Repatriated to Canberra

Web clippings from a former Canberra resident returned to the ACT. Sometimes political, frequently geeky. Opinions expressed are my own and in no way affect my ability to work for the Australian Government on anything.

[yellek]

Being a board gamer dice interest me.

[yellek]

Teaser: new post, tomorrow's event

I have written a new post, which will appear in a guest blog this week. The chart in question is this puzzle: Not an easy dataset to deal with... will link to the post when it appears. *** For those...

I bet this becomes a chord chart #datavis

[yellek]

The new study calculates that staying within a 2-degree carbon budget will require countries to leave 80 percent of coal, 50 percent of gas and 33 percent of global oil untouched until at least 2050. Those numbers are in line with previous estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the International Energy Agency, but this report takes the calculations a step further by accounting for which reserves are best exploited, and which are better off left untapped.

How Much Fuel We Need To Leave Buried To Beat Climate Change | FiveThirtyEight

[yellek]

There is, however, a simple way to settle this debate. If this group is correct about the size of the effect of cellphones on brain cancer, brain tumor rates should have been dramatically increasing since the introduction of the mobile phone. A study in the U.S. published in 2012 evaluated this possibility by comparing observed rates of glioma to projected rates from two studies for the period from 1997 to 2008. It found that brain tumor rates are pretty much unchanged since mobile phones arrived. If the Swedish team is right about the size of the cellphone effect, tumor rates would be 40 percent higher than they are. There is virtually no way its results are correct.

Cellphones Do Not Give You Brain Cancer | FiveThirtyEight

[yellek]

Usually it’s quite easy dressing as Tony Abbott. You wake up, put on lycra shorts and those weird cycling T-shirts that make you look like a Wiggle, go for a ride, shower, put on suit, select a blue tie and go about your day.

Stylewatch: Tony Abbott's leather jacket | Fashion | The Guardian

[yellek]

ISIS kills those it accuses of practicing witchcraft. It certainly doesn’t enlist them. Yes, Monis called himself Muslim. But for most of his career he proclaimed himself to be an Iranian Shia cleric – another identity that would get him murdered by the Sunni sectarians of ISIS.

On Martin Place | Overland literary journal

[yellek]

The challenge is for a government, any government, to find savings that are fair, and then make a case that convinces the public and the Senate to accept them, and also to explain to voters where the new post-mining boom jobs might be created.

Australia, we have a budget problem, and the 'solutions' are underwhelming | Australia news | The Guardian

[yellek]

Credit whoring - IT pros would prefer to make a good decision than to get credit for it. What will make them seek credit is the danger that a member of the group or management who is dangerous to the process might receive the credit for the work instead. That is insulting. If you've got a lot of credit whores in your IT group, there are bigger problems causing it.

[yellek]

While everyone would like to work for a nice person who is always right, IT pros will prefer a jerk who is always right over a nice person who is always wrong. Wrong creates unnecessary work, impossible situations and major failures. Wrong is evil, and it must be defeated. Capacity for technical reasoning trumps all other professional factors, period.

[yellek]

On that Saturday morning in eight excruciating minutes, the PM delivered a weird, cringe-worthy, little Australia lecture to the global community…There he was, boasting about taking Australia backwards on climate change. There he was bemoaning the massively difficult job he has as Australian PM, whining about the unpopularity of his GP tax and his plan for $100,000 degrees. And presenting live to the world a negative character reference of his own people, the Australian public, blaming them, our people, for his government’s failures. Damning our country as selfish, anti-modern, anti-reform, anti-change.

Bill Shorten at the National Press Club on Wednesday the 26th of November 2014

[yellek]

This is at the center of so many of the internet's bitter harassment campaigns — the complete separation of abstract philosophy and real-world effects. As long as you can feel like your own intentions are pure, you're freed from having to wonder whether the war you're fighting is in any way proportionate, or even whether your actions are helping to win it. You don't have to worry if your single angry tweet or email is one of hundreds currently taking over someone's life. It's your soul, not their body or mind, that matters. I'm not going to say whether the platonic ideal of Gamergate is misogynist. I'm not going to say whether it's diverse, or whether it's genuine. It doesn't matter. The only thing I need to know is that as far as I can tell, it is completely devoid of empathy.

Gamergate can't stop being about harassment | The Verge

[yellek]

What you can take from the evidence is that obsessing about reaching some water goal every day is unproductive. Most of us are going to get in three to four cups without doing anything out of the ordinary, and that’s likely to deliver nearly all of the benefits of water intake (if there are any).

You Don’t Need 8 Glasses Of Water A Day | FiveThirtyEight

[yellek]

Let’s be clear: this is the single biggest reason power prices have skyrocketed. According to the federal treasury, 51% of your electricity bill goes towards “network charges”. The carbon tax, despite relentless propaganda to the contrary, is small beer, comprising just 9%.

http://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2014/july/1404136800/jess-hill/power-corrupts

[yellek]

Mr. Carroll said “that he could kill me at that very moment and no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq,”

Before Shooting in Iraq, a Warning on Blackwater - NYTimes.com

[yellek]

In other words, basically everything about the US system is worse for all but those at the top of the economic pyramid.

Are we witnessing the emergence of the United States of Australia? | Warwick Smith | Comment is free | theguardian.com

[yellek]

Why Companies Should Pay For University In which the user pays principle is taken to its logical extreme

Why Companies Should Pay For University — Medium

[yellek]

Three librarians, a cartoonist, and a blogger walk into a restaurant. The cartoonist defaced the menus, the blogger tweeted about it, and then the first librarian cataloged the menu, the second cataloged the tweet, and the third librarian bemoaned the fact that the cartoonist didn't pick up the check and thus leave behind a signed slip with a date on it that could be cataloged as evidence.

Schlock Mercenary - BYU Special Collections