February 2012
11 posts
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“So, next time you read an opinion piece from the CIS you can safely assume the...”
– Oh, snap, John Quiggin. Oh snap. The zombie economics of austerity in Australia
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“Do moviegoers want to hear female voices? Research indicates that our brains are...”
– Trailer voice over work scarce for women (via monsterpussy)
Hrm.
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RTFM
About a year ago the Brisbane river flooded, and although it’s not the worst flooding Brisbane’s ever seen, it was enough to cause some pretty dramatic stuff and freak us comfortable urban dwellers out a lot.
I was fine and none of my family lost anything, either. Fortunately there were none of the horrifying freakish events that caused deaths in places like Toowoomba (an inland city...
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“Abbott has achieved what generations of politicians have only dreamed of: the...”
– Andrew Elder: The National Pikers Club
Opponents of a given politician always complain that they are given soft coverage in the press, but there’s an important point about Abbott: he speaks with what could be described as a calculated recklessness, a contrariness that is both striking and...
January 2012
31 posts
Bismarck’s Voice Among Restored Edison Recordings... →
“In June, 2009, he was told that Congress had whittled down by more than two...”
Endangered Species by Bob Hicok
kathleenjoy:
Very busy sensing there’s nothing down the train tracks except remembering there are only five remaining speakers of Mohave. There might be a loose and rusted spike, a smashed bottle of Bud is likely if I walk long enough into picturing a basketball team of old men and women in a gym in Oklahoma bouncing an orange ball against a team made up of how the rest of the world can’t...
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Obama and the failure of centrism: The New Yorker →
This is stuff we all already know by now, but it’s a rather neat summary, with some behind-the-scene depiction of exactly how miserably the weird centrism the White House adopted in 2009 failed.
The article describes him as “canny and tough” - but it doesn’t mention he’s only really displayed those attributes when facing the progressive side of things.
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valhallaisland:
Thousands of parents illegally homeschooling:
At a get-together of home schoolers in a suburban park in Brisbane, one mother, Cindy, said she was about to start home schooling her son but was afraid of the paperwork involved.
“I’m not planning (on registering) because of the work involved,” she said.
“I’m not very organised and disciplined in that sense so that would be a big...
“You are not a communist, and you are not a Czechoslovakian. You are a dirty Jew,...”
– The Slansky trials: the chilling anti-Semitism of post-war Stalinism.
“There were no minutes or seconds for the ancients. Neither the postman nor the...”
– Paul Valery (via thebronzemedal)
I think about this a lot, how silent the ancient world must have been.
(via oversets)
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We need to stop thinking of shareholders as... →
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How the “Right” to Cheap Parking Makes Streets... →
In this, as in so much else, the sense of entitlement from haves (I already have a car that makes it easy for me; why aren’t public funds making things easier still?) is overwhelming. It reminds me of luxury restaurant owners who complain about how hard it is to sack their staff.
i-am-vampire:
“Some people might question why you would want to remove race from the constitution and then replace it with a power to legislate for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. I would say we have to get away from this 19th-century idea that Aboriginal people are members of a “race”. Their identity is based on ancestry, ethnicity and belief systems, not race. We need to have laws...
“Some people might question why you would want to remove race from the...”
– Mark Leibler, The Age
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It's complicated: Melinda Tankard-Reist by Anna... →
Easily the most sensible thing I have read about MTR in quite some time. Highly recommended.
Twitter bio generator →
This is hilariously/chillingly accurate, but it misses out on ‘these views are my own and do not reflect those of my employer’
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“When governments seek to protect the rich from the poor, they act swiftly and...”
– George Monbiot: Making Democracy Safe for Business: The Guardian.
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“New electoral boundaries and three tropical cyclones also framed the context for...”
– Those were good times. Queensland election 2009
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Cricket was once widely played and popular in the... →
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“These findings show far more than a simple “bias.” They show a stunningly...”
– ThinkProgress on the Murdoch anti carbon price campaign (h/t Damarasaurusrex)
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That Michael Clarke. What a guy. I won't hear a...
Cricket is the stupidest sport I've ever seen.
kiamatthews:
Jack is watching it and trying to explain to me all this nonsense happening and I’m just like “why are there two batters why are they just running back and forth I hate everything about this.”
UNCULTURED SWINE
The Discovery of Vitamins
science:
The concept of vitamins is a hundred years old this year.
During the late 19th century, there were outbreaks of fatal beriberi in East Asia. The study of this disease would lead to the discovery of vitamins. Kanehiro Takaki, a doctor in the Japanese navy, took a special interest in the disease. The navy was plagued by illness: between 1878 and 1881, in a sample of a thousand men, each...
Resolutions
Move house! Should be an easy one, surely.
Get my driver’s license.
Ride my bike on the road.
Languages: I’m not sure what I want to do on this one. I’ll probably re-enrol in Portuguese but I want to do a non-Indo-European language as well. Possibly Mandarin or Korean, since they will likely be the biggest classes at the UQ IML.
Start another blog (I have a few different...
December 2011
22 posts
2 tags
natashavc:
The Morning News, a FANTASTIC site filled with gorgeous essays and reporting, asked me and bunch of smart people what the most important news story of 2011 was. Click and you can also read what heros Julie Klausner, Matthew Gallaway and Matt Langer had to say!! <3
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The Secret Vice is not a waste of time.
setavulos:
monkeytypist:
It’s good to see that Language log is addressing the anti-constructed language sentiment that is out there; in particular the reflex idea espoused (especially by qualified linguists who should know better) that creating fake languages while real ones exist that are poorly documented is somehow a sinful waste of resources. This strikes me as silly for a number of...
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2011 was great, no doubt. But there was no Batman...