Well, on Thursday night I was incredulous at a lecture by Steve Jones. On Friday night I met the fascinating Richard Grant from Our Competitor Blog Network, Nature Network. On Saturday I had a lovely lunch with my new colleagues at Sydney, and then proceeded to nearly drown while skin diving (thirty five years of smoking tends to lessen your lung capacity, okay? I stopped over a year ago). My son returned from a trip to Victoria, which state then proceeded to burn down.
And I still don't have internet at home. Which is why none of these events received a measured and interesting blog post. Sorry.
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Heh, it was good meeting you John. You look just like your photo, so it was easy to recognize you.
There's still (counts) four more Fridays before I leave...
Evolution in humans is still at a full stop, I take it.
Yes, something to do with Mustafa the Incredibly Unpleasant having 8000 kids while kids these days don't seem to have many kids. And he nicely defined actual evolutionary adaptation, like the spread of the lactose tolerance gene, as not being interesting.
Both of the Southeast Australian blogs I read have been all over the story. I live in wildfire country myself (the county as a whole is wildfire country) and I'm amazed that otherwise sensible Aussies aint got nothin' in place whereto wildfires.
Here's a suggestion: Basements. Basements with a six foot layer of dirt between the surface and the basement's ceiling. Stock it with drinks and munchies and wait out the firestorm down there.
I was thinking that myself. People should have fire shelters in their backyards: basically brick sheds covered in earth. We tend not to do basements here as a matter of course, but if I lived in firestorm territory, I'd have one (and a diesel pump for a water tank and hose).
I was also wondering: could one make fireproof blankets for a house, out of fibreglass or something similar? If your roof is fireproof, then these things dropped down the sides and tied off to prevent embers entering their homes would be worth the few thousand dollars it cost to install...
Idle speculation about this leads me to wonder if there might be an air supply problem for an underground shelter, depending on what is burning above, and how long it takes to be consumed.