Most of the photos I took last week were crap partly because of the dust in the air (and partly because I have a new camera, but primarily because I'm a crap photographer), but I don't mind these ones:





That last photo was taken about when I should have been heading back to the observatory to start my shift, but instead I kept on heading up. I must be one of those fools who gets lost in the mountains and needs to be lifted out by chopper. Instead, an hour before I was due back, 3 hours after I left, I got lost when it came time to work out which particular goat track to go back down, found the right goat track, ran part of the way back down the mountain, nearly broke my leg and sprained my ankle half a dozen times, avoided any contact with snakes, and got myself back to dinner at the lodge only 10 minutes late. It was only upon trying to get back out of the dinner chair that I realised I was now officially buggered.

The director of the NSW Government's Centre for Road Safety, Soames Job, said a major cause of the sharp increase in the road toll - up from 321 deaths in 2008 to 415 deaths in 2009, as of Wednesday - was the increase in ''two-wheel vehicles''.

He said that as of midnight on Thursday, motorcycle fatalities stood at 65 for 2009, compared with 44 fatalities for the same time last year, while the number of deaths of bicycle riders had more than doubled in the same period, from six to 14.

Carl Scully reckons that cyclists don't deserve to ride on the road
because we don't "pay fuel levies, tolls, registration and licence fees,
as well as the huge cost of buying and running a motor vehicle".

I personally don't see why the cost of the motor vehicle has any relevance
here (people are free to buy a more appropriate choice of vehicle if they
wanted to), but I'll let Carl have that argument. But now that I know his
feelings, I'm sure he wouldn't mind if I opted out of paying my portion of
the taxes and the 2.5% medicare levy and surcharge that correspond to the
15 billion dollar NSW health budget. I don't want to pay for the stressed
out and overweight lazy slobs stuck in their tanks on the freeway each
morning. Perhaps if Carl had provided bike paths maintained up to a
suitable standard we'd expect of a transportation network, the fat lazy
slob would be getting fit riding a bike instead. As a bonus, while on the
bike, they'd have less chance of contributing to the carnage on the roads,
saving even more health dollars.

In software, adding a six-lane automobile expressway to a railroad bridge is considered maintenance