On the Bottom Half

Idiot-less Roads

Andy took off to Papua New Guinea yesterday morning, so I'm now in charge of his cat and therefore his house. Bonus: his car is mine to use! Haven't driven anything in 5 months, but everything turned out okay. Just a couple of small fender benders and one injury accident... Just kidding. I didn't even make for the right hand side of the road... Can't get used to driving on the right hand side of the car though. In a dramatic twist, there was an utter lack of idiots on the road!!! There we were, thousands of mice all migrating toward the city centre and the traffic was going at or very near the speed limit, no one cut me off - it was amazing!

Did you know that there are houses made without central heating?!? Andy's place doesn't have it! There's a built in heater unit thing in the dining room that blows air into that room, but the rest has to be done with fire places. Completely ridonculous. It is nice to have a cat though. Her name's Meg and she likes attention, in fact demands attention.

Recent mail deliveries: Thanks for the post cards, you two. I laughed and laughed... There's something funny no matter how you read 'The World's Largest Ukrainian Sausage' in Vegreville.

Pretty plain weekend. I went into town to shop for a really expensive digital camera for Andy's research group. They want something for $1400 - $1500, but I can't find a non-SLR camera that fits all the other necessary criteria for anything more than $899. I like it when you can choose between electronics saying: 'too cheap, too cheap. too cheap'. Then I cruised to Melbourne Central to check out the Shot Tower Museum - they built the mall around a Heritage Listed shot tower building because you can't legally do anything to heritage buildings. Rather than leave such prime real estate, they made the inside into a couple of levels of shops, enclosed it in a huge glass pyramid and built the rest of the mall around it. They maintained a section of the tower for a museum and you can read about Melbourne history and how the shot tower worked.

It goes a little something like this: at the top of the tower, lead is melted and ladled onto a fine grate that stands above the central axis of the tower. The lead flows through the small openings in the grate and atomises, much like fuel does when sprayed through an injector. As the lead now falls the height of the tower, the very small droplets coalesce into somewhat larger ones and become spherical because they are essentially experiencing microgravity as astronauts do in space. Any newtonian fluid in microgravity/no gravity does this (correct me if I'm wrong, please) for reasons I won't discuss here. The free fall also cools the lead droplets, which are then cooled further when they land in a water trough at the base of the tower. The cool water firmly solidifies the now spherical shot pellets and prevents any flattening. Someone standing near this carnage then shovels the shot out onto a tilted tray. Properly shaped shot pellets roll straight down the tray, while misshapen ones roll off one side or another; ones that are not at all spherical simply don't roll, but slide into a specially cut slat near the base of the tray to be taken out of the production line. They are remelted with another batch later.

They then roll the useful shot over sizing grates and pack them into bags for shipping. Cool huh?

After all that, I went to Federation Square and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and watched some of their short films in the Memory Grid until close.

There are links to these places in previous posts. I'm trying to acclimatise to a Mac and the one I'm using right now is incompatible with Blogger so I don't have the link-making options that I have otherwise.

Miss you all.

posted by Kyle @ 16:29