Absolutely nothing happened in Sector 83 by 9 by 12 today.
I repeat, nothing happened in Sector 83 by 9 by 12.

Monday, April 02

World

Um...

This is either the most elaborate April Fool's joke I've seen in years, or the dumbest thing I've seen in...  Sadly, just the past week.  There's a lot of dumb in the world.

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Sunday, March 18

World

So That's What This Hunger Games Thing Is

Okay, they're "young adult" novels, but that doesn't actually require the writing to be eye-gougingly awful. I'll stick with Terry Pratchett or Garth Nix, thanks all the same.

(via Slashdot and the most commonly highlighted sentences in Kindle ebooks)

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Saturday, March 17

World

Apropos Of Very Little

Does anyone remember the year - probably in the late nineties, maybe 2000 or so - when suddenly every woman in the world took to wearing orange and black and it looked like the planet had been invaded by giant anthropoid bees?

There is actually a reason I ask.  Well, two reasons, one being that I can't remember.

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Sunday, March 04

World

You Will Believe A Sheep Can Fly

Downstream Benefits, an ABC* report on the upside of the flooding here in Eastern Oz.  With flying sheep.

* The other one.

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Friday, March 02

World

Andrew Breitbart

He was fearlessly honest and outspoken, and will be missed.

Also...  It's rather unsettling when people younger than you die unexpectedly of natural causes.

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Thursday, March 01

World

On The Plus Side

The water levels in Sydney's dam system are at their highest since 1998.

On the minus side:
Residents of four towns have been evacuated as floodwaters covering an area the size of France sweep across NSW.
We don't do things by halves.

Oh yes: Warragamba Dam, Sydney's main reservoir (about two trillion litres), is expected to overflow tonight, into the already swollen Nepean River.  Sydney is still on water restrictions.

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Wednesday, February 29

World

42!

As Douglas Adams wrote of a rather different president:
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.

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Thursday, January 26

World

In My World

Wikipedia:
The science wars were a series of intellectual exchanges, between scientific realists and postmodernist critics, about the nature of scientific theory which took place principally in the United States in the 1990s. The postmodernists questioned scientific objectivity, and undertook a wide-ranging critique of the scientific method and of scientific knowledge, across the gamut of the disciplines of cultural studies, cultural anthropology, feminist studies, comparative literature, media studies, and science and technology studies. The scientific realists disintegrated them with a laser.

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Wednesday, January 18

World

And He Rocks



more...

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Monday, December 05

World

Someone Forgot To Tell The Weather Fairies

It's December now.  That's summer in the Southern Hemisphere.  The weather right now would be considered only moderately chilly...  Were itfor the middle of winter.

I prefer cool weather to hot, but seriously baby, it's cold outside.

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Sunday, October 23

World

Seagulls

So yesterday I was down at Phillip Island to see the penguin parade (the penguins are cute but the wind was coming straight from Antarctica - literally) and before the penguins came along there were a whole lot of seagulls about.  Also dead cuttlefish, but they don't feature in this story.

And the night before that I was watching the filthy neo-hippies - the Occupy $location crowd - being rounded up in Melbourne.  And then I realised: The Occupy crowd are seagulls.  The territoriality, the sense of indignant entitlement, that what's theirs is theirs and what's yours is theirs, and the unshakeable belief that the can make a mess anywhere they like with no repercussions  - they're seagulls.

What to do with this information I'm not yet sure, but identifying the problem is a good first step.

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Monday, September 05

World

Eve Myles Has Enormous Pupils

Seriously, look at them, they're like saucers.

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Monday, July 11

World

Rebecca And The Great Glass Elevator

A tip for guys: Don't proposition women you don't know in hotel elevators at 4AM if you don't want to come off as kind of creepy.

Which seems like a simple enough rule, and not one it had ever crossed my mind to breach.

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Monday, May 30

World

Rainy Rainy Rain

Heavy rain here in Sydney (yay!) with flash flooding reported in several inner-city suburbs and the University of New South Wales under water.

