Do We Stay or Do We Go?
We were called back home because of a serious bushfire threat. All the way home on the drive from the city, a large smoke plume was visible. Luckily the plume indicated the fire was headed south, the opposite direction from our home.
At last, we made it home and sat on the ridge watching the fire burn the tranquil valley below. As we watched in horror, news swept through the small crowd gathered with us on the ridge. A change was rapidly approaching and the wind would soon change direction.
We waited and watched. Suddenly, it happened. The wind swung around from the south bringing swift cool Antarctic gusts. We watched as the fire changed direction and began heading towards us. It surrounded a home on the other side of the valley. Water bombing helicopters swooped in. The Southerly wind change swung the massive smoke plume around and into our faces. What was once clearly visible became obscure.
We could hear a number of massive helicopters overhead and in the valley below but could not see their efforts or targets. Sirens wailed in the distance.
A light fall of soot and ash started to descend like a snowstorm from hell. We dispersed and patrolled our properties, looking for sign of ember attack, hoses at the ready.
Under a soot and ash choked sky we wait. A eerie silence has fallen. No longer able to see the approaching firestorm front. We must decide now, do we stay and fight or do we leave our properties in the hands of fate and the sheer determination and effort of volunteer fire fighters? Stay or go?
A masterpiece of engineering and a work of art
Read MoreThe human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art – Leonardo da Vinci
Hell's Fury
The warnings came a week in advance. Saturday Feb 7, 2009 would be the hottest day ever recorded in Victoria, dry wild winds would rage and fires would blister the landscape.
At 2pm on Saturday, the thermometer outside my home nestled in the forested mountains overlooking Melbourne registered 115 degrees (46.4 C). Winds whipped the window awnings causing them to snap and pop like sails on a yacht at high seas. Smoke from nearby fires choked the valley and obscured the afternoon sun but provided no respite from the intensity of its heat. Our Mountain home with its flat tin roof proved to be more oven than hospice. We all gathered semi-naked around the single air conditioner for comfort.
We watched as Elvis, the giant Erickson S-64 Air-Crane Helitanker traverse across our windows, back and forth, carrying water to nearby bush fires. And we listened with trepidation for the local volunteer fire station’s alarm to sound and we waited for winds to change, to bring back the familiar cool mountain breeze.
Luckily for us and our neighbours, the fires did not reach our valley. But more than1000 other families were not so lucky. They have lost their homes and some, more than 136 at this stage, lost their lives.
The fires still burn and no doubt more will experience loss and grief. Our hearts go out to those who have lost and suffered.
Pondering In My Backyard
“Logic moves in one direction, the direction of clarity, coherence and structure. Ambiguity moves in the other direction, that of fluidity, openness, and release. Mathematics moves back and forth between these two poles. [...] It is the interaction between these different aspects that gives mathematics its power.”
William Byers (How Mathematicians Think, Princeton University Press, 2007)
“Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.” Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
“One cannot understand… the universality of laws of nature, the relationship of things, without an understanding of mathematics. There is no other way to do it.”
Richard P. Feynman
“Philosophy is written in this grand book–I mean the universe–which stands continually open to our glaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.”
Galileo Galilei (Il Saggiatore, 1623)
“Math is the only place where truth and beauty mean the same thing.”
Danica McKellar
#! Crunchbang Wallpaper
Here’s my latest Crunchbang Linux wallpaper. I wanted to stay true to the mostly black default theme as well as ensuring there’s good space on the right side of a lengthy Conky configuration. The file can be downloaded from the #!Crunchbang wiki site.
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