November 2016

At a time when web work is disappearing into its own navel talking about user experience, I love that the DM still just seems to dump it all on the one page. Is that the philosophy Jason Ian Green?

The idea of framing and reframing is something I would put right at the top of a list of things everybody needs to understand, for their health and happiness. A good example is stress, where so often people focus on the *feelings* of stress and trying to relieve those. You will never succeed at that. Reframing on the other hand can change completely how you see the situation you're in, and the stress then automatically changes or disappears. It's knowledge that can change your life in a day. Also important to understand framing I think because it's the main tool used in modern politics. It's really not important what people think in politics, effective politics is changing *how* people think about things. How they frame them. Trump's genius.

Hats off to the scientists for recognising there's a difference between journalism and PR.

Happy birthday DM :)

Discussions around FB etiquette are fascinating, you can see new social models evolving in real time. I've always defaulted to not posting about my kids, or only very minimally. FB for me isn't really about me, it still comes back to that basic question when you post something - why am I posting this? FB is a social space, not a private space, so what about your post is of interest to others, rather than just being about you?

I'm a fan of politicians. There aren't many harder jobs than having to somehow connect with everybody, even the people who hate you and disagree with you. Most of us never have to do that, so we think we're somehow more honest and noble than politicians.

Can save maybe 5 years of school for people.

Brexit, now Trump. If we really understand what's going on here part of us should be happy, people who have been screwed by both sides of politics have had enough. Now we just need to understand that this means ditching the stupid free market ideas that screwed them, and not focusing on Trump or any of the personalities involved. It's not about Trump. The focus on Trump shows that we still don't get it.

The delusional are out in full force. Never trust any idiot who goes on about 'the Left' or 'the Right'. Those are code words for nutjobs. There are many on 'the Right' (meaningless term) that are crowing that Trump's victory is theirs. Completely delusional, the people who voted for Trump despise both sides of politics. http://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/trump-smashes-the-elites/news-story/c09994b350b18462e1b4f66dfb6be713

Happy birthday bald man! More power to you.

Being in Melbourne with its trams is always fantastic. What you notice more than anything else is how many vehicles it keeps off the roads, there's noticeably much less traffic and noise and pollution. Sydney is run by property developers, it ripped up its trams decades ago.

Saw the ultimate business model while in Melbourne. A pub advertised "Schnitty and tits".

Happy birthday old friend! Have a wonderful day.

I think this is true, the only thing that makes the world seem like it's going to the dogs is the belief that the world is going to the dogs. We're increasingly stuck in a delusional echo chamber of our own beliefs. Our fears become our realities. The world is doing just fine. We maybe need to re-frame how we look at things.

Watched this yesterday. The most powerful thing was seeing how all of the alcoholics shown were just ordinary people, who didn't even notice when things started going wrong with alcohol. That's the insidious nature of addiction. One of the guys had just been a 'social' drinker, and was stunned when his doctor told him he might not live another 3 months.

On Alice's birthday :)

Gabriel Tarde saw all of this more than a century ago, and took it even further. Individuals and groups (or governments) are not separate things. Groups are the way individuals emerge and survive. Instead we've had politics in the last 40-50 years running a fantasy idea that individuals are independent things, and groups (particularly governments) just get in their way. It's a dangerous fairytale.

Cleese's grins are hilarious. Cleese's belly is equally hilarious, hard to look away...

Happy birthday!

Happy birthday sis in law!

As an ex-teacher this rings alarm bells. Schools as cheap child care. But if they can do it without just expecting teachers to 'mind the kids', I also know the pressures on working parents. The bigger picture here is our insane world of debt. Both parents need to work these days just to afford a roof over their heads. Like daylight saving, this feels like a band aid that doesn't look at the real problem, which is people needing all this extra time at work.

It's outrageously stupid. 7-9 billion PER YEAR of public money to prop up insurance companies, all because the LibNats can't stand public provision of anything. The only people who benefit from private health insurance is disgustingly rich medical specialists, and the companies themselves. A single insurer is what we need, as they say. Medicare. We should never have got rid of a single telecommunications provider either, the old Telecom, or the old public banking option. Generations of free market fanatics and their bullshit 'competition' ideas are to blame for this. What sort of 'efficient' industry needs the taxpayer to shell out 7-9 billion per year to keep it afloat? Just proves this is nothing about competition and all about smashing public services.

Mark Twain said history may not repeat, but it sure does rhyme. Modern companies and organisations have so much in common with much older organisational forms. I did a fantastic course on organisational forms and history with a theologian about 25 years ago, we really don't understand so much about the lives we live at work. Take the Royal Court, where everything was codified according to status and position and title. There wasn't much interest in what any of these people did, only in the hierarchy. Modern companies often have exactly the same form. Their 'business model' is really just their org structure, there isn't a model as such, everything gets processed through the org structure. This generates huge numbers of meetings, as in the absence of a business model all that's left is constant negotiation between the Lords, Ladies and King about what to do next, and who should be in charge for each bit.

