The Cowled Engineer

Last year, my family and I went on a whale watching trip which was operated by the Quandamooka mob, who are the traditional owners of Moreton Island and the Stradbroke Islands in Moreton Bay.  Local lore man, Uncle Josh Walker, told stories of his country; the people, the wildlife, the land and the ocean.  I was fascinated to hear him tell of a story of the inundation of Moreton Bay and how the flooding of the bay was verified by scientists who indicated that it happened thousands of years ago as the sea level rose when the last ice age came to an end.   The idea that an oral tradition dating back thousands of years could have its roots in an actual event piqued my curiosity.  I never would have thought that an oral tradition could preserve a memory for so long.  But, there seems to be some evidence that this story really does capture an ancient memory of coastal inundation.  At least that's what Patrick Nunn and Nicholas Reid argue in a 2016 paper in Australian Geographer

I used to work as a timber frame and truss detailer before becoming an engineer.  During that period of my life, I prepared shop drawings for the prenailed timber frames of many homes around South East Queensland.  As a detailer, I had to know exactly where to place studs in order to make it easier for the various trades on site to do their work.  For example, plumbers wanted to have blocking directly behind the toilet cistern, so I would detail a decent sized piece of timber in the right spot. When it came to plybrace, I always provided an extra stud at the join between two sheets of bracing (as in the photo above).  As I recall, chippies wanted the extra stud so that they could nail off the sheet without worrying that the nails might miss the stud.  As one chippie told me recently, " If your stud is out by a poofteenth, all your nails are going to miss. "  This double stud detail was, and still is, perceived as best practice. Unfortunately, the double stud deta