Tapdancing Roof Mice

 One of the delightful and trivial things I like about Australia is the preponderance of tin (actually, galvanised steel) roofs. Almost everywhere is roofed in thin layers of corrugated sheet metal, and when the regular Sydney rain piles through and hammers down, the sound is really quite lovely.

Like millions of tapdancing roof mice, all jigging away to their own mousey beat.

I really, really like it. A lot.

Back in the UK, most of the places I lived were either ridged tile roofs or bitumen flat roofs. I slept under thatch a couple of times, and slate too, but the sound of rain on roof in Britain is just not accoustically pleasing.

A good expanse of corrugated roofing sheet, though? That's a sound to be relished.

 

Plays havoc with the noise levels in the home studio, though.

Skepticator Stats and Facts

I just thought I'd share a little Skepticator trivia with y'all

  • Skepticator's first feed was added to the DB on 16 Feb 2010, and it was... Australian Skeptics.
  • The JREF wasn't added until two days later, 18th Feb 2010, when it became the 36th feed in the DB.
  • The first Podcast, as you might expect, was Skeptoid, the fourth feed overall on the second day of the DB's existence
  • SiTPs started to appear early - Westminster Skeptics In The Pub being first in on 18th Feb 2010
  • The most recent feed is Reddit's Skeptic Subreddit.
  • C0nc0rdance was the first YouTube feed into the system on 11th April 2010, and there are now 49 feeds and a dedicated Youtube Viewer
  • There are currently 645 feeds in the system overall
  • FeedID 100 went to the Geologic Podcast. 200 was Skepsos's Skepsis. 300: Michael Shermer on YouTube. 400: Birmingham SiTP. 500: Nathan Lee. 600: The Loom. 700 will be issued in 4 feeds' time
  • Wordpress has 102 listed blogs hosted on the wordpress.com domain. Blogspot, however, has 136
  • The first feed to be rejected was "Dr" Nancy Malik's twitter feed (Nice try, Nancy, but you're a failure). Since then, there has only been one spam attempt, foiled by the moderation system.
  • RichardDawkins.net wasn't added until July 16th.
  • 505 of the 645 feeds are hosted on a ".com" address. There are 76 ".org" addresses, 20 ".net" and only 2 ".com.au". There are 9 ".co.uk" addresses
  • Not including a partial purge in October 2010, 16,709 distinct IP addresses have hit the search page.
  • FeedID 666 went to Rhys's Blog. Right now, as I'm posting, Bad Astronomy has 666 articles indexed
  • The JREF Forum has the most feed items in the DB with 4195, and to be honest I'd forgotten it was there. It's followed by the AFA Forums on 2264, then Pharyngula with 1491
  • There are 11 feeds which have never returned a result, oddly*
  • 175 feeds have the word "skeptic" in their feed title

 

*memo to self, investigate these

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