In praise of Downton Abbey

I'm a sucker for costume dramas, I'll admit. When Downton Abbey started on free to air television in Perth three weeks ago I was glued to the screen and haven't been disappointed thus far. Episode 4 Series 1 shows this weekend and I am resisting the temptation to "read-ahead". I am rather miffed than this wasn't picked up by the ABC. Maybe they could not afford it.

It's an Upstairs Downstairs themed story set in a fictitious grand house during the Edwardian era and in the first episode we hear about the sinking of the Titanic (1912) and the heir to Downtown Abbey is one of the casualties.

For me Maggie Smith steals the show right from the first episode. She definitely has the best lines: "I dont like many of my friends" and "what is a weekend" and "I couldn't have electricity in the house, I wouldn't sleep a wink"

What are your favourite Downtown moments?

Birds have their fill of plastic

Anyone who's walked along a beach in a remote area will be appalled by the amount of washed up plastic and other debris you find.

At our local beach people often leave behind plastic buckets, balls, plastic shoes and other rubbish and if the council beach cleaners don't collect it, where does it end up?

Birds Australia have been highlighted the problem of plastic waste on Lord Howe Island where researchers have found that 95% of Flesh-footed Shearwaters have large amounts of plastics in their digestive systems. Plastic breaks down, but then it can be mistaken for food by the birds. To make matters worse the adult birds feed their chicks with the plastic bits.

A recent report in The Age makes you realise that the plastic you throw out today, or the stuff left behind on the beach may end up in the ocean and eventually find its way into the stomachs of vulnerable seabirds as well as fish and animals such as turtles.

Just take a look at this graphic photo, taken by photographer Chris Jordan on Midway Atoll, of a dead seabird with its stomach full of plastic.

The Australian government has information on its Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities website about the whole marine debris problem and what is being done.

Why buy an Android tablet?

I've been thinking about the proliferation of tablets and the competition (or lack of competition) for Apple's iPad.

The question is why would you buy an Android tablet?

This question was posted on the Businessinsider website. Here's a summary of the responses. Android tablet offers:

• Price
• More competition
• More variety
• Openness
• Flash support
• Support for PDF
• No DRM
• Drag and drop via USB like it's another drive
• Avoid Itunes

CNET has looked at the range of current and upcoming tablets and presented them all in a comparative table.

And Garner predicts that the gap between Apple & Android tablet market shares will continue to decrease. Apple’s iOS currently has 83.9% market share which is expected to drop to 68.7% later in 2011. But it will stay at a healthy 63.5% in 2012, retaining almost half of the market (47.1%) by 2015.

If you want to follow this topic check out Crave: the gadget blog from CNET.

Frog education on campus

Edith Cowan University (ECU) is providing some exciting "green" initiatives and offering a range of interesting sessions for staff and students. The ECU Green Officer Program recently organised for Johnny Prefumo, the Frog Doctor, to run a lunchtime session about setting up a frog friendly garden.

We used to live near a lake in Perth and would hear the wonderful nightly chorus of frogs during the winter months once the rainy season started. So I was keen to find out more about WA frogs and how difficult it would be to set up a frog friendly habitat in a suburban garden.

What did I learn?

• Most of the local WA frogs are brown, not green.
• Most of them have claws as they burrow down to shelter during summer and to breed.
• There are tree frogs and burrowing frogs, most local ones are the latter.
  
• Frogs can't swim, only the tadpoles swim.
• You need to set up areas for the frogs to hide as well as water zones.
  
• They call loudly in winter, once the rain starts and breeding begins.
• Frog numbers are declining.
  
• Local frogs are named after the sounds of their call, for example: "motorbike frog", "quacking frog", "moaning frog".

The WA Museum is running a tadpole exchange program for those who have the right habitat and are wanting to get started with preparing a frog friendly garden. But read up first as it is not just a matter of putting in a pond. The Museum have a frog garden publication which will tell you what you need to do.

And oh, by the way, I won't be setting up a frog spot at home, as the little blighters are really noisy in winter and the neighbours might object. But if you live in a rural or semi-rural area it would be ideal and would help the survival of native frogs.

Pictured is the local Perth frog species, the moaning frog. Note that it has claws, not sucker pads, so it's a burrowing frog not a tree frog.

Steinbeck revisited

I love reading and re-reading the classics and some years ago had a Steinbeck "fling" and read a whole lot of his novels....East Of Eden, The Pearl, Cannery Row and the Grapes of Wrath. But for some reason I had never read Of Mice and Men until recently.

John Steinbeck’s novella, Of Mice and Men, was written in 1937 and tells the story of two down-on-their-luck drifters traveling around, looking for work in California's Salinas Valley during the Depression. This work was written before the Grapes of Wrath and has some similar themes.

The story starts with the two mates, George and Lennie, back on the road after hurridly leaving their previous job. It seems Lennie did some “bad things” and as we hear parts of their story we realise that the child-like Lennie has a mental disability and is a large, lumbering man who does not know his own strength. George is Lennie’s best mate and his protector who is trying the keep him out of trouble. They arrive at a ranch looking for work and hoping for a better life with dreams of making enough money to buy their own place and raise chickens and rabbits. Lennie loves rabbits. When the mean and aggressive Curly, the boss’s son, appears on the scene you know things are not going to end well and that George will have his work cut out trying to keep Lennie safe from harm. Of Mice and Men has a Greek tragedy air of inevitability about it and it moves relentlessly to its tragic conclusion.

One major criticism I have of the book is the character of Curly's wife, who is the archetypical fallen woman and temptress, Eve. You know when you meet her that she will play an important role in Lennie and George's downfall.

Steinbeck’s novels are published here by Penguin Australia

Learning about photonics

I am working on an ANDS Seeding the Commons project along with a team of staff at ECU. One of the exciting aspects of this project is actually going out and interviewing our university researchers, asking them about their research and their research data. Recently we spoke with Professor Kamal Alameh, the director of the Electron Science Research Institute (ESRI), about ECU's research in photonics and microelectronics. Professor Alameh was incredibly hospitable and took us on a tour around the ESRI research facility and explained in layman's terms their diverse and exciting projects. We will be contributing metadata about an ESRI dataset into Research Data Australia.

This Youtube video shows Professor Alameh talking about ESRI and was released in the ECU YouTube Channel this week.

(My blog post 13 for blog every day of June 2011)

An architectural treasure south of Perth

I came across this book recently - "The Fairbridge Chapel : Sir Herbert Baker's labour of love" by David Dolan and Christine Lewis and it reminded me that I was intrigued by this chapel when I saw it for the first time last year on a visit to Fairbridge Farm. The architecture looks so unusual compared to the style of most Australian colonial church architecture (not that I am an expert at all). It certainly has a Cape, as in Cape Town, look about it.

The Fairbridge Chapel is known as the Chapel of the Holy Innocents and was designed by the famous architect Sir Herbert Baker who also designed buildings all over South Africa.

"Baker was a great believer in Kingsley Fairbridge and his work at Fairbridge Farm that when the Child Emigration Society approached him in 1928 about designing a chapel for the Farm School, he was more than happy to oblige. In his autobiography Architecture and Personalities (1994) Baker explained, " I have such admiration for the work of Kingsley Fairbridge, inspired by Rhodes and a Rhodes Scholar, in his farm schools that I gave designs of a chapel for the first Farm School at Pinjarra in Western Australia."

More about Herbert Baker architecture in South Africa here

Baker designed the Union Buildings, the official seat of the South African government in Pretoria, South Africa.

It is well worth a visit to Fairbridge Farm just to see the chapel. It is less than a 60 minute drive south of Perth, near Pinjarra.