Second Aussiversary musings

Wednesday this week was our second Aussiversary, having stepped off the plane to start our new adventure two years ago.

To celebrate, here are some of things I have learnt over the past two years (in no particular order):

• Aussies are very serious about their coffee, and it’s fantastic. (Even if Melbournites think that Sydney coffee is crap!)
• The chips are disappointing but the fish is great.
• The Aussie ideal of mateship is aspirational and inspirational, even if not always realised.
• Not all of the animals are trying to kill you - including the dragons.
• Your average store chocolate is rubbish but they do have people who know what they’re doing.
• Jacaranda trees are awesome.
• If thongs are banned at a club, the bouncer will stare at your feet, not perform an intimate search. And you can buy thongs in vending machines.
• Aussie rules football is possibly the best spectator sport ever. (Based on one game!)
• Thanks to craft breweries, Aussie beer is not all bad, and some of it is very good.
• Brunch is a serious(ly good) meal of the day.
• Musically, Australia is trapped in the era of hair rock power ballads. And it’s awesome.
• The coins have animals on them
• For long haul, always fly an A380 if you can.
• The Socceroos may struggle but Aussies rule at robot soccer.
• They do a good line in sunsets.
• Australia is a great place to do bioinformatics.

Comment below if you think I’ve forgotten anything important - I’m sure there’s lots!

Forget MC Hammer, meet PFC Hammer

Ok, so most people have forgotten MC hammer. Anyway, here’s a feel-good story (courtesy of WEIT) about PFC Hammer, a cat adopted by U.S. Troops in Iraq:

In 2004, a tiny Egyptian Mau kitten wandered into U.S. Army headquarters in Iraq. Dubbed PFC [Private First Class] Hammer, he became a ratter, morale booster, and important stress reliever to the soldiers. When the battalion was set to ship back to Colorado, Staff Sgt. Rick Bousfield contacted Alley Cat Allies and Military Mascots for help in getting PFC Hammer back to the States. PFC Hammer was vetted and quarantined before traveling to Colorado Springs, where he took up permanent residence with Staff Sgt. Bousfield…

And my favourite bit:

…When Hammer was being carried to Bousfield, he heard Rick’s voice and began purring and kneading the arm of the transporter. As it turns out, he remembered his Army buddy after all.

Read the rest of the story here.

What happened on April 15/16? (And more dodgy Blogger stats)

My blog is a fairly modest affair that gets around 500 pageviews a day - mostly of old posts. However, this week has seen a rather unexpected spike in activity:

What happened on the 15^th of April? It seems to be something to do with MacBook Air storage expansion, as that’s the post that seems to have the lion’s share of pageviews this week:

The odd thing is that in the detailed stats view, the peak of views is on the 16^th. More dodgy Blogger stats it seems. Clearly unimportant but if anyone knows what’s going on (in either case), I’d be interested to hear!

Beware of fusion when drying your face with a hand-drier

The hand-dryer in the bathroom of a restaurant we went to recently:

I’m not sure what “fusion” is but it sounds scary. (The drier wasn’t strong enough to make be believe it was nuclear powered.) Who knew it could be so DANGEROUS! (Personally, I close my eyes if I ever stick my face it hot air but maybe that's just me.)

It may have been Australian made but I am not convinced that it was Australian proof-read.

Advance Australia Fair

Today is Australia Day, so I though I would write a post celebrating the attitude of Australia. Whilst the nation has undoubtedly done some terrible things in its not-too-distant history, and has its fair share of bigots, one of the things that I really like about Australia is the way that optimism and inclusiveness are promoted as part of the national identity.

Recognising its foundation and continued growth/development at the hands of immigrants, it manages this without (in my eyes) the excessive patriotism of some other countries one could mention. There is a pride to be Australian without the insecurity of thinking/implying that any non-Australian must be inferior.

