August 2017

So, either the guys (usually guys) in the tin hats are correct and this is all a hoax. Or we're possibly in deep shit.

Something changed between 1967 and Top Gun. https://youtu.be/_vVV8hRTxgE

Companies use their own 'trickle-down' model. The assumption is you pay the CEO and other senior managers outrageous salaries, because their wisdom will then trickle down to the rest of the company. It never. Ever. Works. http://www.smh.com.au/business/banking-and-finance/ceo-pay-of-600k-is-unethical-survey-20170801-gxmzqt.html

Young couples in love are a bit cute. Firstly there's weeks or even months of flirting, with lots of little coy bits and showing off. Then they get together, and often sit there with a 'shit what do we do now?' look on their faces.

The big secret about schools (and universities). Students learn, but they're doing most of it themselves.

My cup runneth over. Idiot gene research and travel in the one article. http://www.traveller.com.au/science-reveals-why-some-people-just-love-to-travel-gxmw3q

Unions are like feminism. Too many people think they're old news, because they're living the fruits of past fights. Freedom and justice are always work, they're not the natural state of things. If you hate unions, decide whether social breakdown is better.

There are days you just have to sit back and share.

I think people should all be paid roughly the same. But lots of good sense here.

Novels are an example I think of how art is not 'subjective', but so important to actually understanding the world. Including people. Artists and art help us to understand the world in the widest and most profound way, but we too often think that's science. Also I love how this article shows how each person is a constantly changing work in progress. We should approach each other keeping that in mind I reckon, every person is on their own journey and trying as hard as you are to figure it all out.

From 2 years ago. Still good advice I reckon.

One for the 'fake news' junkies. Argue with this.

Two more graphs (thanks to Saul Eslake) that show why Bill Shorten is right on the money. The ordinary worker is being screwed, and has been for some time. No matter what you think of unions, gutting them gutted workers' power at the same time. That was the idea.

Professor John Buchanan, from the University of Sydney business school, says policies of both conservative and Labor governments over the past 30 years have resulted in depressed wages. "None of this stuff is an accident," says Buchanan. "We have had a 30-year attack on labour standards. Workers wages have only ever kept up with productivity when they have strong collective voices."

The same-sex marriage debate is brilliantly showing us I think what's really going on in politics, we just have to look. Why are people so prepared to go to the wall on this issue? I think it's because the people so desperate to not allow same-sex marriage are the same people sometimes called 'the culture warriors'. The people who talk about 'the Right' and 'the Left' a lot. But that's a distraction, these people at root aren't really interested in politics, they're moralists (look at Tony Abbott for example, how deeply his Catholicism drives his politics). They're the people who deep down want to remove the separation between Church and State. To reinstate theocracies, government by religion. It's why they turn every issue - terrorism for example - into a great narrative about good and evil. So I think we keep misunderstanding the politics of today as being about this side versus the other side. It's nothing of the sort, it's a battle between politics itself, and religion, for control of our societies. That battle is centuries old, and is just flaring up again. And both sides have their arguments, it's not as easy as saying one side is just wrong.

Diana and the other people who died would almost certainly have survived if they'd been wearing a seat belt. I remember thinking about that when the crash happened, a seat belt saved my life once. It's the little things.

Discovered something a bit miraculous today. Or re-discovered it, doing a bit of research shows it was first noted in the late 1740s, and has been mostly forgotten for over a century now. Will write it up, it's an amazing thing.

Happy birthday :)

A perfect description of how everything wrong with politics right now is a problem with US, me and you, not politicians. Turnbull is holding together a fragile coalition in the face of enormous pressure, against a huge array of single-issue grievances in the community, whether it's climate change or same-sex marriage, or whatever. He's not weak, it takes great strength to compromise. Instead what do we want, as a community? 'Strong' leadership, people who simplify things and promise simplistic, muscular solutions. Abbott is seen as an achiever because he 'did what he said'. And what was that? He said no, to things. And that's all he did, smashed things. Any idiot can do that, and it's how shock jocks get rich - professional whingers. And now Hanson and Hinch, more simpletons with single issues and simplistic anger-driven solutions. We get the politicians we deserve, we really do. We need to look in the mirror, and learn to love compromise, instead of want all of our individual grievances sorted for us, and stuff everybody else.

