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soubriquet

SnowJapan Member
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Posts posted by soubriquet

  1. I have worked with sheep in the UK, and the domestic breeds (not merino) were still prone to strike, despite not having the skin folds. We used to dip, and that would control it, but the pesticide we used was dealdrin, and is now banned.

     

    Fly strike is horrible. The flies lay their eggs in the daggy wool around the anus. The maggots hatch and bore into the flesh, and eventually kill the sheep if not treated.

     

    I can't see why selective breeding can't be used. Sheep are not uniformly woolly, and although its a long time since I've looked at a sheep's arse, neither are they.

  2. I'll be watching, if I can stay awake. Best season in years, thanks to the one tyre rule.

     

    Qualifying is problematic. The one car, one lap shoot-out is supposed to be good TV, but it punishes any mistake, and the real problem is the start position carry over from the previous race. Perhaps they should use free-practice times instead, with no refueling. Then we could reatian the nice mix of short fueled sprinters, vs marathon men.

  3. DOS was a terrible operating system, hopelessly unstable. Everything up to Windows 98 was horrible. MS fixed the problem by ditching everything, and bringing out NT as Windows 2000. At least now if an application goes down it doesn't invariably crash the system: the Blue Screen of Death lol.gif

  4. While I am mostly in qualified agreement with you Ocean11, I'm 100% here:

     

    "And inasmuch as this terrorism might just prove an incentive and an opportunity to rethink some of the fundamentals of community relations, foreign policy and so on, it would be dishonest and counterproductive to pretend you didn't have some specific hopes for after all the blood has been mopped up."

     

    It seems a little hypocritical to ask for Islam to reform itself while While western society is run by criminals.

  5. Well, thank'ee very much. I thought my brain-dump had killed it. I am a geologist (sedimentologist) and I used to get payed by the CSIRO to describe landscapes and their processes, and to project the models back in time. So apart from the fact I'm interested in space in the same way as mountains and machines, remote sensing can generate stunning data sets. The Landsat data are a wonderful archive, so yes, I am interested. Hyperspectral data give 128 channels and a 3m pixel size! Now where did I put my orgasmatron.......?

  6. Inland Yamagata in nice because the central valley is a classic graben, with all the volcanos lined up nicely along the lines of faulting (Zao one side, Gassan the other). Because it is going down (normal faulting), we don't get much serious activity.

     

    Lightweight construction is ideal because in theory a light flexible structure can bounce around, or even come off its foundations without collapsing. The steel frame really helps tie things down and together. The problem is that in Oishida, we are in high snow area. 14 metres last winter, on a daily accumulation basis. Anything like overhanging eaves or window shading, or even gutters gets crushed by snow. I had to get up on the roof of her bakery twice to shovel off the snow, and we still needed a new roof come spring.

     

    Spec built houses are always going to be naff, but it's easy to keep costs down so you save money. My partner's had to be purpose designed because it has a shop and is five sided to fit on the block. We went from this:

    rooftopceremony0501ep.th.jpg

    to this:

    rooftopceremony0515sb.th.jpg

     

    Sorry, Ocean11, t'would seem you will have to pay someone to design and build a one off if you want what you want.

     

    Agree about the lack of planning regs Mr Wiggles, but one of the things I really like about Japan is the freedom to live my life without the infuriating beaureaucratic interference of EC or Oz regs. Maybe I'm missing something.

  7. The built environment in the parts of Japan I know is pretty horrible, a shame considering that the parts without buildings and power lines are so beautiful. I asked my goil about this. She said it's because when you build in paper and wood, there is a cultural expectation that buildings are transient things.

     

    A lot of the rubbish around me is 50's-60's stuff, built when there was little money around and really low quality. It is being replaced at an amazing pace, and the new stuff is fine. My house is new, steel framed, insulated, aircon and central heating. We've a LAN as well as all the bathroom and toilet gizmology. No-one's going to want to knock this one down anytime soon.

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