Questions about council and money
One of those rare, usually low glow, light bulb moments left On the Pulse jumping up and down with excitement recently, when it absolutely cracked the ‘Da Vinci Code’ meaning behind the big question mark on the Henderson Street roundabout.
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It all became clear to On the Pulse at this month’s council meeting after councillors carried a motion to give themselves a 2.5 per cent wage rise. Inverell councillors are now on $11,010 per annum, while the mayor gets $35,040 a year, and that’s what the big question was!
Would they vote to accept it? Is it enough? Is it too much? Are they worth it? Would you do the job? Ah, such a big question mark, and so little time…
Before another second passes
A big sigh of relief on Wednesday from On the Pulse after another leap second was added to the world’s clocks without incident.
The leap second was needed to account for the slight slowdown in the Earth’s rotation. Yes, the days are getting longer, despite the indisputable fact that they go faster as you get older.
The last second that was added in June 2012 caused pandemonium across the internet.
Qantas had its first crash when its reservation systems went down, while Mozilla, Reddit and LinkedIn all had outages.
This time the correction happened during active share market trading hours and had some calling it the next Y2K bug.
However, as with Y2K, On the Pulse sat up late waiting for something to happen and came away, yet again, with a big ‘nothing to see here’ and was left feeling pleased about being a second older.
Turbine research blows in the wind
On the Pulse was immensely heartened when operations director at the South Australian EPA, Peter Dolan, told the Senate Committee Inquiry into Wind Farms that it had done a two-month study of the Waterloo Wind Farm just east of Mintaro.
Phew!
On the Pulse heaved a great sigh of relief, because the Senate committee’s first recommendation in its interim report was that the government should create the Independent Expert Scientific Committee on Industrial Sound (ESCIS).
The acronym sounded suspiciously like some foreign terrorist group to On the Pulse, and the fact that ESCIS would be responsible for providing research and advice to the Minister for the Environment on the impact on human health of audible noise and infrasound from wind turbines had On the Pulse eyeing it off no less suspiciously.
But it seems Pete threw a spanner into the works.
He told the inquiry he had found those concerned about the Waterloo Wind Farm had complained of infrasound noise even when the wind turbines were shut off.
He also told the committee that many millions of Australians are exposed to infrasound from road traffic without expressing great concerns about health, and that was probably just as well for Pete too, because it turned out that some of the highest levels of infrasound found in the study were in the EPAs own urban office building.
