April 2017

Happy Birthday Kirst! Will call you later

Happy Birthday Kerry :)

Joy. Sunrise before I get out of bed. Look away if you're under 15. Fuck daylight saving.

Listening to a ninny from the Business Council of Australia talking about their win on tax cuts. Bring back Dwight. Even dead he's smarter.

Buildings look like inanimate objects, but notice what happens almost the day they're abandoned. They get trashed. Buildings and people form a sort of ecosystem, they need each other. A building is a living thing, an institution. Facilities managers know this, that the greatest unspoken cost of all building is 'maintenance', the ongoing cost to keep a building alive. Architects rarely think about it. One of the scariest things in the world for me right now is the enormous amount of infrastructure that has been built over the last century, where the ongoing upkeep hasn't been costed. Concrete in particular, most of it is crumbling.

Everything is a war now, apparently.

Think it's less than a week since a well-known chef copped a pasting for suggesting links between food and mental health.

Happiness is giving $24 billion of your money away. It's not like we needed it for anything. Is there a collective noun for idiots in dark suits?

Twins rock. I have a friend who studies baby communication. It's amazing how much babies know and do that we don't even realise.

Today's homework Nigel Cousins. Make dividend imputation understandable to us common people. And at the same time explain why with full dividend imputation, as we have in Oz, any cuts to company tax are completely irrelevant. Talk about a sexy topic. But it's about people being screwed - us - so I guess screwing and sex are sort of related?

Air pollution costs Australia between 11 and 25 billion dollars a year in health costs. And we're one of the better countries. A real sleeper health issue. The National Pollutant Inventory (http://npi.gov.au/npi-data/search-npi-data) lets you enter your own post code to see readings for your area. You can see figures for everything from your local tip, to cars, lawnmowers and wood fires. If you have a power station nearby...gulp.

Generations of Australians were brought up to think 'you can't lose money on housing'. A nuclear-scale reality check may be coming their way.

Peter Andrews, the genius Australian farmer, sometimes describes how landscape revegetates itself. You can see it here - from my walk to work - how rain and storms have piled soil and plant debris into semi-circular arcs. That creates mini dams behind which more soil and debris gets caught, and soon there's enough there for plants like grass to grow, which stabilizes the mini-dam even further. Then the hollow behind the arc fills up, and eventually you just have smooth grass where there was once nothing. Look down on any piece of grass that's growing wild and you'll see this. You'll even feel it under your feet, as the process gets more than halfway to finished, it will feel a bit undulating under your feet. I post one of these every storm season, love them, the world is amazing, but you have to look.

Another great topic. The brain. It doesn't store memories, images or thoughts. It doesn't store our 'minds'. It's a lump of electrified meat.

There's something powerful about abandoned places, and there's a big group of people out there who seem to share the feeling, the pics are everywhere. Gilles Deleuze I think put his finger on what makes abandoned places interesting. He said it's about time, that an abandoned building for example isn't just crumbling walls, floors and furniture, it holds the lives of the people who lived in it - their often many years of life in the place. Those ruins aren't an instant of time, they're all of those years enveloped within the ruins, you feel those lives directly by being there or seeing them.

I see a lot of students and even adults holding pens and pencils in sometimes horrendous ways. My own kids included! Maybe it's not as big an issue now, that typing is much more common. But the physical strain some experience just from writing are huge.

Just about every major news outlet ran with this story yesterday. Not one of them thought to check if spider bites actually cause this - they don't. But the story runs so often now that people have come to believe that white-tails do this. No spider does. But there is a good lesson in the story, that we shouldn't be complacent with cleaning wounds, even minor ones. Don't just chuck a band aid on, clean first, povidine is my favourite but my medical friends like @[728961585:2048:Angela Gray] and @[1240225973:2048:Dave Nell Thompson] may have better options.

A path on my way to work. A serious question - would you take the path, or invent another route nearby? And why?

