Tram Town
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
| Category: Footy I was browsing through The VFA: A History of the Victorian Football Association and came across the name Jim Stynes. I had no idea that he played a few games at Prahran. Did you know that, Jack? |
| Category: Audio/Theatre Have you pointed at this before, DB? QLab: Live media timelines for Mac OS X. |
| Category: Audio Just as we audio guys can't have enough microphones, there can't be too many sites dedicated to microphones. Not many, though, are as good as this one. |
Monday, October 30, 2006
| Category: Drought Following a mass of intense research, the good folk over at Diogenes' Lamp have unearthed the astounding fact that we have had droughts before in this country. By all accounts, state governments have responded historically by increasing water catchment and storage mechanisms. You won't find our man Thwaites falling for that one. "We'll all be rooned" said John O'Brien. |
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
| Category: WHWTMSITW Mobile phones wreaking havoc with sperm Men who used mobile phones for more than four hours a day were found to have 25 percent lower sperm count than men who never used a mobile.and Professor Ashok Agarwal, who led the study that tested 360 men from the US and IndiaHow many of these 360 use a mobile phone for "more than four hours a day" and what part of their bodies do they store their sperm in, their ears? |
Monday, October 23, 2006
| Category: Religion Over at BrookesNews is a short analysis of Pope Benedict XVI’s speech on Faith and Reason, delivered at the University of Regensburg, Germany. Well worth the read, Jack! I don't read BrookesNews regularly enough and really should. On this occasion, I was pointed at the article by the good folk over at Diogenes' Lamp. |
Friday, October 20, 2006
Thursday, October 19, 2006
| Category: Home Fillums If you use iMovie and you want to duplicate the "defendant effect" then this might be useful. |
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
| Category: Technology Is that a telly on your head or are you just pleased to not see me. Jeez, 3kg, I wouldn't want my kids wearing that! |
Monday, October 16, 2006
| Category: Signs As I was leaving the Ming Wing out at Monash today, I encountered this sign  No news is good news, right? Well, no, wrong! In fact we had to divert via the stairs between level 2 and level 1 on the way down. My reason for posting, though, is that when I saw the sign I laughed out loud. For mine it's funny in its own right but it also makes me wonder at its reason for existence. Here's my guess... Somebody has recognised that the escalators in the building are not very reliable and has approached the Facilities Appreciation Committee™ with the idea that they should be proactive about the "issue". The vote came in and the funds were provided and the sign went up. Nobody was ever going to keep the information up to date and so the sign sits on the wall as a "grand" mockery of taxpayer-funded academia. |
| Category: Audio DB and I do a bit of SFX work for theatre and, occasionally, film. This item on display ay the Williamstown Historical Society Museum is a sound effects machine used in cinema before the days of fully sychronised sound.  The device would sit up behind the screen and each of the handles could be turned to create an effect hopefully in sync with some on-screen action. Unfortunately, only one of the sounds is currently working; it is labelled twice, "Money" & "Broken Crockery", and is easliy recogisable as either. Image courtesy of the main man over at Diogenes' Lamp who, by the way, is also on display at Williamstown in The George Ridley Room. |
Sunday, October 15, 2006
| Category: Warmening Sp!ked is a really good site, Jack. This recent article entitled "Global warming: the chilling effect on free speech" is an absolute cracker of a read. An open letter to the [Royal] Society – signed by Tim Ball, a professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg, and others – argues that ‘scientific inquiry is unique because it requires falsifiability’: ‘The beauty of science is that no issue is ever “settled”, that no question is beyond being more fully understood, that no conclusion is immune to further experimentation. And yet for the first time in history, the Royal Society is shamelessly using the media to say emphatically: “case closed” on all issues related to climate change.’ |
Saturday, October 14, 2006
Thursday, October 12, 2006
| Category: On GooTube is an advertisement made by David Zucker. It has been flagged as inappropriate for some users but I doubt TramTown readers would find it offensive. |
| Category: Littuchah Skittlebrau engages in some "Irreverent Gun Blogging" by way of a mass book review. |
| Category: Numbers We are seeing reports of a new Lancet study (the last one on this topic was just before the last US election) claiming that well over 600,000 people have died in Iraq since the start of the war. What most of the reports don't mention is that the number of deaths in the sample was 547 and the "researchers" extrapolated from there. WHWTMSITW. Go to Tim Blair's posts for simple numerical analyses. |
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
| Category: Culture Now that I have no earthly reason to care, I have been pointed to a really nice Teletubbies site!. Someone might care. |
Monday, October 09, 2006
Saturday, October 07, 2006
| Category: Trams Yarra Trams are celebrating their centenary tomorrow. Looks like it'd be worth a look in if you have time. |
Friday, October 06, 2006
| Category: Architecture Since I was a kid I've always liked hidden rooms. You know the sorta thing. Bruce Waynes bust, pulling the (Secret Seven/Famous Five) book outta the shelf to reveal a hidden passage. During several of my renovations at home I tried to put a similar thing in but got knobbled by funding constraints (for the record it was one priest hole and one mechanical, remote control moving fence). Some folks haven't been. |
Thursday, October 05, 2006
| Category: Madness The Church of England displaying more evidence of its insufficient sanity: churchgoers had been told to think twice before referring to God as "He" or "Lord" because of dangers it could lead to domestic violenceThe article finishes: "There is a danger that this document has veered too much towards political correctness"No shit, Sherlock? |
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
| Category: Navigation Got one of these last night. Very impressed so far -- in fact, can't fault it to date. I really like the way that if you vear from recommended directions it seems to re-compute 'on-the-fly' the next coupla' clicks first and then the entire route. Only complaint is it doesn't seem to have a Melways option. UBD/WhereIs only, I'm afraid. |
| Category: Madness In fact, a commenter over at Tim Blair's site has decided on the more politically correct term "insufficiently sane". The story is about the NSW police "[warning] the teachers they would be fined if they persisted in helping with the road crossing because they are not trained crossing guards". |