Huge week for the LNP. I don't think it's noticed much that the Libs and Nats have almost nothing in common. One is a party of the city, the other the bush. One believes in free markets and free trade, the other loves protectionism. What unites them is hatred of socialists. And, and this is why this week should be interesting, conservative moral values, at least in recent times (in the past Liberals were much more small-l liberal about that sort of thing). So one of the only things holding the current coalition together is that moral conservatism, which same-sex marriage could make explode.

Didn't see this when it first came out, but have now. Can see why it won the Academy Award. If you haven't seen this doco, I'd highly recommend it if you want to understand how banks and in particular finance are the root cause of most of our problems. You may struggle to believe what you see in this film, it's staggering (and also hugely entertaining, not dry). Just one of a thousand amazing facts in it - in less than 10 years, the 5 top executives at Lehman Brothers took home a billion dollars between them in pay and bonuses.

Happy Birthday Ad!

Happy Birthday bio girl :)

*cough* Told ya so :P

Ben Fletcher is a psychologist with I think a message for everybody. Your life is made up of habits. Some of them you'd call 'bad' habits, like what you eat or drink, or smoking, or whatever. Fletcher's genius was to discover that you can change your entire life by changing *any* of your habits - all of your habits are connected and form a 'habit web'. Bad habits are knots in this web, where you become less open and flexible to the situations in your life. The great news, and Fletcher has tested it over and over, is that you don't have to try to change your bad habits at all. Just change any of them, a little bit every day - the route you take to work, which shoe you put on first, stop and check out the sky on your way into work - anything. Doing that breaks up any knots in your habit web. So if you're overweight and can't seem to change your diet, change something else in your life instead. It works, life is all connected, and amazing.

Isn't Brian doing well? More gouging of the public. The public will pay of course. If you asked them to cough up more for science education in schools they'd probably call you a socialist.

And of course, the real tragedy. All those South Asian holidays, gone!

Just hypothetically, if your maths teacher had given you a problem about Mozart and Kochel numbers and hadn't explained anything about how to approach it, this is what I'd do. Just hypothetically. I'd go to this link, it takes too long to explain! https://www.immchallenge.org.au/files/IM2C_sample_problem_Köchel_numbers.pdf

There's apparently a small group of crankies calling for a plebiscite.

There's a look teenagers get heading to school in the morning which reminds me how life can be a bit shit, at that age. Exhibit A. Stock photo, don't have a clue who it is. But captures it well.

Tut.

While on faces, the first in a series of 'women's expressions'. (I don't know if expressions are gendered, but anyway.) Seen any of these? Got some example pics?

Private health insurance has only one real purpose - to make medical specialists rich, at taxpayers' expense.

More expressions. This time I've left off what they supposedly represent, so people can guess.

Only Kato wants to play. Next 3.

It's a difficult emotion, to see this Autumn or even Spring weather all through this winter, especially of a day, and not be able to feel it as in any way as 'lovely weather'. But as a possible disaster in the making. The emotion of seeing personal comfort as the arbiter of what's good and bad maybe. Like we're losing touch with reality.

This statement is true whether it's private insurance, or private roads, water, schools, banks, electricity etc. "Private insurance, however, is an expensive way to fund health care. When we look at the relationship between private insurance and a nation’s total health-care costs, we find a strong positive relationship: the more a country relies on private insurance the more it pays for health care, without any extra benefit."

Do you wear glasses? Glasses are interesting because their invention comes from the assumption that we see with our eyes. It seems obvious that we see with our eyes. But we don't, yes the eyes are involved, but seeing is a much more interesting thing than that. And it's a story that is so little known, and has huge implications in lots of ways, including in the loopy ideas abut 3D (have posted about those), and also whether we really need glasses as much as they're prescribed, or whether we need to re-learn how to see instead. It's a huge and bit long story, but the standard idea is our eyes take in 'images' of the outside world, which our brain then 'processes' for us. Sounds common sense, but it's completely ridiculous in all sorts of ways. For example if the eye really is taking in images, why does the brain need to 'process' them? If you look at diagrams like the one attached, there's the assumption that the image is already fully formed in the eye, onto the back of the retina, before it heads up the optic nerve to the brain. So no processing needed.

Clapton called Emmanuel the greatest guitarist he'd ever seen. The funny thing is, Tommy's background and range is even more vast than they could imagine. He's even better than they realise.