If we spent the proceeds of the mining boom (one of my pet ideas, apologies if you've had it inflicted on you before) on building high speed rail WEST from Sydney or Melbourne out into the rest of Australia - that part west of Penrith, Sydney folk, where dragons live - we could have changed the whole country. That would dissolve a big chunk of the city/country divide in one go, and people could live way out into the regions if they wanted to and still commute. It would make location almost irrelevant. Instead we pissed the lot up against a wall in tax cuts to people who didn't need them. And when we do talk about high speed rail, we talk about Sydney and Melbourne and Canberra. We need people out of those places, not in them.

Probably too easy, but who's this?

This is a dry topic, but it will change everybody's lives. Let me just go on the record to say that when the big banks come to the taxpayer for handouts when the economy goes into meltdown, as housing collapses, we really should tell them where to go. But we won't because they have us all by the short and curlies. It's a national outrage what they do, a global one too. They are the key to creating economies-as-casinos, and they always get away with it.

Fry is like Gervais, for me. A creative human being, who just occasionally says something incredibly stupid. Like this.

"In a few decades city dwellers will look back on the twilight of the internal combustion engine and ask why governments were so much slower than consumers to read its last rites."

It took quite a few years for the dangers of sugar to be taken seriously. Exercise will be a much tougher nut to crack, the idea that exercise is intrinsically good for you, and the more the better, is one of our deepest myths. There are a lot of people doing irreparable damage to their joints for example, and more disturbingly their hearts. The forces people put on their bodies are enormous, and those forces cause damage. They can even make cells cancerous, so it's not just 'physical' damage. Elite athletes are often sick. That should tell us something.

Don't usually like covers of BoRhap. But not too shabby.

Good on Sunbeam for reinventing "This Way Up".

Don't think they make these any more. But clever.

Real-time thoughts for me today, 3 people on the bus and one is a young guy in his early 20s whose stench is so bad you can barely bring yourself to breathe in at the other end of the bus. He's a serial offender, is always filthy and absolutely stinks. It might be excusable for the homeless, for example. But anybody else - is it just a grin and bear it thing? Teenagers are often ruthless, they tell people they stink. Unfortunately they're on holiday... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/6149070/Proposal-to-ban-smelly-people-from-buses-causes-a-stink.html

Some things need regular re-posting. The Stoics had a way of understanding life that will keep you happy in the most sensible, practical way. Summarised in one flow chart.

Sigh, Clarke was such a breath of sanity. RIP.

Another one of the interesting myths that live with us. Average life expectancy. You can ask just about anyone, and they'll tell you that we live much longer today than our ancestors, mostly due to advances in marvellous modern medicine. It's not true. And it's not even true that people in rich countries today live longer than people in poor countries. We're just bad at maths. Average life expectancy is the average number of years a newborn baby can be expected to live in a given society. Why our *average* life expectancy in the Western world looks like it's grown so much is because our babies don't die like they used to. They're not living to much older ages as adults, they're just surviving to adulthood in much greater numbers. We forget about averages. A person who reaches 65 today is not much more likely to live to 100 than a person who reached 65 500 years ago. There aren't a whole lot of 100+ year old people around, at any time in human history. This myth is a hard one for people to dump though, because it's one of the ways they think the modern world is special, that we're smarter now and our knowledge has helped us live longer. For example if you say to people that our ancestors ate lots of fat and salt, they will say "yes but they lived to about 35, didn't they?" And there's the bad maths, and the myth.

Bus driver: "the whine in the diff on this bloody thing is worse than my ex-wife."

I think mischief is a beautiful word. And a beautiful thing. Little boys specialise in mischief, and are usually in trouble for it. Mischief is like humour but more gentle, and more engaged in the things of the world. It's a sparkle in the eyes, like Clarke had, it's a beautiful way to change the world, because it really is about changing things, through smiles. "...here was a God of Mischief, visiting to simultaneously bring us the truth and make it easier for us to handle."

