Back in January 2006 some clueful person came up with the idea of creating a Google Earth overlay to monitor bushfires in Victoria.
It pulls in the latest image from the Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) from their current incidents page about fires and overlays it on the satellite imagery.
Red circles are controlled fires, red stars are contained fires and red fires are “going” (i.e. not controlled or contained).
Congratulations to Shane Jacobsen for winning the AFI 2006 Best Actor award for Kenny!
This wonderful email was sent to me by a great friend of mine, Graham, telling the tale of unexpected happenings on a late night drive home.
For overseas readers : ute = utility = pickup truck.
The ABC is reporting that there is draft Australian copyright legislation (( legislation here thanks to KatteKrab )) that could make it a requirement for all commercial search engines to contact the copyright holder of every web page/site in Australia and obtain permission for their site to be spidered for indexing.
This is because apparently the proposed legislation will only
protect libraries, archives and research institutions but leave commercial entities like Google out in the cold.
Google’s submission is quoted as saying:
“Given the vast size of the Internet it is impossible for a search engine to contact personally each owner of a web page to determine whether the owner desires its web page to be searched, indexed or cached,” Google submitted.
“If such advanced permission was required, the Internet would promptly grind to a halt.”
I disagree, the Internet wouldn’t grind to a halt, but we might find that Australian based sites would drop off the larger worlds radar as they were expunged from search engines. I don’t know how the legislation would impact sites like mine which whilst being written by someone in Australia (( OK, I’m in LA at the moment, but I’ll be back soon )) are hosted overseas ?
OK, so global warming is going to bleach most of the Great Barrier Reef if business as usual carries on in the world. So the Australian Liberal Party (currently in power) has come up with a really great idea to protect part of it – the Federal Tourism minister wants to cover part of it with a shade cloth!
Federal Tourism Minister Fran Bailey says using “shade cloth” over parts of the Great Barrier Reef off Queensland could protect it from the harmful effects of global warming.
This is based upon the fact that a scientist noticed that shaded areas of the reef currently have more vibrant colours. However, my guess is that this won’t be enough to save the polyps from the rising water temperatures which will be the main issue. Sure, the shade will reduce local temperatures relative to exposed areas, but that won’t stop a general trend in temperature rise from the effects of the surrounding water.
There’s been a fair bit of discussion around the web about the US FDA banning the import of Vegemite (( Alec Muffett – US govt bans Vegemite )) (( Andrew Pollock – Egad. They’ve banned Vegemite! )) (( BoingBoing – US govt bans Vegemite )) ((News.com.au – US bans Vegemite )).
Well I went digging around because this sounded a little too odd and because the only source was a tiny news story that gave no details. Wikipedia’s Vegemite entry mentions the ban but is equivocal about the veracity of the reports and if you check the history and the discussion page there’s quite a debate about whether or not its real.
So I went to the horses mouth – I left a feedback message on the Vegemite website asking about whether this was real or not and (to my suprise) got a rapid response from Kraft Foods, which I’m waiting to see if they’ll give me permission to quote.
The summary is that the news story is pretty much accurate, if a little old, Kraft Foods haven’t been exporting Vegemite to the US for 12 months now because of the US FDA’s regulations on what foods are allowed to have folate fortification.
Today’s prize is for excessive political hyperbole and goes to John Cobb of the National Party.
He criticised the Australia Institute’s statement that perhaps assuming that being able to farm anywhere in a naturally drought stricken country isn’t such a bright idea by describing their attitude as:
agrarian genocide
I’m not quite sure how reconsidering our attitudes to farming in this country equates with mass murder.
Apparently “governments are spending more money on intelligence” after September 11th.
Strange that I’ve not noticed any spontaneous outbreaks of common sense from them recently..
An organisation was doing their annual generator load test, when this happened:
It appears our upsteam ADSL telco has had a failure of an Ethernet switch. This has dropped ALL adsl circuits in Victora. (sic)
Just under an hour later it became obvious why:
It appears that the switch in question had not been connected to the essential power circuit. The telco’s switch had its power restored when the generator test was completed. We will working with the telco to get the switch transferred from mains to essential power on Monday.
Their summary of the testing:
Besides losing all ADSL in Victora, the generator power test went fine. (sic)
Oddly enough I didn’t notice anything that day with our home ADSL, so somebody likes me..