In Australia those days where everyone who is in full time employment (except those who are self employed) gets the day off and still gets paid for it are officially known as public holidays. Most people just refer to them as long weekends since most of them fall on a Monday.

There are nine public holidays in Australia in most years. Some of these are held at different times in different states and some states throw in an extra day or two. Here is a list of those that apply Australia wide and when they usually occur:

• 1st January new years day, also the anniversary of the formation of Australia with Federation on 1st January 1901. Where this day lands on a weekend the following Monday is usually a holiday. Where it falls on a Tuesday the preceding Monday may also be declared a public holiday.
• 26th January Australia day celebrates the invasion of Australia by England with the arrival of the first fleet on that day in 1788.
• Good Friday A Christian holy day dating back to the days when Christians still used the lunar calendar which is why the date changes from year to year depending on the phases of the moon.
• Easter Day always falls on a Sunday so following a long time Australian tradition the following Monday is a public holiday.
• 25th April ANZAC day is the day when Australians remember all those who have made sacrifices for Australia in time of war. The day itself commemorates the day in 1915 when the British Lord Admiral Churchill stupidly sent Australian, New Zealand, and British forces into Gallipoli from where they were supposed to move overland and take out the guns protecting the straight which was preventing British warships entering the Black Sea. Unfortunately due to the poor quality of the available maps they picked a landing site from which it would have been impossible to reach their objective even if they had managed to defeat the turks that were defending. This public holoday now tends to be held on the correct day even when it does fall on a weekend.
• Queen’s Birthday generally held the second Monday in June (except in WA which having celebrated their Foundation Day the Monday before put it off until later in the year). The Queen’s actual birthday is in April but the date is supposedly fixed to correspond to the birth of King George III who was king at the time the day was established although why they chose the second Monday when his birthday was the 3rd I don’t know.
• Labour Day I have never quite figured out the reason for this public holiday which is held at different times in different states. In NSW it is held on the first Monday in October and that long weekend is when the NSW branch of the Australian Model Railway Association hold their annual exhibition.
• Christmas Day 25th December is a pagan festival that dates back many thousands of years celebrating the winter solstice (in the northern hemisphere) and the rebirth of the sun. It was adopted by Christians in about 400AD as the date to celebrate the birth of Christ since at that time they had no idea of when Christ’s actual birth date was and needed to provide a Christian reason for celebrating on that day. Christ’s birth is now believed to have been in June 6BC but that hasn’t changed the date of the celebration any more than the different kings and queens have changed the date on which the queen’s birthday is celebrated.
• Boxing Day on 26th December dates back several hundred years to a British upper class tradition of giving boxes of money to those who worked for them. These days those working in retail do not get the day off as it it the day with the biggest sales of the entire year.

One advantage of having this blog here is that when something bugs me and it would be inappropriate to comment on it anywhere else I can always put something here. One such matter is something I was reading on a web site a couple of weeks ago which involved a discussion regarding knowledge and belief. I partly disagreed with what was said but decided that I do not want to get involved in any arguments there as to the right or wrong viewpoint since I know that there is nothing I could say that could change the minds of those who made the comments in the first place. I have been thinking about it every so often since then though since I haven’t until now been able to tell anyone about it. I have now decided to rectify that by making this post so as to say my piece and move on to other things.

The argument was regarding knowledge and belief and the presented argument suggested that there were four alternatives - knowing and believing, not knowing but believing, knowing and not believing, and not knowing and not believing. The particular examples given fully supported that those four alternatives exist and I agree with it to that point. In my opinion there are an additional two alternatives that were completely overlooked.

With knowledge it is extremely clear cut - either you know something or you don’t know and therefore those are the only two possibilities where it comes to knowledge. Belief is not quite the same though. As well as being able to believe something or not believe it there is a third alternative - that of not knowing or caring enough about it to form an opinion either way. It is possible to not form an opinion on something either way and I don’t consider that the same as not believing. Both believing and not believing require that you have an opinion on the subject and not having an opinion is another alternative. If you don’t have an opinion either way then you are neither a believer nor an unbeliever, you are a skeptic.

The discussion that I decided not to join had completely overlooked the alternatives where no opinion is held and that alternative that they overlooked undermined their entire argument based on their being only four alternatives. My telling them that would not have affected their views in any way though since they had already formed their own opinion.

There are a number of religious and secular celebrations of various sorts occurring over the next few weeks and so it seems appropriate for me to wish everyone all the best for whichever of those celebrations that it is that you celebrate.

