Looks like scientists are going to try new methods to clone the Thylacine, (Thylacinus Cynocephalus).

Image of two Thylacines in Washington DC Zoo

Interesting story from the Australian ABC, scientists have found native plant that repels termites, the report says:

The University of Western Sydney says a team studied a fence post that was left standing in a Queensland paddock, where all the others were eaten by the pest.

The university’s Associate Professor Robert Spooner-Hart says an Australian native plant called the desert sandalwood was growing around the fence post.

Given the alternatives are all pretty noxious, this could be really good news!

We’re sitting under a big thunderstorm at the moment, so I went and had a look at the Bureau of Meterology rain radar map of Melbourne, and saw an amazing image of what was going over the top of us.

So the Liberals pushed through the bill for the sale of Telstra keeping discussion to a minimum. I thought democracy was about talking about things! If this goes horribly wrong (which it’s quite likely to) then it’ll be a case of “Act in haste, repent at leisure”. Except it’ll be the Australian public who suffer, even though 70% of Australians oppose the sale.

To sell off the telco, the Liberals:

• Introduced the 5 bills to Parliament on Thursday;
• Held a one day Senate inquiry on Friday, giving people about 12 hours to read the bills beforehand;
• Brought the 5 bills to the Senate today and got them passed by supressing discussion through a guillotine motion.

This is the same company that has 14% of all phone lines faulty, admitted massively under-investing in its network and then its directors awarded themselves massive pay rises.

Here’s an interesting story from ABC news about a New Zealand Uni who have tagged a crocodile with a satellite transponder and are tracking him online.

The website now works with non-Internet Explorer browsers, kudos to the maintainer (who isn’t an IT person) for fixing it so rapidly after I dropped them a quick email alerting them to the issues.

Well we’re back from our trip up to lovely Queensland, where the weather really was beautiful one day, perfect the next! Donna was doing a day of talks on the Sunday for the Gladstone Area Autism/Asperger Support Group as part of a two day conference, with the Saturday being done by our friend Wendy Lawson. We all stayed at the wonderful Earth & Sea B&B and special thanks to Anlyn and Marshall for looking after us so well there!

We then had a few days to ourselves and we’d booked a cabin at Capricorn Caves which was wonderful, no mobile coverage, brush turkeys everywhere & a small mob of ‘roos. We took the opportunity to pootle around the Capricorn Coast area including Yeppoon, where we were treated to the initially puzzling fact of seeing snails in rockpools with legs, ’till we twigged that there were thousands of tiny hermit crabs there, and spotted a mass of roosting flying foxes in the mangroves around the river just outside the town.

We also managed to loose our rental car keys on the beach, but thankfully some kind soul found them and handed in at the police station, so as we were desperately trying to find a number for the company we got a call from them asking us if we’d lost our keys.. 🙂

Leaving the caves for the trip back to Gladstone we had to stop to avoid hitting a bird sauntering across the road that looked like a cross between a pheasant and a raptor, but turned out to be a Pheasant Coucal, a very large member of the cuckoo family (not a pheasant!) that is the only member to raise its own young. A wonderful view!

Anyway, we’re now back in Melbourne, in the rain, and actually enjoying it. You soon realise that if the weather’s good all the time then there’s no contrast to make it stand out.

An interesting piece of research from Perth, they did a study of people who had required hospital treatment due to a car accident and found that using hand-held mobile phone gave you almost a 5x chance of having an accident in the next 10 minutes, whilst using a hands-free system meant almost a 4x chance of an accident.

This study is bolstered by a study done in Japan which appears to have found at least one reason why trying to use a mobile phone whilst driving is so dangerous. It’s all down to the audio quality as the signal drops out as you move from cell to cell or from obstructions.

To quote from the New Scientist article on the report:

Hamada’s team measured the sound quality of mobile phone calls in parked cars and in cars travelling at 65 kilometres per hour. A comparison of the two types of voice signal revealed silent periods of about 300 milliseconds interrupting the signal roughly six times a minute. They also discovered a time lag of about 300 milliseconds for a phone in a moving car, while for 5 per cent of the time, the frequency range becomes distorted.

Then researchers then played 11 volunteers an audio recording of a story that included similar interruptions. As the volunteers struggled to hear the distorted parts of the recording, their right parietal cortex, the part of the brain that perceives sound, became more active (Transport Research Part F, DOI: 10.1016/j.trf.2005.04.016).

And for all of our sakes, please don’t even consider SMS’ing whilst driving, that’s even more dangerous!

I’ve just finished putting up the photo album from our trip down to Gippsland to the old goldfields areas around Walhalla (including the Goldfields Railway and the “ghost” town of Aberfeldy) and to Tarra Bulga National Park.

A grave at Aberfeldy Cemetery

The above is RMIT Building 19, which is the former Police Watch House.

The larger original by Jeremy is here. The place is now a building site..

Michael Still mentions my experience with the NLA crawler, and along with Steven Hanley speculate about how the NLA is choosing sites to crawl.

Looking at my Apache logs I can see that their is a reference in their browser info to this webpage about their current crawl, which says:

While the Library and its PANDORA partner institutions have been selectively archiving online publications since 1996, this current and first comprehensive crawl of the Australian web domain was begun in June 2005. For the purpose of this collection, the Australian web domain includes .au domain sites. In addition some sites identified by DNS lookup as having an IP address in located in Australia may be included.

The really interesting thing is that my website satisfies neither criteria, being a .org and hosted in the US, although it may be because the little box on this end of my ADSL connection (which redirects everyone to the main site if they forget the www at the start of the URL) does indeed have an Australian IP address..

However, their overview page says:

The purpose of the PANDORA Archive is to collect and provide long-term access to selected online publications and web sites that are about Australia, are by an Australian author on a subject of social, political, cultural, religious, scientific or economic significance and relevance to Australia, or are by an Australian author of recognised authority and make a contribution to international knowledge.

If that’s why I’m in there then I’m realy flattered!

Of course, it’s much more likely to be just be the fact that I got a link from here… 😉