The Lair of the Emerald Serpent

Saturday 13th was the date when the usually annual Astrorest was held at the local university.

It is strange that I have barely darkened the door of the place since I bought my ill fated plane ticket for my long ago cancelled Amsterdam Adventure at a travel agent there back in March 2020. That was just days before the whole Covid thing blew up around the world and did not blow over but like a juggernaut  just got bigger and bigger.


From an absence of almost 18 months, I turned up there 2 days in a row.

( Dark Stars )

August is a busy month for curious creatures. It is the time of year when the universities are out spruiking for new customers. Most of them put on open days for prospective students with lots of freebies, leaflets, lectures and an assortment of interesting displays to tempt the visitors. Some of them have gotten all sneaky and moved their main events to July in order to get one up on the competition.

But even so there is still the other big event of the month - National Science Week.
On the weekend just gone the city was filed with an assortment of stalls from the usual suspects such as the universities, Scitech, some hobby shops selling geek toys such as drones, wildlife rescue groups and CSIRO which is the largest scientific organization in the country in spite of being slashed to the bone by successive penny pinching governments that like to talk about jobs, growth and innovation but view geeks with deepest suspicion. They think that funding football and chasing Olympic gold is a far worthier object of taxpayer funding.



The stupid was on display for the whole world to see with the monumental stuff up that was the national census. By making online completion the default option this year (probably with the intention of saving on printing and postage costs as well as hordes of door knockers) and rabbiting on about 9th August being the day to stop a while and do your patriotic duty they pretty much guaranteed a complete stuff up. Having 18 million folks all filling in paper forms on the same day has never been the cause of too much drama but this year we had the online equivalent of 18 million people turning on their kettles during the ad breaks for a much anticipated football final.

What could possibly go wrong?

Of course the site crashed. As usual they blamed Chinese hackers and most folks seemed to swallow this sad and pathetic batch of excuses. The bright sparks from marketing at the Bureau of Statistics didn't bother to tell folks they could fill in the forms online for about four weeks from receiving their log in codes in the snail mail. Well they did say that after the torrents of #census fail rants on Twitter and Facebook but if they had made the extra effort to explain this in the first place then they could have saved themselves a whole pile of embarrassment.

Then there was the dodgy business of the ABS wanting to keep the names and addresses for 4 years instead of the 18 months that worked perfectly fine since such records began. The more cynical sorts assumed that these buggers were planning on a bit of selling oodles of this juicy data no doubt to make up for the massive slashes in their budget over the last decade or so.

Now the data will be pretty much as good as useless. Not just incomplete but a whole bunch of people will be giving false names to get around the spooking and surveillance especially in the light of the present data retention laws that came into effect a few years ago.

Next Saturday is going to be a public Open Day at the Pawsey centre which is a giant super computer forming part of the Square Kilometre Array radio astronomy project. It turns out that the guided tours got booked out weeks ago but I'll still turn up for a snoop. Been drooling over that place ever since it was built and wanted a sticky beak.

It's been such a feast of geekery. Between spinning metal eggs, magic tricks with magnets and cauldrons of liquid nitrogen, telescopes, robots and Star Wars toys operated by brain waves with no wires needed and even the occasional Gummi bear massacre to demonstrate the dark art of digestion, there has been just so many fascinating things to see and do and so many wonderful opportunities to be reminded of the wonders of the world.

There were cackling black cockatoos, cute and curly egg laying mammals such as real echidnas, blue tongued skinks, carpet pythons and an assortment of skulls and shells at the various stalls in the city and at the universities.

So many things to learn and so little time.

There’s been so much craziness in the big bad world that any sensible serpent would curl up on a nice warm rock and sleep it all out.

