Phew, it was fairly cool for the first week of the month, but it’s warmed up and looks like continuing at around 35C every day for the next week.

But thank goodness we’re not experiencing what the east coast is going through. That’s scary. When you have to go and jump into the ocean to escape flames and smoke, that’s bad.

The worst thing is that this is almost a mass extinction on a smaller scale. This is showing us what it’s going to be like in the future with rising temperatures and continuing drought. And, as they say, even if the drought broke and we had massive rainfall, this would be another catastrophe as water, mud and floods meant more misery.

And it’s almost certain that these conditions will repeat from now on, to a greater or lesser extent. Climate change is real!

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In fact, if you think about future archeological digs in a few hundred years, if there’s anyone doing them that is, they are going to find a layer of ash and charcoal marking 2019/20 over there.

This year will also mark the extinction of huge numbers of small animals, insects and birds. The knock-on effects will be incalculable. Nature interlocks. The loss of one group, one species, will badly affect the food supplies up and down the chan with unpredictable effects. Good luck everyone.

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For my readers outside WA, the only major road between Perth and Adelaide, the next major city ~2,500Km away, was closed for 12 days until Friday, due to bushfires out on the Nullarbor Plain near Norseman. Too much smoke made driving too dangerous.

I had been toying with the idea of doing an eastern states drive this summer, so I would have wanted to drive through all the areas burnt, from northern NSW, down the south-east corner of NSW and Victoria, returning to WA via the Adelaide Hills, also badly burnt, then back to Perth across the Nullarbor where I would have been stuck due to the closure of the Eyre Highway. I would have been caught up in all that, if I’d gone.

It looks now as if my chance has gone for several years at least, that’s the foreseeable future.

Imagine being stuck at a roadhouse on the sole road out on the Nullarbor Plain, sleeping in your car, the roadhouse running out of bottled water and toilet paper, 42C (112F) temperatures, nothing to do for two weeks. I’d go screaming mad. No way to escape, except to drive back to Adelaide, of course.

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Back to the mundane. This was an offer from Amazon US the other day:

This was the same product on Amazon Australia.

Please explain, Amazon. This is rubbish.

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Article in The Guardian today, re the limits of Moore’s Law, illustrating the shrinking size of transistors and space on chips.

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A guy I used to work with at Channel 7 has started a project in a Facebook group, to compile a book about TVW Channel 7 Perth from 1959 to 2017 when it was all demolished.

This is right up my alley, something I’ve wanted to do myself, but only from the Engineering viewpoint.

He’s calling for contributions, but the request is for about 2000 words and only four images. Whaaat?

I’ve told him (on F/B) that this would hardly cover my introduction. To recall all my memories, mostly good, from 1966 to 1999, with a selection of four from my hundreds of images? He must be mad.

In fact this puts me off contributing. I can’t squash it down that small. The editing would be too severe. I’ve said I’ll write my piece as economically as I can and submit it, but I don’t know if I’ll accept those conditions. I might go back to my original plan to do an Engineering history.