On Apr 27, 12:59 pm, Fred Bloggs <nos...@nospam.comwrote:
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bill.slo...@ieee.org wrote:
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On Apr 24, 2:09 pm, Quadibloc <jsav...@ecn.ab.cawrote:
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>The Real Andy wrote:
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>>Makes me wonder about the credibility of any statement Dr Gideon Polya
>>makes.
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>.
>I never thought that I would feel the urge to call someone an
>edelweiss-eating Tanzanian devil, but Dr. Polya proved that I lacked
>imagination.
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>(Note that "Tanzanian" is pronounced Tan.zan._ee_.yan, not
>Tan._zayn_.ee.an; one wouldn't want to spoil the effect.)
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What really spoils the effect is that Dr. Polya lives in Tasmania, a
state of Australia, and not in Tanzania, which is a country in East
Africa.
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Semi-literate Americans do tend to confuse the two places, as they
also tend confuse Australia and Austria. Oddly enough, edelweiss grows
in Austria, so Dr. Polya would have to import it from Europe if he
were in the habit of dining on edelweiss - which would be an eccentric
habit, even in Austria, where the flower doesn't form part of the
normal diet.
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--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
>
Is there any civilized life in Tasmania? It looks like just another
natural wonderland that was raped, pillaged, exploited for its
resources, and left behind.
The pillaging and rapine continues. The Green Party has managed to
protect some of the more interesting elements of the ecology, but the
paper mills where my father was research manager for as long as we
lived in Tasmania continues to chop down a lot of trees. They liked to
claim that their wood felling was sustainable, but since the cycle of
felling and regrowth they had in mind at the time worked on a 200 year
cycle, and the business was set up in the late 1930s, there wasn't a
lot of farmed timber going into the wood chippers at the time. How it
works at the moment isn't clear - two hundred year old wood isn't
ideal for making paper.
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>Even the official tourism site makes the
place seem dull and bereft of any kind of enthusiasm, warning the
prospective visitor that life is slow there.
The population is only around 350,000 on an island the size of
Ireland. The state has the highest fertility and the lowest rate of
population growth of all the Australian states - anybody who is any
good leaves, as I did, and pursues a career someplace where there are
careers worth pursuing.
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I did not know Erol Flynn was from there.
He was born there, but left Tasmania fairly early (like everybody
else) - his father, the "distinguished Australian marine biologist/
zoologist Prof. Theodore Thomson Flynn" was presumably working at the
University of Tasmania in Hobart in 1909.
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>That's something anyway. They might consider making his
boyhood home a museum or something. And was that Gunn Forestry you know
so well.
I don't know anything about Gunn Forestry.
The Green Party obviously doesn't like it, but they do have a tendency
to describe 25-year-old regrowth forests as "virgin primeval
rainforest" because the lie plays better to their target audience than
would the more nuanced truth.
The paper mill where my father worked had to severely restrict the
proportion of old-growth wood - trunks more than four feet (1,2
metres) in diameter - because the lignin in the older wood contained a
relatively high proportion of some organic acid that messed up the
caustic soda recovery cycle - and IIRR preferentially logged regrowth
forests that had grown up in areas clear-felled after the first world
war in order to provide cattle-raising farms for soldiers coming back
from the First World War. The farms were not successful, and the land
rapidly went back to forest.
My father was the guy who worked out that a high proportion of old
wood was what messed up the soda recovery process, and he hired the
Norwegian chemist - Asbjorn Baklien - who worked out how the old wood
caused the problem. Asbjorn went on to a brilliant career with ICI and
Monash University.
http://www.asap.unimelb.edu.au/bspar...s/P003354b.htm
--
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen
