The folowing is satire, and will not make sense unless you have read this disturbing, ridiculous, selfish, dangerous and infuriating article by Miranda Devine, entitled Roads are for cars, not lycra louts .
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Whoever made up the Fairfax motto To Err is Devine has a lot to answer for. It’s a big fat lie. SMH is built for people with conscience and reading comprehension. Pretending otherwise is unfair to columnists and readers alike. Continue reading To Err is Devine
“Imagine visiting a town,” Dr. Jonathon Haidt writes, “where people wear no clothes, never bathe, have sex in public, and eat raw meat by biting off pieces directly from the carcass.”
Dr Haidt’s site is yourmorals.org, where i got my fibre tested. I’m the green bars. You can see that I consider Harm and Fairness to be important moral values. I am less convinced on Loyalty, Authority, and Purity, as moral values.
The main point of the graph is not that my low scores reveal me as base, ill-bred and exquisitely suited to a career in politics. Continue reading the left-wing moral shortfall.
There are people with brains, and there are people with time on their hands. Sometimes these are the same people. People like you. Sure you read the paper and listen to the radio, and watch Two and a Half Men (how funny is the little kid!?) But you also deploy your surplus cognition actively: You edit Wikipedia, comment on blogs, write blogs, make Youtube videos, and play games.
Clay’s point is this: For too long, mainstream media has been on stage, delivering its monologue. People are rolling their eyes. We’re starting to heckle. The show’s not even over and half the crowd has headed to the after-party. Continue reading Clay Shirky’s “cognitive surplus”
I have advocated building a big mirror in the Australian outback, to reflect a whole lot of sunlight back into space and counter the effects of global warming. My preferred construction technique was a nuclear blast that would melt the sand to glass. Happily, this would also create a nuclear winter that could be the extra surge we need in the race to cool the planet.
I was drunk at the time.
I had three people bag Canberra to me today. First, I watched a video embedded in this link, in which Former Prime Minister Keating described it as ‘a great mistake’. Malcolm Fraser then described Parliament House as ‘not meritorious in itself’. He was trying his hardest to be nice.
FIve minutes later I was instant messaged by a friend who lives there. Unprompted, she concurred, delivering the pithy soundbite they were aiming at: ‘the can sucks… :( ‘
And it’s true. Continue reading A stab in the back for the heart of the nation.
Think about head hair. Everyone says it exists to keep our heads warm.
But as skin colour has adapted to the sun, head hair remains, from the Inuits to the Arabs to the Melanesians. Why?
Maybe head hair actually has a ‘helmet effect’ where it deflects/absorbs hits to the head. It would be evolutionarily adaptive. if you look at hair, it covers the area of the brain neatly (except the forehead). Continue reading Helmet Hair Hypothesis
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/19/091019fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all
Malcolm Gladwell has written an article in the New Yorker that makes me think about cycling. The article is about American Football (NFL) players suffering brain injuries. They have a heap of head-on collisions that cause major damage to their brains. In both training and games, they regularly suffer impacts equivalent to decelerations of around 100 G-force.
NFL players report a rate of dementia 5 times that of the rest of the population. Continue reading NFL, AFL, cycling and helmets.
There’s a push to add an intelligence/aptitude test to the mix for university admissions. It’s an indirect and stupid way to solve the problem of the homogeneity of university intakes.
http://www.theage.com.au/national/push-to-make-uni-entrance-fair-for-all-20091017-h26o.html Continue reading ENTER > IQ ?
For too long this blog has blundered around in theoretical la-la land. It’s time to get practical. Should you run if it starts raining?
A wit said to me ‘people think population is like a party – the more the better’. But what if the beer runs out? What if the empties start piling up round our chin? What if the queue for the toilet gets so long people are busting?
Talk about replacing our national standard has ebbed, waned, diminished and frankly, flagged.
So I thought I’d spark debate by throwing this one into the mix. Its design is based on the indigenous flag. It’s a simple, timeless flag that doesn’t try to look sharp and contemporary, because those factors will fade quickly.
It comprises:
Red, representing the land and its first people;
Blue for the sea and the people who’ve come across it, and
As the centre piece, the seven-pointed star of federation, representing our democracy.
On the upside, it looks like a sunrise, and nobody will get confused between us and the Kiwis. On the downside, it doesn’t contain the southern cross, and is faintly reminiscent of Cuba and Puerto Rico.
This flag was made using this website http://www.wearemulticolored.com. Make one yourself and once you click save, link to it in the comments below! Pop in a quick explanation for it too.
On the internet I found this video:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/06/cab-vs-pedicab-road-rage_n_311303.html
It lies at the centre of the circled wagons of pop culture. It was linked to from bikesnobnyc. It was filmed outside of Dave Letterman’s studio. And of course the Fox video cameras were there because of the recent Letterman sex-blackmail scandal.
It documents a road rage incident, wherein two boofheads in baseball caps bash and berate each other to an accompanying cacophony of censorious bleeps. Continue reading Tit for Tat. Take that!
When Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey says Malcolm Turnbull has his “absolute unqualified support“, you know it’s only a matter of moments before more political blood is spilled.
There’s a flipping great article in this week’s New York Times. It’s about whether the War in Afghanistan can be justified.
Why are people so full of opinions? People froth at the mouth if there is a challenge to their views on on Labour’s tax policy, the Liberal’s leadership troubles, the Republican’s media strategy, the Democrat’s foreign policy or the Western Bulldogs forward line policy.
I go past the Melbourne Zoo occasionally. It takes up a lot of space. The elephants make loud noises. It smells. I feel bad that all the animals are locked up in there. And I imagine that it is publicly funded.
I kind of felt like the zoo was a thing of the past. Like faxes, fixed-line 
When Youtube is delivering lions, tigers and bears in their own habitat (Not to mention pandas and bandicoots) why would you bother locking up a whole pack of wild beasts, killing goats by the truckload to keep them fed and risking the escape scenario everyone who lives nearby secretly hopes for? Continue reading The zoo
Thomas the Think Engine 