September 2016

Netball was far and away the best sport to watch all year. Nothing else came close. While most other professional sport collapses in scandals around money, drugs, gambling and wife abuse, netball has been just fantastic contest.

Margaret Court, forgotten yet again. Serena won't even come close to matching Court's record. Everybody forgets Court.

Happy birthday Rach! :)

Not a glamorous topic. But a real sleeper. Can't wait to see the back of the internal combustion engine, noisy and filthy and over complicated and inefficient. And wood fires, still so misunderstood as truly toxic, back burning to protect homes is a disaster for air pollution. You can rebuild homes (or not build them in the bush in the first place).

A few slippery facts in this debate. The Labor Party was founded by unions - it's their party - so to deny them the right to fund Labor is basically just outlawing the Labor Party. Which the Liberals know. Also a lot of the popular mainstream press is already owned by people who use it to actively campaign for the Liberals. News Limited and Fox for example. So to level the playing field with donations - a good reform - at the same time potentially leaves the Liberals with a huge advantage in political terms, because all the money that goes towards supporting them doesn't just come as donations, it gets pumped into these news outlets.

Happy birthday!

The school teacher in me wants to stop kids gripping pens with hands that look like they're in the final stages of arthritis. And to stop girls storing their mobile phones in front pockets of their skirts resting right above their ovaries, public health issue on the slow boil there.

Something for those who think Derryn Hinch is a hero, rather than just a shock jock. Shock jocks always make everything worse. Always. The article is great but doesn't point out that the vast majority of sex offences against children happen within families. A Register wouldn't do a single thing to address that.

Let's have a plebiscite on rich Australians using super as a tax shelter. The number of people this affects is tiny, and shows who this government really stands for. It's not me and you.

This could be a hoot. https://bo-rhap-vr.withgoogle.com

We're going to be hearing a lot about Ectoine I think, amazing. Also very effective against hayfever. Air pollution is a real sleeper issue. Kills 40,000 people a year in the UK. Internal combustion engines, and fires of all kinds, will need to go.

Happy birthday Meg :)

https://agenda.weforum.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/cars.gif

Not an ongoing vendetta against Brian Cox (like he'd care anyway). He's a lovely bloke. But the arrogance of saying this is a book about 'how to think' for starters. As if only science thinks. And then to say: "The whole point of science is that you have to be prepared – and delighted – to change your mind in the face of new evidence. That is the message that should be taught in schools." That's not the point of science, science is not a course in critical thinking. And the fairytale of the scientific method, which was actually invented by philosophers - it doesn't exist. And it isn't even close to how the scientific community itself behaves.

Happy Birthday!

Not a zealot on this, I love cars too. But I don't think it's well enough understood just what shitty technology the internal combustion engine is, and how we desperately need to get rid of it.

Happy birthday cuz :)

Love it. I studied at this School at UNSW, they do some amazing stuff. Materials science is the cutting edge of engineering, most new big innovations in engineering are about the materials used, not the way they're put together.

“Public school students receive significantly more total government funding per student than what goes to private school students." Um, yes, that's why they're called government schools. Next he'll be telling us that there's more sunlight in the day time than the night time.

There's something in this?

Happy birthday!

Thought about this today when the Tele demonised a young girl as a dole bludger, when in fact she'd just finished school and was about to go to TAFE.

I think I posted this one a week or so ago, can't remember. But necessary reading for anybody who wants to understand why people like Trump or Pauline Hanson are popular. And it isn't because people who follow them are dumb.

Watch to the end of this and see if you can not mist up a bit. The ending is something else. If you have a fear or even loathing of refugees or migrants in general, remember this is how that sort of thing always ends. Always.

