RANDOM NOTES

Dominion, Volume 26, Issue 285, 28 August 1933, Page 8

RANDOM NOTES

Sidelights on Current Events \ - ■ LOCAL AND. GENERAL

(By

Kickshaws.)

Would those wartime leaders have talked so eloquently of posterity if they had known that we were going to be it?

Surely those recent German shipping regulations are calculated to make things more at sea than ever.

A professor has discovered that the roof of the world is 70 miles higher than was previously supposed. That is just the sort of thing to put American architects on their mettle.

One can but wonder why we in New Zealand do not copy Australia and carry out our surveys from the air, as is being done now in certain central areas in Australia. Far from this idea having anything in it of a novel nature it has proved itself for the last 12 years. Huge areas in the Congo, which would have required 50 years’ work by the older, methods, have been successfully surveyed in this way. . Some 20,000 miles of unexplored Alaska has been mapped from the.air. In Northern Rhodesia, 63,000 square miles were completed in a few iqonth.s. As this work would haye taken over ten years by ordinary survey methods, some idea ■may be had of its quickness. Some day, perhaps, we shall have an Empire map made on this principle. The cost is possibly the only reason why It has not been done.- Compared with some £4O per square mile for the older methods, ,air survey is roughly twice as cheap. In New Zealand there is plenty of scope for such work. Our maps are scarcely better than rough diagrams.

The miraculous escape from death on the part of a girl at Lower Hutt when five railway carriages passed over her seeins to indicate that it is the duty of some unseen guardian angel to protect Certain people from accident. While one individual - dies as a result of a pin-prick, another for some curious reason survives a long list of hair-raising accidents. A house painter in London, for example, mended hig brace? with a piece of stout wire. While half-way up the side of the house he was painting he slipped and fell Before he had fallen far his improvised braces caught in a projection. He hung there until rescued. In contrast to this we have the principal of a girls’ school who was presented with a bouquet. She pricked her finger on a rope thorn, contracted blood poisoning, and was dead in three days. Or, more curious still; a famous lion tamer who. had survived hairbreadth escapes in the lions’ den bit his own tongue when he slipped bn & banana skin and died of shOc£

Possibly the most ..undignified accidental ending on record occurred to a military general who had survived a thousand deaths at the front On his return from his last campaign he was crossing the street when he was run over by a donkey cart and killed. This accident is nearly as remarkable as that of the pretty girl in the United States of America who suffered a broken rib when she was hugged. People are very fond of saying that accidents will happen, but if we could only discover why they happen it would be more interesting still. For example, when the flywheel of an engine burst, why should it come through a brick wall half-a-mile away and kill a newly-married couple having breakfast? Why should a woman at Mount Eden be knocked senseless by a chunk of rubber from a burst tire of a passing motorcar? The chances of being in one particular spot when that sort of thing happens must be very remote.

' If Hunyary is suffering a plagiie of caterpillars, as reported, Melbourne can justly complain tfiat it is suffering a plague of mice. After wheat had been loaded at a railway station near Melbourne no less than two tons of mice were killed. There are said ,to be ■so many miee in some districts in that area that they attack and kill cats. Indeed, they attack live sheep and in some cases kill them. But these are not lone instances of Nature running riot Sometimes she seems to turn out far too many individuals of one species. Not long ago Yugoslavia staged a butterfly glut There were so many butterflies that they stopped motor-cars and railway trains. Morocco not long ago hud a snail complex. Tiiere were so many snails it was impossible to wglk. They helfl up traffic and could only be eliminated by importing a tlioijsijnd ducks to eat them up. Where locusts are concerned Nature seems to experiment by the thousand tons. How many locusts there are in a flight has never been known.' All that is known is that after, several hundred tons of locusts have been killed and burned the flight is not-noticeably smaller.

It seems astounding to think that Nature has in some cases arranged for Insects to breed at such an astounding rate that if every man in the world spent his entire life killing off their progeny he would never finish the job. A female green fly. only three weeks old is capable of producing six thousand million children in the course of a season. It is therefore evident that if only one hundred female green flies got busy on the job the two thousand million human inhabitants of the world would be overwhelmed by green flies before they could kill them off. Even the locust can account for a family of 400,000 descendants in the course of » a year. A housefly would think nothing of producing 5,000,000,000,000 descendants in six months if permitted to do so. As things are, the annual loss due to the astounding breeding powers of pests is estimated for the British Empire at £200,000,000 a year —a tax of 10 per cent. levied by pests on everything produced. This rather doubtful verse gives the solution to Saturday’s problem:— The professor was strong in the head and the feet; He was known as the “80-mile walker”; He couldn’t remember his house in the street, • * ■ Though at “maths” he was really a corker. But he- knew that the sum of the numbers before And the numbers beyond it were equal; And the problem that you had a weekend to “floor” Is the teasing but logical sequel. So without slide-rule or “logs” the fellow did strive In the chilly but soothing moonshine. Till he found that his number was just 35, In a row that contained 49.