It would appear that the Senate in Australia plays political games with legislation passed by thr House of Representatives .
We could change the make up of State Representatives by insisting only Independent Senators be approved canditates for Senate nomination with a legal requirement that it be an offence to have Political Party alliances as a Senator. This could be difficult to achieve but we the people could get it started when we vote.
Members input appreciated.
Splinter.

Question:

"why are we letting some sections of the world community "stuff" up our Great Barrier Reef when you and I,  as Australian citizen cannot even go near most of it, because walking across it may damage the environment and you definitely cannot fish, recreationally in a national park  -  have we got our priorities right??......... when we police Australians and then let the rest of the world do as they please (ships and illegal fishing) go unchallenged..........it's a bloody disgrace..........AND THAT'S MY VIEW........

Anybody else agree with MY views???..........have a look at the attachment – thanks - graemeb Mentone Victoria Australia

Note - this is frustration that was bought on by an attachment that was with an e-mail on "our" beautiful Great Barrier Reef and at the same time the radio news was telling me how the ship that was "15 miles off course was leaking oil into and onto the reef - graemeb

I am a retired (age) bushie and back-packer.
My wife and I (and sometimes our dog) have travelled extensively in our beautiful land - particularly the north.  Apart from age, what has decided us to stay at home is the massive amount of people on all our roads.  All our quiet camping spots have gone.  We avoided caravan parks wherever possible and when we left a camping site no one would notice where we have camped.  But all overrun by crowds of thoughtless people.
We are atheists from way back and very thrilled that our numbers are growing and so many thousands are finding that religion is really 'the root of all evil'.

Pamela  I had just got my first caravan aheavy wood one about 30 yrs ago you couldn't go above 50mph as it would fishtail and wasn't doing my headache any good we were off to wilsons prom.and never having been that way before I was (trying)to teach my wife how to read a map? I pointed out that yo u looked at the sign posts and read the route no.and followed that number to where you were going we were on th princes H/way at the time,
 WELL!I also told her to look for the Yannaki turnoff to the Prom we had been going for ages and stopped for petrol so I asked the chap how to get to the Prom God he says your miles away you've come to far the only way to go from here is over the divide looking at the car he said you should be O.K.as I had a large Jaguar at the time so we back tracked and words were exchanged which could have finished in the divorce courts but there were none around.this was the first time I'd swore at her and the kids weren't amused anyway we turned off the road over the hill which finished'  part way up and there was.nt any indication of how to get down so we carried on over the unformed track trying all the while to remember some more choice words ,we did find the other bit of road and arrived at last at the promthenI asked her my wife!how she read the map and why she didn't tell me were the turn off was. well she replied I couldn't remember the word Yannaki so decided to keep on the same road(to Lakes Entrance by the way)then??? i noticed that she read the map upside down why the hell do you read it that way i screamed  well she said you told me that we go down this road so I turned the map round so i could follow it "down"but I cant read the words then, and that's why i missed that turnoff, well there is female logic and male logic and never the twain shall meet you cant win em all we are still together after 65 yrs.I've just learned to roll with the punches

When I brought the paper in this morning, I found a sign of extreme oppression to teachers and pupils: the first Back to School catalogue!

So why not go with the flow?  The sample is a little biased to my own area of teaching interest.

My schoolmaster had been a little too crude in his instructions.  He had not been a scientific man, but only a teacher of science.

— H. G. (Herbert George) Wells (1866 - 1946), The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind, Heinemann, 1932.

As a schoolboy in London I learnt how sulphuric acid is manufactured, how time is measured at Greenwich, how soap is made, and how glass is blown — entirely from the teacher or the book, although all of these could have been seen at first hand within half an hour of the school.  Adam saw the animals in the garden before he named them, but we (as Whitehead has said) named them before we saw them.

— Professor Eric Ashby, The Place of Biology in Australian Education, inaugural lecture, Sydney, 1939.

The true aim of the teacher must be to impart an appreciation of method and not a knowledge of facts.  This is far more readily achieved by concentrating the student's attention on a small range of phenomena, than by leading him in a rapid and superficial survey over wide fields of knowledge.  Personally, I have no recollection of at least 90 per cent of the facts that were taught to me at school, but the notions of method which I derived from my instructor in Greek grammar (the contents of which I have long since forgotten) remain in my mind as the really valuable part of my school equipment for life.

— Karl Pearson (1857 - 1936), The Grammar of Science, Everyman edition, p. 12n.

I find not any science that doth fitly or properly pertain to the imagination.

— Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626), Of the Advancement of Learning, second book, XI, 3, 1605..