Keystone habits. If you work in an organisation then this is for you. The amazing thing about habits is that they're all connected, they form a web. If you want to change behaviour, your own or your kids or your organisation, target the habits. And the genius of it is you don't have to focus on the obvious things you want changed, because all habits are connected. You focus on some simple seemingly unrelated habit, and changing that then flows through to the others automatically. Change which leg you put in your pants first every day, or which shoe you tie first, or the route you take to work. Or for your kids, change small things about their routines, if they're being difficult, and this will automatically start to unknot their more difficult behaviours elsewhere.

Are women drinking more now than previously? It does feel like it, to me. Is this article true to life?

Maybe legit, who knows. Can't fault the logic though. It's that dumb time of year again, where we pretend we get an extra hour of daylight by stealing it from morning people and giving it to evening people. And screw everybody's circadian rhythms in the process. Genius.

Vantablack. Artists are feuding over it, it's that interesting, black has always been so important for the visual arts.

Happy birthday coach! Hope you have a great day.

It's hard to say, with music being my real passion for so many years. But music sometimes can become annoying or unsatisfying. Music is rhythms and sounds, but just a tiny subset of the rhythms and sounds of the world. And music works really by creating 'refrains', which are highly simplified, repetitive patterns in rhythm and sound. Those refrains can be a complete joy. But they're always vast simplifications of the rhythms and sounds of the world itself. The song or tune that gets 'stuck' in your head is an example of what refrains do - in nature birds for example use refrains to mark territory, that's what refrains do. Music is the same, it's territorial, often seen with the way people defend the music they like and attack the music they don't like. And how people define so much of their identities around the music they love or hate. Sometimes it's better to go back to the vastly more complex rhythms and sounds of the world. This is a binaural recording, meaning it's completely surround - as if you were there. It won't seem like music, but it's a much deeper type of music. (Use earphones, or you won't get the binaural sound.)

Big fan of the staycation. Sometimes holidays seem to be going the same way as after-school activities for kids. Family holidays in the past were so often to dodgy, cheap places not far away where you just got to lay in the sun a bit and play cricket maybe. Or weeks at home in the summer just doing nothing. Now it's a race to see who has the most amazing experiences, and also who can share pictures of them (which seems to be a large part of the motivation). Still think this passion for the always new experience is laying waste to so many parts of the world, and we already know what it's doing to kids. Helicopter parents are helicoptering themselves as well as their kids. And is there a real anxiety in peoples' lives based around comparing themselves to others?

Fat old angry men as always, saying it like it is. Maybe we should blow up the sharks. Shock and awe. That's the fat old angry man solution to everything. Worked well in Iraq. I'm all for a cull of radio shock jocks.

A bit weird to take a selfie with the little flower girls? Not in a yuk way, just in the sense of he's the only one who ends up with the pic?

When your 5-year-old shames you by saying "what's a pavlova?"

The storms and extra rain the world is experiencing more often now are due to the fact the oceans have been absorbing enormous amounts of extra energy for decades now. That energy has to go somewhere. The graph shows just how huge that build up of energy has been. Maybe this could be the only thing that will force people to think about living somewhere except on the coast? (A zetta is 1 with 21 noughts after it. 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000.)

The Mirrorcube Hotel, in Sweden. From some angles it almost completely disappears.

Happy birthday lipstick chick! Guessing you'll be under the weather in multiple ways.

For so long it seemed logical that big things are complicated, and small things are simple. In living things, organisations, politics - wherever. Bacteria have now taught us we had this completely backwards, the smaller you go with living things, the more complex things become. But it's not just complexity, it's also energy, we think big things are more powerful. But have a look at these energy densities of different fuels - energy density is roughly the amount of energy you can get from a given mass or volume of a material. Not an argument for nuclear energy by the way, it has all sorts of problems, but you can see that as you go smaller, the energy available goes off the scale. (These numbers have units of MJ/kg - means how many million joules of energy is available per kilogram of the material.) Wood - 16.2 Ethanol - 26 Coal - 30 Fat - 37 Petrol - 46 Natural gas - 55 Plutonium - 2,239,000 Thorium - 79,420,000 Uranium - 80,620,000