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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2024

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  • It’s impossible to prevent, only reduce.

    And that’s what such efforts aim to do. You can’t prevent everything but you can definitely cut down on what is potentially being introduced. This is particularly true when a place is as geographically isolated as Antarctica. For a relevant example I know that if you were to bring a raw stick into Australia it’d be confiscated (or required to be pest treated at your cost) due to biosecurity concerns, and we get literally millions of people visiting per year so that’s a significantly harder containment job than Antarctica would present. Even within Australia there are biosecurity controls disallowing movement of stuff like fruit and grape vines between some of our states/regions.

    I would be surprised if biosecurity controls for our parts of Antarctica were not even stricter, given that it is a largely untouched landscape and reducing impact on it is considered worthwhile to do these days (not so much in the early days of the Antarctic program, but we try to do better now).



  • It was really just a matter of how to get a pelican to cooperate rather than it being aggressive or anything - they aren’t intelligent enough to figure out you aren’t going to eat them so will resist attempts be caught.

    Dad and my sister were coming back from town one night and saw this pelican by the side of the road moving really awkwardly, so they pulled over to check it out and found it had a punctured lung (and a somewhat wonky beak, but that had healed from a previous injury). Best guess is someone wasn’t as good with a shotgun as they thought they were - being charitable there is a chance someone figured it would struggle with the beak, either that or they were an arsehole.

    Anyway the pelican wasn’t up to anything much so they took it home, made up a comfy spot in a cardboard box, gave it some old painkillers, and expected to just give it an easier end than being eaten by whatever came across it that night. Next morning however when the box was opened the pelican was alive and kicking (literally) so we pinned it down and put it in part of the chook pen to recover. After a fortnight or so of hanging around eating bits of fish and scaring the daylights out of the chooks every time they saw it the pelican had healed up enough to be properly active again so we wrestled it down once more (took noticeably more effort this time) and bundled it into the car to release down at the dam.


  • I actually have wrestled a bit with a pelican and can say that if you’re prepared to take a few scratches you’ll be able to hold one down. You just have to hold the beak and wings, once you’ve got it pinned their legs are too short to really get at you.

    Admittedly the pelican in question wasn’t operating at full potential (recovering from a wound) but I was in my early teens at the time so wasn’t exactly an example of peak physical performance myself.




  • I reckon Port Arthur is a solid contender with its low population of 251 (known for being the site of a mass shooting that led to significant changes in Australian gun laws). It is fading in name recognition as time goes on though, after all that was approaching 30 years ago and lots of people have been born since then.

    My top pick however would be Bega with its population of 5013 and the name recognition the cheese factory has brought. It’s hard to go past a name that’s printed on cheese (and assorted other products now) in the vast majority of supermarkets across Australia, and they even export overseas to get a bit of international cachet.


  • Yes, while they look interesting there are reasons why saw blade lookalike wheels aren’t commonly used. I hate to think of how the weight of those dirt bike ones would affect the handling (probably not so much of a problem over smooth ice, but rougher terrain would be a challenge).




  • And it’s a very weird and frightening feeling if I do get disoriented.

    I know what you mean, there has been a couple of times in my life where my internal idea of direction has been turned off course and it is a very weird feeling indeed trying to reconcile the direction you internally believe you’re facing against the different direction a map or compass is telling you is actually true.

    As a kid I also once spent a weekend in Melbourne feeling somewhat disconcerted due to not being able to get a sense of direction. I’d never been there before and flew in on an overcast day which never ended up letting up until I flew out so never ended up getting my bearings while we were down there (didn’t help that this was before the smartphone era so maps weren’t available at the drop of a hat).









  • I’m sure I’ve read worse but one that stands out as making me question the time I put into reading it is Out of the Dark by David Weber. I go into it expecting a military sci fi, and for the vast majority of the book that’s what you get - aliens invade Earth and plucky humans resist etc etc. The aliens however have more reserves and air superiority so are slowly winning as the end of the book approaches, at which point you expect the main characters to pull a rabbit out of the hat and do something different. Except that’s not what happens.

    spoiler

    What actually happens is that Count Dracula appears out of (almost) nowhere and flies with a bunch of vampires up to the alien spaceships to kill the aliens, winning the battle for Earth.

    I was definitely not satisfied with this ending, even if there was some foreshadowing earlier in the book that made sense after knowing this was a possibility in this universe.