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Can Aussies on this site (Michael Martin, Chris Maunder, etc.) confirm the veracity of the following?
AUSTRALIA AND AUSTRALIANS
The following is by The late Douglas Adams of "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" fame.
"Australia is a very confusing place, taking up a large amount of the bottom half of the planet. It is recognizable from orbit because of many unusual features, including what at first looks like anenormous bite taken out of its southern edge; a wall of sheer cliffs which plunge into the girting sea. Geologists assure us that this is simply an accident of geomorphology, but they still call it the "Great Australian Bight", proving that not only are they covering up a more frightening theory but they can't spell either.
The first of the confusing things about Australia is the status of the place. Where other landmasses and sovereign lands are classified as continent, island or country, Australia is considered all three. Typically, it is unique in this.
The second confusing thing about Australia is the animals. They can be divided into three categories: Poisonous, Odd, and Sheep. It is true that of the 10 most poisonous arachnids on the planet, Australia has 9 of them. Actually, it would be more accurate to say that of the 9 mostpoisonous arachnids, Australia has all of them. However, there are few snakes, possibly because the spiders have killed them all.
But even the spiders won't go near the sea. Any visitors should be careful to check inside boots (before putting them on), under toilet seats (before sitting down) and generally everywhere else. A stick is very useful for this task.
The last confusing thing about Australia is the inhabitants.
A short history: Sometime around 40,000 years ago some people arrived in boats from the north. They ate all the available food, and a lot of them died. The ones who survived learned respect for the balance of nature, man's proper place in the scheme of things, and spiders. Theysettled in and spent a lot of the intervening time making up strange stories.
Then, around 200 years ago, Europeans arrived in boats from the north. More accurately, European convicts were sent, with a few deranged people in charge. They tried to plant their crops in autumn (failing to take account of the reversal of the seasons), ate all their food, and a lot of them died.
About then the sheep arrived, and have been treasured ever since. It is interesting to note here that the Europeans always consider themselves vastly superior to any other race they encounter, since they can lie, cheat, steal and litigate (marks of a civilised culture they say), whereas all the Aboriginals can do is happily survive being left in the middle of a vast red-hot desert, equipped with a stick.
Eventually, the new lot of people stopped being Europeans on 'extended holiday' and became Australians. The changes are subtle, but deep, caused by the mind-stretching expanses of nothingness and eerie quiet, where a person can sit perfectly still and look deep inside themselves to the core of their essence, their reasons for being, and the necessity of checking inside their boots every morning for fatal surprises. They also picked up the most finely tuned sense of irony in the world, and the Aboriginal gift for making up stories. Be warned.
There is also the matter of the beaches. Australian beaches are simply the nicest and best in the world, although anyone actually venturing into the sea will have to contend with sharks, stinging jellyfish, stonefish (a fish which sits on the bottom of the sea, pretends to be a rock and has venomous barbs sticking out of its back that will kill just from the pain) and surfboarders. However, watching a beach sunset is worth the risk.
As a result of all this hardship, dirt, thirst and wombats, you would expect Australians to be a dour lot. Instead, they are genial, jolly, cheerful and always willing to share a kind word with a stranger.
Faced with insurmountable odds and impossible problems, they smile disarmingly and look for a stick. Major engineering feats have been performed with sheets of corrugated iron, string and mud.
Alone of all the races on earth, they seem to be free from the 'Grass is greener on the other side of the fence' syndrome, and roundly proclaim that Australia is, in fact, the other side of that fence. They call the land "Oz" or "Godzone" (a verbal contraction of "God's Own Country"). THE IRRITATING THING ABOUT THIS IS THEY MAY BE RIGHT.
TIPS TO SURVIVING AUSTRALIA
Don't ever put your hand down a hole for any reason WHATSOEVER.
The beer is stronger than you think, regardless of how strong you think it is.
Always carry a stick.
Air-conditioning is imperative.
Do not attempt to use Australian slang unless you are a trained linguist and extremely good in a fist fight.
Wear thick socks.
Take good maps. Stopping to ask directions only works when there are people nearby
If you leave the urban areas, carry several litres of water with you at all times, or you will die. And don't forget a stick.
Even in the most embellished stories told by Australians, there is always a core of truth that it is unwise to ignore.
HOW TO IDENTIFY AUSTRALIANS
They waddle when they walk due to the 53 expired petrol discount vouchers stuffed in their wallet or purse.
They pronounce Melbourne as "Mel-bin".
They think it makes perfect sense to decorate highways with large fiberglass bananas, prawns and sheep.
They think "Woolloomooloo" is a perfectly reasonable name for a place, that "Wagga Wagga" can be abbreviated to "Wagga", but "Woy Woy" can't be called "Woy".
Their hamburgers will contain beetroot. Apparently it's a must-have.
They don't think it's summer until the steering wheel is too hot to handle.
They believe that all train timetables are works of fiction.
And they all carry a stick!
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He was a brilliantly funny author.
