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Dec. 1st, 2009 @ 12:29 pm
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As a follow up to my recent post, on the issue of how most Global Warming deniers have past history denying the ozone hole, smoking as a health issue, etc.
Hahahaha! ""Senator Minchin wishes to record his dissent from the committee's statements that it believes cigarettes are addictive and that passive smoking causes a number of adverse health effects for non-smokers,"
Minchin was claiming cigarettes weren't addictive! In the 1990s! ROFL.
If you ever find yourself tying to understand the mindset of the climate change deniers in the Liberal Party, just think about that. The power of ideological self-delusion is truly monumental.
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Dec. 1st, 2009 @ 12:08 pm
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OMG, Tony Abbott was a Rhodes Scholar! How did someone who obviously had some academic ability in the past end up as Tony Abbott?
But still, fact-checking fail, SMH - Abbott is not "the first Opposition Leader to have been a Rhodes scholar since former Labor leader Kim Beazley." He is the first Opposition leader to have been a Rhodes scholar since... Malcolm Turnbull. |
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#spill
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Dec. 1st, 2009 @ 03:00 am
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Most nights are slow in the politics game, Hunter S. Thompson used to say. But not this week.
There are ways in which I like to say that for people into politics, politics is like sport. You can have a kick with your local team on the weekends, watch the big leagues on the telly and cheer like mad, enjoy the cameraderie and anger that comes with tribalism, get very drunk when your team wins the Grand Final.
There are some ways in which politics is not like sport. For one thing, it can be pretty random. The Liberal leadership spill is like they've just declared a special bonus super-grand final with two days notice. Or maybe a mud wrestling match.
And there are other ways in which the two differ. In most sports, watching a match played really ineptly isn't that entertaining, even with the schadenfreude of it not being your team. In politics, watching some really really inept play from the opposing team? Absolutely hilarious.......
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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) alaimacerc reports that this weekend Jeremy Clarkson, Top Gear host, freelance opinionated wanker, and known climate change denier, was on UK TV commenting approvingly on old clips of himself denying not just global warming but the ozone hole as well.
( a global warming denial rant )
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Things that I am grateful for this week.
Rediscovering music. Been pulling out artists that I haven't listened to for a while, like Godspeed You Black Emperor, and Air, and Laurie Anderson, and loving it.
A nice stereo at home, and a cute little one in my office, to facilitate this.
Catching up with old friends that I haven't see for far too long, which I did last weekend, and yesterday afternoon.
My wonderful, hardworking (in lots of ways at the moment), caring, resourceful wife.
Good friends and long-running roleplaying games.
Good food available within easy walking distance
The advances in medicine that offer viable treatment and hope for the future to so many people I know with chronic and/or life-threatening medical conditions
Delicious beer. I have monk beer from New Norcia.
And OK, just a little bit of schadenfreude at the Liberal Party implosion. OK, maybe a lot of schadenfreude. I'm actually kind of pleased that the showdown is over climate change. If it was over any other issue, we'd see the delusionist disease continue to fester in the heart of the party rooms, but the way things are going, in a few months it might be driven out of mainstream politics. Either that, or the Libs will be consigned to being even more unelectable. Either is good. |
| » Fear the Future |
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I always thought the common SF trope of Artificial Intelligences turning on humanity and attempting genocide was, while making for good stories, unduly alarmist and not that plausible. But it suddenly seems a whole lot more likely if we base AIs on cats.
Think of a godlike cat treating humans like mice, and I have no mouth and I must scream doesn't sound so bad.
Nov. 27th, 2009 @ 01:03 pm
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This morning I was woken up from a dream by realising that I was in a dream. I was thinking about why my laptop was still working when partly underwater, pondering how it must have good internal waterproofing and that really was a surprise, when I realised that that was nonsense and I must be in a dream, whereupon I woke up and was disappointed that reality wasn't as pleasant as my dream.
Nov. 18th, 2009 @ 11:25 pm
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One thing I learnt from this video of exploding capacitors was that all those dodgy scenes in which complex racks of equipment explode as soon as something goes wrong aren't necessarily impossible, just really implausible. (video from Make via boingboing, who point out that the fun bit starts at 2:30)
Nov. 5th, 2009 @ 11:30 am
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| » Not in South Korea |
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My day has been all about virtually participating in a meeting in South Korea. I've switched my laptop to South Korea time (which is actually the same as Alice Springs time). The best bit is no one can tell when I zone out.
But its just not the same -- at a virtual meeting you can't eat hot-dogs and fries on a stick
Oct. 27th, 2009 @ 04:25 pm
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| » actually, the 'politically' is redundant |
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As John Quiggin points out, the problem with people who say they are being 'politically incorrect' is not that they are being politically incorrect, but rather is that they are usually morally and factually wrong as well.
Oct. 22nd, 2009 @ 03:12 am
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This little internet libel case looks like the sort of thing that might amuse crankynick and other with an interest in the intersection of the internet, politics, and human folly. I'm particularly amused by the jury being asked to rule on whether being called 'one cherry short of a Schwarzwalderkirschtorte' constitutes libel, and (via Update 3 to that post) the phrase '“rabbits-are-eating-my-face” mad'.