In the circle where I was raised, I knew of no one knowledgeable in the visual arts, no one who regularly attended musical performances, and only two adults other than my teachers who spoke without embarrassment of poetry and literature — both of these being women.  As far as I can recall, I never heard a man refer to a good or a great book.  I knew no one who had mastered, or even studied, another language from choice.  And our articulate, conscious life proceeded without acknowledgement of the preceding civilisations which had produced it.

— Shirley Hazzard, Coming of Age in Australia, Boyer Lectures, 1984, ABC Books, 1985.

In every respect but one, in fact, the old Mathematical Tripos seemed perfect.  The one exception, however, appeared to some to be rather important.  It was simply — so the young creative mathematicians, such as Hardy and Littlewood kept saying — that the training had no intellectual merit at all.  They went a little further, and said that the Tripos had killed serious mathematics in England stone dead for a hundred years.  Well, even in academic controversy, that took some skirting around, and they got their way.

— C. P. Snow (1905 - 1980), The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, Rede Lecture, 1959.

Again, there is a fallacy about Examiners.  It is commonly supposed that any one who knows a subject is competent to teach it; and no one seems to doubt that any one who knows a subject is competent to examine in it.  I believe both these opinions to be serious mistakes . . .  Examination is an Art, and a difficult one, which has to be learned like all other arts.

— Thomas Henry Huxley (1825 - 1895), 'Universities: Actual and Ideal', 1874, quoted in Cyril Bibby (ed.) The Essence of T. H. Huxley, Macmillan, 1967, p. 225.

Its so-called equipment is dirty and disorderly beyond description.  Its outfit in anatomy consists of a small box of bones and the dried-up, filthy fragments of a single cadaver.  A cold and rusty incubator, a single microscope, . . . and no access to the County Hospital.  The school is a disgrace to the state whose laws permit it to exist.

— Abraham Flexner (1866 - ??), Medical Education in the United States and Canada (1910), page 190, quoted in Blaine Worthen and James Sanders, 'Educational Evaluation', New York: Longman, 1987, page 101.

The problem with Greypath is that it contains TOO MUCH information.   This poses a delightful dilema. Is Greypath really important to its contributors or is it just part of the deluge of information that swamps us every day?

I am sure that the former is the case.  It is just that we Greypathers are leading such busy lives in the real world that we have little time to take advantage of what Greypath offers in the cyberworld.


Last year I dropped out of a uni  media studies degree course because I didn't want my individuality to bne subsumed into "the university culture."  To be honest I jumped ship just before I would have been pushed overboard.  I have looked at the creative writing course in the Lyceum.  I did a similar programme at adult education a number of years ago.  I will do the Lyceum course when I can find the time. (I feel some excuses comming on.}

OK So I can't spell or do sums and no one could ever accuse me of being politicly correct.  In fact I take a perverse delight in being just the opposite.   What you see is what you get with no fancy packaging.  I am enjoying the experience of being myself after 66 years of conforming to the expectation of others.  Is there any one elseout there who knows what a great feeling that is?

My recent silence arose from my being away, rampaging up and down Cape York. Now I'm back and rampaging here again.

About thirty years ago, I read an article in New Scientist called something like 'Who was Wimshurst'.  James Wimshurst invented the Wimshurst machine, a neat gadget with two spinning discs that generates static charge. It got me started on a long-running temporary obsession with the people who gave their names from things as diverse as the Loop of Henle, the Islets of Langerhans, Goldbach's Conjecture, Wimshurst machines, Down syndrome (not Down's syndrome and more), Boyle's law—and the Bunsen burner.

The Bunsen burner has something in common with the Wheatstone bridge: both were not invented by the person they are named after.  It would require a complete eccentric to know that the inventors were actually Peter Desaga and a Mr Christie, and I don't know where you'd find one of those at this time of day, but that's the good oil, trust me.

I was put in mind of that today when I tripped over a report on the death of Robert Bunsen which reads in part like this:

" /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0mm 5.4pt 0mm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0mm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} His scientific attainments are well known, and the "Bunsen battery" bears his name as a monument of his inventions in electrical science. In public and private life he was both admired and respected, and at the present moment we do not think that Prussia has a man that can fill his place."

So how about that, then?  No mention of the famous burner, or, for that matter, of the Bunsen grease-spot photometer.

I wonder what we can do to control what we are remembered for?

By the way, that link will fail in a few weeks, but I will try to remember to upgrade it before then.  This comment is mute evidence that I have not yet done so.

SOLAR ECLIPSE

i am sure that our condolaces go to all the familys of the air france that crashed only a couple of days ago pome and family