This is captured in one of my favourite things about Australia the nation, which is the national anthem, “Advance Australia Fair”. There are a couple of things I like about this. First, the lyrics of the song itself:

Verse 1 Australians all let us rejoice, For we are young and free; We’ve golden soil and wealth for toil; Our home is girt by sea; Our land abounds in nature’s gifts Of beauty rich and rare; In history’s page, let every stage Advance Australia Fair. In joyful strains then let us sing, Advance Australia Fair.

Verse 2 Beneath our radiant Southern Cross We’ll toil with hearts and hands; To make this Commonwealth of ours Renowned of all the lands; For those who’ve come across the seas We’ve boundless plains to share; With courage let us all combine To Advance Australia Fair. In joyful strains then let us sing, Advance Australia Fair.

OK, so the reality might be a little different, but as something aspirational you can’t do much better than: “For those who’ve come across the seas, we’ve boundless plains to share; with courage let us all combine to Advance Australia Fair.”

It certainly beats lines about killing and/or being killed by ancient foes, who are now your close neighbours (or even fellow countrymen). Admittedly, Australia’s federation as a nation was a blood-free independence (and they’ve not yet done away with the monarchy completely) but it’s still decidedly up-beat and lacking in über-nationalism.

The second thing I like about it is the fact that, whilst performed in 1878, it only became the official national anthem in 1984, supplanting the fusty and outdated God Save the Queen. As merits the national anthem of a modern democracy, it was chosen by plebiscite (i.e. non-binding referendum) - something that I think should be at the heart of a lot more political decisions in the digital age.

You don’t have to be stuck in the past. In my opinion, a national anthem should reflect modern ideals. After all, it’s supposed to be something to identify with. I’d love if it the UK replaced God Save the Queen with something more secular and democratic (even if it does contain the classic line, “Frustrate their knavish tricks”). I’m sure that the anthems of a few other nations could do with a bit of a spruce up too.

Well done, Australia.

You know you live in Australia when...

… the vending machines sell flip-flops*.

(*You know you've become native when you start calling them “thongs”.)

Gold star for Merrell customer service!

 I’ve had a few pairs of Merrell shoes (mostly the super-comfy Moab Ventilator) and generally found them to last pretty well, given how much I wear them. Therefore, I was quite disappointed when my (non-Moab) Merrell shoes broke today, whilst putting them back on in a store changing room. They were under five months old and I have worn them a fair amount but not enough to expect one loops holding the laces to just snap. Without that loop, they could not be laced up properly and were essentially useless as a result.

Being in the city, I decided to visit the Merrell shop in Sydney (where I bought the shoes) to see if there was anything that could be done. The lady in the shop looked at the damage and, having not seen such an issue before, swapped them on the spot for a brand new pair! Now, that’s customer service! (And worthy of public acknowledgement, I feel.)

Well done, Merrell. My faith in your shoes is restored!

Farwell, old squashy kangaroo friend

It’s exactly a month until the Big Move Down Under and therefore seemed an appropriate time for a quick post to say goodbye to an old friend. Before you feel too sad on my behalf, the friend in question is a hat - an Australian Barmah “Squashy Kangaroo” hat to be precise.

I got my Squashy a few years ago during my first visit to Australia, on holiday. One of the appeals at the time - as suggested by the name - is that it folds up and squashes down nice and small, ideal for travelling.

Since Australia, I have mostly used it a sun hat in the garden but it’s also been on a few more exciting/adventurous trips with me, including our Honeymoon in Belize. Over time, however, it has got a bit mis-shapen sweat-stained and the prospect of ample opportunity to replace it meant that it was finally time to say goodbye. I am not sure whether I will get exactly the same type but I definitely see another Barmah hat (or two!) in my future.

Happy World Cat Day!

Apparently, today is World Cat Day. So here are some gratuitous cat photos to celebrate!

And, of course, the ubiquitous cats in boxes…

h/t WEIT.

Aboriginal-style stegosaurus

Another ArtStudio creation, this is an attempt to combine two of my favourite things - Aboriginal art and dinosaurs! Given that I am not Aboriginal, I can't really call it Aboriginal art but I don't know what the technical name for this style is.

