April 2016

Happy birthday sis! Will call you later.

Happy Birthday!

Sweet.

Lol, it's bizarre that so many people hated Paul Keating, who is a fundamentally intelligent, warm and bloody funny guy. And that so many loved John Howard, who was always a mean-spirited weasel who played the race card and brought hate politics to Australia, via the Republicans in the US.

Wowser of the week award for me, I know, but photos of special events like weddings seem a lot less classy with the beers front and centre. Put the bloody drinks down, we know you drink, well done you. So many of these pictures now look like ads for a brewery.

Atheists versus the religious. OMG.

See? Men vacuum.

Can recommend Facebook's Activity Log, it's great. Particularly if you're trying to find something from an older conversation, makes it a doddle.

In all seriousness, it is amazing that even today Lithgow is seen as a 'hole'. It's spectacular. Nothing else West of the mountains has anything quite like it.

Deeper than expected. I guess if you spend a lot of time yelling, your voice will sound higher.

Just check out the numbers in this, even if you're not interested in Bernie Sanders. The scale of the ripping off is staggering, almost beyond belief. These same thieves then fund think tanks and shock jocks to make people angry about piddling things like migrants, unions and welfare, to distract from the fact that they've basically gutted entire countries. "It’s been known since 2012 that elites in the US and around the world are sitting on a gargantuan amount of tax-free assets worth at least $21 trillion. And according to James Henry of the Tax Justice Network, that number may be as high as $31 trillion. But for the sake of argument, let’s say $21 trillion. What could we fund with that? For starters, we could give each of the approximately 600,000 homeless people across America a $650,000 home for $400 billion, amounting to just 2 percent of those offshore assets. We could provide a basic income of $10,000 a year to all 247 million Americans over age 18 for a little over than $2 trillion a year, and do that for ten years. Obviously, not all this sum is owned by US companies, but $21 trillion is an insane amount of money. Even a portion could easily pay for all of Bernie Sanders’ proposals, from free college ($75 billion/year) to 13 million new infrastructure jobs (one-time cost of $1 trillion), to free comprehensive healthcare for every man, woman, and child ($1.38 trillion/year), to expanding Social Security ($1.2 trillion spread out over 10 years), to a youth jobs program ($5.5 billion/year). The list goes on."

It did change my life, stopping trying for that one, continuous 8-hour sleep. I remember my parents often being up in the middle of the night, it's a beautiful, quiet time. One of the challenges is, as the writer says, the custom now of late nights, particularly in social situations. Just needs careful balancing.

The fitness industry is a slow learner. http://blog.bonati.com/us-army-phasing-out-sit-ups-due-to-spine-injuries/

OK, it's not a cat pic or an emotional and profound saying. But I'd read it anyway, we can't let them keep getting away with this.

David Gillespie says no to this, which surprises some. But his reasons are interesting: http://davidgillespie.org/no-we-dont-need-a-sugar-tax/

Fantastic piece on the politics of science, the myth of the scientific method, and the myths in particular of nutrition science.

These guys are great.

Her parents would be so proud.

Going to check my labels from now on.

When you study trigonometry at school, you're actually studying deep history. Modern curricula separate maths and history though so you're never told that (hardly anybody even remembers the connection). Angles are the source of all science, and of existence itself. The ancient atomists talk about them all the time, but we forgot why for thousands of years. Why were the ancients obsessed with angles? Yes to help them measure, like the height of pyramids and other things. But that came later, and trigonometry uses angles without really ever understanding them. The angle itself is almost impossible to define, we use trig to give it a number or measured size, as in the diagrams shown we can use the lengths of sides to give angles a size or number. But that's not the essence of the angle itself. The angle is pure deviation. That's why the ancients made them the heart of both their science and their humanities, and of existence. The deviation at the heart of all things, what introduces novelty to the world, all by itself. You can see how this flowed into their ideas about atoms. The smallest possible angle is a tangent. It was in studying this smallest possible angle that a tangent creates with another line that they started to understand the infinitesimal, or atoms. And from which differentiation and integration were born, in mathematics. This is also why the vortex or vortices were the heart of ancient sciences and which again we mostly forgot. Vortices are what are born from that initial deviation, of the angle. Even in the 19th century vortices survived in atomic theory, there were models of the atom as a vortex. Today race car designers and aeronautical engineers, amongst many others, still grapple with vortices. We think we've become cleverer since that earlier time, but I doubt it, we've forgotten much more than we've discovered. And tragically many of the major works of that early time haven't survived.

The bit about bringing your fattest hog so Cameron can roger it was hilarious. There really are terrorists among us. They're the people not paying tax or enough tax, and at the same time telling the rest of us to tighten our belts, while they rip off whole countries and pocket the lot. They're not all politicians or corporate types either. Often they're just boomers.

Germaine is about the only person in this debate asking why a man who gets his cock cut off suddenly becomes a woman. And she's called crazy.

'Cycling has become the new golf.' That's bang on the money.

UBI. Ooh yeh.

Can we please have some Autumn now. And some rain. Thank you.

There's something a bit depressing about sitting in the middle of a possible global catastrophe, and the best many can say about it is "aren't we having lovely weather". Calling the current weather lovely is like saying a 6-year old in a bikini is sexy.

Brian May and Queen are a different type of hero for our times. Relentlessly smart and curious and inventive, and decent. And able to shamelessly access the power of magnificence and spectacle at a time when these were considered uncool, while at the same time speaking to both elites and the common listener. They transcended cool. Queen isn't often recognised for the genius of combining all of those things, mostly because they were so smart, in an industry that's so often fairly stupid, and obsessed with petty notions of cool. For many music is the banner of their youth, and the same territorial crap dominates their thinking about it well into adulthood, into what's worthy or cool and what isn't. It's all the same boring high school politics. Queen paid no attention to any of that at all. And Brian never stops. Crinoline.

Happy birthday!! Won't be far behind you :)

Happy birthday Aunty Bev :)

The Night Manager is a cracker. I think Tom Hiddleston is my new man crush.

All the hard work of motherhood is rewarded in moments like this.

Interesting to see misogynistic online trolls in action. This in response to somebody posting about the success for Charlotte Wood's latest novel.

I don't think people should talk on their phones at the cinema. But I'd prefer the whole cinema texts through the whole movie than listen to bloody bags of chips and lollies being rustled.

Yes. Our time will come. "Since buying crocs and taking on the haters, all my prejudice against them has melted away. Are they really so bad? Aren’t they just fucking comfortable? Aren’t they just so uncool it’s come full circle? Maybe it’s their time to rise out of the ashes of Croc hatred and join the Croc-naissance."

ffs Channel 7, how many bloody ads?

Like Hans Rosling, Pinker (who has his faults) is one of the few brave enough to point out that this might be the best ever time to be alive. And that there may be such thing as progress in history.

Lest we forget what they would rather not remember.

A plug. http://theconversation.com/data-collected-about-student-behaviour-doesnt-help-improve-teaching-or-learning-57793

Dyson's innovation still hasn't stretched to getting its gadgets to cost less than an average weekly pay package.

This is very important. Firstly, the bunny ears is the only way to go. But secondly, I hadn't seen this variation, it seems the goods. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-11-12/how-to-tie-your-shoes-and-lace-your-shoes-the-best-way

Happy birthday, long time :)