Arthur C. Clarke once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguisable from magic. This video features a guy juggling to music. It’s not technology, but he’s so bloody advanced it certainly is indistinguishable from magic.
Have a look.I submitted my application for Skills Assessment to the Australian Computer Society today, the first stage in the process of applying for residency. They say to expect a decision within 8 to 10 weeks, so fingers crossed ;-)
Great post from Bruce Schneier on the future of privacy.
In a sense, we’re living in a unique time in history. Identification checks are common, but they still require us to whip out our ID. Soon it’ll happen automatically, either through an RFID chip in our wallet or face-recognition from cameras. And those cameras, now visible, will shrink to the point where we won’t even see them.
Two Iraqi women whose husbands and children were killed by US troops during the Iraq war have been refused entry into the United States for a speaking tour.
In a piece of painful irony, the reason given for the rejection was that the women don’t have enough family in Iraq to prove that they’ll return to the country…Via: This Modern WorldI’m just back from ten days holidays in New Zealand so I’ve lots of photos to share. Myself and Jacqui had been invited to Graham & Louise’s wedding (photos) one weekend, followed by Danny & Rachel’s wedding (photos) the next weekend, both in the same place in NZ, so we decided to make a holiday out of it with Nathan, Anna, Tiff and Nick.
Apart from the two weddings, we managed to climb Mount Manganui (photos), drive to Waihi Beach (photos) and visit lots of geothermal springs around Rotorua (photos). There are also some random photos that don’t fit in to any of the other categories.There was mild panic when we first arrived as it was pissing rain and Graham’s wedding was the following day, and was supposed to be held outdoors. We needn’t have worried as NZ turned on the sunshine the next day and it remained on for the rest of our trip. So much for the ‘Land of the Long White Cloud’!We flew home yesterday afternoon, tanned and tired, only to have some woman get hammered on flight home and refuse to fasten her seat belt and stay in her seat for landing. After much diplomacy, crunch time arrived as we were five minutes from touchdown, so she got handcuffed to her seat at which point she started abusing everyone with a torrent of bad language. She was taken from the plane by medics when we had landed. An eventful end to a great holiday.Once they get their hooks into you they really don’t want to let go! Last year I bought an XBox to play Halo and decided to sign up for XBox-Live in the mistaken belief that I’d use it. Of course, I did no such thing, so I decided to cancel it before it came up for renewal.
Went to the XBox web site. Lots of instructions which were extremely helpful and detailed about getting connected, or troubleshooting any issues, but no mention of being able to cancel.Fired up the XBox itself and examined my XBox Live settings. Again, many options for changing your credit card details, changing the type of your subscription, but no mention of ever leaving.The renewal email arrived today, again devoid of information on any quitting option, so it was back to the web site.After clicking numerous links I finally got a phone number I could call, so I did…Support: Hi, how can I help you today?Me: I’d like to cancel my XBox Live please.(mild intake of breath, presumably indicating surprise that anyone would be crazy enough to do such a thing)S: So you’d like to cancel your XBox Live. Is this correct?M: Yes.S: Could I ask you why?M: Because I don’t use it and I’ve sold my XBox.S: You know you can sell it, or transfer it to a family member who might want it?M: No thanks, I’d just like to cancel it.S: Can I tell you about…M: Look, can I just cancel the account please?After that it was relatively plain sailing. Thank fuck I don’t need Microsoft for anything else! Reminds me of the Borg.Top 5 Countries by number of executions:
I finished last week’s training with a 54.5km bike ride. I was pretty tired starting off, and not very enthusiastic at all, but with the race next weekend it was important to get it done.
I rode from my house up to Centennial Park and did about 10 laps up there in a one off, two on, one off format: one lap nice and easy, two at a reasonably tough pace, then anothe easy one, followed by a stop for a quick stretch, then repeat. The fast laps were reasonably good, with time scattered between 6:25 and 6:30, but I don’t think I’ll be able to ride at that speed for the full 40km in the race… well not if I want to run a decent 10K afterwards!This week is going to be relatively quiet training-wise; normal until Wednesday evening, then Thursday is Australia Day, a public holiday, so I’ll do nothing from then on, apart from maybe a short run on Friday.S: 5km – B: 114.1km – R: 14.1kmCycling home last night was a bit touch and go. I called in to City Bike Depot to get a new tool bag as my current one no longer fits behind saddle since I get set up with aerobars. on leaving there it started raining and while riding up Oxford St. I was tempted to just keep heading home and abandon the laps of the park.