Don't panic!

And if you do, Google can help... (Happy Birthday, Douglas Adams!)

Roses are red but are they green?

Although I have always known that buying roses on Valentine's Day is a romantic cliche that shows a lack of imagination, what I did not realise is that it usually also shows a serious lack of environmental awareness. Although I regularly think about the environmental impacts of food and fuel, I must admit that I've never really thought about flowers before. (OK, so I don't think about flowers too much in general but I do sometimes buy them!)

In yesterday's "60-Second Earth" Scientific American Podcast, "Roses Raise Environment Concerns", they draw attention to the negative environmental impacts of roses, from direct impacts of habitat destruction and water/pesticide usage to the carbon footprint of transport and refrigeration.

This is not news - Scientific American itself previously had an article in 2009, "Blooms Away: The Real Price of Flowers", exploring some of these issues. It is news to me, though, as is the idea that roses are particularly bad - presumably because of the excessive demand at an inappropriate (from a growth perspective) time of the year.

As with all environmental issues, however, it's also quite complicated. As the 2009 article states:

"First off, don't assume that imported roses are environmentally hostile. A 2007 study by Cranfield University in England found that raising 12,000 Kenyan roses resulted in 13,200 pounds (6,000 kilograms) of CO₂; the equivalent number grown in a Dutch hothouse emitted 77,150 pounds (35,000 kilograms) of CO₂. Both examples include energy used in production and delivery by plane and/or truck. The roses from Holland required artificial light, heat and cooling over the eight- to 12-week growing cycle, whereas Africa's strong sun boosted rose production by nearly 70 percent over those grown in  Europe's flower auction capital."

If you do want to give flowers then the best thing is probably to consider getting them from a company like Florverde:

"Florverde Sustainable Flowers FSF® are grown responsibly by growers. This means they follow best practices to protect the environment and their workers."

Likewise, if giving jewellery, consider a Fair trade supplier, like CRED. (Order by Wednesday for UK Valentine's Day delivery. We got our wedding rings from them so I wanted to give them a mention!)

It's not always easy to consider the environmental impact of our activities (and I could certainly do more) but when it comes to luxury goods like flowers and jewellery, I think we have a particular responsibility to do the right thing. It's the thought that counts, so spare a thought for the environment this Valentine's Day.

Snow!

I love snow! We don't get much of it in Southampton but today we are forecast to have rather a lot. I feel a little bit sorry for travelling students with exams today but I am looking forward to a snowy walk into work across the Common!

New Year's Aspirations for 2013

I'm not a great believer in New Year's Resolutions. After all, if there's something you should change in your life, do it when you realise it, don't wait until the end of the year. There is also the potential issue of self-recrimination etc. if you fail to keep them.

At the same time, it is useful to reflect on stuff from time to time and New Year provides a good time for this and plenty of time sitting around to think about it too! I can't say I've given it a lot of thought but I did think it would be worth penning a few New Year's aspirations. (Not because its anyone else's business, of course, but I do think I am more likely to do something if I've publicly stated it - not that it worked with the gym!)

☑ Make more time for reading. I made a quite long Christmas reading list of interesting papers and stuff but did not do a very good job at getting through it and it's back to work tomorrow. I also got a few books for Christmas, which all look good. I'm also behind with work-related reading. Must. Read. More.

☑ Make more time for writing. I've got a few papers and a book chapter that need writing. Episodes of Mystic Mog and the Exploding Tortoise have also been decreasing in frequency down to a disappointing 4 in December. There are a number of contributing factors to this but one is clearly not setting aside time to write.

☑ Blog more papers. Although this is not specifically a science blog per se, one of the motivations behind blogging was to try and get better at science communication. The number of science-related posts is not too bad (about 1 in 3) but I could definitely do with blogging a few more original papers, which will hopefully also help with the reading and writing.

