disassociated

Image courtesy of disassociated.

While there’s a slim chance regions of Australia may yet be spared a third consecutive wet, rainy, La Niña weather event this summer, the outlook for spring is not so promising.

The Bureau of Meteorology advised last week parts of eastern Australian can expect higher than usual rainfalls, thanks to another meteorological phenomenon, a positive Southern Annular Mode, or SAM, for short:

Further, Dr Bettio said a positive Southern Annular Mode (SAM) is also likely, which pushes weather systems south, bringing wetter easterly winds to NSW and fewer cold fronts to western Tasmania. Dr Bettio said parts of Western Australia and western Tasmania are likely to experience below average rainfall this spring. Almost all of Australia is likely to experience warmer than average nights, while cooler days are likely for large parts of the mainland except the tropical north.

With electric vehicles (EV) set to sky-rocket in popularity in Australia, there has to be plenty of business and start-up opportunities in the sector. Publicly available EV charging stations, which I wrote about the other day, would be one of them.

Melbourne tech-writer Anthony Agius was behind two companies whose aim was to install and operate charging stations across Australia, and in a detailed article, he outlines what he discovered about making them available for anyone to use.

The point of this post isn’t to analyse why I’m not an EV charging mogul with dozens of stations making mad profits around the country. The point is to dump everything I’ve learned about this topic into a single place so even if I don’t make anything out if, maybe someone else will stumble across it, learn something and do what I couldn’t. Even if one extra EV charger gets installed because of this post, it’ll be an improvement over my pathetic attempt.

Image courtesy of NASA.

The above image is of Aquarius, lunar module of the ill-fated Apollo 13 Moon flight of April 1970.

Here it is seen moments after being jettisoned by the Apollo crew. For those who came in late, Aquarius acted as a “lifeboat” for much of the shortened Apollo 13 mission, after an explosion damaged Odyssey, the command module. Without Aquarius the crew may never have returned home.

I’m not sure though if it features in Apollo Remastered, the new book by British author and science writer Andy Saunders, which contains a veritable trove of photos from the Apollo missions. Saunders has spent the last few years enhancing four hundred previously grainy images, making them far sharper and clearer than those originally released.

Some before and after examples of the remastered photos can be seen in this BBC report by Jonathan Amos. And if you’re not familiar with the Apollo 13 story, American filmmaker Ron Howard’s 1995 feature of the same name is well worth a look.

Fans of defunct French electronic music act Daft Punk will love this… Sample Breakdown, by Tracklib, shows how Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo composed some of their signature tracks.

Oh to have a job that required listening to just about every recorded musical composition since the 1970s (it seems) in order to compose original material. And then to hone on just the right samples from a song, and create something else from it: amazing.

The Roman Empire — which dominated the then known world for near on five centuries — gave us its trademark roads, plumbing, floor heating, a postal service, concrete, and surgical tools.

Had the empire — as a whole, rather than the partitioned east, west, entity it later became — remained at its peak a lot longer, we can only speculate as to what other innovations may have been spawned.

An Industrial Revolution perhaps? Possibly. But prior to the fifth century, Common Era? Not likely, says Bret C. Devereaux, an ancient and military historian at the University of North Carolina.

Image courtesy of Royal Australian Mint.

I’d never heard of the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) until now, but in short they’re a government intelligence agency.

To mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of their establishment, the Directorate, in association with the Royal Australian Mint, have issued a commemorative fifty-cent coin. But not any fifty-cent coin… this one comes with a hidden, coded, message:

Designed in collaboration with staff from ASD and the Royal Australian Mint, the commemorative coin pays tribute to the evolution of signals intelligence with multiple layers of cryptographic code included in the design. A hidden message will be revealed as each layer of code is cracked; all that is needed is a pen, paper, Wikipedia and brainpower.

Anyone who thinks they’ve cracked the code is invited to submit their answer to the ASD, who will reveal the correct message at the end of September 2022.

Update: well that was quick… ABC News reports a fourteen year old Tasmanian boy cracked the code in about an hour, on the day of the coin’s release.

Presently, general use charging stations for electric vehicles (EV) are relatively scarce in Australia, with the majority being located mainly in car parking buildings. While not a problem for EV owners who have a garage with a charger at home, or drivers with access to one in their workplace parking area, recharging the battery of an EV can be tricky for many others. Limited numbers of public charging stations may even be putting off those wishing to switch to EVs.

Even though a Transport NSW map of publicly available charge stations shows them to be seemingly abundant, most EV owners want the option to recharge their vehicles at home. But a trial being introduced by several municipal councils in and around the greater Sydney area, may prove to be a game changer. In the near future, EV owners will be able to plug into chargers connected to power poles.

The scheme could eventually result in almost two-hundred-thousand EV charging stations appearing on suburban streets, says Jason Carter, writing for TechAU:

There will be a total of 50 street-side locations selected for the EV Streetside Charging Project, with each EV charging station to be connected directly to the overhead electricity supply and energy use matched with 100% GreenPower. There is potential for 190,000 EV chargers that could be connected to street-side power poles across Australia.

Somehow I missed this earlier in the week, but the winners of the 2022 Davitt Awards for crime writing by Australian women, were announced last week, on Saturday 27 August.

Charlotte McConaghy’s environmental thriller, Once There Were Wolves (Penguin Random House Australia), won the award for Best Adult Novel. The Best Young Adult Novel prize went to Leanne Hall for The Gaps (Text Publishing) while the Best Children’s Novel Award was won by Nicki Greenberg (Melbourne, Victoria) for The Detective’s Guide to Ocean Travel (Affirm Press).

Christopher Robin was one of the main characters in the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, originally written by British author A. A. Milne, nearly one hundred years ago. Together with a posse of friends — based on soft toys — including a teddy-bear called Winnie-the-Pooh, they lived in an imaginary forest called the Hundred Acre Wood. Readers of the books and poems written by Milne, will recall Christopher Robin one day left the forest to go to boarding school.

The parting of ways appeared to be quite amicable. Christopher Robin’s soft toy friends, including Piglet, Kanga, and Tigger, held a farewell party before he left. But it seems the geniality didn’t last, with Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet later becoming resentful of Christopher Robin’s departure. So much so, that when the boy returns to Hundred Acre Wood as an adult with his girlfriend, they are intent on murdering their one time friend, and those close to him.

That’s the situation at least in Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood and Honey, trailer, by Rhys Waterfield. Never return to your past, what else is there to say? Think I’ll be sleeping with the lights on tonight though…