The House(s) of Fran_mart

When I finished my 10 travel photos challenge I realised that I had a few interesting/amusing photos that nearly made the cut.  So here they are.  The order is simply that in which I stumbled across them.  This photo is a picnic area in a Provincial Park somewhere near Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan.  It was a three week mission so we had 2 weekends free.  On the first myself and two UN colleagues engaged a driver and went hiking in the park  It was nice that they had yurta set up as shelter sheds.  This is the centre of Bishkek, with the Tien Shan mountains in the background.  From memory PRC is on the other side of the ridge. The photo was taken from the Balcony of the Hotel Dushtok where we stayed for most of the time.  We had started off at a more modern hotel out by the disused airport but (a) it took an hour each way to get there (b) the runways were used for go kart racing so the hotel was very noisy and (c) the quality of ...

This is a little musing about a couple of items related to COVID 19.  The first is a reaction to an article on the ABC site headed "something like "You only need one number to monitor COVID".  The proposed indicator is the change in the average rate of new infections for the previous 5 days compared to the same data for the previous day.  If the value is below 1 it means the rate of new infections is dropping. It isn't a bad indicator but does have a flaw.  Here is an image of the Australian data for the period starting on 19 April. (The ABC show a much longer time series with the data below for quite a while.) The value of the indicator can first be calculated on 24 April and shows a value well below 1 as the calculation of the 5 day sum excludes a value of 41 and includes a value of 14.  However the next day 13 drops off and is replaced by 20 so the value goes well above 1 but dropping the next day as 26 is replaced by 16.  I show the number of new c...

These are my comments on an exchange on my Face book page. The challenge was to pick out which on tasks was not related to my paid employment.  I’ll point out in passing that some of these were things that occurred – intentionally or otherwise – in the course of jobs.   They were not all the actual title of the job. 1.      Washed out a milk float ;   This was about the worst job I had.   As about 12 years old I got a job washing out the van that our milko in the UK used.   In the course of their work a little milk would get splashed about so at the end of the week I had to scrub the inside of the van to get it squeaky clean.   Even in English climate   5 day old spilt milk smelled bad. 2.      . Got the ABS mentioned in a Sydney Daily Telegraph article along with Bobby Limb and Warwick Capper .   In my first stint in the Census I worked on the document giving the ABS views on the content of the 19...