Pappus' plane

It was a busy night, and we reflected the extra busy-ness from last week by doubling our team size.

Round one. Which country does the clothing and fashion company Joop come from? Which chocolate bar, which has been on the Australian market for 62 years, is about to stop being made? Which indoor pastime ends with 'casting off'? Which group recently released a cover of 'Bohemian Rhapsody', gaining millions of YouTube views in a week? What is the modern name for German Measles? 14.

In the music round, we didn't know who sang 'He's Gonna Step on You Again', and a few other things. 12.

Round three. William Shakespeare lived during the reigns of which two English monarchs? Which model Ferrari has a name meaning 'redhead'? What is Carrie Bradshaw's favourite brand of shoe? Which common material is made from sand, limestone, and sodium carbonate? All Queensland cab number plates start with which letter? We scored a perfect 16, the only team to do so. $20!

Round four was on an amusing topic - the names of the trivia teams. For example, there's a team called 'G-O-G-G-O', and there was a question: Goggomobils were made in Germany, but where were the Goggo Darts made? 'No, not the Dart, not the Dart...' What is a sheepshank? 'Gaussian Eliminator' is a term used in which field of learning? Anyway, we scored 13.

Bonuses. Who made the Baby Doll perfume? What is the capital of Tunisia? High School Musical was set in which US city? We missed two of those, and so ended up down in 11th place. One extra bonus would have given us third, and with both we would have won.

I buy a weekly ticket from the train station every Monday. It is a good system - I can then travel on any Translink service between zones 1 and 4 for the rest of the week. This means I never have to worry about buying bus tickets.

Yesterday, I got on the bus to go to QPAC, showed my ticket to the driver, who waved me on. Then he called me back, and said that it was now December, whereas my ticket expired on November 30. Completely befusled^*, I paid $2.90 for a single ticket, and then studied my weekly ticket. It was as the bus driver had said, which meant that either I'd bought the ticket last Tuesday, or the QR official at Park Road station had dudded me. It was the latter.

^*I try hard to coin new variants of words that should already have been thought of. This is another failure - 'befusled' gets four Google hits, including one from a book published in 1826.

This story has a happy ending, insofar as that is possible. I showed the weekly ticket that had lasted a day to the ticket person in the station today, they checked the log of tickets sold, and confirmed that my ticket was indeed bought on Monday at 8:23am, and issued me a replacement for the rest of the week. It's actually a 'replacement monthly', a type of ticket I'd never seen before. This novelty is worth at least a couple of cents to me, so the pure financial loss is not quite as great as the $2.90 I indicate in the title. I did have to stand around for about 7 minutes waiting for the replacement ticket though.

Perhaps we should all revisit this essay.

- Tim Minchin

I went to the first of his two Brisbane concerts last night. After some careful tallying, I worked out that it was the second proper concert I'd ever been to. It was very funny, especially the first half, and my only regret was that I'd heard the opening song before. I laughed a lot when I heard it on the YouTube video, but already knowing the main punchline spoiled it for me a little bit. I imagine that there will come a point where I am familiar enough with the song that the comfortable anticipation of the punchline makes it funny again, but I am not there yet.

The conclusion that I draw from this is a recommendation to people who haven't heard Tim Minchin to not listen to any of his songs before you go to one of his shows. I'm not sure that Minchin would appreciate that advice, though.

Pianos are good.

Ignore trends for the moment. Why does the average temperature fluctuate from year to year? Is it an artefact of the temperature sampling? Does the total heat content of the earth actually go up and down like that? Is it something like a random walk or does something force it back towards an equilibrium?

I went ice skating for the first time on Saturday. I was understandably terrified beforehand that I would end up in hospital, but my biggest problems two days on are some sore muscles, a blister on my right big toe, and a minor bruise.

I had two main concerns about the technique of ice skating. The first is that I'd never even skated on inlines before, having stuck with the traditional skates even through the 1990's inline revolution.

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The second was that I didn't know how to stop. I never even practised stopping on roller skates, always relying and the "crash into the wall" method rather than a T-stop. As it turns out, this was not a major problem - no-one knows how to stop on ice skates.<sup>*

*</sup>The only exceptions were two ice hockey players, the supervisors, and someone wearing a 'synchronised skating' jacket. All the other dozens of people there just skated towards a wall and grabbed it.

When I got on the ice, I found it surprisingly easy to stay upright and to move forward at something around walking pace. I was told that I needed to have my skates more parallel rather than angled outwards, and eventually I managed to get the muscle memory working so that I could move on the straight fairly quickly. I was pretty horribly inefficient, especially early on - I thought I was going to cramp up, so heavily I was working my lower leg muscles.

Unfortunately, my turns were not quite so fluid, and later on, once I was building up speed and the ice was quite melted, I fell over twice in 5-10 minutes. The wrist guards I'd bought were handy.

I had one other slow fall, and about a dozen near-falls.