest is farmland. The main feature of the island is its booming population of koalas who are doing so well that the population has to be managed by taking koalas from the island to areas on the mainland where the populations are not doing so well. The second feature of the island are the 90 or so people who live there. They seem to be mostly mad to one degree or another. Our tick-list of wildlife we saw, apart from koalas, included echidnas, pelicans, lizards, and a large copperhead snake. Oh, and from the train to Stony Point we saw bogans and gangs of youths on scooters (the sort you push with your foot).











More photos in the Picasa gallery.

09-10 French Island

Dinosaur Comics and Hilbert's Hotel

You're one wacky dinosaur T-Rex!

No news is good news?

"No news is good new" they say, but in my case, no news just means no free minutes near a computer over the last couple of weeks. The last week of September, I was in Adelaide at the Australian Maths Society annual conference. It was a big one, with about 400 people attending. I tried to take some pictures of Adelaide but, even at 10 am on a Sunday moring, I had to go half an hour (by tram) out of the city, to Glenelg, and a beach, before I could find anything more interesting than four lane streets and drunks leaving the pub. (There's something wrong with a city where it's significantly easier to find a morning beer than a morning coffee.)







Though, back in the city, in front of the Adelaide Oval, I did find a larger than life statue of Sir Donald Bradman the "statistically" greatest sportsman in the world.



The following week I was back in NZ to defend my thesis at my oral exam. Apart from some nerves at the start of the exam, the experience was pretty good. The whole thing took a little over two hours but it didn't feel long at the time, whatever that indicates. Anyway, I now have a large list of small corrections to make to the thesis before I can hand in the final bound copies and start confusing airline staff by calling myself a doctor.

Rainy Friday

It looks like I won't be getting home dry today. 13 km to ride and this is the latest rain radar image for Melbourne (from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology).


(Melbourne is in the centre of the image.)

A good address

09-09 Ian Potter Gallery

A photo story

It's Saturday evening, I'm not quite feeling motivated enough to write anything about the day, so I'll let the photos tell the story. though I should explain that the first photo is from the Collingwood Childrens' Farm where there was a farmers' market this morning.























More photos:

09-09 Hair