Oz town suffers hairy panic attack The good burghers of Wangaratta in rural Victoria are battling to reclaim their town from a nasty "hairy panic" attack which has seen their homes engulfed by an invading army of massed tumbleweed. According to 7 News, residents' homes have been smothered by the wandering seed heads of Panicum effusum, aka hairy panic - a …
Here's your IT angle.
After diving deeper into this story, it does appear that the farmer, far from abandoning his plot, was paid by NASA to encourage the growth of this weed.
NASA is now tracking it across the countryside, and initial results are hailing it a success.
Why? I hear you ask. Well, a new generation of Mars Rovers are being modelled on this very weed.
They intend to deliver a few grammes of seed to the planet and germinate them as and when required. The seeds thus produced are collected for later use and the weed gets fitted with tiny lightweight measuring gubbins and released.
There, feel better?
> "Just normally there is a tenuous connection even on bootnotes, but completely devoid on this one."
The bootnotes is the whole point of the article. Since you can't just write "Trump is a poopyhead!", go find some story about something invasive and twist it into a joke at his expense.
Not that I support the guy, mind you. Just wish the cheap 'Saturday Night Live' style of groupthink wasn't appearing here on a supposedly tech-based site.
Why ever not?
1. 'Merica claims to be the land of free speach.
2. It's election time.
3. He may well get elected.
4. Everyone else seems to be doing so.
5. etc etc.
HOWEVER, keeping strictly in line with the subject of the article, would poppyhead be more appropriate in this instance?
Tenuous IT reference - artificial intelligence. It might help a politico somewhere.
Hey. I said MIGHT.
re: "we now know where Trump gets his hair from"
Someone on his hairdressing staff misunderstood the joke about how the "this is a crock of poop and it stinks" comment on the assembly line became mistranslated every step up the food chain to become the CEO's new "this is powerful stuff that promotes growth" policy directive.
A quick stroll through Bootnotes suggests that there's almost nil IT value there. And that's the way it should be. I'm guessing that unless the article talks about todgers, boobs, or adult beverages (or maybe all three) there will always be those cockwombies who consider themselves as no non-sense IT people.
Get a freakin' grip.. it's Bootnotes, often NSFW but always worth the read. There's more to life than IT or your mom's basement. OTOH, you could just try NOT to read anything labeled Bootnotes.
there will always be those cockwombies who consider themselves as no non-sense IT people.-
Oh Good God NO !! this is not me, I love Bootnotes, and sorely miss Weekend edition. I loathe the new sensible direction, but alas there is little I can do to alter the course. True to "nonsense IT" my water cooling rig at home is literally glued together in multiple places, and yes it works !!!
And indeed, the standard of commentard whining isn't what it used to be. Poor show.
You call this NEWS? WTF is WRONG with you sheeple? Ran out of IT things to report? Asleep on the job? If I wanna read this sort of BULLSHIT..
No, f*ck. I can't do it. My personality is not sufficiently damaged to abandon logic, good taste and the rules of grammar and spelling to do a proper rant justice. And I don't drink enough either.
Besides, I'm in IT. We came up with automation because we maintain a certain essential core of laziness and rants like this are just too much like hard work.
So, yes, we need more rants. *Proper* ones.
But if you really intend to report other stuff, you could have used the story of a brothel being a tad creative with English in having an Open Door day for kids. Well, sort of :).
IT angle? Isn't that about 37 1/2 degrees? Celsius of course.
Seriously, these poor folk are having terrible storage issues on their mesh network now that they've switched to cellulose fiber. I mean the back end of the farm just looks a horrible mess of tangled fibers. It could take days to get it all sorted. To top it all this is the very definition of IoT*
* Infestation of Tumbleweeds
Which reminds me of the old Australian joke about how you know that a 747 full of Brits has arrived at Sydney Airport. When the engines stop, the whining doesn't.
Which would be fine except that once I had to endure an hour and a half of Australian whining at the old Munich airport when our flight was delayed. He was telling anyone who would listen that the hotel was crap, the food was crap, the public transport system was crap, the beer was crap, and in fact that everything was crap. The real gist of his complaint turned out to be that his company had sent him to Productronica without telling him that (a) it was after Oktoberfest, not during and (b) the natives mostly did not speak English.
Which reminds me of the old Australian joke about how you know that a 747 full of Brits has arrived at Sydney Airport. When the engines stop, the whining doesn't.
That may be old, but I never heard it, LOL :)
A shadow of its former self?
And yes, slow news day it seems. I saw this story on the Beeb a few hours ago, and I would guess the tech angle is the guy used a leaf blower attempting to move "hairy panic" from his garden. So, the leaf blower is the tech angle? geesh what a stretch that is...
"guy used a leaf blower attempting to move "hairy panic" from his garden"
What's wrong with a flamethrower? Yes, yes, I know it might result in a flashover from all that nice dry dead stuff blowing about but, hey, it's on some back-country Aussie town..
It's not like anything of value would be lost.
And yet Known Hero uses the "Where's the IT angle?" icon... An icon that has been available to us commentards for years. An icon that was created by the site administrator as a handy way to address the fact the people have been complaining about the lack of IT angle in bootnote articles for *ages*
You know, as if the lack if IT angle here was the whole idea of the Bootnotes section since the beginning...
Irony if I have ever seen it!
"...similarly, rumours that Donald Trump intends to expel Salsola tragus from the United States should he become president are unconfirmed."
Well! Trump will not only make Russia pay for the deportation of Russian thistles, but will also make Putin eat most of the extant weeds. Though Trump will reserve a few well-shaped tumbleweeds in order to replace his thinning mop of hairlike growth.
(Actually, the thought of that fatuous fruit being able to make Putin do anything is a laugh -- in any confrontation between the two, President Trump would end up ceding NASA, the Washington Monument, Alaska, and both of his own kidneys to Putin.)
(edit: At least two of you jokers beat me to it.... good on yer.)
As my grandfather and his brother apparently found out: they were deported from Australia in the early 20th century after taking on rural work burning scrub and failing to take note of the wind direction. Apparently a local hamlet went up in flames.
I know, LOL, my family! Oddly enough we also have some connection to Henry Parkes, 'The Father of the Federation' way back in Victorian times, so I guess we've had a hand in building it before subsequently attempting to burn it to the ground.
And afterwards you have...
a town to rebuild. Brilliant!
First, yes, it would be brilliant, especially if lit at night, but perhaps not in the manner you meant, Herr GrumpenKraut. Second, it sounds like a win all around. The local townsfolk gain both excitement from the spectacle and exercise from running around dealing with the conflagration. The firefighters would be better able to justify their positions and their yearly budgets, perhaps with an increase for next FY. The constabulary would likewise be able to get in on the act by filling out reports, gathering evidence, intruding into the lives of all around and failing entirely to catch the arsonist(s). News services would have something with which to fill their daily cycles. The public at large would have entertainment available they might have otherwise done without. Insurance companies and hardware stores would similarly be stimulated, passing the benefits of which to the economy as a whole. What's not to like?
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