Month: June 2009
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How the sausage is made
People like me should never, ever be told about parliamentary RSS feeds. Unfortunately, I found out anyway, and soon after discovered a report from last week entitled Plebiscite for an Australian Republic Bill 2008 (tabled by the enchantingly-named Senate Finance and Public Administration Legislation Committee). Briefly, the proposal is to hold a plebiscite on whether…
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Meta-engineering
I’m beginning to think I should have approached this maths modelling stuff from an engineering point of view: with a requirements document, version control and unit testing. Constructing a reasonably complicated mathematical model seems to have enough in common with software development that such things could be quite useful. I’m calling this “meta-engineering”, because I’d…
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What am I doing?
Over the past few weeks I’ve had numerous questions of the form: “how’s your work going?” I find I can only ever answer this with banalities like “good” or “meh”. It’s not that I don’t know what I’m doing. At any given point in time, I have a list of minor challenges written up on…
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Reality fails to sway Fielding
From our adorably naïve Family First Senator, via the ABC: When I put forward the question ‘isn’t it true that carbon emissions have been going up and global temperature hasn’t?’, they wanted to rephrase my question and not answer it. Of course they did you fool – it’s a loaded question. Technically the answer is…
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Eddies in the spacetime continuum
…behind that sofa. Either that, or it’s the evolutionary process at work in the Swan River.
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From a campus
I found this somewhat random piece of work (sung to the tune of Bette Midler’s From A Distance) while digging through my hard drive. I did have to change “John” to “Rudd” though. From a distance the campus looks green and orange, and the concrete buildings grey. From a distance OASIS meets the screen, and…
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Marvelous spam
Normally unseen by the small number of real live humans who visit this blog, I get a steady stream of comment spam. None of it makes it through, most being caught by a set of fairly simple filter rules, and the rest being swiftly cut down by a heartless moderator (i.e. me). Recent comment spammers…
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The flu scoreboard
According to the WHO, Australia is now coming fifth in diagnosed H1N1 cases, behind the US, Mexico, Canada and Japan. We started off slow, but I reckon we can take ’em. Come on! *cough* Update (June 5th): we’ve knocked off Japan to take fourth place! As of update 43, the WHO has us at 501…