There seems to be a move in recent years to not specifically reference any particular celebration when offering greetings at this time of year since that is assumed to be offensive to those who do not participate in the particular celebration. I have selected what I hope is a completely neutral greeting to head this post just in case you are one of those who takes offense at a particular greeting relating to a celebration that you do not participate in. On the other hand I do not object to anyone wanting to return the greeting with reference to some celebration that they participate in.

The only forms of greeting that I do object to are those that are trying to be “politically correct” without having considered that the words of their greeting actually have a completely different meaning in different parts of the world. A greeting of “Happy Holidays” is completely inappropriate since I am not going away on an extended trip in the near future. If you are going away on such a trip in the near future then I’ll wish you a happy holiday but going away on holidays has nothing whatever to do with the coming celebrations (unless you live in the USA where the word holiday means something totally different). In any case with regard to wishing someone “Happy Holidays”, I prefer to use the French equivalent and wish them a “Bon Voyage” instead.

Many science fiction stories are set so far in the future that whatever situation they describe could at least in theory happen by that date. Surprisingly though, a lot of this science fiction contains references to events that were either in the future at the time it was written which are now past and didn’t happen or which were in the past when the story was written and are now unknown to many readers. A science fiction story set well into the future can therefore appear dated due to these references.

Let’s consider a couple of examples. One is Jerry Pournelle’s future history series. A significant past event upon which much of the series relies is the joining together of the USA and the Soviet Union to form the co-dominium A lot of this series was obviously written before 1989 when the Soviet Union broke up. The timeline in more recent books lists a future date upon which for some unexplained reason the Soviet Union is reformed - basically in order that it can then subsequent to that time join with the USA in order to allow the references to that joining throughout all of the books to be considered to be correct.

Another example would be in Robert Heinlein’s book “Starship Troopers”. When the lead character is required to attend the hanging of one of his classmates who had gone AWOL and then murdered someone, reference is made to their marching to the parade to “Danny Deever”. That term is also used as an alternate way of describing what is to happen. How many readers today would be that familiar with Rudyard Kipling’s work to recognise the reference. I know I missed it for a long time and in fact was only able to see the point of the reference when listening to classical music on the radio earlier this week when the radio actually played a version of “Danny Deever”. Would people at that future time be that much more familiar with Kipling compared to the average person today?

There seems to be plenty of disagreement both between different religions and also between different countries as to exactly what day a week starts and ends on. Why there needs to be such disagreements I don’t know since the very way in which the names were first allocated to the days of the week makes it extremely clear which day is first and which last.

When the Babylonians first introduced the seven day week they knew of seven ‘planets’ and they decided to name the days of the week after those ‘planets’. They didn’t just name them at random though even though the method that they chose for allocating them appears random. What they actually did was to allocate one planet to each hour of each day of the week in order from the slowest moving (Saturn) to the fastest moving (the Moon), repeating the process 24 times so as to allocate a planet to each of the 168 hours in the week. The planet allocated to the first hour of each day was then used to provide a name for that day.

The very names of the days of the week therefore mean that the week starts on Saturday.

SitePoint Forums have just finished collecting nominations for this year’s member awards. Last year after having been selected as member of the month for August I got nominated for four or five of their annual awards inclusing JavaScript Guru, PHP Guru, and Member of the Year. I think the other nominations were a mistake on the part of the person nominating as to what the nominations were for. I didn’t win any of the awards but I did come second in the JavaScript voting.

This year they have made sure that I can’t be nominated for Member of the Year by presenting me with a Mentor’s “badge” a couple of days before nominations closed (and that makes me a “staff member” and therefore inelligible for that award.

Personally I think that the honour in being asked to be a Mentor by the talented experts who make up the “staff” f the SitePoint Forums is a far greater honour than winning any of their annual awards would be.

I have reworked all the pages on my model railway website to a new design.

I have a already created a number of web sites on computers and model railways but find that there is occasionally something I would have liked to write about that doesn’t fit the theme of any of my sites. Hence the introduction of this new blog as a place where I can post all those comments that I want to make that are not related to computers and so don’t belong on my computer blog.

So what sorts of things can you expect to find here?

Well, it is probably going to end up being a really mixed collection of comments about all sorts of different things. I am going to categorise some of the comments based on my various hobbies but will not be limiting my comments to just those areas. Basically if I want to make a comment about anything at all and don’t have a more appropriate place to put it then I will post it here.