WMDs

October 31, 2009 – 6:31 pm

At this time of year it is not safe to ride without at least one WMD – or ‘Weapon of Magpie Distraction’ for the uninitiated. I find magpies particularly distracting while I’m riding, so I’d really like to return the favour by making a few of them feel really distracted. On many days lately when I have been distracted by magpies I have felt very very strongly that my magpie distractor of choice would be a bazooka. A bazooka is probably not the ideal choice however – and I haven’t used one so far – for at least the following reasons:

  • While the actual blast can be quite distracting – particularly if well targeted – a bazooka may take a while to reload. I read somewhere that a recent survey showed that at least 98% of magpies don’t actually know what a bazooka looks like. This probably means that during the reload time a magpie is not likely to be distracted by the mere presence of a bazooka.
  • There is also a good chance that the recoil from the bazooka blast will knock your bike over. This is probably more distracting for you than it is for the magpie, unless of course you are being closely followed by an inattentive car or truck driver (who may have been distracted by the magpie.) In that case the subsequent sirens and flashing lights and traffic chaos might be quite distracting for the magpie.

I have heard of at least one case of a tennis racket being used as a very effective WMD. I usually don’t have a tennis racket with me when I am riding so I haven’t tried that distraction yet. On a couple of occasions I have picked up a small tree from the roadside and carried that with me for the rest of my ride. That kind of works, but for me it has never had the  impact I imagine a tennis racket would, and small trees don’t make good riding companions.

So lately I’ve settled on the less satisfying but mostly effective distractor of looking just plain silly.

There are of course many many ways of looking silly. If some other nameless cyclist had not come to my rescue I may have had many years of trial and error ahead of me in the search for exactly the right kind of silliness to effectively distract magpies. Fortunately there are many other cyclists doing their best to look silly (that is why lycra bike pants were invented after all) and somewhere along the line some one of them decided to look silly by wearing a hedgehog on his head. Lo and behold he discovered – by chance – that this was an effective magpie distractor. Of course we don’t have hedgehogs in Australia – and the echidna is a protected species – so I’ve had to make do by adding spiky bits to my helmet. So far it seems to be working. There is one magpie about 1km down the road from our place who likes to swoop at least a dozen times each time I ride by him, and I’d say he definitely looks distracted every single time he swoops.

By mike | Posted in funny bits, personal bits, pointy bits, shared bits | Comments (1)

Apollo Lunar Surface Journal

July 20, 2009 – 12:01 pm

This time 40 years ago I was nine years old, discovering Jazz at night on the old valve radio my parents had given me (and yet to discover or have any particular interest in popular music) and breakfast cereal boxes had charts and pictures and cards and models of rockets and lunar modules. I remember Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘The Sounds of Silence’ playing on TV so many times during – or in between bits of – broadcasts of moon mission stuff. We all had the day off school. That is my Monday morning recollection of my part in that slice of history.

Much closer to the actual events is this – http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/alsj/frame.html – an amazing resource – a real treasure.

From the foreward:

Hour upon hour of the astronauts’ conversations with each other and with Mission Control in Houston, as well as television scenes taken during their lunar expeditions, were recorded as they occurred from July 1969 to December 1972. For all the years since then, these recordings were available but, for the most part, remained “on the shelf” to collect dust. Now, through the dedication and hard work of historian Eric Jones and the lunar astronauts, the aural and visual history of the Apollo lunar expeditions is being taken off the shelf, dusted off, and presented in a way which everyone can understand and enjoy. Besides cleaning up the voice transcripts, Eric is conducting exhaustive interviews with the lunar astronauts and inserting their recollections of the events which took place more than twenty years ago.

By mike | Posted in pointy bits, shared bits | Comments (0)

the digital divide

April 9, 2009 – 7:03 pm

There were two surprises to come out of the announcement of the national broadband network this week. The first was that the government got it right. I’d been hoping and praying for the last few months that they would have the balls and the vision and they have exceeded my expectations on both counts. Real leadership – who’d have thought! The second surprise has been the petty mindedness and utter lack of vision on the part of the opposition and some ‘analysts’. This also has exceeded my expectations. The implications of affordable high speed internet access across Australia are enormous. This is not about downloading movies – it is about what will be produced. It is about what will be possible. It is about unlocking potential. If there is a digital divide it is between those who can only see what now is and those who are ready to make what will be.

(writing this as we drive into Canberra for the weekend.)

By mike | Posted in pointy bits, shared bits | Comments (0)