Plutoed

I am so proud of my 7 year old son. He is learning about space at the moment and, jokingly, his teacher aide has been threatening to send him on a rocket to Pluto if he doesn't do his work. He sniggers every time she makes this threat for several times until she begs to know what he is sniggering about. Then he tells her that Pluto isn't even a real planet (it's a dwarf planet, don't you know) which makes her threat quite silly.

Must BLOG

There is no way around it - Facebook is a poor substitute for just saying what I want to say about whatever is on my mind (without distraction).

- Water - I feel somewhat vindicated in my thought that reduced allocations, water buybacks, desalination plants, compulsory water tanks were not going to "fix" the Murray-Darling: All we needed was just a good sequence of floods, which incidentally make some or most of those fixes look foolish in hindsight. However, trading of water, infrastructure for transmission and efficiency, and even dams/water storages help both in drought and to manage the bounty of floods.

As far as the Lake Eyre basin is concerned, There is such an inland sea of evaporative ponds (lake Yamma-Yamma, Coongie Lakes, Bulloo lakes, lake hope, Goyder's lagoon, Warburton Lakes, Diamantina lakes, lake Blanche, Lake frome, as well ase now Lake Eyre South and North) that in the medium term, it should be considered that it would generate "coastal showers" for the inland basins of Australia, hopefully extending a run of higher runoffs.See: Lake Eyre Status and

Latest satellite images for images and data on water in the deserts.