The Argument to Moderation, also known as the Golden Mean Fallacy. 'Everything in Moderation'. In this extreme time in history, people feel that the truth 'must lie somewhere in the middle'. In politics, food, exercise, immigration - you name it. In politics it's sometimes used as "The Overton Window", to persuade people into voting for what they see as 'the sensible centre'. It's hard to accept, because it seems the sensible way forward to people living in extreme times. But it's a trap, and a well known one at that, going back to those clever Ancient Greeks, who saw through it. I bang on about moderation because I don't like living in extreme times, and this isn't the way out of them. And it's also just interesting to understand all the many faces of rhetoric - the art of persuasion, the ways people are persuaded to act.

Blackboard, Bill Steamshovel and Squiggle. I miss them. I thought I missed Bill and Ben the Flower Pot Men too, but watching some of that on YouTube again, I realise it was some sort of acid trip for kids.

This is where knowing what to think about Trump is tricky. Neville Chamberlian was widely criticised in hindsight for trying to appease Adolf Hitler, on Hitler's rise to power. To try to negotiate with him. In hindsight obviously Hitler had no interest in that, and some say Chamberlain and other allies should have acted physically to have Hitler removed. Fast forward to today and leaders of North Korea and Syria are similarly unlikely to negotiate, on anything. Putin is probably similar. So maybe, just maybe, a bit of muscle is the way forward. There are no easy answers in politics.

Yes @[100001374621876:2048:Michael Kato], this is a good one. http://www.theherald.com.au/story/4591325/ice-problems-not-as-bad-as-grog-abuse-poll-photos/?cs=305

"...news from our friends about their families’ triumphs and trials has become omnipresent, unrelenting—a never-ending vacation slide show from hell." 'Oversharers' often see FB as like an extension of their actual lives. It's like opening the old social pages in the middle of the local newspaper. There's nothing wrong with that either, sharing those things is nice, in moderation dare I say. But the weird part is how many can't see FB in any other way, if you don't post personal things for example, people will see those posts as a reflection on the life you're living, they'll suggest the person is dull or an 'overthinker'. As if FB is supposed to be some picture of a person and their life. Often posts have very little connection to the everyday life somebody is living, they're just ideas they want to talk about. 'Overthinking' is an illusion caused by oversharing. FB is a public space, not a private space, it's the people who understand and respect that distinction who share less, not more, and use FB for more public activities, like discussion. It's about respect and vanity too, about not assuming the details of your personal life are actually interesting to other people. It's what they try to teach kids in schools about social media.

Hmm, more possibly dubious use of averages. The 'typical' Australian is not the 'average' Australian. The typical Australian would be the modal Australian I think, in statistics, and maybe that's what the ABS has done here, but I'm not sure. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-11/typical-australian-revealed-in-2016-census-data-release/8434178?sf69827976=1

Guess who?

We cycle half of our closest friends roughly every 7 years. Friendship is fascinating, it's something that is highly dependent on circumstances and stages of life, and friendships are what help us move through those stages. They usually have an expiration date. One of the reasons Proust was underwhelmed by friendship was because of this - that's it's very often more a means to an end than a deep, lasting relationship.

Here you go @[606028898:2048:Jason], this might give you heart (ha). I did a lot of endurance exercise as a younger man, and developed atrial fibrillation, have always wondered if it was related. Cyclists often develop it too. Extreme exercise has become even more popular, as a kid I barely remember anybody I know running a marathon or triathlon for example, or cycling 50km. We live in an age of extremes.

We think we're a bit clever for religion these days, but the true message of Easter is much more profound than all the self-help, self-esteem, self-improvement and status-seeking we've replaced it with in our lives. Elizabeth Farrelly on the same theme: "Junichiro Tanizaki​ famously wrote of the depth and resonance brought to Japanese architecture – its textures and toilets and even tableware – by the creation and play of shadow. "The beauty of a Japanese room depends on a variation of shadows, heavy shadows against light shadows – it has nothing else. Westerners are amazed at the simplicity of Japanese rooms, perceiving in them no more than ashen walls bereft of ornament. Their reaction is understandable, but it betrays a failure to comprehend the mystery of shadows. Indeed, Western culture has pretty much devoted its post-Enlightenment centuries to abolishing shadow – pain, depth, mystery – in its bid to outwit death. Consider modernism's open plan, white wall, floor-to-ceiling glass and ultra-smooth materials. It was (is) a war on texture and interiority that evolved into a war on anything sad, recessive, quiet or still, and in turn, into a social media world where if you're anything other than excited (Facebook) or angry (Twitter) there's something seriously amiss."

