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Post by Verbivore on Feb 2, 2022 23:57:39 GMT
I was waiting for someone else to start the month's thread; however … We’ve discussed, years ago, the use of football fields and olympic swimming pools as comparative measures. In AU for a while it’s been Sydney Harbours. Now there’s a newly minted one. From a news article on flooding in Western Australia: "We've got a serious amount of water coming down the river system. It hit almost 500,000 megalitres a day.
"Picture a Sydney Harbour going under that bridge in 24 hours."
The Bureau's senior hydrologist, Michael Salinas, had another way to describe the flow of water.
"[It]'s equivalent to 3,000 Tesla Model 3s flowing every second down Fitzroy River Crossing," he said.
Unfortunately, I have some difficulty picturing bulk Teslas flowing down a river, even though I've lived most of my life in a major flood zone and have seen dozens, perhaps even scores, of cattle 'flowing' down flooded streams. I wonder if those (imaginary) Teslas moo like drowning cattle.
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Post by Dave Miller on Feb 3, 2022 8:04:29 GMT
I can (sort of) picture the amount that is 3,000 Teslas (having seen a traffic jam or two), but I think “a Sydney Harbour” is an odd choice of volume. I’ve never seen it, but even if I had, the visible surface area would give me no clue to depth and volume.
500,000 megalitres? I’d express that as 500 million tonnes, which takes it well outside what I can imagine!
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Post by Twoddle on Feb 3, 2022 9:22:55 GMT
Did that chappy go to the trouble of calculating the volume of a Tesla 3 and dividing it into the volume of water in question? If so I think he’s underworked.
Perhaps the water industry uses a megalitre as a standard unit but my reaction to that figure was that it should have been expressed as 500 gigalitres, not that I can envisage either of those amounts.
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Post by Twoddle on Feb 3, 2022 9:33:31 GMT
In the London-centric UK, volumes are sometimes expressed in terms of London buses. I wonder how many Teslas equal one double-decker.
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Post by Verbivore on Feb 6, 2022 20:39:20 GMT
Australia is working up to a federal election (YAWN!) and the 'news' is full of related nonsense.
An expression that particularly gets my goat – one that I encountered four times in the first three news articles I read this morning – is forward planning.
One can't plan backwards, surely? I reckon that forward planning is a nonsense of biz-speak and pollie-speak. (And, given the complete cock-up that has been the 'management' of the COVID pandemic, any kind of planning – forward, backward, or sideways – has been patently missing in AU.)
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Feb 6, 2022 21:06:56 GMT
I haven’t encountered “forward planning” for some time. I thought there had been so much criticism of it that people had started avoiding its use sometime ago. Depends on the context. You can of course have town planning and I recall having a conversation with a town planner who was quite keen on the idea of forward planning to distinguish it from his profession.
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Feb 7, 2022 10:11:52 GMT
Good morning, Vv. Your new avatar is striking but please will you explain it?
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Post by Verbivore on Feb 7, 2022 11:22:20 GMT
Good morning, Vv. Your new avatar is striking but please will you explain it? Good evening here, LJH (22:25 hrs). My new avatar is the symbol for atheism. I had a moment to spare and remembered that I'd made Twod's Dawkins avatar years ago. Deciding that my generic one was, well, generic, I opted to update with this new one.
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Post by Verbivore on Feb 7, 2022 20:51:44 GMT
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Post by Twoddle on Feb 9, 2022 21:36:40 GMT
Paul Doherty, the creator of this message board, returned home today from hospital, having had major heart-surgery. After lengthy waits and repeated delays all now seems to be going well, and I'm sure we all wish him a successful and speedy recuperation.
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Post by Verbivore on Feb 9, 2022 21:39:48 GMT
Paul Doherty, the creator of this message board, returned home today from hospital, having had major heart-surgery. After lengthy waits and repeated delays all now seems to be going well, and I'm sure we all wish him a successful and speedy recuperation. Bravo for Paul! May his recovery be rapid and complete.
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Feb 11, 2022 22:38:36 GMT
I have recently had to write a semi-formal letter to a large organisation and was unable to discover the name of the person to whom I wished to communicate. I recall, years ago, that the appropriate salutation was “Dear Sir or Madam“ but this seems to be regarded as old-fashioned. So what do you say? I resisted the idea of saying “Dear Complaints Manager“ or any other such salutation by job title (I didn’t, in any case, know the job title). I also dislike the idea of “Good Morning” or “Greetings”. Even more I dislike “Hello” or “Hi”. I have explored the internet but was unsuccessful in finding anything which seemed appropriate. Furthermore, there seems to be a distinction between American and British usage. I found nothing Australian. In the end I went with my old-fashioned custom and chose “Dear Sir or Madam” but to do any modern people have any better ideas?
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Post by Twoddle on Feb 12, 2022 12:12:23 GMT
It's "Dear Sir or Madam" for me, LJH, but I'm definitely not modern!
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Post by Verbivore on Feb 18, 2022 1:34:06 GMT
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Post by Little Jack Horner on Feb 18, 2022 16:40:06 GMT
Welcome back, Vv! I wonder if you have been moving house? I haven’t heard of postvention either and, quite frankly, I don’t want to hear of it again. I am glad to say that my spellchecker hasn’t heard of it either. Counselling after stressful events has, of course, been around for years. I am not sure that the “pre” in prevention is a prefix? As far as I know there is no “vention”. If pre- is a prefix, perhaps postvention should be replaced by suffvention as in suffix? I am going to avoid any such word.
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