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.