☑ Cook more meat. I don't intend to eat more meat. I'm never going to be vegetarian for a number of reasons but nor do I see the need to eat meat every day and tend to cook quite a lot of vegetarian meals. When I do cook meat, however, it tends to be safe recipes erring on the side of boring. This is largely because I lack experience and the confidence that comes with it. One of this year's Christmas presents was The River Cottage Meat Book and I intend to make good use of it!

☑ Budget. I don't consider myself particularly irresponsible with money but there is always room for improvement. I've got reasonably good of keeping track of my expenses in 2012 but 2013 is time to convert that knowledge into some proper budget planning. Maybe.

☑ Gain control of my inboxes. I had a bit of a purge a while back but my email is still swamped by loads of junk mail. Time for another purge, I think. I think it's also time to try and make Facebook more active and less passive - it's actually easier to keep track of messages in FB than email sometimes. Unless I really get my inbox in shape, that is.

Not the most inspiring list (or interesting post!) in the world but it will be interesting (for me) to revisit these in a few months and see what progress I am making. It doesn't hurt to have aspirations.

My favourite Mayan "End of the World" advice

The Independent had a great little articles a couple of weeks ago in preparation for the Mayan non-prediction of the End of the World yesterday: How to prepare for the end of the world: Fit a smoke alarm, leave extra time for journeys, and give your pets a cuddle... "British organisations have been issuing tongue in cheek advice on how to prepare for the upcoming Mayan-predicted apocalypse on the 21st December".

As it happens, I gave one of my cats a good cuddle in the morning because I didn't have to get out of bed early, thanks to an extra day off in honour of The University of Southampton's Diamond Jubilee. My favourite advice, though, had to be from a London Fire Brigade spokesman:

"Fit a smoke alarm on each level of your home, then at least you might stand a chance of knowing that the end of the world is nigh ahead of those who don't.

"If you survive the apocalypse you'll be alerted to a fire more quickly should one ever break out."

[BTW, the glyphs in the picture have nothing to do with the "Mayan Apocalypse", they're from my visit to Xunantunich in Belize.]

M&M's World... WTF?

Today, we had a day trip to London and experienced something very strange. All across the city, we spied people carrying yellow bags with M&M's on them as if they had been shopping in some form of M&M shop. Stranger still, it turned out that they had! They had all visited M&M's World, London. Described by World Chocolate Guide as "the largest candy store in the world", M&M's World London is 35,000 square feet of over-priced tat, spread over four stories.
The only thing that is a bigger mystery to me that the fact that someone thought a four-storey 35,000 square foot shop selling nothing but M&M's merchandise was exactly what London's Leicester Square was missing is the fact that loads of people were buying said merchandise. Even more bizarre, people were getting their photo taken at various points inside the shop as if they were visiting some kind of national monument.

It felt like a scene out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers or something, where some kind of mind-controlling alien force is slowly taking over people one by one and soon we would be the only people left without a yellow bag full of M&M's in novelty-shaped boxes and slightly creepy soft toys of sweets in uniform.

Most annoying/strange of all, they didn't even seem to have a particularly massive range of M&M's. Sure, they had the regular M&M's in 24 different colours - great if you're decorating a cake or something - but we've been on the lookout for Mini M&M's (for decorating cup cakes) for a while and they didn't even stock them. Makes any claim to being "the largest candy store in the world" a bit weak, in my book. What they mean is "the largest candy-themed Merchandise store in the world". (Who even knew so many M&M's products existed?)

Still, at the end of the day, you have to have some grudging admiration for the Mars folk. Somehow, they have convinced the good people (tourists?) of London to advertise their candy and spend over the odds to do so. Pure Marketing Genius. (If you ever see me with a yellow M&M's bag, though, alert the authorities - the alien invasion is imminent!)

Olympic Fish

Something frivolous for the weekend to help fill the void until the Paralympics start.

An ironic fortune cookie: it's not what you know...

