February 2018

Love the Bake Off shows. But the Australian one is an embarrassment. Childishly simple bakes, and two judges who aren’t even bakers, whose insight extends to repeated use of phrases like ‘moist’ and ‘great flavour’.

I think law is a beautiful thing, and the beauty of it isn’t often seen. What I see as most beautiful is that it shows us that we are often wrong in the way we understand the relationship between individual things and general things. Between small things and big things, one of my biggest interests. In law there are cases, where individuals go to court. The individual. Each case is considered against all other cases that have been to court - the case law. Each case can also set a precedent, which means alter the case law. You can see that at no point is there an actual difference between the individual and the general case, the case law precedents are themselves made up of individual cases, and each individual case can alter the case law. In ethics this approach is called casuistry, where each situation has to be examined according to its specific details, and assessed against previous cases. It’s an approach, like law, that rejects any splitting of situations into specific and general, individual and general, big and small.

Lessons from relationships, for FB? https://www.nicknotas.com/blog/why-people-you-meet-arent-interested-in-you/

But, but...isn't it all just 'supply and demand'? Huge demand for nurses and emergency workers and teachers and other 'essential workers', in these areas, so surely the 'law of supply and demand' means there will now be a magic supply of these workers, there? Ditto for places like Nyngan and Warren and Ivanhoe, huge demand for doctors and teachers etc., so there must be a huge supply heading out that way? I'm being facetious of course. Nothing like that happens, because that 'law' is the dumbest thing since Daylight Saving.

When we say ‘looking in the mirror’, what do we mean by ‘in’? Where is ‘in’ the mirror? Is the image we see ‘in’ the mirror? If not, where is it?

One of those memes that’s supposed to make you go “hmm, yes”. I think it’s half-right, because you can care for and have compassion for, respect and trust people you don’t love. So there’s a something extra, and it’s not romance. It’s a spark, based on a a feeling of the unknown in the person you love. Something that makes you curious and excited, and which you can never really figure out. They’re always a bit of a mystery to you, they’re something that’s not you and which you can never grasp.

Teenager picking at pimples in the triangle of death. Do you say anything?

I'm sure I already posted, but i can't see it. Happy Birthday big boy! 50?

Dinner, and then a Glass Onion.

If you’ve never seen a camera obscura, the effect is striking. A small hole in a wall or blind won’t just let light in, it projects an entire image of the outside inside the room. Most cameras use this principle, they just add lenses. But if you look closely around you, the same effect happens all over the place. Look at this picture of the shadow cast by a tree during an eclipse. You’ll notice that a ‘picture’ of the eclipse has been captured by many of the tiny gaps between the leaves, causing them to project multiple images of the eclipse onto the side of a house. Traditional theories of light and vision and images can make no real sense of how this all works. It would say a small hole would let light through, but has no convincing explanation for why an entire ‘image’ of the scene seems to come through that hole.

Scott Morrison on the TV, spruiking again that if you give $65 billion in tax cuts to foreign multinational companies in Australia, many of which pay no tax anyway, rivers of gold will flow through to workers in jobs and wages. I'm honestly asking - who believes this stuff? I genuinely scratch my head. We just went through 2 decades of economic boom, and wages went nowhere. If business didn't pay workers more in the biggest boom in history, when would they?

If you suffer from insomnia, here’s what worked for me. Don’t focus on yourself. Insomnia is not anything about you, or your body. Stop all the trying to relax or sleep or whatever other method you try to get to sleep. Sleep is automatic, it doesn’t need any sort of trying or doing. Let that really sink in. Nothing you can do will MAKE you sleep. Once you really accept that, you’re on the way to better sleep. Let the bed do the work. By which I mean take the focus off you, and just let the actual being in bed do the work for you. And give it time to do the work, let that basic rest gradually put you to sleep. Don’t try and rush anything. Sleep is what happens all by itself after you’ve rested for a while. If you feel stresses and tensions and thoughts happening, always go back to getting the focus off you and back to the basic act of laying in bed. If those thoughts and feelings are still there, let them rest in the bed with you too, lay there not trying to do anything at all, except lay there. Don’t even think about sleeping or not sleeping, REST only, but don’t TRY to rest either. The bed will do it for you. Enjoy feeling it do all the work, rediscover the joy of bed, and resting.

