A month and a bit ago, I wrote up my take on covid19 on facebook. At the time, Australia was at 1300 cases, numbers were doubling twice a week, and I’d been pessimistically assuming two weeks between infection and detection.That led me to pessimistically estimate that we’d be at 20,000 cases by Easter, and we’d […]
Yikes. Been a while. I can’t think of anything intelligent to blog, so some linky tidbits instead: rpm 4.10 includes “~” as a special versioning character, just like dpkg has for ages. Holds a special place in my heart since I did the original patch for dpkg a bit over 11 years ago now. (And […]
Good grief. It was bad enough discovering that the characters in Shadowunit maintained in-universe livejournals (and respond to comments), and not much worse to discover the title character from Castle maintaining a twitter account. Watching him solving an in-universe crime pushed things a bit, but the latest seems to be that the “Nikki Heat” novels […]
Apparently it’s IMO season, and in honour of such, Terry Tao reposed one of the questions on his blog as a “polymath” project — something to be solved collaboratively over the web, rather than by individual effort. Two hundred comments or so later, and a complete proof was achieved, though how much that benefited from […]
For a variety of reasons — personal, business, linux australia, linux.conf.au — I’ve been poking at budgeting lately. I thought it might be worth a post on some of the ideas that I’ve found useful; if they turn out to be too obvious, well, bad luck. :) The way to look at a budget, it […]
Summary: meh. Universe, cinematography, characters, drama, humour: 9 or 10 out of 10. Plot: 3 or 4. It was fun to watch, but I didn’t end up caring about anything much that happened. Probably would’ve been more interesting if I was more invested in either the world or the characters — ie, if I’d read […]
So I believe I mentioned I’d adopted a “live-and-let-live” approach to my chin and cheeks recently. The results so far: Definitely up to the point where it needs a bit of a trim, but apparently it’s not as easy to get a beard trimmer as it is to get razors. Who knew? Out of shot, […]
An interesting article in New Scientist from earlier in the year summarises some interesting Quantum Physics papers, though now I look, I see they’re actually a little dated, one from 2006 and the other from 1994, with Carlo Rovelli listed as the last author of both, and quoted in the article. The problem both articles […]
An Alliterative Adventure By Anthony An age ago, Andrew was amusing himself annoying army ants. His aunt, Alice, an accomplished author, was attired in aubergine accoutrements from Abercrombie and Fitch (awkwardly altered by an anterior artichoke accident). Angsty and anxious, she attempted to ameliorate her aches with an aspirin, so as to be able to […]
So, having just last night been trying to convince myself that I could deal with the low-CPU and (more importantly) battery life of the HP Mini-Note 2133 (Joxer seems happy with his) along comes CES and the announcement of the HP Mini-Note 2140, with an Atom CPU, and reportedly a resolution of 1366 by 768. […]
Lunch for today. Recipe: Lamb forequarter chop (200g). Cook on frypan ’til medium, sprinkle with garlic salt to taste. One mandarin, peeled, broken, scattered. One cavendish banana, peeled, sliced, scattered. Blueberries. Strawberries. Total time to cook, consume, clean, and blog about an hour. Total cost, about $5. Missing were mango, cheese and beer. Oh well, […]
(Alternative title: I aten’t dead) My name’s Anthony and, like a lot of other people, I suffer from depression. It’s not something I like to talk about — my normal philosophy is just to filter out that part of my life and just talk and think about the interesting and fun parts of life. The […]
The latest warning from Dresden Codak‘s Aaron Diaz: Do we really want to live in a society populated by geriatric 27-year-olds? In living so long and spending so much time `thinking’ do we not also run the risk of becoming a cold, passionless race incapable of experiencing our two emotions (fear and not fear)? Also […]
Suppposedly, card number five in the Tarot is the Hierophant, described as “someone who interprets secret knowledge” and representing concepts such as “conformity” and “group identification”. Not that any of that is related to this “five things you don’t know about me” meme, for which I’ve apparently been tagged by both Pia and Tony. And […]
Today’s news: I’m now a scary biker type person, just like Martin, Michael, David, Bruce, and James along with once and future bikers like Sarah or Pia, but only dreaming of approaching the glory days of the munificent Greg. As of yesterday, my ride is a gorgeous blue 2005-model Honda VTR250, picked up from the […]