(via Liliian Edwards internet law blog panGloss, which contains further erudite commentary of interest mostly to people who care about internet law)
Oct. 10th, 2009 @ 10:49 pm
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| » in which I battle disk errors |
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Yesterday I planned to spend several hours coding for a job I should have finished friday. Instead, after a routine system upgrade my machine refused to boot. After applying all the various disk repair tools at my disposal, it still wouldn't boot. Apple disk utility just threw up its hands and did nothing. Techtool Pro (I had to burn a DVD specially) decided that whatever was wrong with the disk was confusing it enough that it wasn't going to try and repair it (for some reason, TT looks impressive and claims to do lots of things, but never seems to actually do anything useful when you want it to). DiskWarrior, usually the old faithful of disk repair, actually did nothing the first time, and then made things significantly worse the second time (though it did drop a few useful hints along the way). The disk wouldn't even appear via firewire target disk mode by this point. A lesser geek would might have given up (after all, I had a recent back up -- I would probably have lost only a day and a half of work, and I'd been at the repair thing for a few hours already with no result). But I prevailed -- put the Mac into command line single user mode (I bet a lot of you didn't even know you could do that) and bashed away with nothing but fsck, the primitive ancestor of all disk tools -- there are good reasons why its name has become an expletive -- and rm to remove some particularly heinous files. Of course, the system had already fscked it dozens of times by now, but without my delicate guidance. Discovered that, for example, doing fsck_hfs on the disk in raw mode (eg /dev/rdisk0s2) does different things to plain old fsck -fy /dev/disk0, because it does a catalog rebuild. I don't really know why, but it worked. Predictably, the disk still didn't boot after that, but after I forced it to boot into safe mode that seemed to fix it. So, feeling accomplished, having defeated the evil data eating monster with only a day lost, by dint of my superior magical incantations technical skills. Of course, it also means a day has passed with nothing to show for it except that I haven't lost even more time. Of such minutia is my life filled. Now you know why I don't talk about work stuff more often.
I like the way some of my geek buddies twitter tag stuff like this with #firstworldproblems.
Sep. 22nd, 2009 @ 06:58 pm
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| » the greatest human who ever lived |
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And then there is that other guy who died recently, the one sometimes claimed to be the greatest human being who has ever lived, Norman Borlaug. Who? I don't remember seeing his singles on the pop charts.
Very few of us, even in at our maddest and most optimistic, ever think there is any chance that anyone will consider us the greatest human who ever lived, even a pair of opinionated stage magicians.
Sep. 22nd, 2009 @ 05:42 pm
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| » (No Subject) |
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I did warn you yesterday that this journal was no longer safe from the threat of poetry. So, while you are all probably sick of me talking about how much I love the works of Dorothy Porter, here is my favourite poem, if a depressing one, from her book What a Piece of Work, a pretty dark little book about a psychiatrist who battles his own demons (mostly unsuccessfully).
( My Own Orders )
ETA I'm still learning about formatting, now using pre tags to preserve whitespace
Sep. 19th, 2009 @ 02:22 pm
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| » (No Subject) |
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We (the countries who backed the US Invasion of Iraq) have managed to turn it into a country in which homophobic serial killers with a taste for ritual torture not just operate with relative impunity, but hold themselves up as moral guardians.
We seem to have largely replaced one set of monsters with another.
Sep. 19th, 2009 @ 01:19 pm
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| » Turing |
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I posted a while ago about the campaign for an official apology for Alan Turings appalling treatment as a result of his homosexuality. I was pleased to read this morning that that campaign was successful, and Gordon Brown has issued an official apology. I was pleased that the apology also said that "... the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly", so there was a general acknowledgement of the unjustness of the laws, not just an apology to Turing in particular.
I found it a bit odd, though, that the government apology mentions only his wartime service breaking the German Enigma codes, and refers to him first and foremost as a codebreaker. While this was a significant achievement, his other achievements are not mentioned at all. I guess to the general public (and readers of Cryptonomicon) he might be most famous as a codebreaker, but his discoveries about the formal underpinnings of Computer Science that truly mark him as one of the 20th Centuries intellectual giants. His invention of Turing Machines, a formal description of computers, essentially laid the foundations of modern Computer Science*. And then there is the Turing test, still a subject of much intellectual debate today, still possibly the single most influential contribution to the artificial intelligence field. Reducing him to merely a wartime cryptographer is to greatly underestimate his greatness and influence.
*though actually Alonzo Church deserves a lot of the credit too, for showing a similar result earlier. This isn't a Newton vs Leibnitz thing, though, Church and Turing worked closely together.
Sep. 11th, 2009 @ 12:16 pm
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| » Sandman explicated |
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If you are an obsessive Sandman fan like myself, Teresa Nielsen Hayden's ridiculously erudite re-reading of the series that she has just started at Tor.com looks like it will be well worth the effort.
Sep. 10th, 2009 @ 02:48 pm
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