I felt the need to get out the office for lunch today and combat the resumption of bad weather, so I popped to one of the local Chinese restaurants (Chan's) for Singapore rice noodles. And very tasty they were too. I was slightly amused by my fortune cookie, though, working as I do at a University (where knowledge is held in somewhat high esteem):

If only this were true, all of our students that are surfing Facebook when they should be revising (or even listening to lectures!) would have much better marks! I am sure that who you know is important at times to get ahead in life but when it comes to trying to build - or contribute to - an accurate model of the world around you, I'm afraid that it's still what you know that counts.

(Sadly, one of the things the author of this "fortune" did not know, apparently, is how to use apostrophes. If only (s)he had known a copy editor...)

Lymington market rules!

It's another rainy Saturday in July, which has me wistfully thinking back to recent Saturdays that were not so wet - and catching up with some queued blog posts before they are completely out of date.

The week before our friends left for America (and after they had sold their car), we asked them if there was anywhere they wanted to go one last time, and Lymington was that somewhere. I thought that I had blogged about Lymington before but it seems that I haven't. It's a lovely little town on the south coast of Hampshire in the New Forest district. In addition to some nice walks nearby (particularly around the mudflats to the west), a large open air saltwater swimming pool, and a ferry to the Isle of Wight, Lymington has a market on the High Street every Saturday.

We'd been looking for some salad hands for ages and that Saturday, we found some! (Of course, now that we have some (a) they seem to be everywhere and (b) the weather has refused to provide any decent salad weather.) The stall from which we bought our salad hands had loads of lovely carved products and was just one of the local craft and food stalls. The market also features a load of general household goods stalls but rather than (or, perhaps, in addition to) the usual tat that I associate with such things, they tend to be selling really useful stuff at great prices. As well as our beautiful salad hands, we also managed to get half a dozen other odds and sods between us that we had been looking for elsewhere.

My favourite eatery in Lymington, the Vanilla Pod cafe, has sadly closed down, so I can no longer recommend a trip incorporating a fantastic brunch. Nevertheless, there are plenty of nice places to eat and the sandwiches and cakes in the Driftwood Cafe - a small takeaway-only cafe in the cobbled are of the town centre where we got some coffee - looked particularly good. If you are in the area and the sun should ever decide to grace us with its presence again (or, I suppose, the clouds decide to let it), I thoroughly recommend a visit.

The Glossariser 1.0 is here

A while ago, I made a molecular evolution glossary page in case it was of use to anyone. Being a geek and a programmer, rather than actually making the webpage myself, I made a program to make the webpage for me. From a plain text set of terms and definitions, this program will construct a formatted web page, including hyperlinks between terms (if so desired).

As I now need to make another glossary for MapTime, I thought I would throw together a quick cgi script to make the code available online, and the Glossariser was born.



It's rather crude at present and, in particular, contains no documentation - trial and error only, I'm afraid! Input is, again, raw text with a number of delimiter options. (It only splits on the first occurrence of the chosen delimiter, so periods can be used quite happily.) There are currently a limited selection of output styles available. Unless "tabs" is chosen, terms will be split up according to their first letter and output alphabetically:



The "Header" or "bold" style refers to the formatting for the letters A-Z. The "table" output is similar but has each letter in a row of a table. The tabs style was a bit experimental and doesn't really work that well, so I won't bother to explain it here. (Feel free to try it!)

If you just want a standalone HTML page, you can (hopefully) just save the output directly. Otherwise, you will either want to copy and paste the text into a Word document or, to use in Blogger or other existing framework, just "view source" and copy the bits you need. (That's how I made the molecular evolution glossary.)

I have some plans for improvements - there are a few bugs to iron out and I would like to add URLs etc. - but, as with most things, they will probably wait until I, or someone else, really wants them in place. So, if it is useful but doesn't quite do what you want, let me know and I might be able to update it. There's also no reason that its use should be limited to a glossary. Any list of names/keywords and associated short paragraphs will do - perhaps I should make the alphabetical arrangement optional in this case?

The Glossariser is available at: http://bioware.soton.ac.uk/glossariser.html.

(If it ever saves you an evening of writing HTML and you want to say thanks, buy The Cabbages of Doom for just 99p! ☺ (You can't blame a guy for trying!))