As debated by Catherine, Michael, Tom and Jess on the trip home from Woodford.

Research by Jess.

1. george are not breaking up, just taking a break. [ more info ]
2. Birds do fly in a V formation because it is the most aerodynamic option and allows them to communicate more. [ more info ]
3. When entering a roundabout with the intention of going straight (ie neither left nor right), the Australian road rules state that the left hand indicator must be operated after entering the roundabout and until the car has exited. The only time the right indicator is used is if the car is turning right (ie exiting more than half way through the roundabout) in which case the right hand indicator must be operated before entering the roundabout. [ more info ]
4. If you die, your trustee or executor has to lodge all outstanding tax returns up to the date of your death. Any compulsory HECS repayment included on an income tax notice of assessment which relates to the period before your death must be paid from your estate, but the remainder of your HECS debt is cancelled. Neither your family nor the trustee is required to pay the rest of your accumulated HECS debt. [ more info ]
5. Mutton is labelled as lamb sometimes:
   

   MEAT SUBSTITUTION UNCOVERED IN NSW

   There is some surprising news from an investigation of butchers’ shops in New South Wales.

   It’s found cheap cuts of pork and mutton are being substituted for beef and lamb.

   The State Food Authority tested product from 50 butchers shops in Sydney and the Hunter Valley, and found 70 per cent of it was not what it alleged to be.

   That included pork and mutton being found in product marketed as beef or lamb mince.

   Spokeswoman Peta Sutherland says while some breaches were deliberate, most were unintentional.

   “In this investigation, we have a high percentage where we found the wrong type of meat, but in many cases we’ve been able to take it back and to talk the butcher and say, ‘look you’ve got to clean up your machine, you’ve got to clean between batches’, and that sort of stuff.

   “Where we do find evidence that it may be deliberate we then take the appropriate legal action on them.”

   The Food Authority says further inspections will now be carried out at supermarkets and large retail chains.

   [ more info ]

   Also:

   Chances are that you have seen mutton for sale- only they call it ‘lamb’! Some commercial store lambs do go over 12 months of age, but with the perceived public opinion of mutton, most of it is still labelled as lamb.
   [ more info ]

6. Why do traffic jams appear out of nowhere and you can’t find the cause?
   

   There are several processes that cause congestion to seemingly appear out of nowhere only to slowly vanish as you drive through it. Flow on a freeway is constrained by a small number of critical locations, referred to as bottlenecks. When demand exceeds the capacity of a given bottleneck it becomes active, and it is not able to serve all drivers exactly when they arrive. These drivers thus have to wait in a queue until there is space for them to pass through the bottleneck, and the delay is manifest as reduced speeds in the lineup.

   To illustrate this situation, consider a bottleneck where three lanes drop to two. Those two lanes limit the flow of vehicles that can pass the site of the lane drop to the capacity of two lanes, even though demand can be as high as three lanes’ worth of traffic. When active, the bottleneck will serve vehicles at capacity and the queue can grow to stretch for several miles if it persists for a long time. The rate at which the queue length grows or shrinks is determined by the difference between upstream demand and bottleneck capacity.

   An analogous situation would be water flowing into a bucket with a hole in the bottom. The hole is the limiting factor and represents the bottleneck, whereas the water level represents the queue length. If there is some water in the bucket it will flow out at a relatively constant rate, independent of how fast water is entering from above, but the rate water enters the bucket determines whether the water level will rise or fall.

   [ more info ]

7. Mt Warning is 1100 metres above sea level and the walking track is 8.8km long. This compares broadly to Mount Tennant which is about 1360 metres above sea level. The walking track on Mount Tennant starts at about 560 metres, so we probably walked higher (if not longer) doing Mount Warning. By the way, Mount Warning is of great significance to the indigenous Bundjalung people who ask that people consider not climbing the mountain at all.(ed: I disagree, I don’t think we climbed that far)
8. What is more fuel efficient: four of us going home on a plane or in a car? There is no straightforward answer, but it is probably a car because despite the following facts, you would still need transport to get to and from the airport at each end. [ more info ]
   

   A plane like a Boeing 747 uses approximately 1 gallon of fuel (about 4 litres) every second. Over the course of a 10-hour flight, it might burn 36,000 gallons (150,000 litres). According to Boeing’s Web site, the 747 burns approximately 5 gallons of fuel per mile (12 litres per kilometre).
   This sounds like a tremendously poor miles-per-gallon rating! But consider that a 747 can carry as many as 568 people. Let’s call it 500 people to take into account the fact that not all seats on most flights are occupied. A 747 is transporting 500 people 1 mile using 5 gallons of fuel. That means the plane is burning 0.01 gallons per person per mile. In other words, the plane is getting 100 miles per gallon per person! The typical car gets about 25 miles per gallon, so the 747 is much better than a car carrying one person, and compares favourably even if there are four people in the car. Not bad when you consider that the 747 is flying at 550 miles per hour (900 km/h)!

9. Is it more fuel efficient to drive with the air conditioning on and the windows shut, or no airconditioning with the windows down (causing drag). The latter is apparently better. Open windows reduce mileage by about 10% but airconditioning reduces mileage but 10-20%. [ more info ]The website also notes, interestingly:
   

   Avoid turning on the car air-conditioning while running at highway speeds, as this tends to put an immediate heavy load on your compressor and clutch. This could cause excessive wear and tear on these components. Instead turn your air conditioner on at car speeds below 25 to 30 m.p.h. This helps to preserve your expensive compressor. Use air conditioning only when necessary. Try opening the window.

   If your car has “Cruise Control” use it. Using cruise control will save you 5% to 10% of a gallon of gas on long trips.

10. What’s the feminine equivalent of phallic?
    

    The feminine counterpart of phallic is doughnutish. No, just kidding. There really is a word, and it is yonic. This word is the adjectival form of yoni, which is a term used in Hinduism to refer to the external female genitalia regarded as a symbol of Shakti; it’s from Sanskrit, and first appears in English in the late eighteenth century. My all-time favorite example of yonic is found in this recent parody of Gilbert and Sullivan, in which TV’s Xena, Warrior Princess takes over “I am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General”:

    • My armory is brazen, but my weapons are ironical;
    • My sword is rather phallic, but my chakram’s rather yonical (To find out what that means, you’ll have to study Indo-Aryan).
    • I am the very model of a heroine barbarian!

    The word yonic is quite rare. Presumably this concept was previously considered either irrelevant or undiscussable. It is, however, an extremely useful word, and now that we’re pulling ouselves out of the mire of phallocentrism, our cultural vocabulary has been–ahem–enlarged by the increasing currency of this word. In general the only people who are familiar with it are those of us who have very big, um, dictionaries, but that’s changing, and one can now find it in serious academic discussions as well as parodies, manuals of Wicca (modern witchcraft), and other sources.

    [ more info ]

    “The antonym of “yonnic” would more properly be “lingamic”, in keeping with its linguistic origin. “phallus” is a Greek-derived word, while “yoni” and “lingam” come from a far more ancient Hindu tradition

    [ more info ]