Average speed safety cameras for cars, again in the news. NSW is going it alone in not using them (the Nationals don’t like them). These cameras would change our roads in the most profound way. Much smarter and fairer than existing speed cameras, and targeted at people - and there are many - who drive as if the road is their personal space. I’m always amazed how few people actually have the maturity to stay within a speed limit, it reflects the mindset of most driving: me me me. http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/safety-experts-say-a-flick-of-a-switch-would-save-lives-on-nsw-roads-20180209-p4yztb.html

Happy Birthday :)

Michel Foucault challenged the idea that sex was a repressed thing that we needed to talk about. Instead he pointed out that we talk about sex now way more than we ever have in history. Why? Foucault realised that our obsession with sex in modern times is a narrowing of our desires and how they play out in our lives, into the very narrow channel of what goes on in our pants. Germaine Greer used Foucault later to challenge her own Female Eunuch, which said women’s desires were being repressed. She changed that to say sexual liberation was no liberation at all, because it did nothing to address why sex was so central to what we talk about. 13,000 hours of porn is created every year in the world, the channeling of our desires is a global industry. Both men and women are victims of this channelling.

Happy Birthday Belly!

If you go up a few thousand feet, you can see why vegetarianism is not a good idea. About the only thing alive down there is the crop.

The American novelist Richard Powers says that it’s our parents’ weaknesses that have the deepest, most lasting influence on us, above and beyond anything else they teach us. Many peoples’ lives are driven by the attempt to not be the things they saw as weakness in their own parents. But I also think it’s our weaknesses which bind us much more than any of our strengths, not just within families. We are our most human when we are weak and fallible. Nothing connects us faster to another human being than saying “hmm, I really stuffed up here.” As in nature, so in us, the weakest force of nature - gravity - is also the force that holds the entire universe together. The meek shall inherit the Earth. One of the most powerful pieces of parenting I’ve heard of was a friend, talking to her eldest child as a teenager, and saying “look, this is hard for you, but it’s also hard for your dad and me - we’ve never been parents of a teenager before either, we’re learning as we go along”.

We're away! "“Some, but not all, and none of them a small entity, have said they cannot respond within the time fixed ... The deadline cannot be met due to the amount of material that needs to be reviewed and assembled". Meaning...big financial institutions have so much misconduct going on, they need more time to create a list of it. (Or - all shredders are running at maximum capacity.) You couldn't make this up.

The dance floor is a brutal place.

“Private insurance is so counter-productive and so unfair that the best thing would be to end the subsidies and use the saving to improve the performance of the public system. (Howard's claim that his tax rebate would reduce the pressure on public hospitals was always just a fig-leaf to hide his attempt to prop up the two-class system.)”

I prefer the old ways in education, where the focus was habit and not our minds and ideas. And we are, in the West, so lacking poise of mind and body. We’re hyper-sensitized slobs, or hyper-sensitized six packs. William James: “According as a function receives daily exercise or not, the man becomes a different kind of being in later life. We have lately had a number of accomplished Hindoo visitors at Cambridge, who talked freely of life and philosophy. More than one of them has confided to me that the sight of our faces, all contracted as they are with the habitual American over-intensity and anxiety of expression, and our ungraceful and distorted attitudes when sitting, made on him a very painful impression. "I do not see," said one, "how it is possible for you to live as you do, without a single minute in your day deliberately given to tranquillity and meditation. It is an invariable part of our Hindoo life to retire for at least half an hour daily into silence, to relax our muscles, govern our breathing, and meditate on eternal things. Every Hindoo child is trained to this from a very early age." The good fruits of such a discipline were obvious in the physical repose and lack of tension, and the wonderful smoothness and calmness of facial expression, and imperturbability of manner of these Orientals. I felt that my countrymen were depriving themselves of an essential grace of character. How many American children ever hear it said by parent or teacher, that they should moderate their piercing voices, that they should relax their unused muscles, and as far as possible, when sitting, sit quite still? Not one in a thousand, not one in five thousand! Yet, from its reflex influence on the inner mental states, this ceaseless over-tension, overmotion, and over-expression are working on us grievous national harm.”