Which is what you get for building a university in a swamp.*

More of the same expected tomorrow, but I stocked up on eatables on the way home and I don't have to go in to the office, so I don't mind much.

Water levels in our dams are at their highest since 2002.  In May 2008 we had just 3mm of rain; I think we've had more than that in the last five minutes...

It's okay though; my new phone has internet access so if my house floats out to sea I'll live-blog it.

* But the fourth one stayed up!

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Sunday, May 29

World

Consonental Drift

I always thought the term Mid-Atlantic in Mid-Atlantic accent refered to the same Mid-Atlantic as the Mid-Atlantic states.

Turns out that it's an artificial accent deliberately created to be equally well-received in America and Britain - half-way between, in fact - so it really means Mid-Atlantic as in the Mid-Atlantic ridge.  Which is why it's not heard any more - it was created at a particular time to serve a particular purpose, rather than arising organically in a regional population.

Which came up because I was watching The Idiot's Lantern just now (new Doctor Who, series 2 episode 7), and the lady in* the television is doing a flawless 1950's received pronunciation (i.e. BBC English) accent.

Which has likewise pretty much disappeared now, encountered only in old TV shows and new period pieces.  Which is what The Idiot's Lantern is.  And when I started looking things up on Wikipedia, things fell into place.

* Yes. **
** Spoilers, as River Song would say.

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Saturday, May 28

World

Cute Sad Funny Weird

In one little photo.

Yes, she's riding a lavender toy horsie.  smile

That's because the real horsies for the event are quarantined due to an outbreak of a lethal horsie virus.  sad

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Monday, May 16

World

Carbon Dioxide Snow

Does carbon dioxide snow ever naturally form on Earth?

Carbon dioxide solidifies at -78C at 1 atmosphere.  The lowest recorded (natural) temperature on Earth is -89C at Vostok Station in Antarctica.  So, the question arises...

The answer is apparently yes.  No.  Maybe.   With a side-order of ask the Mythbusters.  A big part of the problem is that CO2 represents just 0.04% of our atmosphere by volume, so when you have one atmosphere of air you have, more or less, zero atmospheres of CO2

Which (a) may change the equations and (b) if it does fall as snow you're unlikely to notice.

No, it's not quite that cold here right now.

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Friday, November 05

World

Thanks For One Thing, President Obama

Just one thing.


 

1 Australian dollar = 1.01500 U.S. dollars

Just after the Global Financial Kerfuffle, the Australian dollar plunged to US 55¢.  How things have changed in two years.

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Thursday, November 04

World

Misplaced Snark

Mea culpa.  Or at least, mea snarka.

When that huge German sinkhole opened up and it was reported that "natural causes were suspected" and I said "As opposed to what?", well, as opposed to subsidence due to mining operations.

Which appear to have not been the cause, hence the perfectly reasonable statement about natural causes.

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World

Note To Republicans

You won.  You made greater gains in Congress than in any election since 1946.  You've been handed a mandate to be the Party of No for the next two years.  You don't even need to come up with a platform.

If you're depressed because you didn't somehow take the White House in a mid-term, consider this: Think how irritable President Obama is now, when his party has had control of both houses of Congress for two years.  Now think how he'll feel after two years of the Republican-controlled House blocking his every move.  And gloat, just a little.

Oh, and if a group of Democrats approaches you looking to rent fifteen hundred tug boats and ten thousand miles of steel cable, you might want to cut them a deal, just this once.

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World

Note To Democrats

You lost.  You lost because the country has seen the direction your party is headed and wants no part in it.  You suffered your worst losses in Congress for 60 years.  The Republicans won not because of their sparkling personalities or inspired policies, but simply because they're not Democrats.

If you're gloating because two or three of the Tea Party candidates didn't win, then at least you're easily pleased, something likely to stand you in good stead in 2012.

Also, you should probably look into cutting California adrift before it drags Nevada or Oregon down with it.  Probably best to just tow the entire state out to sea and scuttle it.

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Wednesday, November 03

World

As Opposed To... What, Exactly?