There’s the train wreck that is Brexit - a most poisoned chalice indeed. So much so that those who did their damnedest to get the referendum result by means fair or foul have now decided to jump ship and let some one else clean up the mess.
Nigel Farrage truly is a slimy lying Frog Faced wanker


Here in Oz, politics is also in a state of limbo. A pox on both your houses seems to be the general attitude of the public everywhere. Then there’s the usual folks who demand a change from preferential voting to first past the post or who proclaim how onerous and undemocratic it is to be ‘forced’ to vote. A $50 fine is not quite the same thing as a gun to one’s head and anyway there is no requirement to actually vote, just to turn up and get one’s name ticked off the electoral roll.
Elections are nearly always held on Saturdays and you don’t need to produce your passport, driver’s licence, and your great grandmother’s birth certificate before being given the ballot papers. So they actually make it as easy as possible to vote rather than forcing some people to jump through hoops.
And the Iraqis who had their country bombed back into the stone age courtesy of the Brits, George W Bush and his brown nosed minions in Australia now have to endure more of the same from a bunch of mad jihadis.
The Ramadan bombings in Baghdad last Sunday are already second page news over here.

But at least there are still the geeks to provide a bright spark of hope amidst all the doom and gloom. Last year we had the Euronauts dancing on comets and now there is the Jupiter mission where the spaceship hit the target and was one second out after a billions of miles and more than five years.




Still got lots of catching up to do looking at all the pretty pictures between doing Camp Nanowrimo and an assortment of online courses.

The clock is tick tocking. Only five days now to get to the summit of Mount Nano situated some 50,000 words above the white blank pages at the base camp. If things had been normal, if the Izzie had a half decent map, by now would already be staking the emerald and silver serpent flag at the summit. Would not only have that big fat stash of words but also at least twenty stories with beginnings, middles and most importantly ends. Yesss. The Izzie is not good at endings. Lack of practice mainly.

It all seemed so promising at the start. Already by Friday 13th July had a little brown A-Z index book with at least 400 possible story titles and reasonable outlines and ideas for at least forty stories. But only 26 would be needed. One completed story each day and by the end of the alphabet the word count would be well in the bag along with room for another ten thousand words as extras with little effort at all. Such a nice little map that was. There was only one minor problem. What could best be described as a major earthquake took place on the last day of July. It took a good five days to assess the damage and become rather suspicious about the usefulness of that very precious map. It took until the second Saturday to realize that progress would be impossible unless we tossed the infernal thing on the campfire or at least locked it away for another time and place when it might regain its usefulness

Procrastinating on telling toadish tales until the daily word quota of proper story words was reached simply resulted in the story muses stalling and sulking and refusing to return until the toxic toad had been let loose and out and about. Those words were very easy to write. They were like genies screaming to be let out of their bottle lest it explode with the pressure. Since the whole purpose of camp squiggling is to provide a source of ideas for the main event in November, it was obvious that we would have to let the toad have her wicked way rampaging all over the page. She could run riot and then the other critters would feel free to come out of the woodwork. Such a pity that hardly any of them came from the original maps.

The psycho toad from hell had set her horrid Dementors on them and sent them all scurrying off into the recesses of the serpent’s green cells. Maybe they will return some time when it is finally safe to do so.

She is probably plotting and planning another howler if she has not popped it in the post box already. Did not see her toadish face today at the mad house and her Hummer was nowhere to be seen. Maybe she was off invading Poland or something.

In the meantime, Izzie has found new distractions from the day job with the start of an online course in Cryptography. Lucky we got three weeks to get the homework in because the rest of this week will be devoted to the last 4,000 words and hopefully a few last minute sprints of inspiration.

It’s exactly eleven years ago since last having anything to do with discrete probability and statistics so got some serious catching up to do. It will be good to get the old green cells occupied on something totally untoadish

It's not all toxic toads and devious Denentors in Izzieland

Some happy snippets


Some one is going to send Izzie a nice owl for a change
Just got an email wanting our muggle address so they can send the $20 book voucher we won at the recent University Open Day. (it was the linguistics quiz)

Thanks to the Cat, signed up for 3 FREE geeky courses at Coursera
1 Cryptography
2 Introduction to mathematical thinking
3 A beginner's guide to irrational behaviour

And last but not least

Just passed 40,000 words over in Camp Nano. The summit of Mount Nano is only just out of reach. Pity that a whole 16,000 of those words concern a certain toxic toad. Guessing that is progress. Last month she got herself a whole 30,000!