If you don't want the equivalent of Donald Trump running Australia, listen to this woman. The Americans destroyed their unions - Trump is the outcome. The English the same - they got Brexit. You may not like unions, you may find them a bit confronting and wish people could all kiss and hug and dance in the streets instead. Life doesn't work like that. Working people have to fight to get good lives - they always have, and always will have to.

I think there’s real sense in this. http://www.shaynahiller.com/nutrition/10-reasons-having-a-flat-stomach-is-bad-for-your-health/

Leo McKern as Rumpole, reciting Thomas Hood. A beautiful thing.

Ever noticed that kids are very reluctant to head the ball, when they’re learning to play soccer? I think that’s a natural protective instinct. Have wondered about this for a while, all the attention is on rugby and American football and concussions - the evidence there is more and more scary - but heading the ball in soccer seems at least as bad, to me.

This image is extraordinary. In India, there is huge pressure to pass high school exams. Cheating and corruption is widespread, and that’s what you can see in the photo. This is parents, relatives and friends climbing through the windows of exam centres to provide answers to students taking exams inside. Exam supervisors are often bribed to leave the room while this happens. There are 6.5 million exam-taking students in this particular state of India. When the authorities announced they were going to crack down on cheating, over one million of these students left school immediately. The bigger story for me here isn’t ‘India’s education is corrupt’. It’s that we don’t understand in the rich world just how important education is, we take it for granted and fund it almost grudgingly. The Indians know how important it is, for them it’s the difference between a life of poverty and a chance at a better life. Here we even tell students exams don’t matter, education doesn’t really matter all that much, there will always be another pathway for them etc. True in some ways, but the implicit message we’re giving them is that going to school is pretty much a waste of their time. They act accordingly, and our educational outcomes on global measures are going backwards. School SHOULD be challenging, it should cause a degree of discomfort, it should be hard work and you should have to be outside your comfort zone when you learn. Otherwise you won’t learn a thing. How ‘stressed’ our students are should not be the measure, school was much harder even when I went to school, and stress was lower. So we’re not understanding that stress, it’s not about how hard school is.

Europe offers some of the finest food in the world. And art. And architecture. But it’s a popular music wasteland ;)

Heh.

Language is fascinating. Where does the expression 'having sex' come from? We don't 'have eating' or 'have cleaning' or 'have gardening'.

It’s time to de-privatise banking and return it to being a public service. Since the earliest days of all cultures money-lending has been seen as a social and moral evil. We think we’re too clever for that ancient wisdom, we don’t know our arses from our elbows.

Some ripper tweets on this one.

We seem to be overwhelmingly in love with ourselves, we love people who are like us. Why is the only other option somebody opposite to how we are? We either have to choose between loving a copy of ourselves, or somebody who’s the complete opposite of that? Bollocks.

The Mad Monk has escaped again, this time calling for cuts to immigration. One of the things not many know is that the only thing that keeps economies like Australia's running, is immigrants. Immigration actually fuels economic growth, if immigration hadn't occurred in the past decade (and you can study this directly), Australia would have had at least one recession, in 2009 when the GFC hit. There is nothing else producing any growth in the economy, apart from immigrants and government stimulus. Aging countries like Australia, China, and the US would be completely sunk without immigration, because our birth rates are so low we would have most of our population in nursing homes in a very short time.

“So just how useful are conscious thoughts? Their function is generally limited to giving people a sense of self-identity. Despite the illusion that our thoughts give us agency and power, they actually arise as by-products of our circumstances and our actions – they are not often the cause of them. We are little more than a bunch of conditioned reflexes labouring under the illusion that we are superior controllers. We do have inner lives, apparently, but to change the way we behave requires interventions that influence our non-conscious self. The will - at least for most people most of the time – is little more than a self-delusional consciousness. At best, we have only a small degree of control over our public self.”

"Second, why should students be free of stress? Life is not free of stress. University study requires a great deal of effort and imposes deadlines for which the HSC, stress and all, will have been good practice...Instead of fearing the HSC, students should be encouraged to approach it in the admirable spirit expressed by Professor Michelle Simmons, this year's Australian of the Year: "Do hard things.""

A puzzle about time. Is there a problem with the use of 'when' in this news story? (The supernova is pictured between the red arrows, if you're interested in that part of the story.) "On Sept. 20, 2016, Victor Buso, an amateur astronomer in Rosario, Argentina, was checking out the new camera on his telescope by taking pictures of a nearby spiral galaxy when a star within it went off in a supernova explosion."