I'd call myself a frugal person. In an era of debt-funded orgies of consumption, that tends to make you look 'cheap' or 'tight'. But it's not about saving money, it's about a whole way of understanding life. How people manage their money is a psychological thing as much as an economic thing. Economics is a branch of psychology. The reason we get financial crises is because we get waves of what is called 'irrational exuberance', where peoples' lives start to be run like a mini-casino. Talking to people just recently about how they shop for groceries, and being surprised that many pay no attention to price at all. And eating out and seeing people pay $25 for a hamburger and chips without blinking. This isn't really about money, it's about the psychology of consumption, how happiness and sense of identity starts to become defined by what you buy and own. It's about status and identity. Also as the article notes, because the majority of people have gone backwards in terms of wealth in the last 2-3 decades, frugality has changed. You won't get that wealth back by counting the pennies (you'll need to join a union instead). But the status economy is one we're all living inside, and we don't look at the psychology of it enough I don't think.

The simplest way to feel better fast, when you're sick, is to stop fighting the symptoms. Those symptoms aren't the disease, they're your own body at work. I've tried this with colds and pain and it works. Embrace the pain of the symptoms, don't fight them. The pain goes away much faster, as does the illness.

A question about ethics. If you have the flu, do you offer to give somebody a lift in your car when you'll be driving for an hour or more, and not tell them you're sick?

I'm sure I can link this to travel. The more you do it, the less it 'works' and the more extreme varieties you need to keep you going. http://www.executivestyle.com.au/how-watching-porn-is-ruining-reallife-sex-for-young-men-gxuil8

I think she possibly has left this much too late. At this age she won't really be around to assist whoever the new monarch is, in any transition, and she won't be there to be able to trot out to others as a calming sense of continuity.

Hmm, yes.

From a few weeks ago...if you found yourself on a train with Paul McCartney, sitting alone, what would you do?

Some pictures say an awful lot.

We love our Big 4 banks. But what really goes on in banking is slowly coming to light. We don't ever learn, finance should never, ever be allowed to run countries.

Revenge is a tasty dish.

I don't mind Barnaby. But I'm not sure which country he's talking about here ;)

People are often disgusted with politicians arguing. This disgust actually irritates me, politics is the way societies invented to resolve their differences. I think it was Paul Keating who once noted that societies whose politicians don't argue usually live in a state of constant civil war. It really amazes me that people think politicians should just 'all get along'. In my experience even in a club or workplace of 5 or 6 people, people often don't get along, they bitch and moan and undermine other people - all the things they hate in politicians. We need to be more grown up about this and recognise that there are profound differences between us sometimes, and they need to be argued out, there is no happy compromise. I love the UK parliament, it's a bear pit. As it bloody should be.

Happy birthday Kath :)

A collage.

Dawko has somewhere to retire. North Korea bans all religion. Seems to be working out for them, a fun place to live.

Can't remember who I stole this from. But gold.

Is there a behaviour more annoying than passive-aggressive behaviour?

A P.S. on yesterday's post. Very few people seem to like politics, and maybe a majority of people think politicians should be 'nicer' to each other. Anybody who has been involved in a group of any kind, like at work or a sporting club, knows that people are really talking out of their butts with politics. The sort of behaviour they hate in politicians is what they do every single day with their colleagues. I still think there's a lot of truth to the research that shows that many people stop maturing emotionally in high school. Lots of adult life is the same sort of interpersonal politics we live through at high school.

When they teach maths at school, they rarely give you the history behind the maths. It's the history which often brings the whole subject alive. Take calculus. Calculus firstly is some of the sexiest *looking* maths you can do. Those curves and functions, beautiful. It was invented almost simultaneously by 2 giants of thought, one a philosopher (Leibniz) and the other a scientist (Newton). What they rarely tell you at school is why we need calculus, and why we need algebra, and why we need geometry (the big 3). Geometry helps us understand shapes and angles, algebra gives us a way to generalize basic arithmetic, and calculus gives us a way to calculate how things are changing (slopes of curves and areas under and beneath curves). There is a pretty good argument that sometimes scientists are better teachers of maths, because there can show you how it's actually used. A lot of people hate maths, often because it was so badly taught. I don't think anybody is born bad at maths, or bad at any subject, it all comes back to the teaching.

Here's a puzzle. Can you find any differences between the two images?

Well, it said share...