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Indeed: "So long and thanks for all the books" -- Stephen Fry
The best funny authors of a generation (possibly two or three generations) have gone (DNA & TP) and I fear we shall not see their like again.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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You could always write a book around thought of the day. They're faintly amusing in a non-funny way. Or sheep. Write about sheep.
How about a combination? A sheep's thought of the day... baaa... baaa... BAAAA... which roughly translates to "There's nothing wrong with being Welsh. And a sheep.". 
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Geez. Cheer up! I imagine that the same was said after the deaths of the comic geniuses who passed before the two in question, like P. G. Wodehouse. Even as we speak there will be somebody in a squalid garret or a dank basement putting together the ideas for the next wave. Unless you're planning to shuffle off into the great beyond sometime soon I'll warrant ye there'll be new marvels yet! Trust me, I'm a chronic depressive so if I have hope ..... !
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Indeed - but Wodehouse, DNA, and PT had a big advantage: if you were good in those days, you would get published, and you would get to a mass readership.
Today, the person who gets "published" is the person who shouts the loudest, not the one that can write the best.
The gems are mostly buried under the weight of tweeted dross...and since there is no money to be made at the bottom of the pile any more, how is a beginner author to fund his career?
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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Well put. 
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I think that's a very simplistic view of the 'old days' and a rather negative view of the present. Getting a publishing deal was undoubtedly difficult but it would be absurd to think that those who made it did so only on merit or that those who didn't were necessarily poor writers. Any amount of dross was published and more than a few masterpieces lost. There was more than enough patronage and nepotism around to act in the stead of what you call shouting the loudest. It should also be remembered that in those days you required more than publication to succeed; you also had to impress reviewers! It's as well to recall that Douglas Adams got his publishing deal on the strength of the popularity of the radio version of Hitchhikers not because a publisher saw a manuscript and championed it!
It is instructive to look at best sellers list from the past. Here's the Publisher's Weekly list for 1930, for example.
Quote: 1930[edit]
Cimarron by Edna Ferber
Exile by Warwick Deeping
The Woman of Andros by Thornton Wilder
Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes
Angel Pavement by J. B. Priestley
The Door by Mary Roberts Rinehart
Rogue Herries by Hugh Walpole
Chances by A. Hamilton Gibbs
Young Man of Manhattan by Katharine Brush
Twenty-Four Hours by Louis Bromfield
Lasting, quality literature all? I think not. Variation in the quality spectrum greatly different from similar lists from today? Absolutely not.
Yes, there is a far greater number of books being thrust out into the Universe with the advent of cheap self-publishing with ebooks but the death of the quality filter is greatly exaggerated. Neither the most popular nor the most 'academically approved" works show any great difference in quality to their forefathers. Conventional publishers continue to produce pretty much the same mixture of good and bad, failing to recognise the best and overestimating the lesser authors with the same regularity as ever. And while there are no fewer full-time authors there are far more people making some income from novel writing than at any time in history. And of course the reduced cost for publishers means that we are seeing a lot more books in translation. It is unlikely that the Morgue Drawer and Department Q series, for example, would be known to many of us under the old ways of publishing.
I refuse to accept that the age of the good book is dead, not least because having finally yielded to the temptation of an e-reader a few years ago I am now getting through two a week and see no danger of a shortfall in years to come. Just because there is a super abundance of hype does not necessarily mean that it's all nothing but hype.
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Of course it's a simplistic view! (This is a very small text box)
But...in the "old days" as you put it, books cost money to publish (typesetting, proofreading, printing, binding, marketing, warehousing, shipping, bookshops, and then profit at the end) it took an Editor to read each and every submission and decide if it was worth publishing, needed help to get to that state, or rejected. Each book was moderated if you like.
Nowadays, it costs nothing - or peanuts at best. So the moderation which sifted out the total chaff from the "might be worth supporting" no longer occurs.
And people who can't even string a sentence together can informa the world that they are going to the toilet, or that this tomato sandwich is excellent.
As Lynne Truss said:
...by tragic historical coincidence a period of abysmal undereducating in literacy has coincided with this unexpected explosion of global self-publishing. Thus people who don't know their apostrophe from their elbow are positively invited to disseminate their writings to anyone on the planet stupid enough to double-click and scroll. -- Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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I'm really not sure how you think the existence of Twitter and self-publishing is a threat to conventional publishing. The best sellers and the books in the running for the many and various literary prizes remain as near as dammit exclusively the products of the painstaking process you describe - a process which by no means guarantees the absence of grammatical anomalies, weird punctuation, and misspellings, by the way, as the copy of The Time Machine I was given in school which had half the odd numbered pages blank amply demonstrates! Reviews which deal only with traditional publications are no less plentiful than in the past. There is certainly no compulsion requiring you to read or even acknowledge the existence of Twitter, or self-published ebooks.