Repairs are to begin Wednesday on a 65-foot-deep (20 meters) sinkhole that opened in the eastern German town of Schmalkalden on Monday, local authorities said.

The sinkhole, which measured more than 130 feet (40 meters) across, swallowed a car and forced the evacuation of 25 people in nine houses, the regional newspaper Thueringer-Allgemeine reported.

-snip-

Jürgen Reinholz, environment and agriculture minister for the state of Thuringia, said natural causes were suspected, according to Spiegel Online International.

Uh huh. Thanks for that.

(Quality reporting from CNN.)

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Sunday, October 31

World

So, PZ...

Look at this picture of Maddox and his political principles, too — he's indistinguishable from contemporary teabaggers, except for the fact that he had his sign professionally done and all the words are spelled correctly.
What exactly are you against - free enterprise, capitalism, liberty, private property rights, or America?

Or are you implying that people who support free enterprise, capitalism, liberty, private property rights, or America are intrinsically racist?

Being on the right side of one debate doesn't always make up for being a ranting loon in another.

(From here.)

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Thursday, October 21

World

Some Things You Got Right While You Were Left

Kathy Shaidle writes about 8 Things she wishes she'd known when she was a leftist.

And for the most part, it's a solid piece.  But then, near the end, I noticed this paragraph:
Today we also know that Sacco & Vanzetti were guilty, as were the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss. There really were Communist agents in the State Department. Rachel Carson made stuff up. The Kennedys were jerks. Hollywood lied about the Scopes “Monkey” Trial. Many of the most iconic images and “facts” about the Vietnam War have been twisted beyond recognition.
(My italics.)

While I agree with most of those points, I was interested to see how, exactly, Hollywood had lied about the Scopes trial.  I had no particular reason to doubt that there were distortions in Inherit the Wind, so I followed the link to see what was said.

What was said was an abjectly dishonest apology for creationist claptrap.  When you see phrases like:
the purported evidence for evolution
you know you're not in for an honest debate about Hollywood's representation of a historic trial.

They pass of straightforward falsehoods like:
Indeed, the case for evolution remains far from satisfying standards of verifiable science.
With equally straightforward misrepresentations and ad hominems:
This is evident in the current vociferous debate between two of evolution’s most outstanding high priests, Stephen J. Gould and Richard Dawkins.
That current vociferous debate was about rates of evolutionary change on the local scale and the contigent nature of evolution.  Which is to say, there is no doubt at all that evolution happened; rather, there were questions about the reconstruction of the process on short timescales.
The Scopes Trial took place more than 70 years ago. Nevertheless its legacy continues to be felt in the series of legal battles currently being fought in courts across the USA.
Fought by the creationists, and lost, because what they are attempting to do is replace science education in public schools with their religious beliefs, and that is not just an affront to every right-thinking individual, but actually against the First Amendment.

Sorry, Kathy, on this one point you were right the first time, back when you were left.

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Thursday, October 07

World

I Spy With My Little Eye, Something Beginning With P... And Ending With Arity

Even through Paypal an AUD now buys more than 0.95 USD.  And that's after the dip a couple of days ago when our Reserve Bank decided not to increase interest rates.

When you switch back and forth between the US and AU business press, things start to get a bit surrreal.  From today's Sydney Morning Herald:
''Jobs creation is far stronger than expected,'' said Macquarie economist Ben Dinte. ''The RBA is definitely wary of labour shortages developing in the economy.''
From Yahoo! Finance:
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Private employers unexpectedly cut 39,000 jobs in September after an upwardly revised gain of 10,000 in August, a report by a payrolls processor showed on Wednesday.

The August figure was originally reported as a loss of 10,000.

The Australian dollar hasn't been at parity with the US dollar since it was floated in 1983.

This makes buying goodies online really cheap, except if you want to get Civ 5 on Steam, who are being dickheads and charging Australians 60% more than anyone else.

(I just picked up the Icewind Dale bundle on GOG - IWD 1 plus Heart of Winter and Trials of the Luremaster for $10.)

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