It was angles that led the ancient Greeks to invent the idea of atoms. You know those questions you sometimes ask as a kid, about the infinitely big and infinitely small, like if the universe ends at this point, what's beyond that point? Or if you keep cutting something up, do you ever get to a smallest bit? You can think about that stuff all day and not come up with an answer, but the Greeks realised there was a very practical example of it right in front of them. The tangent. A tangent is the smallest angle possible. Defined as the angle between a straight line just touching a curve, and the curve, as in the picture. Something we all drew in high school, probably without guessing that it was the root of a lot of our science. You can draw it, but you can't calculate that angle, because it's infinitely close to the slope of the curve - the closer you get to it, the more it disappears in a puff of slope in front of you. It was that impossible tension between something you could easily draw but which couldn't be measured or analysed that drove the Greeks to invent the idea of the infinitesimal, and atoms. But their atoms weren't like the little balls you learned about in school, they were vortices, angles constantly changing and undefinable. We still haven't come back to that linking of maths to the real world in that way, we've forgotten a lot of that wisdom.

Bit of a shame Arnie cant run for Pres in the US.

Nick Hanauer using the same smarts that made him a billionaire, to explain why we're stuck between two groups of idiot extremists.

It's not a secret I hate daylight saving. But it's always been difficult to explain to others what it is about it that is so stupid and so appalling. I think this nails it. We have a semi-religion of WAKISM, as described in this article, and daylight saving is just one of the more stupid aspects of it. We've medicalised sleep and made it about EEGs and hormones and brain chemicals. But what we've really done is a much, much bigger and more serious, existential thing. Fantastic insights here too into many aspects of this problem, like how sleeping pills don't help sleep, they just make you forget being awake. We're hyperaroused. Our conscious selves are constantly anxious and exhausted, trying to make the world revolve around them. Fuck daylight saving, it's not far off again. https://aeon.co/essays/the-cure-for-insomnia-is-to-fall-in-love-with-sleep-again

Not done with angles. Trig is a bit of a trick, the sin, cos and tan we learn at school are really just ratios of lengths, they can help you measure lengths and deviations, but they don't actually tell you anything about the angles themselves that generate the deviation in the first place. Angles can't be defined, we can only measure the deviations they cause. The angle is the cause of all things. Pure deviation, undefinable.

*duck* You just don't see this as much any more. Aprons, so versatile.

Happy Birthday crater cheeks 🙂 We love you! Always that smile, and the calm, and the thinking of others. You're alright :)

"t'wired" is a modern contraction of tired and wired. Where you're simultaneously exhausted and wide awake/alert. Exhaustion makes you want to collapse down, being alert makes you want to be up. So really t'wired is the old rack.

Anybody else hate the telephone? It has some great uses, but I don't like it mostly because it seems rude. Rings loudly at you firstly - like having a conversation with somebody and them yelling "talk to me! talk to me!" at you over and over. Then you can get stuck on it with people who want to vomit up every emotion they've been sitting on all day.

Each of those red flames, 100 times bigger than the Earth.

Who got the cane at school? I did, multiple times, and it was a lot bigger than that.

Happy Birthday Sax!

Do people think Church and State should be separate? A lot of what's going on in politics is driven by people who think the answer to that is a firm no. That fight never went away.

It really has changed the world, or better the world has used it to change itself. Lots of people only come to FB to share their personal lives, and that's a choice, but FB is doing so, so much more. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/aug/28/from-relationships-to-revolutions-seven-ways-facebook-has-changed-the-world

Snoring is one of those things like sitting, said to be bad for you, and yet so many do it. I have wondered if one of the reasons so many people snore, and sleep badly generally, is because we sleep on flat beds. Are we really built to sleep on a flat surface? If you look at other apes, their beds sink in the middle, they're like big round wicker chairs that were popular in the 1960s and 1970s. And somebody has built a bed based on chimpanzee bed design, note that it has rockers underneath too. Whereas sleeping flat gives the body no support at all.

"The difference between theory and practice is always greater in practice than it is in theory." Wag.

I imagine boomers sitting around their daily Alan Jones or Paul Murray, sucking down the wines and popping the pills, talking about how young people have lost the plot, while planning their next 'round the world trip with the kids' inheritance money.

There's something in the air...

"I would be very emphatic that our schools, our parishes exist to teach a Catholic view of marriage," he said. I would be very emphatic that they take some of the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars they're getting and teach some maths, science and english with it. There was a time Catholic education was about...education. Not training people for the Ministry. Now we have a Jesuit pope, maybe we can hope to get education back front and centre in Catholic schools, not piety.