If you live West of the Great Dividing Range, you assume there's a degree of misunderstanding about you. But maybe you don't expect it to be this bad.

Nicholas Christakis is a professor of medicine and sociology, and studies social networks. What's he's found is amazing, and gives us new ways to understand how our everyday social life interacts with our online social life, and how our health and happiness are profoundly linked to our social networks. Even more interestingly, he shows how the social network is itself a living thing, semi-independent of the individuals in it. Some of the findings - obesity is contagious. We can become fat if our friends are fat. Broadway musicals succeed or not depending on the social network of the people who put them together.

It's strange that we wouldn't tolerate this for flying, but we do for driving. There are lots of things that could be done, but the biggest challenge of all is getting people to give up the individual focus of cars and bikes. We treat them like little homes on wheels, our own little bit of territory.

Happy birthday Mel! We're creeping close to that half century...

Some see this as evidence of political correctness, or as some sort of attempt to appease halal food requirements. Others, with properly functioning brains, see this as Cadbury selling eggs that are good for Easter egg hunts. Happy Easter, loons and all!

There's much more going on in the sharing of personal life on FB than we see on the surface. Lots of it is driven by comparison, under the cover of keeping people updated on what's going on. Comparison is the heart of all social life, but it's also the source of all unhappiness in social life.

Australia does well here.

Michel Serres talks about legend, as having two related meanings. One as a type of story, and the other as the legend on a map, which tells you how to read the map. Serres says the two meanings are connected. The legends (stories) that have come down to us are also the legend that allows us to understand our world and lives. One of these is the legend of angels, which seems like silly mythology to atheists, but which Serres says is, like all religious stories, a very precise way to understand something profound about our lives. Angels are messengers, they pass on important news about God and the world. This makes angels a legend for our time, because for the last 100 years our technologies have been focused most heavily on communication. They tell us instantly what's happening, just about anywhere. They 'announce' the news of the world, every moment, good and bad. They make us feel directly the responsibility and glory and guilt of what happens everywhere, and we live that continuum between glory and guilt every single day.

Happy Birthday Aunty Bev! The Queen of remembering birthdays! Hope you have a wonderful day :)

How much space you get in an aeroplane is dependent on how much you pay. But should there be exceptions based on physical reasons? Should tall people for example have to pay thousands more just to receive a seat they can actually sit in? This is a variation of debates around whether overweight people should have to pay for extra seat room. I think that's probably fair enough, but height isn't something you can gain or lose, you're stuck with it.

This tells many stories, thanks CommSec.

Happy birthday Fireman Cam! it is today?

eBay's most popular current categories confirm what iPhone users already know.

Oops.

Etiquette matters. Hugely, including on FB. This one is a pet peeve of mine, there are 26 others in this article. "If you can’t attend an event that you’re formally invited to, don't think that not RSVPing is the same as declining. And don't RSVP at the last minute for an event that involves real planning by the host."

*high five Cooerwull* They maketh woman too.

I can see an argument coming...

Call me a cynic but I reckon some of the loudest voices for this test couldn't pass it themselves. A bit like how people obsessed with law and order break laws for a hobby.

Nomadic Matt trying to assuage his guilt. Not his fault, it's the 'tourists'. He's as much as part of it as anybody else, his solution won't work. Tourism is like the debates around city versus country. In reality the 'country' is just a mini-city, and once a regional town gets big enough it's clear that it was just a city-in-the-making all along. City and country are actually the same thing, seen through different lenses. Ditto with tourism, the underlying model - of 'seeing the world' - is really just extending the tourist's lifestyle to new places. Eventually the tourist destination becomes just some new offshoot of the tourist's home country. Not a reason not to travel, but a reason not to be naive about it. It's delusional to think travel doesn't change the places you go to see. Often in very bad ways.

