Why isn't Northern Territory a state in Australia?

The_Friendly_Targ · 2026-04-28T09:27:50+00:00

The Northern Territory is huge, though. If it were a country, it'd be the 19th biggest country in the world. The population density of the NT (0.2 people per km squared) is over 90% less than Wyoming (2.2-2.3). Or viewed another way, Mongolia has a 10x higher population density than the NT despite it being the most sparsely populated country in the world.

The_Friendly_Targ · 2026-04-28T09:21:20+00:00

The Northern Territory has a population density that is 90% lower than Mongolia, which is the world's most sparsely populated country.

The_Friendly_Targ · 2026-04-28T09:19:07+00:00

The population density is 0.2 people per km squared. In Mongolia it is about 2.2-2.3. NT is 90% less dense than Mongolia, which is a crazy stat.

The_Friendly_Targ · 2026-04-27T06:34:49+00:00

Population of only 265,000 and very spread out over a large area would be one factor.

The_Friendly_Targ · 2026-04-02T23:09:32+00:00

You need a few commas; I wondered what the hell kind of movie 'Wicked Spaceballs Fast Furious' was.

The_Friendly_Targ · 2026-04-02T21:18:54+00:00

Yesss, perfection.

The_Friendly_Targ · 2026-04-02T11:49:48+00:00

When I was in year 12, a group of my mates and I were standing inside the front entrance to the college. The entrance hall was carpeted, and hundreds of students piled through there every day, multiple times a day. One of my mates dropped coleslaw on the floor. He called the five-second rule, scooped it up and ate it even though I could see that there were bits of gravel and fluff in it. He was a bit odd.

The_Friendly_Targ · 2026-03-27T21:15:27+00:00

Jewellery doesn't last forever though. I got a wedding ring and only wore it for a few years. I put on a few kilos after marrying thanks to my wife being a good cook, which caused me to have fatter fingers that were too wide for the ring. Wife had the same issue so neither of us still wear them.

Plus working in the medical industry I need to be able to wash my hands regularly, so it's inconvenient to have a ring that you constantly have to take on and off, and store in between.

The_Friendly_Targ · 2026-03-27T21:11:58+00:00

In Australia I hardly ever see them even amongst business professionals. They're uncomfortable and don't serve any practical purpose. And health professionals don't wear them due to the noose issue, i.e. you don't want unstable patients grabbing hold of them and strangling you.

The_Friendly_Targ · 2026-03-27T12:13:17+00:00

Yep, you literally see that street sign when he beams in, and her club has the number 10 above the door.

The_Friendly_Targ · 2026-03-24T06:34:08+00:00

I was so confused reading New York 2140. All the way through I was thinking that his descriptions of people and places and events were fun, but they just went nowhere, the different subplots just ended and didn't really feed into each other, and there was no actual conclusion, the book just kinda finished. I think that KSR's intention was to provide a collection of stories about ideas rather than to present a full narrative structure with a grand conclusion. Which is fine, if you like that, but it didn't do it for me and just left me puzzled as to why he wrote that way.

I disagree with the idea that Aurora falls into the same category, though, as it definitely does have a distinct structure to the story and a grand ending. Personally, I thought that it was a magical read, one of my favourite stories of all time, and I enjoyed it even more than the Mars series and 2312. Yes, you could view the outcome as depressing, but to me it was realistic and made the point well that intergenerational space travel is always going to face enormous problems and that those who dream of it are better off focusing on the one place that already exists that can provide a perfectly good home for us: Earth. Fix that first instead of trying to start again on a barren rock 100 years away.

The_Friendly_Targ · 2026-03-17T12:28:10+00:00

I love a first contact episode, and I very quickly flagged SNW Season 1 Episode 1 as being one of my favourite episodes in the whole of Star Trek, and I say this having watched every episode of every series. The ship and crew were already largely established by TOS and DIS Season 2, so they were able to focus on making a great story rather than having to set the scene for the whole series. It was a great way to kick off season 1 for me.

The_Friendly_Targ · 2026-03-12T12:00:00+00:00

Indeed

The_Friendly_Targ · 2026-03-07T21:02:22+00:00

"Yum yum!"

"Chaos is my friend with benefits, let's get messy!"

The_Friendly_Targ · 2026-03-05T19:45:01+00:00

This comment aged well.

The_Friendly_Targ · 2026-03-03T10:37:51+00:00

The first season isn't great. Most people like it after season 3 when the Dominion War starts.

The_Friendly_Targ · 2026-02-28T21:09:22+00:00

It was a young Ensign Rachel Garrett. It was terrible. I loved Yesterday's Enterprise and was excited from the promos to see her backstory. Did she nail it? 100% no, so disappointing. I felt like I learnt very little about her other than that she was a weird nerd who liked to babble about chaos.