Does anybody else wonder if the constant job-changing that is now the norm is less about wonderful opportunities for workers, and more about lots of crap jobs, with little job security to boot? Why are we ‘preparing’ young people for this ‘reality’ more than we are questioning modern jobs?

Happy Birthday, Bassman!

I think this is one of the greatest fantasies at the heart of modern life. The idea of starting society again from scratch, going off-grid, being more ‘authentic’. Think I’ve mentioned that before, I see the passion for authenticity, in life, food, music, religion, and whatever else, as one of the clearest symptoms of the dangers of the times we live in. ‘Only natural ingredients’ in our cooking, getting ‘back to nature’ in outdoor sports and activities, and saving our kids from the evils of modern screen-devices, etc. etc. etc. This was the fantasy that drove the boomers too, of remaking the world anew, out of love; they ended up the richest and most destructive generation in all of human history, what they really did was smash traditions that were thousands of years old, in favour of businesses that tried to take their place, businesses they owned. It made them immensely rich, but at the cost of following generations, who are now struggling with the damage. It’s how this sort of utopian thinking always ends, as it did for this commune.

If it seems that the world has gone mad, Urban Dictionary can help. All of the talk of ‘the Left’ and ‘the Right’ in politics is a sideshow. The real clash we’re all living through is probably much deeper, and nothing to do with politics at all. It’s a clash of worldview, between secular-progressive ways of life, and more traditional conservative ‘religious’ ways of life (although in reality a highly conservative, family values type of religious life). We thought that had all gone away, that science and progress and secularism had triumphed. It never went anywhere, secularism failed to produce traditions of its own, thinking that ideas and fine words are enough. And we keep thinking it’s all about politics. We’re living the same battles humans have for hundreds, or even thousands of years. The next time somebody mentions ‘the Left’, there’s a pretty high chance they’re not of ‘the Right’, but arguing for a return to a more traditional way of life, based in religious values. (Tony Abbott and his followers here in Oz - even a short bit of research on Abbott’s life will tell you this is his main passion, not politics, Santamaria is one of his heroes.) And I don’t take sides in this, I think secularism is a weak way to organise the world, if it doesn’t build institutions to implement secular ideas, just as I think the traditionalists are thoroughly nasty in the way they go about their work in the ‘culture war’.

More Fletcher. We have a tendency to treat feelings as things. We think we are ‘sad’ or ‘happy’ or ‘angry’. But feelings come from the things we do, they’re feelings OF something. Something that really helped me in my life, and the genius of Fletcher was to realise that when our lives become sad or anxious or stressed, or whatever feelings, it’s because they’ve become too narrowly routine. So, as he says, for a healthy life, always do something different, even in the smallest ways. Vary your routines every day, even in tiny ways. “Happiness is the consequence of what we do and how we behave. So when a person who is unhappy shifts their focus and does something different they help themselves to become happier. Trying to think yourself happier is difficult, happiness comes when you change what you do.‘

Who remembers slide rules? Are logarithms still in the syllabus?

He's right, but at the same time these words made me laugh. It's what the AMA has done for decades. Pots and kettles. ""If universities keep unilaterally putting their prestige in their bottom line in front of what’s best for the wider community then we should speak out."

Cars are evil, part 79.

Venice is probably the only major city in the world that can still let you experience what cities were like, before the internal combustion engine. More than anything else, what I noticed in Venice was the quiet. We’re so used to the terrible racket of even our towns now, let alone our cities, that we don’t even realise or often think about a life without noise. It’s heaven. https://youtu.be/K5ZOVriDjy0

Happy Birthday Ian!

Often wondered this as a kid. That it stays about the same level of saltiness is one of the components of the Gaia theory.

Do you work somewhere where your performance is measured? If so you may love this book. Nurses, teachers, police, anybody who suffers in the world of performance measures and KPIs. I have nothing against measurement, but performance measurement is something different again. Destroying many peoples' working lives. Numbers and measures are as political as anything else. In fact I co-wrote a book about it! https://www.amazon.com/Transforming-Measurement-Learning-Teaching-Education/dp/1138118893/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1519857068&sr=8-2&keywords=transforming+the+measurement+of+learning