Our schools really do fail our boys, far too often. I sit through annual awards ceremonies watching lines of grinning girls and think about whether schools still really don't have a clue about boys.

It's a real thing.

I don't think this is just about smart and dumb. It's true smart people need to speak up more than they do, but what usually determines what happens in the world isn't thinking - it's power, and status. Most of life and work is just an extended version of high school, with the same status rubbish that goes on there. https://www.theguardian.com/global/commentisfree/2016/jun/06/smart-people-stupid-things-simple-answer

It's about time we went after the disgusting greed at the top-end of town. Maybe the LNP would call this 'the politics of envy', I call it organised crime.

Waleed Aly was spot on about this. The idiot moralists in the LNP have scored a possibly massive own-goal, with impacts well beyond marriage equality. Suddenly there are 100,000 extra potential Greens/Labor voters on the electoral roll, for the next election.

Happy Birthday!

This is one reason I'm looking forward to more automation in cars, what's sometimes called self-driving cars. (A bad name for them, because the idea in most cases is to help the driver, not to replace them.) I once had a serious car accident because I fell asleep behind the wheel. Like everybody else, I never thought that would be me. If semi-automated cars were around back then, the accident wouldn't have happened. It could also have hurt or killed somebody else, it's just luck that it didn't.

This 'fight' is potentially the dumbest thing since Alien vs Predator.

Unregulated doctors' fees and patient choice versus uncontrollable insurance costs. Insurers try to introduce 'managed care' to control costs, doctors push back because it restricts their capacity to treat. The answer? Reduce the power of doctors and insurers in health governance, and make the test the public good. No more private health insurance, regulated fees, no more private hospitals that can cherry-pick patients, much more powerful community health options, evidence-based procedures etc.

Looks about as useful as every consultant I've ever met.

Do lots of people hate you? Here's the good news :)

Knowledge is in the world, not of the world. "On the planking, on the ship's bulwarks, on the sea, with the course of the sun through the sky and the ship, an unreadable and wrenching script takes shape, takes shape and destroys itself at the same slow pace - shadows, spines, shafts of broken light refocused in the angles, the triangles of a fleeting geometry that yields to the shadow of the ocean waves. And then, unceasingly, lives again." Marguerite Duras, The North China Lover

Yanis, yeh.

Happy Birthday :)

Happy Birthday :)

Gabriel Tarde, describing most of our lives in one sentence. Tarde showed that there is almost nothing that isn't explainable by imitation. "...it is for the pleasure of change, of not doing the usual thing, that the part of the public which is influenced by fashion adopts a new product to the neglect of an old one; then when the novelty has become acclimated and appreciated for its own sake the older product seeks a refuge in the cherished habits of the other part of the public which is partial to custom and which wishes to show in that way that it also does not do the same thing as the rest of the world."

All the lonely people.

I think the "fitness" myth is one of the toughest to crack. But it's starting to unravel. Not only is 'fit' probably a meaningless idea - we can be fit-to-do certain things, but there's such probably no such thing as being 'fit' generally - but all the exercise so many people are doing to try to 'keep fit' is probably doing untold damage to their bodies, as this cardiologist explains well. Exercise is huge physical forces, applied to your body. It doesn't make you lose weight, and those forces do real damage. What else would we expect? You flog the body with huge forces, it will damage it. Given the average little old lady can put almost a tonne of force on their body doing something as simple as hopping up out of a chair, you can imagine how enormous the forces are once gym equipment and other exercise gets involved.

Does anybody still watch Rumpole? A hero of mine, he feels like something from a much wiser time.

Dumb is like an echo chamber, it feeds on itself. (Obama wasn't elected as President until 3 years after Hurricane Katrina.)

Better value than Australian housing.

Do you ruminate? (No cow jokes.) That cycle, where emotions and feelings produce thoughts, often about the emotions and feelings, and then that extra thinking makes the emotions and feelings even stronger, making you think more about it all, and then the feelings and emotions get even stronger...and on and on and on. It's not so much a cycle as a spiral, because each time you go around the level of emotion and feeling is stronger, and the amount of thinking increases. You get sucked deeper and deeper into the vortex, like a black hole. This is how depression works, but a lot of us probably do milder forms of it as well, every day. We're stuck in our heads.

Sing it people.