The rain never really got going properly, and had almost stopped by the time I got to the park, so I decided to stick to the original plan and got a little over four laps done on the bars. Nothing too exciting, just cruising around getting used to the new position. I think I could probably do with moving the saddle a bit higher and a bit more forward, so I might play around with it tomorrow. Finished up at home after 33.3km, giving me a total of 59.6km for the day when the morning’s session was included.Today’s swim was good too. Kim is on holidays at the moment so we’re getting decent sessions which is good. This one was nice and cruisey.300 FS200 Catch100 BC2 * { 400 FS on 6:30 (5:47) 200 Pull on 3:30 (2:58) 100 IM on 2:00 (1:33) 2 * 50 FS on 60 (44) }200 FS Swim DownTotal: 2400mBack in September, I wrote to Morris Iemma, the NSW State Premier, telling him I was extremely disappointed that he agreed to the Federal Government’s request for special ‘anti-terrorist’ powers. Today, almost four months later, I got a reply:
Dear M/s RedmondThank you for your recent email regarding counter-terrorism laws. The special meeting of the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) on27 September 2005 unanimously agreed to a range of proposals aimed at strengthening Australia’s security and counter-terrorism arrangements. The Prime Minister, Premiers, and Chief Ministers all agreed that the evolving nature of the terrorist threat, as demonstrated in the London attacks, presented a clear case for Australia’s counter-terrorism laws to be strengthened. COAG also agreed that any new laws must be effective against terrorism and contain appropriate safeguards such as parliamentary and judicial review. The Anti-Terrorism Bill (No.2) 2005 (Cth) gives effect to the agreement reached at COAG, in particular through new laws regarding control orders and preventative detention. It also implements other changes to federal laws (such as those regarding sedition) for which the Commonwealth Government is solely responsible.In accordance with COAG’s agreement, my Government has recently passed the Terrorism (Police Powers) Amendment (Preventative Detention) Bill 2005 to complement the Commonwealth laws regarding preventative detention. In some respects these new laws are unusual. They are not the kinds of laws that democratic governments like to introduce. However the nature of the terrorist threat we now face makes them necessary. My government has sought to strike the right balance, doing all we can to prevent terrorism while at the same time safeguarding individual rights.Yours sincerelyMorris Iemma MPPremier and Treasurer
I usually use PithHelmet, an ad-blocking plug-in for Safari as I hate bloody ads distracting me as I’m reading stuff on the web.
However, evrey time Safari gets updated, as it did yesterday with the 10.4.4 update, PithHelmet gets disabled foe a couple of days until its developer has a chance to release a new version. I’m in the middle of that couple of days at the moment, and it’s a pain in the arse – I’d forgotten just how many bloody ads there are on the net these days, and most of them are flashing at you trying to grab your attention. Piss off! :-(Happy New Year everyone. I’m off up the coast now for three days of relaxing by day and partying by night ;-)
Mike the Mad Biologist covers a story from Nature in which it has been shown that bacteria can evolve resistance to defensins, the small proteins your body uses to defeat them, mainly deployed in yoru mouth, nose etc.
In people, natural bacteria-fighting compounds kill microbes in places such as the mouth, eyes and skin. More than 800 such compounds, dubbed antimicrobial peptides, have been identified in humans, plants, frogs and other organisms.Several drugs based on antimicrobial peptides are being developed, in part because of the rising problem of antibiotic resistance to conventional drugs such as penicillin.So 65 years after the introduction of Penicillin we have MRSA, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, commonly knowns as a ‘superbug’ because it’s resistant to both Penicillin and Methicillin. In another 50-60 years we’ll more than likely end up with a vast range of bacteria which is resistant to our bodies’ own frontline defenses. Not good.
Malaria is one of mankind’s biggest killers, with an annual death toll in the region of 1.5 million. It has also been implicated in the prevalence of sickle-cell anaemia amongst blacks, and now also in the prevalence of alcoholism, again in blacks. Why blacks? Because Sub-Saharan Africa is plagued with malaria, and evolutionary adaptations to combat malaria have unintended side-effects.
From: The Loomalaria wreaks colossal damage in many parts of the world. Today it kills over a million people a year, mostly children, and it has been plaguing our species for thousands of years. Carrying a single copy of the sickle-cell gene boosts the odds that people can have children in malaria-prone regions. Unfortunately, when two people who carry the gene have children together, there’s a one-in-four chance that each child will get both copies of the gene. Over many generations, the advantage of having one copy of the gene outweighs the disadvantage of having two—at least in populations that have endured centuries of malaria.