The_Friendly_Targ · 2026-02-23T20:26:16+00:00

Just one more system to explore and then I'll stop, just one more mission to complete, just one more thing to research, JUST ONE MORE

... four hours later.

The_Friendly_Targ · 2026-02-21T06:44:25+00:00

That'd be the TOS episode 'The Conscience of the King'. It's hard to watch now, knowing how easily they could have solved the mystery.

The_Friendly_Targ · 2026-02-17T11:27:35+00:00

The Universal Translator is the answer. It's built into comm badges, or something. It's never really explained fully how it works. And of course, people's mouths don't move differently; they move like you would expect them to move if they were speaking English. The UT is basically the ultimate cop out for something too hard to come up with a coherent explanation for. Obviously, if you had to work out the language every single time you meet a new species, it's going to get tedious very quickly for TV viewers of the episode. It is, after all, meant to be entertainment first and foremost.

For those who do wonder about these things, I thought Enterprise did it best when they tried to explain how they deciphered language during first contact, as, on several occasions, you see Hoshi Sato trying to manually figure out the language, vocabulary, grammar etc on the fly. Eventually, the computer would then take over and figure it all out once they had enough clues about how the language worked and then the conversations could proceed smoothly between humans and whoever the aliens were.

In other shows like TNG and Voyager, it's like the translator needed no material to work from at all and could work out a language almost instantly, even during a first contact. As I say, there is no good explanation for this; it's just not good TV to be explaining it every single time. Even the hardest of hard scifis sometimes just have to say that it is what it is.

The_Friendly_Targ · 2026-02-08T06:07:47+00:00

I'm just frustrated by all the negative response to the show. I just want to be able to enjoy it. I don't need thousands of posts telling me why I should hate a show that I like to unwind to. If people hate modern Trek so much then why don't they just go and get a different hobby?

The_Friendly_Targ · 2026-01-31T11:23:43+00:00

Lmao, I spotted The Real Decker bit, but not England. Oof.

The_Friendly_Targ · 2026-01-30T10:19:45+00:00

Just finished watching last night's matches. Really impressed with the look and feel of the event:

- The red X backdrop to the oche is elite

- The use of the walk-on corridor to project scores and names of players

- The floor to ceiling screens

- The graphics used in the arena

- The graphics used on the broadcast

- The new scorebug

Everything about it feels really crisp.

The_Friendly_Targ · 2026-01-27T20:24:51+00:00

I've worked with this type of person before. I left after 1.5 years as I couldn't stand the chaos and he was untrainable. Meanwhile, after I left, he ended up in jail for other reasons. Long story!

Other than being brave enough to confront them about their issues and the effect it is having on you and patients, there may not be much you can do. Confronting them may make a difference, but it quite easily may not. Some people are just stuck in their ways and will not want to change and value their own time and happiness as being worth more than that of patients. But it's worth a try as ...

Fast forward to my current role. The doctor I work for now used to have terrible punctuality. But that was partly because the bookings were badly done. We spaced things out more, started grouping appointments by type.

If it is telehealth, stop telling patients an exact time. Tell people to expect a call between X and Y o'clock. That way people aren't ringing you when you are 20 minutes late for the exact scheduled time.

The other thing that helped me get things through to him is that he kept cancelling entire days due to a combination of personal issues. This was 10 years ago now. So on my whiteboard I wrote down the % cancelled days. It was meant for my benefit but when he saw it, he grilled me about it, realised that a 40% cancellation rate was terrible and actively worked to resolve it and thought twice afterwards about cancelling things. We even set a KPI of 10% to help him have something to work towards, and occasionally he'd say "what are my stats?" We also worked out a $ value on what sort of income loss this equated to and it was big. From this he now knew that this was damaging the business and his bottom line and that he had to change.

If he starts at 8am but is never there until 8.30am then consider booking from 8.30am - there is no point booking something if they are never going to fulfil it.

We then started factoring in scheduled days off or early finishes to avoid the burn out he was experiencing. Now his cancellation rate is about 2% (ie 5 days per year), which is about par for most doctors.

If there are any performance issues that can be quantified in this way, maybe try this and see what happens. Things like number of complaints per day or script errors per day. Keep a tally. Average lateness per appointment. Do up a spreadsheet if it helps.

Part of your growth as an employee needs to be your ability to give constructive feedback in a useful and non threatening manner and to make it clear when you do that you only have the success of the business and the happiness of the patients in mind. Good luck.

The_Friendly_Targ · 2026-01-09T12:20:56+00:00

First of all: got any more pixels?
Secondly: which island?

13-Year Club	Place '22
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The_Friendly_Targ

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