"3D" TV and film have struggled to take off every time they've been launched and re-launched over the past century. People usually hate the hassle of the glasses, but even more they just don't think ordinary TV and films are lacking anything. But what if ordinary "2D" images aren't 2D? Seriously, when you watch TV or films, does what you watch seem flat to you? Do you think "hey that's a person, but she's all squashed flat"?

Beautiful. For the shy people out there. One gem: "The internet, far from cutting us off from each other, has simply provided more fodder for our own era’s fascination with emotional authenticity and therapeutic self-expression — a shift in public attitudes towards personal privacy that Eva Illouz, professor of sociology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has called ‘the transformation of the public sphere into an arena for the exposition of private life’."

Last week Malcolm Turnbull talked about Australian values. Every year during the Easter-Anzac Day time, it's clear that what Australians value more than anything else, is holidays.

"This Anzac Day let's maybe tone down the talk of noble sacrifice and Australianess and remember that eight thousand young men, all of whom were sons and brothers and nephews and friends and husbands and grandsons, were brutally mown down by equally terrified young men on a beach in Turkey just over a century ago in order to achieve absolutely nothing. That is the true lesson of war, and right now it seems like a lesson that we're in danger of being taught again." Andrew Street

Was cool 5 years ago. Nothing has changed.

This is the actual second verse of Advance Australia Fair, which isn't well known. When gallant Cook from Albion sail'd, To trace wide oceans o'er, True British courage bore him on, Till he landed on our shore. Then here he raised Old England's flag, The standard of the brave; With all her faults we love her still, "Brittannia rules the wave!" In joyful strains then let us sing "Advance Australia fair!"

The chest, the chain, the facelift.

Standing with my prediction that T20 cricket will destroy cricket.

In the old days Pauline, they just came right out and said it.

I'm not completely sure the fact a sequence of numbers would need to pass through zero means the climate would have to do the same. You can get discontinuous jumps in reality. But happy to be proved wrong.

"People are more interested in actually communicating, instead of broadcasting. We don’t want personal and private lives merging any more...". Young people get it, they're smarter than we give them credit for.

Gas companies are exactly like property developers. Disgusting vermin. Both use the same language, we need more 'supply'. Which just means they both want even more public land, having used up what they'd already been given (and in the case of the gas companies, sold off overseas so we'll never see the money) to plug into their business model, which makes them rich and screws the rest of us. I doubt Turnbull will win this one. This is how stupid Australia has become under decades of 'government is evil' rubbish imported from the US. The big corporates fill that stupidity void left by slashing regulation, and the rest of us use debt to just survive.

Still love this one. If you measure the pressure in the tyres while a car is up on a lift like this, and then again when the car is on the ground again, which pressure will be higher?

If you call it a probe rather than a drone, you can do whatever you like. Alas no naked Saturnian celebrities.

If comedians and musicians can be worth hundreds of millions, why can't somebody who has led the free world be rich? It's a much, much harder job than writing a fantasy novel or joke or song.

Happy Birthday :)

This is me. And my boy. Homebodies.

This is what you've been saying @[728961585:2048:Angela Gray]? Reading it described this way, it sounds like the same concerns most small businesses have. Small business is rarely very profitable, there aren't economies of scale. Corner shops and other small shops have significantly disappeared over the past decades for the same reason. In this case small practices have survived because of historically larger incomes than most small businesses, which the Medicare rebate freeze has put a lid on. The rebate freeze is designed to undermine Medicare, which is despicable, but what it has done has forced medicine into the same situation as most small business. Are GPs setting up their own bigger practices, to take on the corporates? http://www.smh.com.au/national/health/gps-despair-as-work-pressures-on-the-rise-20170426-gvstzn.html