In the decades since the discovery of the sickle-cell trade-off, scientists have discovered that several other defenses to malaria have evolved where the disease is a high risk—in Africa, the Mediterranean, Southeast Asia, and New Guinea. And many of these adaptations come with drawbacks of their own. Now a new study offers evidence of yet another mixed blessing: one defense against malaria may make people prone to alcoholism.
Well we finally managed it. Billy held his inaugural poker night on Saturday after the previous attempt had been postponed. Myself, Kev, Tommy, Niall, Chantal, Billy and Lisa rocked up for our first night of gambling. Preparation had been fairly rushed once we had learned that Billy was playing online, but we still spent the first two hours deciding/explaining the Hold ‘Em rules we’d be playing under and organising food.
It was a strictly low stakes game, so it was decided that everyone would buy $25 worth of chips and away we went. Niall adopted the rube approach, pretending he had no idea while at the same time piling up the chips. Chantal was the same, having begun her deception, as soon as we’d collected her on the way to Billy’s, by saying that she’d be worried she’d giggle too much when she had good cards. She racked up a significant pile before admitting it was all a ruse and she was a bit of a shark. I did pretty well too, though since Billy and Tom took it upon themselves to occasionally bet without actually having looked at their cards it was possible to get by with only a rough idea of what to do.It finished up after about four hours with Chantal making a $32 profit, me making $18 and Niall making $11. One other point to note is that the three of us who finished with the most amount of money were also the three supping on the beers. Food, or drink, for thought…The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal has a great article entitled Intelligent Design or ‘No Model’ Creationism: A Total Fraud And A Scam – Why It Can’t Qualify As Even A Pseudoscience, which, you might correctly surmise, demolishes the whole ID argument. It’s a long read, but it does make the effort to point out the difference between the dictionary definition of ‘theory’ and what the word means in a scientific context, a distinction often overlooked and which makes the ‘debate’ possible in the first place.
Most people tend to think of the word “theory†as meaning pretty much the same thing as their concept of “hypothesisâ€â€”namely, a guess or surmise. A “theory†is thought of as a very tentative proposition. This is only natural, because that is the “ordinary English†meaning of the word outside of scientific contexts, and our citizens’ educational experiences have rarely done anything to disabuse them of this notion. As I define “scientific theory,†it is a great, overarching, explanatory scheme which explains a vast number of phenomena; which makes connections between phenomena that would otherwise be perceived as having nothing to do with each other; which makes wild, off-the-wall predictions which nonetheless turn out as forecast; which is supported by an overwhelming amount of evidence and has been tested countless times in countless ways without being falsified; shows consilience to a truly remarkable extent; and which is, for all practical purposes, universally accepted by the scientific community. A scientific theory has content, in spades. By this definition (and powerful arguments can be made against any other) there are only about a dozen scientific theories that I can think of right off the bat, and no scientific theories have ever existed which are not currently accepted. Examples would be the modern atomic theory, theory of plate tectonics, Einstein’s theories of relativity, the microbe theory of disease, the heliocentric theory, the modern synthetic theory of evolution, the gene/chromosome/DNA/RNA theory of inheritance/protein synthesis.
I managed to pick up a nice dose of the flu at the weekend. Throat felt a bit scratchy late on Friday night, then woke up with just a sore throat on Saturday so thought that was it. By Saturday night I had a bit of a fever and it was downhill from there. Sunday & Monday were write-offs, yesterday was OK but decided to stay home from work just to be on the safe side.
It’s amazing how much it knocks back your lung capacity. Any sort of exertion is liable to produce a bout of coughing with all the gunk that brings with it. I definitely won’t be exercising for the rest of the week. On the plus side, lack of appetite coupled with body working overtime to deal with the infection sees me emerge a kilo lighter ;-)Got the bus home this evening and when I walked up the end of my street I saw a few people looking out to sea. I turned around to see some whales breaching, so I ran home, grabbed my camera and managed to get a couple of shots. Spent the next 15 minutes watching them travel down the coast towards Bondi.
Last year Citibank announced a product called Ready Credit, which is basically a credit card, but with the fancy feature of 4.9% interest on balance transfers until you have it paid off. No six month limit or anything. Since ING is paying 5.4% on their savings account, only paying 4.9% on a loan was a bloody bargain, so I signed up, transferred my outstanding balances and ditched all but my daily card. I never bought anything using the Citibank card (and chopped off the magnetic stripe so I couldn’t!) and just made the regular monthly repayment.
Today I get a letter saying that they’ve decided to introduce a $160 “credit facility fee”, payable on Dec 1st, but that if I spend $1000 before then I won’t have to pay it! That’s practically fucking extortion. Oh well, time to move credit providers.