I would be wary of using Lynne Truss, who appears not even to know the difference between orthography and grammar, as an authority. While much of what she says in the book you quote is reasonable guidance it should not be taken as commandment! And some of it is undoubtedly just plain wrong (unless you are of the opinion that Shakespeare and Dickens, to name but two, were ignorant peasants who dint write proper like!) She is certainly entirely wrong to equate good orthography and grammar with worthwhile reading. The importance and value of what someone has to say should not be diminished because of the odd grammatical or orthographical slip - try reading one of Paul's epistles in the original Greek, it's the stuff of nightmares for the Greek equivalent of Lynne Truss!
By Truss's standards J. K. Rowling is (or perhaps more accurately was) a poor writer and her editors certainly didn't give her a lot of help in that regard and PTerry himself often came under fire for some less than conventional sentence construction. She is however a supreme storyteller and that for me and millions of other readers is far more important than whether every word and sentence passes some arbitrary test of correctness.
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you obviously didn't expect a real response to this from someone 'down under' - at the time you posted it, most of us (sane) people here were doing what koalas do in the trees - get your mind outta da gutter, I mean sleep 
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As soon as I posted it, I realised that Aussies in Oz would be sleeping in their beds -- after beating up their women for daring to ask why they were so late and where was the weekly pay check, which of course had been spent at the beer.
But I thought the Man from Mel-bin who now lives half a world away would come up with a reply but he may have hit the bar early, what with it being a Friday!
PS. I guess Aussies really don't need Friday as an excuse for starting their binge drinking at 10 am!
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Hang on, I'll just put my stick down.
I can confirm much of this as absolute fact.
Other interesting facts include:
Australians will gamble on anything. Astute visitors can fund an entire holiday by starting every sentence with "I bet ...".
ALL of the wildlife is dangerous. NO exceptions. Even the bloody flies bite!
There is no such thing as an MOT - that pile of rusting metal listing on the curb is someone's family car.
If a driver is wearing a hat, stop, wait for them to drive away or they will kill you.
Road rules are guidelines only.
OffRoading does not require a 4x4 - any hatchback will do.
The beer is sold in small glasses. People will tell you this is to stop it warming up - it isn't so. It is so that aussies can keep up with the drink count when compared to Poms (e.g. "I had fifteen beers last night, mate!" = "I had fifteen pints last night, old chap" ) see also "the beer is stronger than you think"
Roadsigns. When a road sign warns that a bend's maximum speed is 55kph it means 55. Take the bend at 56 and you will die (see also MOT information).
Speeding. The police hide their radar traps - usually at the side of a straight, steep hill where you can't avoid speeding.
The law states that radar traps must be signed. The sign is usually placed 4 feet from the van, entirely hidden until after you pass it.
Roadkill. There's lots of it. When it's a kangaroo it can be accompanied by large quantities of car parts (see MOT).
Hitchhiking. Don't.
People will tell you that crocodiles jaws can be held closed with a small rubber band. Count their fingers.
Kangaroos really do hop down suburban streets (see roadkill) They can disembowel a dog with a single kick.
Australians are very friendly and welcoming of visitors. This is because we need to make up the numbers for all those 'lost' due to the long list of lethal animals!
PooperPig - Coming Soon
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Take a look at Fun Stuff[^]
The article has been credited to Douglas Adams (of hitchhikers Guide) but was actually written by Jeremy Lee for the site H2G2.com[^]. See the original article here[^]. He graciously let me repost it on CodeProject many, many moons ago.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Happy Friday!! Yay!!!!
![Jig | [Dance]](https://www.codeproject.com/script/Forums/Images/jig.gif) 
And why is it so hard to get facial recognition training working on raspbian??
I've been developing the python code in VS on windows and then port over to raspi.
I was able to compile opencv 2.4.10 (I think off the top of my head but its not the default raspbian comes with) on the raspi but any of the normal methods for training blow up.
Anyway, enough of this caffeine rush spout. I just want the work day to be finished already and jealous of ones who are already enjoying the weekend.
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Quote: I just want the work day to be finished already and jealous of ones who are already enjoying the weekend
You may consider moving to the North (or the South) Pole. There it is a few short steps to change to a different time zone, and so speed up the day's progress!
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It's always Monday at the south pole.
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Being first to the week end just means you first to be back at work on Monday. Gotta go it's Saturday morning and the suns up...
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Funny, how astronomers use term, "red" for "non-red" objects. 
The sh*t I complain about
It's like there ain't a cloud in the sky and it's raining out - Eminem
~! Firewall !~
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But a dwarf planet is NOT a planet!
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Still my claim would be applicable. Astronomers using term "planet" for "non-planet" objects? 
The sh*t I complain about
It's like there ain't a cloud in the sky and it's raining out - Eminem
~! Firewall !~
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Afzaal Ahmad Zeeshan wrote: "red" for "non-red" objects
 Giant Red Spot is red in colour. Where is the non-red object?
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This spot IS indeed red.
The G, B components within the Giant Red Spot are much lesser than R. Also see some videos of Jupiter taken from the Voyager I and II spacecraft as early as the 1980s.
I think you should realize that eighteenth and nineteenth century astronomers were a million times observant and intelligent than you and me ...
... with less than a millionth of the facilities. And they named it as the Giant Red Spot.
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