Training Log Archive: blairtrewin

At Fitzroy on my way to an engagement in the city. A good deal less crowded than it would have been this time yesterday (although it was mildly annoying that the additional coolness also applied to the showers).

One of the benefits of usually getting home late, and not often being around on weekends, is that I have never been visited by doorknockers working on behalf of electricity companies. At the meeting I was at this afternoon (discussing energy policy) one of the people present mentioned their experience of a doorknocker who was very insistent that the deal they were spruiking was available only if it was signed on the spot and that it wasn't possible to take the contract away and have a look at it. The doorknocker could have chosen their target better - the householder they were dealing with was the Victorian Shadow Minister for Energy (and for good measure she's also Shadow Minister for Consumer Affairs).

C • Seems to be standard practice 3

Headed to the pool earlier than might otherwise have been the case - the options were first thing or afternoon, and I didn't fancy doing laps in 37-degree pool crowds. Felt reasonably good but the clock isn't really consistent with that.

The demographics of the 7.40am Saturday pool crowd are very different from those of the 8.20am Saturday pool crowd.

Back in Melbourne and took to the Fitzroy pool. Feel as if I'm in purely maintenance mode at the moment and not sure how good a job I'm doing of maintaining things (and it's probably not the best time of year to be trying to cut one's food intake to match lower volume of exercise, either).

Spent the evening at the cricket with Bruce and family and compared injury notes in the process; the similarities seem pretty strong. If the consequences are also the same then Oceania isn't looking good (and if, as I suspect, any surgery that's required won't be able to be done until after the summer holidays, the early months of the 2013 season aren't looking too good either). Will know more in the next week or so with a bit of luck.

After Tuesday I thought another stationary bike session would be in order, but I've moved hotels (mainly because the Academy of Science is no longer paying for it and the Menzies is a bit out of my league otherwise), and I discovered that just because the sign on the lift says there's a gym on the 7th floor doesn't mean said gym actually exists.

A few good discoveries today - the best of them being 45 years of snowfall data whose existence had hitherto gone unnoticed, from a site near Bombala. There's nothing like it from any non-Alpine site anywhere else in Australia and it will potentially be a very useful data set for climate change work (given our expectation that low-elevation snow will decline faster than high-elevation snow).

Another highlight was the site where the homestead burned down in 1915 and the only thing which was saved (by the "Chinese gardener") was the rainfall records. I'm tempted to put that site in the final long-term set just for that. One which I probably won't be including was the site which is at a retirement village and where there's a 2008 note stating that the nominal observer "will relocate the gauge closer to the dementia facility, where measuring the rain will be an activity for the care recipients".

And, to show that there's nothing new about Queanbeyan being a den of mischief, there is a report of vandalism at the site there dating from 1950 (they called them vandals in 1950; a previous report I'd seen, of similar activity in 1886 in the Adelaide Hills, called them "larrikins"). They still don't live up to Woodburn's effort of having five gauges nicked in as many years between 2001 and 2005.

Back to Melbourne tonight.

A post-seminar swim at the Uni of NSW pool, having decided that I wasn't up to going out to Epping for the Summer Series (instead I went out to Manly after work, a nice trip in all respects except for losing half my fish and chips to the birds). Quite a crowded pool but seemed to manage OK, and feeling a bit better than I have for the last few days.

Did something a bit different this morning and took to the stationary bike in the hotel gym. Good to get a sweat up but a stationary bike is just as boring now as it was the last time I tried it (with a broken arm) in 2005. Got a cramp midway through for no good reason but it disappeared quickly. The session did seem to loosen my knee up quite well, although it tightened again after sitting down for a while in the afternoon.

I've switched from conference mode to file-trawling mode - which in this part of the world means I'm reading a reasonable number of documents written by a certain T. Bluett. You won't be surprised to learn that station files he was responsible for usually have copies of topographic maps of the vicinity. (There was also the usual amusement caused by seeing things written in 1982 that you probably wouldn't see written in 2012, although nothing remotely on the scale of what was said about members of the indigenous population in 1960s documents in Western Australia).

There was a classic nerd conversation at the workshop dinner last night. A reasonable number of people are probably familiar with the concept of the Kevin Bacon number (the number of links which you need to get to Kevin Bacon through people who have co-appeared in a movie or TV show). Mathematicians will also be familiar with the Erdos number (obtained through co-authoring papers with people who can be linked to people who have been co-authors of papers with the prolific Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos), and the discussion turned to who had a low Bacon-Erdos number (the sum of your Bacon and Erdos numbers). I think mine's 9, 4 for Erdos and 5 for Bacon (obtained through one of my colleagues appearing on the ABC Catalyst programme, which Cate Blanchett has also been on).

And then someone introduced the idea of a Bacon-Erdos-Sabbath number (the last being derived from people who have played in bands with people who have been in Black Sabbath). I'm almost certain mine is undefined. One wonders who would have the lowest one - my guess would be Brian May (the one who was in Queen, not the one who's been in Canadian and American orienteering teams), also a scientist of some note.

In the hotel pool in Sydney, which was shorter than I'm used to although not so short as to get dizzy. Much as per normal for the last couple of weeks, although a bit faster through the pushing-off-the-wall factor. Continuing not to make a lot of progress - will start the process of getting it properly looked at if there's no progress by the time I get back from Sydney.

Obviously the notices at the hotel haven't been updated for a while because one of the items on it was that the playing of radios and cassette players was not allowed. Readers born after 1990 may need to ask their parents what a "cassette player" was.