More than 700 tonnes of antibiotics are imported into Australia every year. More than half of those antibiotics go into stock feed (column 2), nearly 10% is used by vets (column 3), and about 35% is used in the health system (column 1). Fruit trees are even sprayed with antibiotics to control infection. Agriculture is our biggest worry with antibiotic resistance. Not people. Agricultural practices that are so bad that they need to dose food with antibiotics to keep animals healthy is where mad cow disease came from. And a lot of these tonnes are used to just fatten animals, there isn't even a medical use. Also at a time when everybody is asked to consider the impact of eating meat on the environment, it doesn't hurt to have a look at the impact having pets has (https://www.worldwildlife.org/magazine/issues/spring-2016/articles/what-s-the-environmental-impact-of-pet-food). The numbers are pretty staggering. People seem to want productive animals off farms at the same time as they want pampered animals at home, and don't see the contradiction.

If all else fails, just whack it with a hammer. Do you wear lederhosen when brewing @[1240225973:2048:Dave Nell Thompson]?

7-Eleven going up in Lithgow right now. I'm sure our idiot conservative masters and shock jocks would support the employer, pesky unions get in the way.

What Shorten and Turnbull and others like them around the world should do is get together in secret and agree to support each other through key decisions. Because the biggest danger in the world today doesn't come from either side of politics, it comes from the growing anti-politics forces, the populists. Those forces are what led us into two world wars in the last century, and they're gathering momentum again now. And as people living in these countries, we have to give up our cheap disgust with politics and get behind politics itself, rather than just be constantly cynical and smug about politicians. The anti-politics forces are winning, they have too many of us assuming politics is broken and that politicians are scum. The populists are pointing at real problems, we just have to avoid their solutions.

What's the minimum number of cut and re-joins needed to turn the 4 small chains on the left into the chain on the right?

Love this one, from gizmodo. Private message me if you have an answer, so it doesn't spoil it for others. "At precisely 7:00 a.m., a monk sets out to climb a tall mountain, so that he might visit a temple at its peak. The trail he walks is narrow and winding, but it is the only way to reach the summit. As he ascends the mountain, the monk walks the path at varying speeds. Though he stops occasionally to rest and eat, he never strays from the path, and he never walks backwards. At exactly 7:00 p.m., the monk reaches the temple at the summit, where he stays the night. The following morning at 7:00 a.m. sharp, the monk departs the temple and begins his journey back to the bottom of the mountain. He descends by way of the same path, again walking slowly at times and quickly at others, stopping here and there to eat and drink and rest, but never deviating from the path and never going backwards. Twelve hours later, at 7:00 p.m. on the nose, the monk arrives back at the foot of the mountain. Is there any point along the path that the monk occupied at precisely the same time on both days? How do you know?"

Love Angus, but the similarity is starting to get creepy.

Watching The Martian again the other day, along with the film Gravity there's been a real shift in the way people see science fiction. In the past science fiction was all that corny Star Trek reaching for the stars stuff, to go where no man (sic) has gone before etc. And 2001 was the same, about humankind reaching for the stars and leaving Earth behind. The Martian and these other recent films are flipping things. Suddenly there's a realisation that the one thing standing between all of us and extinction is that thin blue line at the surface of the Earth. Not a greenie message either, the Green movement is often even more conservative than the conservatives it hates, with its fantasies of living at one with Nature etc. As if nature was a thing that even existed. All known life in the universe lives in that thin blue line. Everything we think and do will eventually have to focus on that.

Some say potato, but I say coconut.

Not been a big fan of US cars, but the suspension on this one must be first rate.

Rock on birthday boy!

Germ theory is like a novel, looks a bit boring on the outside but is fantastically interesting up close. The detour though Pasteur and antibiotics is coming to a close in medicine. The Koch and Pasteur theories were all about treating an individual patient and individual disease organisms. But germs, like us, live in ecosystems. So that's where they're going to need to go next, and it's underway. Eat your fermented foods!

This was 1977. Nobody writes songs like this, before or since.

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." Marcel Proust

Fantastic news. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-28/antiseptic-used-in-wwi-could-hold-key-to-treating-superbugs/8062496?section=health&sf43640282=1

Hamilton drives for Germans. Germans don't like shit like this, will be interesting to see. For years the Brits attacked Schumacher for the things they describe as lovable in Hamilton. Let's see how his reputation goes from here.

We're not living in a 'post-truth' era, that's just the next stupid way to misunderstand Trump. It's the 'Trump supporters are stupid' rubbish dressed up in different clothes. As if they're too dumb to understand facts. Fact-checking websites made no real difference to politics even before Trump (and nor should they have). We need to understand politics a lot better.

I haven't met a person yet who talks about 'nanny states' who isn't living some fantasy of being 15 for the rest of their life. If you don't want nanny states, don't act like children.

So much history in one photo.

Remember these smoke pots @[1222290127:2048:Tobias Drengenberg]? Still the biggest explosions I've ever seen at a gig, must have been borderline legal, you can see the whole stage and camera shakes. Still makes the hairs go up on my arms :)

Does protest achieve anything? An open question. Something about it doesn't sit right with me, it has a set of assumptions built into it that are a bit strange. Like the idea that power is 'held' by some group, and that's who we need to protest about or to. That sort of thing makes Chomskyites a bit excited, but it's a really questionable idea. And protest tends to alienate the people whose minds people want to change. There's also sometimes a vanity about it, as if my grievance is the one you should all be paying attention to etc.